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Falconbury

The Mini MBA for In-house Lawyers Summer School Training Course

This inspirational summer school has been designed to draw on the latest MBA thinking to focus on real issues confronting todays in-house legal departments.

14-17 July 2025 »
from £1699

Need help?  Enrol or reserve

Course overview

This inspirational summer school has been designed to draw on the latest MBA thinking to focus on real issues confronting todays in-house legal departments.

By enhancing your management skills and your understanding of the main challenges facing business leaders today, you will understand how you can better support and advise your business from a legal viewpoint.

It will enable you to discover key strategic business frameworks, tools, techniques and concepts to enhance your business knowledge and excel in your role as a valuable in-house lawyer. Overall it will enable you to become a more rounded business professional.

The expert trainers will share their own experiences from working in law and as business managers. By attending this intensive summer school, you will benefit from their considerable expertise and have time to explore new skills and ways of working to ensure you succeed in a demanding role.

Key topics covered in this comprehensive and interactive summer school include:

  • Business strategy concepts and frameworks
  • Operational effectiveness: process and quality management
  • Balancing demands on legal services with business goals
  • Building teams, motivation, engagement and a better culture
  • Managing finance and understanding KPIs
  • Negotiating techniques and process

This training course is part of our collection of Legal Function Training Courses for the in-house lawyer.

Benefits of attending:

By attending this comprehensive and interactive summer school you will:

  • Enhance your core management and leadership techniques
  • Understand how to enable effective change management
  • Learn key business strategy concepts and frameworks
  • Achieve better outcomes by applying project management techniques
  • Understand the challenges facing businesses today and how the legal dept can provide support
  • Establish a motivated and engaged legal team
  • Get to grips with corporate culture and use it to your advantage
  • Develop your finance and accounting principles knowledge
  • Enhance your budgeting skills
  • Identify creative options for fee arrangements
  • Understand the process of negotiation in more depth
  • Recognise different negotiation styles and body language and learn how to react to them including cultural style and context

Who should attend?

This summer school has been specifically designed for the legal professional who wants to succeed in their role, including:

  • Heads of legal departments
  • Legal directors and managers
  • Senior corporate counsel and advisers
  • Key corporate law team members
  • Private practice lawyers seeking to switch to an in-house role

Enrol or reserve

This course will cover:

Module 1: Business strategy and strategic planning

Business strategy

  • Key business strategy concepts and frameworks
    • Includes understanding its purpose, value, and alignment with departmental strategies
    • Includes Blue Ocean/Kim & Mauborgne; Porter/USPs, Grant, Johnson & Scholes
  • The strategic process – investigate, create, implement, embed
  • Challenges facing businesses today
  • Understanding customer value, including customers inside your organisation

Operational effectiveness and efficiency

  • Introductions to
    • Process management
    • Quality management
    • Knowledge management
    • Risk appetite and corporate culture
  • Using these strategies to:
    • streamline your legal services inside your organisation, and
    • understanding tensions between profitability, efficiency and risk inside your organisation

Developing a strategy for legal services

  • Understanding the needs and demands for legal services
  • Aligning legal services goals with the goals of the business
  • Delivering value for the business
  • In-house capability decisions
  • When to engage with external providers

Module 2: Leading and managing strategic change

People management and leadership skills

  • Team-building, collaboration, culture and trust
    • Understanding and leading global and virtual teams; building trust; encouraging collaborative behaviours; understanding cognitive biases; psychological safety
  • Building motivation and engagement
    • Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations; trust; autonomy, mastery and purpose
  • Leadership and influencing skills
    • Leadership styles; leading versus managing; becoming comfortable with leading; influencing in 360°

Leading strategic change

  • Managing change
    • Including Kotter, Lewin and ADKAR models
    • Overcoming common problems
  • Successful strategy implementation and the importance of communication, transparency, coaching and influencing skills

