Struggling with managing or developing a legal team? Unsure how to set effective goals and keep your team motivated? Feeling drained? Fear not! Kate Dugan, General Counsel of Energizer, joins The Legal Department to energize your approach to legal team management. In this episode, Kate shares her strategies for creating impactful Individual Development Plans (IDPs), coaching soft skills, and fostering a collaborative team environment. Learn how to effectively delegate stretch projects, provide growth opportunities, and become a supportive leader your team can rely on. Her mantra, “Don’t say no, ask how,” is bound to become your go-to in-house tagline for leading a successful and motivated legal team. Don’t miss out on these game-changing insights for building a thriving in-house legal department!
—
Listen to the podcast here
Don’t Say “No” Ask How: Developing A Team In The Legal Department Kate Dugan Energizer
Introduction And Kate Dugan’s Role At Energizer
On today’s episode, I’m excited to welcome Kate Dugan. She’s the General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of Energizer Holdings. You might know the Energizer Bunny. I certainly grew up with that. We’re going to be talking about team development, managing your team, and all of the business management skills that nobody taught us in law school or at a law firm.
—
Kate, how are you?
Stacy, I’m great. How are you?
I’m good and I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a couple of reasons. First of all, I think management is a topic that nobody cares about or tells lawyers how to do so I’m excited to delve into the topic, but we’re both from St. Louis. I’m excited about our hometown connection.
We could spend the whole hour talking about St. Louis, but I’m sure we won’t.
Yeah. That’d be very niche. Just diving in here. First, let’s talk a little bit about Energizer. Give some stats. How big is the company? What are the different areas you’re in and how big is your legal team?
Energizer Holdings, as you mentioned, we’ve got our bunny. Everyone knows that we make batteries. We sell our products in more than 150 countries around the globe but what most people don’t know about Energizer is that in addition to our battery and lighting portfolio, we also sell auto care products. Some of the most well-known auto care brands in the world like Armor All/STP, A/C Pro, and all these great products that help consumers keep their car looking great and running every day is another really exciting part of our business.
We have expanded from the scrappy battery company that we once were to a much broader consumer company and it’s something I think the organization enjoys quite a bit. As I mentioned, we operate in more than 150 countries around the world, which makes my job challenging and fun. I know it is a piece of our day-to-day that’s exciting and challenging.
For a company of that size and scope, what does the legal team look like?
We’re currently a team of about 50, and that is through maybe a more inorganic growth within the organization. A few months or so ago, we added the regulatory function to our group, and at that time, expanded from around 30 to 50. Also, we’re going to be expanding even further into a team of about 74. We’re now welcoming our compliance and trade compliance functions into the legal team. It’s a great time to be in the legal department and we’ve got this wonderful portfolio of areas that we’re managing for the organization but as of this time, we’ll be 74.
I feel like you might have the competency curse. “She’s such a good GC. Let’s give her more functions.”
It’s great. I am incredibly honored by the trust that the organization puts, not only me but also our legal leadership team. I am excited to bring on the new functions. It’s going to be a great change for the organization.
Let’s start with the 50. How many of those are lawyers and/or how many are support personnel? Ballpark it.
I would say so because we’ve got our regulatory team in there, those professionals are not legal professionals. From a lawyer’s perspective, if I had to ballpark it probably be in the 15 to 20 range and then the remaining are support professionals or regulatory or we do have the government affairs team in our group as well, government affairs professionals. We have a mix of folks. It’s not just lawyers in the legal department. It’s a wide variety of professionals with a wide variety of skills, education, and experiences that contribute to the overall portfolio of folks who support the various things that we do.
That is not only a large team, but it’s a diverse team because you have legal folks and non-legal folks. I’m going to want to pick that apart, but I know at least for the legal department, the legal professionals that you were involved in recruiting either directly or in a supporting role. A lot of the questions I get from readers are related to how they get in-house jobs and what are GCs looking for. Maybe we could talk just a little bit about what’s your approach to recruiting and the skill mix you’re looking for.
You’re right. It’s interesting. As I was reflecting a little bit more about this, when I think about why I have had a hand in the recruitment or direct responsibility for the recruitment of the vast majority of the legal department, if not all of the folks that are there, it’s because of the length of my tenure. I’ve been there for more than ten years, as well as the reality of my career trajectory at Energizer. My team knows that and I joke about this all the time. I’ve literally had nearly every job in the legal department. I’ve either been recruiting specifically for a particular role, whether it’s a backfill or a new role that emerged because of something the organization was doing or other.
