Chaka Patterson, founder and CEO of Chaka Strategy, has a blunt message for lawyers who think legal expertise alone will carry them to the top.
Patterson, also the author of The Hot Seat: Mastering the Public Company General Counsel Role, argues that technical legal proficiency is simply the entry fee for the job, not the thing that keeps you in it.
His central argument is that emotional intelligence, executive presence, and the ability to communicate legal ideas to non-lawyers are what truly separate lasting general counsels from short-lived ones.
The statistics behind GC turnover are striking, with Patterson noting that over 40% of general counsels are replaced within five years of taking the role.
He draws a clear line between what he calls “last call” lawyers, those who simply dispense legal advice when asked, and “first call” lawyers, the ones a CEO reaches for on almost any serious matter.
“First call” lawyers, Patterson explains, are the ones who tend to survive and thrive, because they have earned genuine trust as broad business advisors rather than narrow legal technicians.
One of the most common traps new general counsels fall into is treating business colleagues the way they once treated outside clients, or worse, the way they treated targets during government work.
That adversarial or transactional instinct, Patterson warns, corrodes the internal relationships a GC depends on to function effectively inside a company.
Another critical misconception is that the CFO owns the markets narrative and the communications team owns public relations, leaving the GC to manage only their defined legal piece of any crisis.
Patterson is direct on this point: when a stock drops sharply or an activist investor sends a letter, the general counsel must think simultaneously about public relations, financial markets, employee communications, and legal exposure, not wait for someone else to take the lead.
He frames the GC role not as a specialist position but as a quarterback function, one that requires coordinating every dimension of a problem holistically and in real time.
This broader mandate means that lawyers moving in-house from private practice or government roles face a significant cultural and operational adjustment that many underestimate.
The lawyers who navigate that transition successfully are typically those who invest early in relationships across the C-suite and develop fluency in the business concerns that drive executive decision-making.
Patterson’s broader point is that the general counsel who gets called first is not necessarily the most technically brilliant lawyer in the room, but the most trusted strategic presence at the table.
For any lawyer with ambitions toward a public company GC role, that reframing of what the job actually demands may be the most important career lesson available.