You're at a great company, with a fancy title and what seems from the outside to be exciting work. But all that glitters is not gold. No matter where you are in your career--whether you're just starting out or at the top of the career ladder, you can feel stuck.

Ellen Yang shares advice for attorneys and managers alike on how to recognize that you (or your team) might be feeling stuck and how to break through that to find something more fulfilling. She has specific advice for senior level lawyers, deputy GCs and associate GCs, about how to fill out that resume to get GC ready.

Ellen also did the unheard of: she returned to a law firm after more than a decade in-house. Tune in to learn about that experience and whether a return to the "dark side" is right for you. Lots of great stories and advice here to help you level-up, whatever that means to you.

In-house legal professionals are more than advisors – they’re strategic leaders. This episode of The Legal Department is a replay of a dynamic discussion about how personal branding and influence can elevate your impact, visibility, and career. Listen to the real-world strategies, lessons learned, and tools for building your brand authentically – both inside your organization and across your network. Whether you're climbing the ladder or looking to lead from where you are, this session will help you position yourself for influence and opportunity.

Topics:

1. Why Influence Matters

Why personal brand and internal influence are strategic assets

1. Personal Brand in Practice: How We Built Ours

Tactics used to define and project their brand (internally and externally)

Mistakes made and lessons learned along the way

1. Making Yourself Visible Without Being Self-Promotional

Strategies for subtle self-advocacy and internal visibility

Communicating your value to non-legal stakeholders

Leveraging internal wins to grow reputation

1. LinkedIn, Leadership, and Leverage: Career Opportunities Through Branding

Using LinkedIn and networking to create inbound opportunities

How branding helped panelists navigate job transitions or promotions

Advice for in-house lawyers at different stages of their careers

Former Bain consultant and executive coach Anita Kishore knows how to run a good meeting. When a CEO cancelled a standing meeting with her, Anita learned the hard way that planning ahead and communicating meeting objectives are essential for any meeting. As an executive coach, she helps executives maximize their effectiveness through good meeting hygiene. In this episode, find out the two secrets to make any meeting a hit. From project meetings, all-hands, staff meetings or 1:1s, Anita shares strategies for how to maximize effectiveness of any meeting.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why setting an agenda and knowing the meeting objective is table stakes;
• How to know which meetings you need to attend;
• How to manage the clock by "calling a banana";
• How to draw out the introverts by using technology to encourage participation
• Tune in to learn the skills you need to be a meeting pro.

Attention all legal operations professionals! This episode is for you. Legal Ops consultant Lyndsey Cain of LegalEng is in The Legal Department to talk about how to make your legal tech implementation a success. From identifying a non-IT leader, knowing your goals, having a comms plan, and an ongoing governance structure, Lyndsey shares that success is more than "just the tech." She also shares tips on vendor engagement, negotiating those implementation services, and how to navigate tech updates.

In this Office Hours discussion, Stacy Bratcher is joined by Leah Huddleston, Chief Legal Officer/Corporate Secretary at CBIZ, and Candace Jackson, Senior Vice President/General Counsel/Corporate Secretary of Silvaco. They share their journeys from associate general counsel and deputy GC to their current chairs, highlighting the most valuable lessons they learned along the way. Leah and Candace explain why a GC must truly know the business inside out and why they sometimes need to act as ethical supervisors. They also discuss how GCs can develop an executive presence and how they must handle the leadership development of their teams.

Feeling like you're never going to get resources to support your legal function?

Kathy Zhu has been there. Facing an endless demand for her time and limited resources to meet the business need at DoorDash, Kathy as head of Commercial Contracting, built relationships with her key customers and a process to help her team manage and communicate priorities within the company. She was so successful in showing her team's value (and their resource needs), her clients actually donated their own headcount to the legal department so she could serve them better.

Seeing the value of process, tools and relationships, Kathy and her co-founder built a tool (Streamline AI) to help in-house legal departments manage their workload and generate metrics to make the case for more resources.

In this episode, Kathy shares how she managed "the bottomless pit of need" using Google forms as a bush fix before Streamline AI was born.

She shares:

• Why transparency and vulnerability are a superpower for building relationships with your key clients
• How using metrics can help you "speak CFO" and tell the story of your legal department
• Why understanding the stage of the company and what's needed can help lawyers deliver better services

Host Stacy Bratcher steps onto the Leveraging Latitude podcast with Alex Su and Candice Reed to share her practical, hard-won tips for leveling up as in-house counsel. From building genuine relationships with business leaders to positioning yourself as a strategic partner, managing and inspiring your team, and being intentional about your own professional growth, Stacy offers an energizing roadmap for success. She also reveals two fun facts about herself and the pump-up songs that keep her going. 

This episode first appeared on Leveraging Latitude: Cultivating a Full Life in the Law, a podcast by Latitude. Learn more at LATITUDELEGAL.COM.

Tired of feeling like your legal department is a cost center? Fielding too many questions about the outside counsel spend, headcount and all the costs you generate? In this episode, you'll learn how to start an affirmative recovery program that can generate millions of dollars for your company. Veteran GC Andrew Johnstone, formerly in-house at Sears and US Foods, joins Greg McPolin of Burford Capital to share the "how" and "why" of building an affirmative recovery program in your in-house legal department. If you're not pursuing affirmative claims for your company, you're leaving money on the table. Tune in to learn how to generate positive cash flow and an ROI from your in-house legal work.

You may be thinking, "not another episode on AI! Haven't we covered that already?" Well, you're right. The Legal Department has covered AI, but we haven't talked practically or tactically about how you would actually use AI in an in-house legal department. In this episode, Sterling Miller, the OG of In-House, shares practical tips on how in-house departments can safely use AI.

Other discussions include: 

• How to deal with confidentiality and attorney client privilege with AI tools
• Practical, step-by-step suggestions for drafting prompts for different tasks
• AI use-cases for in-house lawyers
• How to navigate e-discovery

Sterling also shares his favorite AI tools for legal departments–put together after 2 years of research, so you don't have to!

This is an episode you won't want to miss. Bookmark it and listen on a flight so you can take notes!

New to a global company? Working with lawyers in different parts of the world and struggling to connect? It's not just about understanding the language: to work cross-culturally, you need to understand the other party's culture. In this episode, Juliana Calil, former in-house attorney at Google, Intel, Disney and other big name companies shares her experience as a Brazilian lawyer learning how to practice in the US and eventually taking that experience back to Brazil. As Juliana shares, working internationally takes more than being bilingual. She shares how many of the in-house fundamentals are still key in international roles and how being curious about the other party's culture ensures success. We also tackle key differences in how US and Brazilian companies handle IP issues. Estou empolgado com isso!