You can have that other bucket of reasons for recruitment. That is why I’ve had a lot of experience in recruiting and as I think about approach, one of the most important things and I don’t know that this is that obvious to people, particularly those who are coming from a firm environment and going in-house. However, when I think about how my approach has evolved over that many years of tenure, one of the core principles is to always follow what the business needs.
I think a lot of lawyers come into an in-house environment and their first inclination is to build a mini-law firm, which doesn’t always work for whatever environment it is that you are supporting. I say this a lot too, to my team. It sounds harsh, but it’s true. Energizer does not exist to have a legal department. Energizer exists to sell our great products. Our battery, our lighting, and our auto care portfolios serve our customers and ensure that our consumers, the people who use our products, are enjoying the high-quality products that we put out in the world.
We’re there as legal support to make sure that first of all, we are enabling those commercial and consumer ambitions of our colleagues but also to make sure we’re doing things the right way to make sure that we don’t have legal faults that preclude us from being able to sell our great products around the world. [Ma1] My first sort of thinking here on approach is to always follow the business needs. A specific example of that is we’ve got an organization or your part of an organization that’s leaning in on, for example, eCommerce, or there’s going to be a lot of M&A in the longer term strategic horizon.
Hiring For The Business Needs
I don’t know that you’re doing yourself a lot of favors by hiring lawyers, legal professionals, or whatever it is that you need that doesn’t have any direct impact or ability to service those strategic needs of the organization. For me, point one is to make sure that when you’re hiring or you’re thinking about your organization or you’re looking at gaps or holes to fill in an organization you’re being thoughtful about what does the business need? What is the long-term strategic horizon for the organization? Where do we need deeper support and where can we maybe back off?
Do we have a huge labor and employment portfolio? No. You don’t need a 40-person labor and employment team to support a relatively non-existent portfolio. That’s point one and we could talk more about this however you wish. Culture and fit is such a key aspect of recruitment and how a particular individual is going to not only serve the subject matter that he or she has been hired in to serve but more broadly serve the organization effectively so she can get to those outcomes that matter for the business.
Let’s dig in on that, especially for folks who come from a law firm and go in-house. I think that there’s a little bit of mystery around what culture and fit are and what the things that I need to bring to the job other than my technical legal skill. I did an episode with an executive coach, Dina Denham Smith, and she talked a lot about that. For example, I know you were at a law firm for a long time too. Law firm deliverables are perfect legal work. In-house work does not have to be perfect. It needs to be efficient, approachable, and to speak the language. I wonder, when you’re looking at fit, how do you approach that? What does that mean basically?
In-house work isn't about perfection. It's about being efficient, approachable, and speaking the language of the business. Share on XKey Traits For In-House Lawyers
I love what you’re talking about how differently in-house lawyers operate from law firm lawyers and that’s a piece of it. When I think about fit for Energizer, we do well with curious people who are very willing to roll up their sleeves. If I boil down the perfect Energizer candidate, no matter what the subject matter is, they almost always have those two qualities. These are people who are going to come into our business and they’re going to be curious about our business.
The best in-house lawyers? Curious and willing to roll up their sleeves. It’s more than just technical skills. Share on XEven if it’s outside, what you would imagine to be the regular lanes of a corporate lawyer or your litigator or whatever the particular role is. The people who do well at Energizer seek to master their particular area but also have just a broad scale of curiosity about how things are done at our organization, what we make, where we make it, and who’s responsible for that. I think that tends to serve colleagues well.
Also, the rolling up of the sleeves. I know that 70 people sounds like a lot of people for a legal department, but I also told you at the beginning of our conversation that we serve 150 markets worldwide. If you do the math, and I’m not quite sure what that math is, we don’t have a ton of people and we’ve got very limited resources to make sure the work is getting done around the world. This notion that there’s not going to be hard work to do is something that I want to dispel.
There is a lot of work to do. I make my own PowerPoint presentations. I write my own emails. There’s no magic person behind the curtain who’s doing things for me and I’m just sitting in some ivory tower making decisions. We are a hardworking group and a lot of that is driven by the needs of our business and the volume of need by our business. When I say we need someone, when I’m looking for people to roll up their sleeves, I mean it. You’re going to be working, but you’re going to also have a lot of fun. Our team is fun. I don’t know how else to say that.
