How to Become Someone Worth Planning Around
Succession planning is typically discussed as something that happens to legal departments. But there’s a version of this conversation that belongs entirely to you, because the attorneys who get promoted, retained, and invested in are not always the most technically excellent ones. They are the ones their GC cannot afford to lose.
That distinction is worth understanding, because it is largely within your control.
Make your institutional knowledge visible. The attorneys who are hardest to replace are the ones who hold knowledge that lives nowhere else: client relationships, regulatory history, institutional context, process expertise. If that knowledge exists only in your head, you are valuable but fragile. If you have documented it, shared it, and built others’ capacity around it, you become someone your GC has actively invested in retaining. Counterintuitively, making yourself easier to cover makes you harder to let go.
Raise your hand for adjacent work. The attorneys who get succession-planned around are rarely the ones who stayed narrowly in their lane. Volunteering for cross-functional projects, supporting a different business unit, or developing fluency in a practice area adjacent to your own signals readiness for more and makes you genuinely more valuable. It also gives your GC a reason to think of your growth as a retention strategy, not just a development expense.
Be the person who solves problems before they’re assigned. Technical skill is the baseline. What distinguishes the attorneys who get promoted and retained is business judgment: the ability to anticipate issues, communicate clearly with non-lawyers, and bring solutions rather than just analyses. If your GC trusts your judgment beyond your practice area, you are no longer just an attorney on the team. You are a strategic asset.
Have the conversation directly. If you want to grow, say so. GCs are not always able to guess who is ambitious and who is content. A direct, well-timed conversation about where you want to develop, and how that serves the department, is almost always received better than attorneys expect. It also makes you far more likely to be included in succession planning conversations rather than simply subject to them.
The attorneys who are worth planning around are not waiting to be noticed. They are making themselves known through the breadth of their contribution, the quality of their judgment, and the clarity of their ambition.
