A Career Guide for Upwardly Mobile Deputy GCs

Job satisfaction among DGCs rose significantly since 2023, from 70% to 96%. However, this hasn't translated into career mobility: 80% of DGCs said they face challenges with career progression at their current companies, and the same number of DGCs believe the only way to move up is to change employers.

The research identified three primary skill sets DGCs will need to excel and advance to the position of a GC, either as a logical successor to the current GC or at a new organization. These skill sets—or lack thereof—are areas of professional growth DGCs said they need, weren’t available to them on their current team and, as such, were motivating them to seek career growth elsewhere: 1) strategic leadership and corporate governance, 2) people management, and 3) legal department management.

The research also revealed widespread acceptance of Generative AI in legal departments, with 94% of DGCs believing GenAI’s benefits outweigh its risks. However, this optimistic outlook is tempered by significant implementation hurdles that span technological, organizational, and cultural barriers. While 88% of DGCs felt pressure to adopt new technology, staff resistance and infrastructure limitations indicated successful implementation requires technological solutions tightly coupled with change management strategies.

Compliance and regulatory risks emerged as the primary concern among DGCs, which emphasizes the importance of finding the right resources to provide comprehensive training. Less than half (43%) of DGCs considered their organizations’ AI training to be sufficient for actual legal work.

Nearly half of DGCs reported their departments were under-resourced, and 98% of these under-resourced DGCs also reported career progression challenges. Legal departments are pressured to optimize budgets to ensure they can deal with 2025’s uncertain business, regulatory, and economic environment with agility.

As a result, enterprise DGCs are looking at new approaches to resourcing and talent for these transient yet often long-term needs. Flexible legal talent providers, such as Axiom, emerge as an effective solution that allows them to scale capacity up or down as needed, helping to avoid excess cost and generate greater value without sacrificing specialized knowledge that’s needed, as well as practical generalized legal knowledge and in-house experience.