One of the hardest juggling acts to master when acting as in-house counsel is the ability to see future risks and discern their threat level. The goal of any business (even the lemonade stand down the street) at its core is to make money, and in order to do so, a business needs to continually grow revenue. The catch is that when a company does make decisions to grow revenue, it faces potential risks. Those risks could be strictly business-related, like when a company decides to launch a new product line that is outside of the bounds of what has been doing previously. Or it would be legal risks, like when a business decides to breach a contract for strategic reasons. In any case, the in-house attorney is tasked with charting a path through the risky minefield to success.
In my short time as an in-house counsel, I have been involved in multiple decision-making processes where a company weighed growth against risk. What was difficult for me originally was not to overinflate the legal risks inherent in any growth-oriented business. It was always very easy for me to conjure up scenarios that would hurt the business if we went with decision A over decision B. But what I learned along the way is those scenarios I conjured up in my head were almost always a "worst-case scenario." The next level to that analysis is not only identifying the possible risks but also estimating their probability. From there, you can strategize how to get the company from point A to point B without increasing the probability of an identified risk.
I think my biggest struggle was not take a bundle of moderate to low-risk possibilities and make them larger in scale. A business will always have some sort of risk and at times it may be beneficial for a growing business to take on more risk. The key is to map out all of the risks, big and small, and find a path for the business to follow. Once that is done, the communication to the executive team is much more seamless. Nobody likes a "dooms-dayer," especially executives. Every scenario will be unique, and it helps to become familiar with the operations of the business. There could be a time to raise the alarm for an impending doomsday; however, it is not all the time. I have learned along the way that sometimes my legal risk imagination is more like a John Grisham novel than actual reality. The key for me was to not sweat the small risks when trying to navigate around the major legal risks.
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