You got the bunny. It’s funny, and no offense, but batteries are a commodity thing. I don’t get excited to go to Target and get my batteries. I’m excited about the toy or gadget or whatever I need the batteries for, but it’s not a luxury purchase. However, I think that the way the company has used the bunny is infusing. I’m curious if that is an example of the spirit of fun in the company.
I think that’s great. I totally agree. Energizer is a really fun place to work. We’ve got our stuff. Every company has its stuff but I think Energizer, at least for me, throughout my career at Energizer, which by the way is the longest place I’ve ever been. I’ve been reflecting on that too. I have never stayed at a job longer than I have at Energizer, again, which is more than ten years at this point and a lot of it is driven by the fun that we have every single day. I laugh hard every single day at work. It is great and that’s driven by our people, plain and simple.
We have amazingly smart, professional, practical, down-to-earth people who share a common ambition, willing to work hard to achieve that ambition, and are open to challenge dialogue. We are a good group of people and I’m saying this beyond just the legal department. This is Energizer. I do think our bunny provides an important inspiration for that. He is one of the world’s most recognized brands. It’s an exciting part of our business that we get to protect as lawyers every day for the company but I think you’re right to draw the connection between our lighthearted and fun bunny and maybe some of that personality that we see around the office every day.
It sounds like it’s fun in the Energizer legal department. We talked about there is the management function of the GC. We’re having fun and we’ve got great colleagues. Managing, especially a big team, is part of the job. I recorded an episode about Do You Want To Be A General Counsel with the former general counsel of Heineken and a sitting general counsel of the Gateway Foundation. That was something they said that they were surprised by when they got to the role that it was the management function was at least for these folks between 40% and 50% of their time. I want to see if that resonates with you.
I’m surprised by that percentage only because my perspective would be that it’s probably more than that, at least for me, the management aspect of it. There’s a people team piece, which I do think is the most important piece. It’s my job to make sure that our team is operating effectively and that we have our eyes on the prize. Also, we are aligned with what the business needs, that we don’t have folks in our organization that are swirling on a particular topic when no one cares, and we’ve got the right people.
The people who are there are pointed in the right direction, feeling good and confident about their role at Energizer. When they don’t feel good and confident about their role at Energizer, they have the tools, resources, and support that they need. I would say that this component of my job is more than 50% of my day. Also, there’s the other piece, which is managing around the legal team. Which is managing with other leaders to ensure that where we need to be heard or where there’s a particular topic or thing that we need to make sure is baked into any business assessment or any decision we’re making about how we’re going to move forward as an organization.
Managing a legal team is more than 50% of my day—ensuring everyone has the support they need to succeed. Share on XIt’s my job as well as our leadership team’s job to make sure that we’re heard, I would say, at an appropriate scale and that once decisions are made, we are supporting the organization fully and ensuring that we’re managing and mitigating all the risks that may follow from that decision. I talk about this a lot and I have a discussion that I like to have with the legal team probably once every two years about what makes a good in-house counsel. What are the characteristics?
I think one of the most striking things, at least to me and probably to others, is that at some point, your technical skills matter less and less and your ability to communicate, influence, and collaborate constructively with other leaders in other functions matters more and more. I think lawyers who love the technical side of what they do struggle with this piece more than others in-house because it’s very different than working for a law firm working in-house.
It’s a completely different way of practicing law that a lot of people don’t, myself included, back in the day when I was working for a law firm, didn’t understand the differences between working for a company versus working for a law firm. I feel like I got a little meandery[Ma3] in there, but hopefully, that answers the question.
For sure, and I want to weave this in with a more direct question because the technical is almost easier to train and develop in people because you could be like, “GDPR, you are going to be supporting our European market. We need you to get deep on GDPR.” There are readily available CLEs etc. that you could do some technical training on.
Training on that collaboration, backing away from the technical and looking at getting the work done, the people are trying to launch their new product before Black Friday or whatever, it can be more challenging. I wanted to dig in a little bit about how you more granularly work on developing those skills with your team.
The “Don’t Say No, Ask How” Philosophy
I think a lot of it is through observation. We have an amazing group of leaders in our legal team who have honed these skills incredibly effectively. I learn from them. I watch them interact with our business clients and I am always impressed by their approaches in terms of how to make sure that points are delivered but not hammered. I’m always impressed with how they have embedded and this is a common phrase in our legal department, “Don’t say no. Ask how,” philosophy in their approach. It’s not mine. I heard it at Ladder Up a few years ago.
