Cisco GC: Admit When Another Firm Is Better

It’s hard for anybody, least of all large multi-service law firms, to turn down business or recommend a competitor.

But Mark Chandler, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary, and Chief Compliance Officer at Cisco Systems, says firms ought to be recommending others more often. Nothing “cements” a relationship with him, Chandler said, like admitting honestly when someone else would be better for a particular matter.

In the final installment of a two-part series in Big Law Business, Chandler shares his thoughts on law firm marketing, law firms learning to work together, and his favorite Supreme Court Justice.

Part II Excerpts:

The personal outreach is particularly ineffective. You know, I really don’t need to go to dinner and sports events with people I barely know instead of being with my family, especially if their main interest in it is wallet share.

I think law firms will be more successful to the extent they play well in the sand box with other law firms. There are a lot of times where I’m looking for disparate skill sets. I’m not going to find it one place.

In the law firm world all they’re ever telling you is the best lawyer you could ever possibly have for anything you could possibly imagine is someone else in their firm.

It’s really important, especially in a big company, to be outside of the corporate headquarters bubble, listening to what customers want and realizing the things we do to manage our business that are convenient for us internally aren’t necessarily important to our customers.

Below is an edited transcript of the final installment of our two-part series with Chandler.

Big Law Business: How often does Cisco open up new relationships with firms? What are you looking for when you make those hiring decisions?

Chandler: We’re a global company, so we never know when we’re going to need help with an issue in a very specialized situation. We’ll try to canvas the field and figure out who knows the most effective players and then talk to them and choose one.

You could end up with an employment law issue in, name a country, and then you need to hire a law firm. So we certainly open up a lot of engagements that way.

In terms of larger engagements with U.S. law firms or global law firms, it really depends on having some kind of specialized expertise that fits a particular need we have.

So if it’s litigation for instance, it’s useful to know if someone previously had litigation over that particular patent, or knows the other side’s counsel very well, or if they’ve litigated a similar issue before, so that you’re benefiting from a learning curve that’s already out there.

Big Law Business: Outside of those special situations where you go looking for someone, what’s the best way for firms to approach you? Do you pay attention to marketing materials?

Chandler: The marketing stuff is sometimes useful, and I’ll circulate it occasionally. I’ll see something in a newsletter and say, “Well this is interesting. We should call this guy and learn more about it.”

So the marketing materials are marginally useful. But they have too much of it, and I generally am hitting the unsubscribe button more than I used to, because they’re not targeted to when I need it.

The personal outreach is particularly ineffective. You know, I really don’t need to go to dinner and sports events with people I barely know instead of being with my family, especially if their main interest in it is wallet share.

One of the ways that we developed a relationship with Skadden is that they did a wonderful job of creating opportunities for in-house counsel to work on pro bono matters.

Pro bono participation is very important not only in terms of our company culture, but also for the happiness and job satisfaction of the lawyers on my team. We started working with some great people at Skadden on some of their pro bono activities, and that was a great chance to get to know the firm better, which I hadn’t had much experience with.

Big Law Business: Aside from the innovations we’ve already talked about, how have you seen the relationship between inside and outside counsel change?

Chandler: I think leaders of law firms need to look at what their competitive advantages are and focus on those in a way that allows for them to provide the most efficient and best services to their clients.

That may mean you look and say, “We shouldn’t have a lot of associates doing this. We should hire contract attorneys, or maybe there’s a technology solution that works better.”

I think law firms have largely looked historically at inputs instead of outputs. And the inputs have largely been people time. The more they can put inputs in the more money they make.

I think general counsel are starting to look more at outcomes and solutions. What’s the solution I’m looking for? What’s the best way to get there? What’s the team I need to get there?

I think law firms will be more successful to the extent they play well in the sand box with other law firms. There are a lot of times where I’m looking for disparate skill sets. I’m not going to find it one place.

The law firm compensation model is driven around having lawyers try to drum up other work for their firms. I’m often approached by people who I trust to do good work, who are coming to me and trying to explore why I should hire their firm to do some other work for me, work that I have being done by very good lawyers already usually.

When they come to me with that, I’ll often say, “Tell me why I should fire my existing lawyer? What are they doing wrong that you’re going to do better? Why are you really better than the umpteen other firms who have very similar practices?”

This interview is obviously going to cost me a lot of dinner and sporting event invitations, but the marketing approach is often to figure out some way to get my personal time spent with some other lawyer who’ll leverage the personal relationship I have with someone already.