Module 3: Project management and teamwork

Introduction to project management and working with stakeholders

  • Essential skills of project management
    • An introduction to waterfall project management and agile projects
  • How to plan, execute, control and manage a project to achieve set goals
  • Managing risks and monitoring progress
  • Avoiding pitfalls and staying on target
  • Working with and getting buy-in from stakeholders

Module 4: Finance for business

Accounting principles

  • A general overview of accounting principles and how they should be applied (with examples)
  • Identify specifics within UK-GAAP / IFRS where applicable in general accounts

Understanding the statement of cashflow, profit and loss and the balance sheet

  • Case study using an anonymous set of accounts
  • The key factors and what they mean
  • Identify how different statements within a set of accounts are related to one another

Identifying accounting scenarios that illustrate good performance – profitability and solvency

  • Examples of key performance indicators that demonstrate performance levels
  • Discuss what KPI’s mean
  • The ranges of KPI’s in terms of output that determine good performance or otherwise
  • Practical: consider KPI’s that relate to your business

Identifying accounting scenarios that might raise legal concerns

  • Focus on insolvent accounts
  • Work-In-Progress (WIP) measurement
  • Overdrawn Directors Loan Accounts (DLA)
  • VAT and the principle of timing with invoicing

Module 5: Managing finance and the legal department

Managing a budget for the legal department and external expenditure

  • The importance of an 80/20 approach to analysis
  • Owning a budget
  • Involvement in constructing a budget and understanding the mechanisms in that construction
  • Identifying and understanding variance from the norm

Managing fees with external law firms

  • Understanding margin from the departments cost base and pricing accordingly
  • Communicating with client on costs
  • Tracking costs
  • Recording time
  • Money-on-Account
  • Credit control

Traditional fee arrangements and more creative options

  • Hourly rates vs fixed fees.
  • Ensuring fixed fees create margin.
  • Retainers and MOA

Work-In-Progress – the great unknown

  • Understanding and measuring WIP
  • Managing WIP
  • WIP as part of fee-earner performance

Module 6: Negotiation Skills for International Lawyers

Negotiation is the lifeblood of the business world and underpins every business deal and contract. It involves a variety of skills, many of which can be learned – but most people never actually do spend the time learning them.

The art of negotiation also involves knowing yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, and leveraging the best relevant facets of your personality. This module teaches those skills and helps you identify what makes you, you – and which parts of your personality are best to turn on and off in negotiations to get the best results.

Simplifying complexity

Background

  • Negotiation – what do we mean?
  • Good negotiators

A negotiating process model

  • General knowledge: know yourself and the counter party
  • Understanding and dealing with fears
  • Understanding paralanguage
  • Understanding body language
  • Understanding negotiation styles
  • International negotiations: Understanding context and its impact
  • International negotiations: Understanding culture

Specific deal knowledge: know the deal

  • Understanding stakeholder interests
  • Understanding the key objectives
  • Understanding commercial leverage
  • BATNA
  • WATNA
  • Bottom line
  • ZOPA

Prepare your specific negotiation plan

  • Understanding and preparing your SIIOOPS
  • Preparing your team composition
  • Rehearsing
  • Setting the agenda
  • Preparing the environment
  • Defining communication rules

The negotiation

  • Negotiate!
  • Strategy and sharing
  • Feedback

Negotiation techniques

  • Techniques around offers and counters
  • Techniques to resolve conflicts
  • Techniques to build trust
  • Techniques to get past negotiation obstacles
  • Ploys and counterploys
  • Situational tactics
  • Closing

Enrol or reserve

Helene Russell
TheKnowledgeBusiness

Hélène Russell, founder of The Knowledge Business, is a UK solicitor (non-practising) and specialist in Knowledge, Learning and Innovation. After 8 years in practice, primarily in clinical negligence litigation defence, she has worked as a self-employed knowledge management consultant for 13 years. Hélène specialises in practical tools to improve the efficiency and profitability of real-life law firms.