It was such a crisp way of memorializing a philosophy I have always had. I use that phrase quite a bit with our department to remind them of this point. As I said, our job is to where possible enable the ambitions of our organization. Our job is not to provide exhaustive checklists for people to fill out before they can even think about interacting with a customer but I think a lot of people maintain that perception of legal teams is that, “These guys are business impediments, but I got to go talk to them because these are the rules.”
We worked hard to dispense with that perception of the legal team and partner. That word is thrown out a lot and I think some people live it and some people don’t. We work hard to live it and one of the ways we do that is through this, “Don’t say no. Ask how,” philosophy. As I was mentioning our legal leadership team, as I think through the ways that they’ve embedded that philosophy in their day-to-day work, they’re very good about bringing opportunities to other members of their team so that they can just watch. How does that conversation go? When do you stop talking? I think this is a big question for lawyers.
That is an important teaching point. They’ve heard it. Stop hammering it.
Do not run through the open door. If you’ve gotten there, stop talking but if you haven’t gotten there, this is another important skill in helping your clients reach these conclusions themselves so that it’s their decision. You can give good facts, guidance, and recommendations, but ultimately, we are here to support this organization. Our business leaders make business decisions, and ensuring that they have the right information at the right tone with the right risk calibration so that ultimately they can make the call and they can make the right call is an important piece of what we do. As I said, sometimes it means not talking. Sometimes it means putting a period at the end of your sentence and letting the discussion follow and they’ll get there on their own.
Especially with a trusted relationship. It sounds like you and others on your team have a pretty long tenure. When you get a reputation as being that true partner, you don’t have to be as emphatic and reiterate your points as much because you just put out the breadcrumb and then let them take it from there.
That’s exactly right. It’s confidence through competence. You got to let people try this and they’re not always going to succeed. We’ve all had terrible meetings where we’ve reflected and said, “I blew that. I missed an opportunity to get to a better outcome for the organization,” but that is the only way I think or it is one of the better ways to learn how to do better next time. I think Energizer, at least our legal department, is unique in offering these types of opportunities to all levels of lawyers and professionals to practice those skills. Try it on.
When you say the following or tag along, do you have a formal mentoring relationship? Maybe talk a little bit about how that works with your more established. I don’t know if you people have different titles or how you work this out.
I would say, do we have formal mentoring programs at Energizer? We totally do, but I am a huge fan of informal opportunities to create relationships that are impactful to careers. That’s been my path. I’ve always been a little suspicious of formal mentoring programs because they have never been particularly enriching for me necessarily but that doesn’t mean they’re not amazing in all the ways that they are amazing. I don’t mean to disparage formal mentoring programs.
One of the things we’ve started doing, and this is new for us, is trying to gauge where people’s interests are. We launched a survey and received responses from our team from those who wanted to participate. It was okay if you didn’t want to participate. “What are you interested in? Do you want to pick up some ethics and compliance work? Are you a patent lawyer who’s interested in maybe understanding a little bit more about what it takes to get a commercial agreement from start to finish?”
We’ve collected and aggregated that information and are now, looking for stretch opportunities or more unique opportunities for our team to get exposure in these areas that they otherwise would not ordinarily have an opportunity to have. The other piece I’d say at Energizer, and I don’t know if this is unique to Energizer, but one of the more amazing pieces of my career is there is no other place to build a resume than our legal department.
It’s because we have so much work to do in so many countries that I don’t know that we’ve ever said no to somebody raising their hand saying, “I don’t know the first thing about GDPR, but I’m happy to work on that for you. I’m happy to help us start to put a framework around this and understand how we’re going to need to react to it.” I am not saying that is how we handle GDPR.
We google it.
We use the Google, but I have very aware colleagues who have that well in hand. I use it just as an example. A call back to something you said, there are lots of new issues that arise every single day that not one of us necessarily has ever touched, but there’s always a chance to pick up the topic. Usually, what that ends up driving are discussions within our legal department and discussions within our business partners, within our colleagues to better understand the topic. That drives, develops, and builds competence in the lawyer or the professional and allows that growth opportunity in a safe place so that when they go into the meeting to present their ideas, they already have an established working team.
They know the issues well. They’ve got a practical view into how to approach it, and they’re able to get the business to a good place for whatever it is that they’re helping advise on. This very fertile ground of opportunity, I think, drives a lot of that growth and learning to be able to be a good, strong, successful, and impactful in-house leader. Again, I don’t know if that’s unique to Energizer, but it has certainly been one of the most important aspects of my role there.
