In-House Insights: John Beckett’s leadership strategy as a GC
The road to becoming a successful General Counsel (GC) has many paths. As part of the Counsel+ In-House Insights interview series, we discovered how John Beckett’s journey took him from being a scholar of Japanese literature to leading proven in-house legal teams. John started his legal career at Freshfields as an M&A lawyer and has worked in-house at global companies. Throughout our interview, he spoke eloquently about how he has coped with challenges, developed as a business strategist and lawyer, cross-departmental collaboration and how GCs can add value to the business.
What inspired you to become a lawyer?
I was an academic in Japanese literature and spent six years studying and working in Japan. The intellectual challenge of academia meant that I understood how to conduct research thoroughly and engage in rigorous analytical thinking. Having a number of friends from Cambridge who worked in law, I saw there was considerable overlap with academia and realised that being a lawyer could be a challenging and rewarding career.
How have you developed as a lawyer?
I’m a natural extrovert and I very much like working with people. Partners and colleagues have seen that in me and I have been fortunate to have been asked to go on several extremely interesting secondments when I was in private practice. One of the things that I liked most from those experiences was the depth of the relationship that I was able to develop through close and sustained contact with clients.
Following an enjoyable role in-house at ION Trading, focusing on cross-border corporate transactions, I was approached to join Mitsubishi Heavy Industries as a senior lawyer, which felt like a natural move, given my background speaking fluent Japanese and my ability to operate seamlessly within Japanese culture. The role offered an opportunity to expand and operate in the way that a GC would, and led to me working across commercial transactions and contracts, disputes, compliance, governance, privacy and more.
I subsequently took a role at ESAB Corporation (a global welding and cutting business listed on the New York Stock Exchange), where I was Head of Legal for EMEAR and ran global transactions for the legal team, again managing a team and advising senior leadership. Most recently, I joined Hunter Douglas Europe – the global leader in window coverings in which 3G Capital holds a majority stake – last year as General Counsel EMEA and Oceania. In this role, I’ve especially enjoyed managing strategically significant disputes, negotiating a wide range of complex B2B and B2C contracts and counselling executive leadership. In 2024, I’ve also focused on divisional responsibilities and have been in charge of a major global outsourcing project.
All of my positions have required me to be commercially-minded, which has shaped me as both a business strategist and as a lawyer.
What skills do you need to succeed as a business-minded GC?
As you become more senior and influential in an organisation, you are able to truly contribute to big picture issues. You see what’s interesting about running a specific business, and where legal perspectives and risk management skills can contribute and add value.
GCs are gatekeepers of risk. It’s essential to be able to help our businesses resolve their complex commercial problems, while distilling legal issues and communicating their effect, or potential effect, on the business. We also need to be competent at understanding which legal issues we should be addressing in-house and which ones we need to outsource if we are to be cost management experts.
These skills must be present to achieve big picture success. It’s essential for us to be robust in the face of criticism or challenge as GCs and not shrink from our role managing legal and regulatory risk.
Formidable legal teams are not just a support function, they defend and bolster the bottom line.
How do you offer solutions and add value as a GC?
If we are not offering solutions, what value are we adding to the business?
As someone who has worked for publicly listed companies and PE-backed ones, I find there is an increasing pressure for GCs to contribute to the bottom line, not only to protect the business. So the key challenge is: how do we actually add value, rather than just preserve it, acting as value creators and not only mitigators of risk. This isn’t an easy question because it’s not a way of thinking that lawyers have traditionally been expected or required to have. There are times when we have to say no, but the best lawyers work as thought partners to find solutions.
That’s what really drives me – working with internal and external stakeholders to find those win-win solutions whenever possible. I’m very much a problem-solver. Build a good relationship and find a solution that works in the interests of your key stakeholders.
That makes you a business partner and therefore a skilled lawyer, not a brake.
What does leadership mean to you as a GC?
For me leadership is managing my own team well, and collaborating effectively with colleagues across other teams.
I enjoy managing lawyers with different personalities and from different backgrounds. My goal is to really help others develop and grow, finding the right way and level at which to challenge them, depending on their ability and appetite. Business acumen is best learnt by doing and by experience, because it’s not something historically we as lawyers have been trained to possess.
We have a lot of skills as lawyers that are required to drive projects. Those skills need the right support across the business in order to enhance value.
Part of our ability to keep talented people will also revolve around understanding what motivates them, as people aren’t usually motivated only by money, but by other things like fringe benefits, promotion opportunities, a healthy work-life balance and opportunities to learn and develop their skills. It goes without saying that post-COVID, most people expect some kind of hybrid working.
If teams are overstretched, GCs run a real risk of seeing burn-outs among their lawyers, which is clearly a major problem, especially if the team was already over-stretched. This illustrates the need for GCs to manage stress levels and workloads, protect people and generally be aware of their well-being.
Let’s talk about relationship-building as a GC
Being a successful GC is about the relationships you develop: cultivate relationships that are built on trust and mutual respect with your teams, peers and external lawyers.
Listening to people is crucial. Sometimes colleagues don’t understand where there is heightened risk created by their actions or decisions, because it’s not their job. We need to hear and decode what they’re saying, and see if we perceive risks.
It’s important to actively relationship-build across your networks. It gives us great reassurance and perspective to know that other legal leaders are facing the same challenges.
Through dialogue, you really get a broad sense of what everybody is working on and how others have dealt with similar issues and challenges.
Networking is an opportunity to share ideas and working practices and I think that’s why, for example, places like Blake Morgan’s Counsel+ forum are immensely valuable for us as GCs.
What are some challenges that are arising for GCs?
As often discussed recently, lawyers are increasingly being looked to for expertise and leadership in a wider range of areas, from HR to cyber-security to ESG. Whether or not that is something you crave as a GC is beside the point: it’s an opportunity for us to further demonstrate our commercial utility to our businesses in new areas.
This role expansion can and must be seen as an opportunity. We need to work out how we can keep on top of the continuously shifting legal and regulatory landscape and help our businesses operate adroitly within it. We cannot just signal value here, we must thrive ethically and financially well into the future. Our customers, consumers, and younger colleagues count on it. We ourselves count on it.
Thinking about my teams, our approach to these issues also greatly influences how you attract and retain talent.
Also with budgetary constraints in mind, it’s essential to apply energy where it’s needed most. We should not be scared of technology; generative AI and legal technology in general is here to stay and it can be leveraged as a tool with the right minds guiding it.
Can GCs influence the culture of an entire firm?
Absolutely. First and foremost it starts with the perception of our own legal team, exemplifying excellence and humanity, bringing that to our work across all parts of the business.
Next, we do have to work with our boards and with our CEOs especially to establish clearly what the appropriate tone from the top is. Once you empower your C-Suite to correctly understand and contextualise legal and compliance risk, they will be more likely to be good actors, which is foundational to the sort of legal and compliance culture that we envision as GCs.
Counsel+ is an in-house lawyer forum, aimed at general counsel and the in-house community. Find out more about it here and sign up to our mailing list to ensure you do not miss out on exclusive invitations to roundtable events, thought-provoking webinars and the latest developments.
This interview is part of a series of conversations with in-house lawyers which Blake Morgan are documenting, as part of our business forum for in-house counsel.
Tags: counsel plus, in-house insights
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