And then the lawyer who’s trying to drum up the business, who I’m working with already, gets a share of the billings when I hire another lawyer in the firm. Well in the manufacturing world we have an expression that’s applicable to this. We say, “Never trust a vendor except when he says he can’t.”

In the law firm world all they’re ever telling you is the best lawyer you could ever possibly have for anything you could possibly imagine is someone else in their firm.

I recently had a situation where someone had switched firms and called me up to tell me why I should hire their new firm to help with a new particular kind of problem because they were the best. And I said, “You know, just a few months ago when you were at the other firm you told me to hire that firm because they were the best. What’s changed other than the team logo on your uniform?”

I don’t think that’s a very useful way to think about providing value. There are going to be solutions that require multiple law firms, and I think the best lawyers are the ones who will come and tell you when their firm isn’t the right one to use and will point you to who you really should use.

Nothing cements the relationship like coming to me and saying, “You know for this particular problem you should really hire those people over there.” It’s a hard thing for them to do, because they’re compensated to bring in business to their own firms. But I think it’s a necessary thing for them to do if they don’t have the best solution

Big Law Business: Is there a lawyer who’s had a special influence over you?

Chandler: Without hesitation I would put Gordy Davidson , who was the chairman of Fenwick & West, and is my board counsel.

Gordy has tremendous leadership abilities. He has a really rare balance. He earns people’s trust immediately by the sophistication, and at the same time, the simplicity of the way he lays out problems and solutions, as well as the respect he shows other people he interacts with.

There’s not a day where it wouldn’t be good for me to ask myself, “How would Gordy handle this?”

Big Law Business: Are there specific traits you look for in individual lawyers?

Chandler: The first is integrity, and that cuts across both personal integrity and communication style, so that what someone is telling you is always extremely straight. You never have any question whether you’re going to get exactly the straight information you need. The story isn’t going to change. That’s number one.

Number two, to go with that integrity and directness, is succinctness. I find that there aren’t a lot of problems that need a huge amount of exposition. You can usually cut to the chase pretty well on identifying key issues, and the fulcrum on which the decision is going to be made.

Big Law Business: You mentioned Gordy’s leadership. You seem more willing than other GC to interact with the media and be a face of the company. How important is that to you?

Chandler: There are some issues that go so directly to the core of what the company is about, and are so reflective of our culture and our values that it’s important, as the chief legal officer, to be there to speak to them.

And I think it’s a good idea then to have the company out there when it involves those kinds of matter, and the spokesperson should be an employee of the company.

There are other matters that are maybe more purely legal in nature, matters which aren’t as directly related to the ethos of the organization, where I don’t think it’s as important that it be the in-house counsel. It can be someone outside as well.

Big Law Business: Before you became General Counsel, you served in Paris as Managing Attorney for Cisco’s Europe, Middle East and Africa region. How did your time in Paris shape you, or how does it influence your role as GC?

Chandler: You know, there’s nothing in a business more valuable, to my mind, than being face to face with our customers, because they really define the raison d’être of our organization. We exist to be able to provide our customers with products and solutions that solve problems for them.

It’s really important, especially in a big company, to be outside of the corporate headquarters bubble, listening to what customers want and realizing the things we do to manage our business that are convenient for us internally aren’t necessarily important to our customers. The phrase is “inside baseball”, I think.

So the two and a half years in Paris were tremendously valuable because that’s what I did every day. Every single day I was talking to customers, trying to get transactions completed, trying in the very fast-moving marketplace of the late 90s to make sure that people wanted our products and not our competitors’.

Learning to function in that competitive environment, learning to recognize that the value for our shareholders, for our employees, for our customers, came from listening to our customers, was incredibly valuable.

And actually living in other countries, you learn to walk in the shoes of other people and to really understand what cultural differences are about. There is something very valuable that comes from challenging yourself in that way.

I really recommend international experience, really living internationally, not just travel, as part of career development for any future leader, whether in the legal organization or elsewhere.

Big Law Business: Who’s your favorite Supreme Court Justice?

Chandler: I’d actually put at the top of my list Earl Warren. From his background as governor of California and as attorney general in California, he understood how society moves things forward and how change happens in a democracy.

He was appointed by President Eisenhower, and through his leadership in bringing unanimous votes in some cases, such as Brown v. Board of Education and a series of other cases, he basically made real for all American citizens the promises of liberty and civil rights that were in our founding documents, but which were realized for the few and not the many.

His judicial skill and his political skill in making that happen had an enormous, positive, transformative effect on our country.