Kate, I think that what we’re talking about, we just moved into the stretch project conversation, which is something I wanted to get granular with because I think you’ve done such a good job of that and it sounds like the company culture supports that. You mentioned the survey and I want to get granular and tactical about this because I thought this was smart.
When I interviewed Valerie Portillo from the Diversity Lab Project, I don’t know if this was a DEI initiative or if you have a ton of work and you’re trying to figure out who wants to do it, but she talked about finding more transparent ways of raising awareness to stretch projects and places for people to grow. Can you talk about how you approach this? Does the survey come from you? Does it come from someone on your team? How do you populate?” Those are pretty specific things that you’re asking about. Maybe you can tell us how you developed the survey.
I’ll back up for you and tell you why we did this survey. There are two reasons why we did this survey. First of all, there is plenty of work in the legal department, which should surprise you 0.0% based on everything that I’ve said. There’s plenty of opportunity for folks and making sure that we route that activity or route those needs to people who are interested in growing a skillset in a particular area to us was a clear win.
The second reason why we did this survey, and then I promise you I will get into the granular of how we did it, but the second reason why we did it is like many companies, we do engagement surveys. We get enterprise-wide results and department-wide results. One of the things that our colleagues said was, “I love it here. I am learning a lot. I want to learn more. I want to continue growing in my career. I want to continue learning.”
We wanted to make sure that we were responding to that in a constructive way and in a way that we could follow through on. This was a discussion within our legal leadership team brainstorming how we could, how we could facilitate the connections between desired work or desired new areas of growth and development with need.
It’s smart to even put that together.
We’re still very early days, but I do think that this is going to be a great way to, at a minimum, inventory what our colleagues are interested in doing and what they want to learn to do. One of the things is we wanted to be sensitive to a couple of things. First of all, there are some people who love what they do. I’m going to pick on the patent lawyers because patent lawyers love patent work. Maybe they want to do other stuff, but for the most part, this is the work that jazzes them up and that’s okay. That’s fine. It’s fine to love your discipline and say, “I am going to be the best fill-in-the-blank professional that I can be. I am not looking to learn how to close an M&A transaction.”
That’s okay. First of all, being respectful to those people on our team, but then also being respectful of the time of the others on our team who do have desires outside of their particular subject area to make sure that filling out a survey wasn’t going to take them 30 minutes and stress them out. What we did was we took all the stuff that we do as a legal department and we clicked the box. I think we used SurveyMonkey or maybe we used a tool within our legal tracker software that helped us collect all this, all this data.
We put it in there a lot for comments, inventoried what people wanted and I think we are starting just now. As I said, this is still early days, but we are starting to say, “Stacy is interested in procurement. I know she is our patent lawyer, but she wants to pick up some procurement, some direct or indirect procurement work. Here’s a new issue that’s popped up for the business. Why don’t you come to the conference call that we’re having with the client at 10:00? Can you make it, and then just start?
Getting involved in the issue and hearing how our procurement lawyer talks to the business. What things are on his or her mind about the particular issue? What’s the business context? What’s the background noise on this one versus the particular issue? I think it’s like anywhere else. You just get started with a particular topic. I’ll have to come back on a return episode and let you know how’s this going but I think it was very well received by the department. I got a lot of great responses and as I said, we kept it simple and non-mandatory.
I think that’s smart for so many reasons, but one of them was when I had a larger team at USC, it was so fertile with an infinite number of different projects, people, and things to get your hands dirty with. However, doing it through a survey gauging interest is a great way to avoid the trap of being voluntold because you do have the work. That list that you populated in your survey, that’s real work. Somebody has to roll their sleeves up and get it done. It was smart.
I want to backtrack a little bit with goal development and developing the individuals on the team. Certainly, the survey is a great indicator of what substantive areas they want to do, but I assume that you also, like most departments, have an annual goal-setting, evaluations, etc. How do you approach professional development outside of the technical that we talked about?
The Importance Of Individual Development Plans
Setting aside our KPI planning. What do we need to accomplish from a legal perspective throughout the year? How do we best support the enterprise-wide business objectives? That’s one process. We do also have, at Energizer, what we call our Individual Development Plan process of IDPs, however, you wish to refer to those.
