Game-changer: John Schultz
Game-changer: John Schultz

After winning the Financial Times 2016 award for “most innovative in-house legal department” in October, the European team at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) were invited to a dinner in London for previous years’ finalists.

The HPE team were pleased with their win, having fought off tough competition from GE, Nokia and Crowdcube. But they all laid much of the credit for their success at the door of HPE’s group general counsel John Schultz.

His European and US lawyers had led the legal work for the historic split of Hewlett-Packard into two distinct Fortune 50 companies. Transacted over 13 months, lawyers created the legal framework to divide up 50,000 patents, 150,000 customer and partner relationships and 280,000 employees.

In transactions of this size, companies usually rely heavily — and expensively — on private practice lawyers. But under Mr Schultz’s leadership, the transaction came in $40m under budget for external counsel fees.

Speaking from his base in California, Mr Schultz says he is proud of the separation but stresses his lawyers’ input. “It involved everyone on the team playing important roles and represented a team win in the broadest way imaginable,” he says. An emphasis on teamwork and managing people is a guiding force in his career.

At HPE, Mr Schultz has created the Talent Factory, which focuses on nurturing legal skills inside the company — “being talent makers, rather than talent takers,” as he puts it. This means that where possible senior positions are filled via internal promotions and lawyers receive mentoring, leadership training and guidance on the next stage of their careers.

The Talent Factory is part of his overall strategy to bring more work in-house and change the culture of the in-house legal department to one of a game-changer.

Remaking the rules seems to come naturally to Mr Schultz. Although he has been an in-house lawyer only since 2008, and took over the group general counsel role in 2012, he is not afraid to challenge traditional ways of working.

For example, he cut across the usual competitor lines between external law firms in the HP v Oracle case. In addition to his own team of in-house lawyers, he brought together leading lawyers from four competing firms into one integrated trial team for a resounding win. “Each person had to bring an innovative spirit to it. They had to ask, ‘How do I make my piece fit with the whole and what do we want the whole to be?’” he says.

Ultimately, collaboration — not always embraced by star lawyers — is an important driver of innovation and success.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024. All rights reserved.
Reuse this content (opens in new window) CommentsJump to comments section

Follow the topics in this article

Comments