Have you ever felt that the legal support for your company is designed just for your needs — or have you ever felt that it’s a little off somehow? Is your legal support making your job easier or harder?
Every company is unique, each with its own set of innovation goals. These diverse innovation goals lead to very different companies, each with their own approach to business operations, procurement, research and design, hiring, marketing, sales, and manufacturing.
Some companies aim to be pioneering adventurers, the first movers in markets and product areas that are yet untapped, or where others have failed. Their innovation goal is to be radically different from the rest, to carve out a niche that’s entirely their own.
Some companies prefer to leverage their competitive advantages to win market share. Their innovations may not be primarily product-based, but rather are improvements in manufacturing or distribution.
Then there are the industry giants, established market leaders who work on incremental improvements to their successful products to keep customers engaged.
The differences in these approaches can be felt throughout the company, and are familiar to anyone who has interfaced with companies across industries. However, legal services providers who support innovation often use a one-size-fits-all approach, and this misalignment often hinders rather than supports innovation. If you have ever worked in, or worked with, a company in which legal is viewed as “roadblock” or the “deal killing department” rather than a partner and enabler of the business, then you know how this feels.
The solution is simple in concept, but hard to execute: build legal support around the innovation goals of each company. The company’s innovation goals define how the company plans to create its competitive advantage in the market — and legal support has to be tailored accordingly.
For example, a supplier agreement for a company aiming to win based on distribution network advantages will look significantly different from a supplier agreement for a company that is looking to use procured materials to create an entirely new product. As another example, the approach to documentation and publication for a company incrementally improving a regulated consumer product may differ substantially from that of a company creating new categories of SAAS offerings. Even confidentiality agreements and employee agreements can vary depending on whether a team is working on new product R&D or feature improvements.
To properly align legal support with the company’s goals, legal professionals must understand and consider the innovation goals and management approach. They need to ask questions like whether the company manages different products differently, or if the innovation goals are the same across product lines. By doing so, legal efforts can effectively support a company’s goals, rather than being perceived as a roadblock to success. If the lawyers don’t ask, the chance of being an impediment goes way up. If the lawyers do ask about innovation goals, the answers to those questions might enable legal innovation that supports business innovation. Is your legal team asking the right questions?