Again, it’s voluntary. You don’t have to do this, but these are plans that people put together that are supposed to reflect their ambitions either within their current role or their ambitions for other roles. One of the things you and I talked about before was my historical perceptions of IDPs and maybe how I’m dealing with them now. I will be honest with you and with apologies to our phenomenal HR team at Energizer, I always used to think that IDPs were baloney.
I thought they were only a methodology for communicating my commitment to my manager. Also, I needed to put in there all the things that I thought my manager wanted to hear from me versus what I wanted to do with my career or things that I wanted to learn at the organization but weren’t necessarily in my lane. As I have evolved, we all have evolved as professionals, I have now gotten to a much more constructive place where I truly understand the value of an IDP and the power of writing it down.
When I talk about IDPs with our team, with my direct reports, what you’ll hear me say is, “This is your document. This is for you to reflect what your ambitions are over whatever professional horizon you have identified for yourself as meaningful whether that’s 6 months, 3 years, 5 years, 7 years, or 10 years.” The other thing I say to the team is not only, “This for you, but it is okay for you to have ambitions for my job, for your boss’s job, for a job outside of the legal department, and possibly for a job not at Energizer.”
I don’t want anyone to leave. We have an amazing team, but we live in a world where careers are grown inside companies and sometimes they reach a point and then the career is further grown outside the company. I think it is wise to normalize that and make that okay when people are talking about their career ambitions. I have members in my legal leadership team who transparently let me know that they want my job and I think that’s awesome.
I don’t feel threatened by this. I feel excited by this. What we’ve done as we’ve talked through these IDPs is, “Where do you need exposure? What skills are you going to need when you are either, because I’ve been hit by a bus, and so the company needs to make a decision about who they’re going to put in the GC seat?” What do you want to make sure is on your skills list that it is an easy choice for them to select you as a general counsel or if another opportunity emerges outside of the company because you’re ready to go be a GC, let’s make sure your resume looks great.
I don’t want you to leave, but let’s make sure your resume looks great when it’s time for you to get the job that you want. I think the permission to be a little bolder than maybe I thought about IDPs before has created rich conversations for my direct reports and within our broader legal team. We’re hearing amazing things from people that you would maybe not ever hear. For example, “I want to get involved in government affairs. This is something that’s been a long-term interest of mine. It’s amazing to know that this may be an opportunity. Put me down on the survey for a government affairs opportunity.”
Connecting these dots, creating opportunities, and creating a safe place where it’s okay to talk about what you want to do versus what you think your manager wants you to do has really enriched the process for our team. It also created possibilities and curiosity where maybe the IDP process before was a more routine check-the-box HR exercise.
I got to tell you as you’re explaining this, I feel like it’s brilliant on so many levels. First of all, you are mining the gold. You’re seeing, “What do these people need or what do they want?” You then can think about how to plug them in, how to get more out of them, and how to put them in a position for those. I would assume that you might even line up the survey with the IDP, but then the connection they must have to you as a leader is like, “She cares. I’m not just grinding out the work, answering the emails, going to these meetings, or whatever.” It seems like that would be such a strong way to build the team and the loyalty, etc.
I hope so. I have to say I am incredibly proud of this team that we have throughout the entire legal organization. The team that we are bringing on is also an unbelievably strong and engaged team. Sometimes these transitions can be a little crazy, but this one is going to be so easy because we already work so closely together that it’s going to be more of the same collaboration, support, professionalism, and fun that makes our team special.
I realize it’s my team and I’m super biased, but I do want people to understand that I genuinely do care about people’s career paths and I’m realistic and practical about them. If you want to be the general counsel of Energizer, there are not four of those roles. There’s only one of those roles. If you want to be a general counsel somewhere, let’s make sure you milk this opportunity for all that it is. Get ready because it’s a big job. Being a GC is a very big job.
The more exposure you have to not only subject areas but also basic stuff like budget management. Also, bringing people under the tent of what that feels like to manage a quarterly budget, to manage your annual business planning, to communicate hard things about how much you feel like you need to spend in the following year because of X situation. These are conversations that aren’t easy and need to occur.
They’re not your every day. There is pretty much one person that has those kinds of conversations. The other thing that occurred to me is that this is a great tool for you for succession planning otherwise you’d be like, “Julie is pretty smart. I’ve had her in a couple of committee meetings. I think she could do it,” but now you have your portfolio or you have your whole game board to see, “These people are the people I should be grooming for this.”
