Dennis Garcia has spent more than 30 years building in-house legal teams, most recently as VP and General Counsel of Litera. When he lists the qualities he screens for in a hiring interview, not one of them is a legal skill. That is not an oversight. It is some of the clearest evidence yet for why business clients hire and promote lawyers on everything except the law.
Ask a general counsel what they look for in a new hire, and most will reach for a familiar list: sharp drafting, careful issue spotting, deep subject matter expertise. Dennis Garcia takes a different view, and when he talks through what he screens for, legal skill barely gets a mention.
That was the takeaway from a conversation between David Lancelot, LawVu’s CLO and EVP of Advocacy, and Garcia on the Legal Leaders Podcast. Garcia spent time at IBM and Accenture, then 22-and-a-half years at Microsoft, before landing as VP and General Counsel of Litera, where he now leads a lean five-person legal team unifying what he calls the practice of law and the business of law. Thirty-plus years and four companies later, that experience is exactly why his answer carries weight.
It’s an uncomfortable thing to hear if you spent three years in law school and a career keeping up with case law: according to one of the most experienced general counsel in tech, everything you were trained to master isn’t what gets you hired or promoted in-house.
The list that isn’t about the law
Here is what tops Garcia’s in-house lawyer hiring criteria: energy and enthusiasm, a can-do attitude, the ability to stay positive through a job that has more hard days than easy ones, confidence, and being easy to work with. Then, without missing a beat, he named the one his business partners raise more than any other.
“Someone who’s highly likable,” Garcia said. “We want people to join our team who our clients are going to feel comfortable in engaging in, in working with, and who will say, ‘Oh, I want to reach out to Dennis,’ versus avoiding Dennis. The last thing we want are lawyers or general counsels who our clients want to avoid.”
None of that sounds like a bar exam question, because your average business client, whether a sales leader, a product owner or a finance partner, can’t open a memo and grade the legal reasoning inside it, because they were never trained to. What they can judge is whether the lawyer in front of them was easy to work with, showed up ready, and helped them move faster rather than slower.
Garcia added one more item that wouldn’t have made this list a decade ago: “People who understand technology and AI, who are using leading AI tools so that they can be more productive and more efficient.” He doesn’t mean people who can explain what a large language model is, but those already using the tools to get more done and making the people around them better in the process. That has quietly become table stakes rather than a differentiator, and AI skills for in-house lawyers are no longer optional.
Brilliant but brief is a hiring bar, not a style tip
Garcia mentioned one quality that stood out more than the rest, because most lawyers file it under communication style rather than career risk. “If we’re too long in our communication skills or we’re saying too much, our clients aren’t going to get our message or our advice. You want to be brilliant; you want to be brief.”
It’s less a note about tightening your prose than a filter Garcia applies when deciding who gets staffed on the deal, who gets asked back into the room, and eventually who gets promoted. A four-page memo nobody reads protects no one, while a three-line answer that gets acted on protects the business, and that’s the real measure of value here. In-house lawyers are trained to be thorough, but when that thoroughness never reaches the reader, it stops being rigor and starts looking like a missed opportunity dressed up as diligence.
The most telling story Garcia shared was from his very first year at IBM. He was supporting a division general counsel, just the two of them covering an entire business unit, when his boss told him he was heading to Martha’s Vineyard for three weeks. “I’m going to leave everything to you,” Garcia recalled him saying. “Sit in my office. Here’s my file folders, and away you go.”
Garcia was a junior lawyer who had barely finished the bar exam, handed a caseload rather than a curriculum. “Looking back, I appreciated the trust he had in me and the ability to sort of learn by doing,” he said.
Judgment is the asset in-house lawyers need, especially now that AI is absorbing more of the reactive, repetitive work that used to be how junior lawyers earned their stripes. You don’t build judgment by sitting through more training, you build it by being trusted with something real before you feel ready for it, and by having a leader willing to accept the risk of a mistake while they’re three weeks away.
Garcia treats confidence the same way, as something built rather than born. Ahead of high-stakes moments like conference sessions and executive presentations, he practices out loud, records himself, and does the reps until the delivery matches the quality of the thinking behind it. “I need to practice the questions, what I’m going to say, my points,” he said. “When you’re practicing beforehand, hopefully you’re building up that self-esteem and confidence.” He expects the same discipline from the lawyers on his team preparing to present to the business, treating rehearsal as a professional skill rather than an extracurricular.
What this means for how you hire and develop lawyers
Garcia’s general counsel hiring advice translates into a handful of habits any legal leader can put into practice right away.
First, hire for energy and genuine curiosity about growing beyond the core job, not just for the credentials on the resume. A candidate who asks how they can help beyond their assigned scope is telling you something a transcript never will.
Second, treat likability as a real hiring criterion rather than a soft nice to have. If your business partners would rather solve a problem themselves than call your lawyer, that lawyer has a growth area no legal skill will fix.
Third, look for candidates already using leading AI tools to get more done, the kind of person who makes the whole team sharper rather than only themselves.
Fourth, coach succinctness as a core skill, not a personality trait some lawyers happen to have. If a memo is too long to get read, it has already failed, regardless of how sound the analysis inside it is.
Fifth, build a rehearsal habit ahead of anything high stakes. Record yourself, do a dry run, say the words out loud before the moment that matters, because confidence isn’t something you either have or don’t. It’s something you rehearse into being.
None of these five things will show up on a law school transcript, though all five of them will show up in the room.
Business clients were never going to start grading legal reasoning; what they can grade, and always have, is whether a lawyer made their job easier. The lawyers who understand that stop treating it as unfair and start treating it as the actual job description. Garcia built a 30-year career on exactly that insight, and the legal leaders who take it seriously now are the ones who will still be indispensable when AI has absorbed everything else.
Want the full conversation, including how Garcia’s IBM apprenticeship shaped his approach to leadership? Listen to Dennis Garcia’s full episode on the Legal Leaders Podcast.
