Every general counsel (GC) eventually faces the same question: how do you build a legal department structure that actually serves the business, and not just the lawyers in it? While the answer looks different for every organisation, the principles behind a sound legal department structure tend to rhyme.
Legal department structure: Keeping work where it belongs
Dorothy Wong has spent the better part of her career working that out. As Vice President, Legal and Corporate Services at the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC), she oversees a legal portfolio that spans legal services, privacy, procurement, corporate strategy, board governance, and Claims Injury Legal Services.
Before ICBC, she spent years at Vancouver Airport Authority, where she moved from legal counsel to Director of Legal and first discovered what running a team actually requires. Her path to both roles started in private practice; she articled at Lang Michener LLP, which later became MacMillan LLP, and spent her first years as an associate in the financial services group.
The question of keeping internal or going external
The first question any GC faces when shaping a legal department structure is where the work should sit: inside or out. For Wong, the answer starts internally. Her team at ICBC handles the bulk of the corporation’s legal work, and that is by design.
“I love having our legal team because they are really connected to our clients day to day… that understanding of the business — a deep understanding of what their priorities are — is really hard to replicate externally.”
That business proximity is the resourcing decision at the centre of her legal department structure. As such, work goes to external counsel in four specific situations:
- niche areas of law not covered internally, such as environmental law
- complexity that requires a specialist the internal team does not have
- capacity, such as when volume exceeds what the team can absorb
- complex litigation, which consistently goes external
“We keep as much as we can internal, but we do also rely on our external firms when we need them,” she says. Those external relationships are long-standing, such as firms that have come to know ICBC over time and can step in without a long onboarding curve.
Check out this article on additional insights from Wong:
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Beyond the memo: Giving advice people can actually use
While private practice trains lawyers to analyse, in-house work demands something more. As for Wong, she found out that operational teams cannot wait for a memo; they need advice they can act on, and delivering that is as much a skill as the legal analysis behind it.
“It’s not helpful when a lawyer just adds to the list of problems or adds to the list of worries. It’s not helping them actually move forward and figure out what the best path is.”
Translating legal advice to useful items
The standard she holds her team to is clear — translate legal advice into something the business can act on. As she puts it: “What should I do? Translating legal advice into: what am I actually going to do now?”
The memo still gets written, and the analysis still happens. However, the advice that reaches the business must answer one question: what next? This is the shift that separates a legal department structure that adds value from one that simply manages risk from a distance.
Building the team: What curiosity has to do with it
When Wong recruits, technical expertise is assumed. However, what she is actually screening for goes further. Her list, in no particular order, is as follows:
- curiosity
- practicality
- a solution-oriented mindset
- optimism, or a genuine belief that problems can be solved
Shaping a legal department structure around these qualities is deliberate. The thread connecting all four is the same one that runs through her own career.
“I encourage people on our team to also go and spend time with their internal clients and learn the business, because it’s both super rewarding, enriching, and it also deepens your understanding of the business and you end up giving better legal advice,” she says.
At ICBC, this means lawyers are expected to move out of the legal department and into the business. This is not just to build relationships, but to understand what the organisation actually does and where it is headed.
The management role no law firm prepares you for
No legal department structure survives long on legal expertise alone. Wong learned this the hard way, and private practice did not prepare her to manage people. “I didn’t gain any management experience [at a firm]. It wasn’t part of my role,” she says.
What she found in-house was a skill set built from scratch: career pathing, mentoring, and learning when to step back. Her day-to-day now looks nothing like traditional legal practice. “A lot of it is figuring out how I support lawyers on my team to support them in giving legal advice to the rest of the company,” says Wong.
For any lawyer stepping into a legal management role for the first time, her advice is short: go in with humility. “It is a completely different skill set… One has to learn and develop different muscles that you have to exercise for sure.”
In Wong’s view, getting the legal department structure right means building around strong leadership, not just strong lawyers. That is the difference between a team that handles problems and one that helps the organisation move forward.
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