Managing Succession Planning In The Legal Department
If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I have complete confidence that there are leaders ready to go and that’s a good feeling.
Take your victory lap. That’s super smart. That’s why I wanted to talk to you because you’re not just sleepwalking through leading the department. It seems very intentional and I’m sure they appreciate it. It seems like it’s a win with your team. I have a couple of tiny questions. When we talked about the department and what you’re looking for, you talked about “we work and roll up the sleeves.” I know that was not always your perception of an in-house job. I don’t know if we have true confessions here about what your perception was about in-house legal work before you started doing it.
This is maybe a sad part of my past. We talked before. I was a litigator. I litigated most of my career in Chicago and had every intention of becoming the next great trial lawyer. I came to Energizer through circumstances that I didn’t know that I would have anticipated in my career. Also, with apologize to the people who hired me who are now in extremely senior roles at Energizer. I did not view it at the time Energizer was a long-term stop when I was hired on.
I ended up loving it. I ended up having every job in the legal department and now here I am as the general counsel of the company. It all worked out. My perception when I was a law firm associate, and a law firm attorney was that in-house jobs are cush. You fill out some spreadsheets. You have long lunches. You don’t dig into the substance and there’s not a lot to do because you’ve got outside law firms who are doing all the legal work. That perception was immediately wiped out when I came over to Energizer and understood what the job entailed.
It makes me feel terrible for all these misconceptions I had and honestly, Stacy, how rigid but for some circumstances in my professional status at a law firm here in St. Louis and for my views on how I was feeling at that particular firm, I would never have come to Energizer. I would never have done this. I would never have gone in-house. I feel like I saved myself from a huge mistake.
This is exactly what I was meant to do. This was exactly the career that I was meant to have and I feel so lucky that the universe came together. The stars aligned and brought this role to me because the Kate Dugan of 2008, and 2009 would’ve been like, “I’m never going in-house. That’s not for me,” and she was very wrong. I’m embarrassed at how I misperceived the role.
You can’t see when you’ve got your head on the timesheet billing those hours. When you get these questions at the last minute and I reflect on my own experience in a law firm, you’re like, “Why don’t they have their shit together over there?” You’re like, “My head’s on a swivel and I’m spinning twenty plates at the same time. I ask all guests the last question. It’s a little lighter and I feel like I’m getting the vibe of fun, collaboration, team, and all that. I want to if you have a pump-up song.
You were kind enough to give me this question in advance so I did have an opportunity to reflect on it. In my reflection, I was thinking, “God, I got to find just the right song to impress Stacy.” have decided to tell you the truth. The truth is that when I need to get pumped up, I listen to my college fight song, which is Fight Tigers. I am a University of Missouri graduate School of Journalism. I will listen to that song and get myself ready to go to do whatever I need to do.
It’s funny. This is pulling the curtain back a little on podcasts with lawyers. That question, people stress about it. I don’t know what the audience feels, but I get a lot of safe choices. I think Diana Feinstein, who’s a partner at Gibson, Dunn. I think Thunderstruck was her real answer, but she told me that she thought the lyrics were a little racy. I can’t remember what her other song was. Dirt Off Your Shoulder, which is all kinds of inappropriate, is one of my go-tos. Ladies Is Pimps too. Kate Dugan, thank you so much for being in the show.
Thank you.
It was super fun.
—
Thanks for joining me. If you like the show, would you please follow, like, and subscribe? That helps other readers find the show. If you’re inspired, you can rate and review on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get your shows. Thanks.
Important Links
- Energizer Holdings
- Kate Dugan – LinkedIn
- Dina Denham Smith – Past episode
- Do You Want To Be A General Counsel – Past episode
- Valerie Portillo – Past episode
- Diana Feinstein – Past episode
- Apple – The Legal Department Podcast
- Spotify – The Legal Department Podcast
About Kate Dugan
Kate Dugan leads legal, compliance, regulatory and government affairs function at Energizer. She serves as the primary legal advisor for Energizer globally and Corporate Secretary to Energizer’s board of directors.
Since joining Energizer in 2014, Kate has held various leadership roles, most recently as Energizer’s Associate General Counsel, Commercial, Marketing and Intellectual Property. Previously, Kate was a litigator with Greenberg Traurig in Chicago; Shook, Hardy & Bacon in Kansas City, Missouri; and Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner in St. Louis.
Kate holds a Juris Doctorate from Saint Louis University and a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Missouri.