Hélène has extensive experience in business strategy, project management and teaching leadership skills. She runs a popular 'KM Strategy + coaching' course in UK and has written short form and lengthy strategies for a variety of law firms, as well, of course, as writing her own business’s strategy. Hélène has spoken at various events, including Ark’s KM Legal, Lexpo-18, for UWE, St Andrew’s University, BLS and Allice, and chaired international conferences.

She runs a global online KM training and networking group and is a core committee member organising the annual UK Knowledge Mobilisation Conference and Chair of CILIP’s Knowledge and Information Management Special Interest Group. Hélène has an executive MBA with distinction (which included a strategy module), and she is the sole author of two textbooks, contributor to five of Ark’s multi-author books and is currently contracted to Facet Publishing to write a handbook on KM Strategy.

 

 

More details

Rupert Hawke
Hawke Legal

Rupert Hawke, founder of Hawke Legal, has a business degree and is a qualified management accountant. He spent the first 10 years of his career working in multi-national business. In 2007 he was appointed Finance Director of Cartwright King Solicitors – then a regional East Midlands firm. Firstly as FD and then as Managing Director (appointed 2013), Rupert oversaw CK’s journey to becoming a national law firm with 18 offices nationwide offering a wide range of legal services and renowned for a great culture, quality staff, and cutting edge IT systems.

Through his wide-ranging managerial experience in the legal sector, Rupert is a leading authority on law firm financial / strategic management and its application, and has contributed to numerous publications and spoken widely including for The Law Society.

After 12 years at Cartwright King Rupert decided he wanted a new challenge and started Rupert Hawke Legal – a consultancy that utilises the mass of experience and contacts Rupert has developed in his leading role in the legal sector.

More details

Mark Weston
Sederby Consulting Limited

Mark Weston has run his own law firm, Weston Legal, since 1 January 2024. He is also a consultant at Hill Dickinson LLP where he joined in February 2016 as a partner and Head of its Commercial, TMT & IP Practice. Before that, he was a partner and Head of the Commercial/IP/IT Team at Matthew Arnold & Baldwin LLP and before that, he spent several years at Baker & McKenzie in London and Chicago and has also previously been seconded to Hewlett Packard and other technology businesses. He changed role to become a consultant in Hill Dickinson’s London office in January 2024.

Expertise: Mark’s practice covers both non-contentious and contentious matters in all areas of commercial law, intellectual property law, information technology law, Internet, electronic commerce and on-line services law. He specialises in commercial and Tech issues. Mark is used as a ‘trusted adviser’ by many clients in all sorts of businesses and often acts as ‘private practice in-house counsel’ for many clients. He specialises in tech and internet businesses.

Clients: Just some of Mark’s more well-known clients include Elstree Film Studios, RTL Group S.A., Sykes Cottages, Retailcorp Brands LLC, The Gulf Marketing Group, Moneynetint Limited and the BBC.

Some detail: Mark has extensive experience in advising clients on all manner of commercial matters (such as business planning and solutions, franchising, distribution, agency and marketing) through branding and intellectual property exploitation and licensing, to advice and documentation regarding hardware and software issues (such as development, licensing, maintenance and distribution, SaaS and cloud, Internet transactional solutioning, B2B, B2C and B2G electronic commerce, S-commerce and M-Commerce, social media, outsourcing, facilities management, procurement, IT policies, data protection (privacy), GDPR and freedom of information issues as well as artificial intelligence (AI)). He has a particular expertise in new digital business and revenue streams. He is also experienced in dealing with software disputes and IT litigation. The increasingly extensive media side of his practice relates primarily to publishing (both real world and digital content), to games and gaming platforms (and particularly transmedia technologies), advising companies about their advertising onscreen, online and in print and managing their public communications strategies generally (dealing with the CMA and ASA in the process) – and also a smattering of television, film and music exploitation. Recently he has been very active in AI advice.

