The complexity of today’s problems calls for members of in-house legal teams to collaborate across disciplinary and structural boundaries to tackle their organization’s most sophisticated issues. They must integrate their individual, specialized expertise in order to deliver high-quality, customized outcomes on high-priority problems.  Increasingly, they must also rely on experts in other functions throughout their company, and to become “business partners” with managers and executives.  By truly collaborating, a team of professionals is able to create solutions than none could develop alone, no matter how clever or hardworking.

Yet, collaboration is rarely seamless. Think specifically about your experiences collaborating at your current organization when you answer the following questions.
Your responses will be entirely anonymous.  Please be candid.

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* 1. What kinds of benefits have you personally gotten from collaborating with your colleagues (other in-house legal team members, business partners, outside lawyers) ? Benefits could be tangible (e.g., created a new process for delivering expedited contracts) or intangible (e.g., recognition). Please be specific about what other roles were involved in the collaboration.

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* 2. Now think about impediments to collaboration in your daily work.  What are the biggest barriers inhibiting YOU from collaborating with your colleagues (in the legal team, other functions, or elsewhere)?

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* 3. What is your current job title / role? [optional]

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* 4. What year did you qualify as a lawyer? [optional]

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* 5. If you would like to participate in a research interview with Dr. Heidi Gardner of Harvard Law School, please either list your contact details here (email and phone number), or reach out to Dr. Gardner directly on hgardner@law.harvard.edu

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