When you’re interviewing for a new role in the Legal Risk & Compliance space, there are several key attributes that hiring managers will be looking for. If you can demonstrate them during your application and interview, you’ll have a better chance of securing your preferred position. On Episode 8 of The UNCOVER Pod I was joined by Rebecca Atkinson, the General Counsel at Howard Kennedy LLP in London, who shared her views on what those key attributes are. She also shared her advice for professionals who are joining the industry from other areas or at the entry level.
What are the most important attributes that you will look for when hiring candidates into your team?
For me, what’s really important is that you’ve got a can-do attitude and a willingness to do things outside of your regular job. Sometimes we all have to muck in. For example, I’ve been helping onboarding clients and picking up risk advice queries, and I’m really enjoying it. We’re all going to help each other in my team. Some aspects of risk and compliance are really tough so we have to work together.
One of the other things that’s really important is commerciality. At the end of the day, a law firm is there to service clients and make money. It is a business at the end of the day. My job is to get people where they need to get to, in the most compliant and risk averse way. That doesn’t mean that risks can’t be taken, they’ve just got to be understood and calculated properly so that people can do things with their eyes open. My team and I need to be able to do that commercially. We have to be able to justify not doing this transaction or whatever it might be.
Sometimes you’ve got to get people to do things they just don’t want to do, so you have to approach things with a level of positivity. But, at the same time, you have to be able to catastrophise and show people the worst case scenario. You have to be creative enough to find solutions to their problems, which are commercially viable and mitigate as much risk as possible.
So overall, in every candidate, from very junior to the senior level, I look for commercial mindedness, creative thinking abilities, can-do attitudes and a willingness and ability to learn.”
What would your advice be to risk and compliance professionals who are just starting out in the industry?
“It’s up to you in terms of which track to go down. So you might say, ‘I want to be an AML person’, ‘I want to be a risk advice type person or compliance advice person’, ‘I want to be a sanctions lawyer’… you can choose to be quite focused, or you can choose to be more general than that. Generally, the larger the firms you go to, the more focussed you’ll end up being.
Secondly I would say to learn as much as you can. You can’t over-learn in this sector, and the more you know, the more things will connect to each other. If you’ve learned about different aspects of the industry, you might have a sanctions issue, but you can see it from a money laundering perspective as well because you understand the code of conduct. There are tons of resources out there, and the vast majority of the time they’re completely free. Hook up to those publications’ newsletters, attend free webinars, download applications which will read text to you so that you can listen to things like SRA sanctions guidance when it comes out.
Finally, network as much as you can and get yourself on LinkedIn. Post as much as you feel comfortable with, and get to know people in your network as much as you can. Get yourself into a group of people who are doing a similar role to you or in roles you want to be in, and try to build your brand as much as possible. Then you’ll get to be known in the industry, and then you will be approached for opportunities like podcasts, conferences, training etc. Having a brand can’t hurt, but networking is the most important thing.”
To learn more about getting into the Legal Risk & Compliance industry, tune into The UNCOVER Pod here.