More unusual: 

Mark has previously spent several months on secondment to Hewlett Packard and he has also been seconded to assist in the legal problems arising in new technology companies such as Symbian. From 2000 to 2001, Mark was resident in the Chicago office of Baker & McKenzie advising US clients on European and UK aspects of IT and electronic commerce law and practice.

Mark is the author of the Legal Practice Companion, a parallel text book used at several law schools, the editor of the IP and Media Law Companion as well as the rest of the Companion series of books published by Bloomsbury Professional, Tottels, Cavendish Publishing and Oxford University Press. He has noted numerous reports for the IT Law Reports and is widely published in Computing, Computers & Law, Computer Law & Security Report, IT Law Today, Intellectual Property World, Solicitors Journal and many other journals both online and offline. Mark has also authored articles syndicated in the national and trade press and is regularly quoted in national newspapers and is heard on radio as an expert in his fields. Mark is the author of the Business Names on the Internet chapter in the PLC Ecommerce Manual as well as numerous other articles on various Commercial & IT law topics.

Mark lectures regularly on all Commercial, IP and IT law topics, including at the IBC IT ‘Summer School’ Programme in Cambridge, England; the Falconbury and MBL two-day and three-day Commercial Contracts seminars (run several times a year) and IT Contracts seminars (run three times a year) in London; and he has previously lectured at the Annual On-line & Internet Commerce Law Institute seminar in Chicago and tutored at University College London.  He also runs a programme of bespoke training schemes on commercial law, IP law, IT law, AI law and data law as well as soft skills programmes such as negotiation skills and presentation skills.

Finally, you may have seen that Mark likes blogging and writing books, which are available at all good bookshops! He also appears regularly on BBC1 (usually providing advice on-screen to BBC Watchdog) and also on Sky News as a legal commentator, as well as trying to avoid the huge quantity of pink powder the TV make-up girls want to apply to his increasingly receding hairline.

More details

NEW higher discounts for multiple bookings - bring your colleagues to make your training budget go further:

  • 30% off the 2nd delegate*
  • 40% off the 3rd delegate*
  • 50% off the 4th delegate*

Please contact us for pricing if you are interested in booking 5 or more delegates

14-17 July 2025

Summer school

Classroom
Rembrandt Hotel
London

09:00-17:00 UK (London)
Timings may be different for each day
Course code 14838
Optional £300/€419/$479 per night

  • GBP 1,699 2,099
  • EUR 2,449 3,009
  • USD 2,805 3,429

Until 09 Jun

  • 4 days classroom-based training
  • Optional accommodation - 4 nights including breakfast, checking in the day before the course
  • Meet presenters and fellow attendees in person
  • Lunch and refreshments provided
  • Download documentation and certification of completion
  • Fair transfer and cancellation policy

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Not ready to book yet?

for 7 days, no obligation

* Early booking discounts may not be combined with other discounts or offers. As such, the discounts for 2nd/3rd/4th delegates are based on the full price; and apply only when booking multiple delegates on the same date.

United Kingdom

  • GAMI
  • TMF Group
  • Tokio Marine Kiln Group Ltd

Mozambique

  • Companhia Moçambicana de Gasoduto, SA

Enrol or reserve

Run The Mini MBA for In-house Lawyers Summer School Classroom for your team

4 days

Typical duration

Pricing from:

  • GBP 1,600
  • Per attendee, based on 10 attendees
  • Course tailored to your requirements
  • At your choice of location, or online

 

We can customise this course to your requirements and deliver it on an in-house basis for any number of your staff or colleagues.

Contact our in-house training experts Aleksandra Beer and Yesim Nurko to discuss your requirements:

Multiple colleagues? See above for details of our discounts for 2, 3, or 4 delegates. For more, talk to one of our training experts to discuss how to:

Run this course conveniently and cost-effectively in-house for your staff and colleagues

Aleksandra Beer

Aleksandra BEER
Training expert

Yesim Nurko

Yesim NURKO
Training expert

+44 (0)20 7749 4749

inhouse@ipi.academy