'THINKING LIKE CLIENTS' (TLC) COURSE

Are you looking better to understand the role and challenges of your clients? Would you like to get to know senior in-house counsel at leading regional and international corporations?

Welcome to Thinking Like Clients (TLC), Delos's exclusive training programme designed and curated in collaboration with Corail Consultants, which features a faculty of senior in-house with sophisticated experience of legal risk management and attendant governance, corporate and business issues.

The programme considers the role and challenges of the modern GC and in-house legal team, mainly at major international groups. The aim is to equip you with an understanding of how clients think of success and damage in legal matters, particularly with respect to arbitration, and thus increase your chances of a successful pitch, retainer, and follow-on instructions.

The course will also discuss:

1.  The changes in how in-house legal teams are working and engaging with external counsel, including as a result of AI.

2.  The frontier legal issues that GCs see as most significant today and how these may arise in the context of disputes.

3.  The economics of the in-house legal function, and relatedly case economics from a business perspective.

COURSE OUTLINE AND CALENDAR

TLC will be delivered remotely as a series of interactive workshops with the seasoned faculty and a limited group of participants. The course will take place over 5 weekly sessions of 1.5 hours each during February-March 2026.

The course outline is as follows, and will involve discussion of practical examples drawn from the faculty's extensive experience:

• Week 1 – Inside the Boardroom: Understanding the Modern General Counsel (GC)

Today’s GC is far more than a legal adviser—they must combine legal certainty with business compatibility, assess and mitigate risks, define legal strategy, and inform and educate their internal stakeholders.

This opening session will demystify the modern in-house counsel role to focus on what truly matters to your clients. You will learn how legal departments have evolved into business service functions, how rising legal risks and internationalisation gave them more influence, more accountability but also less autonomy and why their work has shifted from reactive (disputes) to proactive (policies and processes). This foundational knowledge will strengthen how you position your services and communicate with in-house teams.

• Week 2 – The Bottom Line: The Economics of Legal in a Business Environment

A legal department is always a cost centre, and the economic rationale or value added by a legal team is notoriously difficult to justify—the trouble they avoid remains unseen and financially unverifiable.

This session will give you critical insights into the financial pressures your clients face daily and how GCs demonstrate internally the value-add of legal. Discover how sophisticated organisations take a holistic view of business risks, and the place of legal risk within a business’s overall risk profile – specifically in the context of regulatory or compliance risk models. You will learn what law firms should know about their clients’ risk appetite and how to communicate clearly about a case’s risk profile and cost—essential knowledge for positioning your services effectively and demonstrating value to in-house teams.

• Week 3 – What In-House Counsel Really Want from External Counsel

With the increasing complexity of legal issues and risks, external counsel are more necessary than ever, whether for specialist expertise, infrastructure support, or critical challenge – if they adapt to the business’s worldview.

This session reveals the blueprint for becoming an indispensable external adviser. Learn what the importance of a dispute really is for a business company, and why lowering the number of disputes, rather than cases won or lost, is the number one quality indicator of a healthy in-house litigation department. These insights will help you transform from service provider to trusted adviser with lasting client relationships.

• Week 4 – The AI GC? How Tech is Impacting the Legal Function and its Expectations of External Counsel

AI and tech more generally are driving rapid changes in the in-house legal role, with significant implications for the organisation of legal teams, contracting, contract management, and disputes.

This forward-looking session will prepare you for the rapid evolutions of the disputes legal services landscape as seen by in-house counsel. Explore how in-house counsel teams are profiting from AI and why there are limitations to these benefits, what this means for in-house counsel teams, and in turn for law firms in terms of service quality, support, and fees. Position yourself ahead of these changes to remain relevant and valuable to your clients.

• Week 5 – The Future GC and the Future External Counsel: New Risks, New Skills, New Opportunities

More risks, wider remits, tech disruption, and less legal/more business spirit, means that the role of GCs and their skillset will keep evolving – and their external counsel must evolve with them.

This concluding session will place you at the forefront of the changes and evolutions affecting legal teams globally. Understand why legal, regulatory, sanctions, governance, and compliance teams increasingly need to converge on solutions; learn about the critical importance of new processes for how GCs communicate risk and report efficiently to boards and risk committees; and discover why the future GC needs to finetune their legal instinct more than their expert knowledge, be governance- savvy, act strategically, and look forward: in brief, be a manager. By understanding these deep-current changes, you will gain actionable insights for how to pitch, how to communicate, and how to become and remain a trusted adviser.

COURSE FEES

The cost of the course is EUR 820 excl. VAT. Early bird applicants (i.e. by 30 November 2025) and Delos full annual members receive a 10% discount, and certain GAP firm members receive a 20% discount. The course capacity is limited to ensure that sessions are as interactive and lively as possible.

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