The path to leadership in local government: Q&A with Gillian Marshall, Chief Legal Officer at Wakefield Council

A career in public sector law offers a unique opportunity to make a tangible difference in communities, and few understand this better than Gillian Marshall, Chief Legal Officer at Wakefield Council. 

With an extensive career spanning local government legal services, Gillian has worked on a diverse range of cases – helping shape policies, oversee governance, and contribute to impactful projects.

In this Q&A, Gillian shares her journey into local government law, the challenges and rewards of working in the public sector, and valuable insights for legal professionals considering a transition into this field – and into leadership.

• Can you tell us about your career journey and where you started? 

My current role is the Chief Legal Officer at Wakefield Council – I've pretty much worked in local government my whole legal career. I went through a traditional route to get there, in that I did a law degree before completing what were then called Law Society finals. 

After that I spent a couple of years working with the Engineering Employers’ Federation [now Make UK] doing various tribunals, which teaches you to just dive into things and get on with it. I landed a contract as a Trainee Solicitor at Leeds where I qualified and then I spent 18 years at Leeds in a variety of different roles. 

I then moved on to a Head of Legal role at Selby District Council before coming back to West Yorkshire, to Wakefield, about six years ago.

• How have you found moving through local government? 

The opportunities are there, you've got to push yourself a little bit out of your comfort zone to take the opportunities that come up. But I have thoroughly enjoyed my career in local government, and I actually think it's one of the best sectors to work in. I wouldn't want to work anywhere else.

• What attracted you initially to local government? 

I've never worked in private practice, but having spent a bit of time working for an employers' association and then in local government, it's the impact that you can make in the job.

So whilst you're still doing legal work, you can actually see what a difference your legal work makes, whether it's opening up a new library, changing a road system or dealing with the most vulnerable in society, you can actually see the difference that you make and you can drive around where you work and say, ‘I had a part in that’.

• As the Chief Legal Officer, what does a typical day look like for you? 

Every day is absolutely different. But I think the thing that would surprise people at the early stage in their career journey is how little black letter law I do during a day. As the Chief Legal Officer, I'm a member of the council's Corporate Management Team, which means I advise at committees, mainly cabinet and full council, which is a very different role to people who may be going into court on a daily basis.

What this means is that I have to have a really good understanding overall of how the council works and the basics around governance and decision-making, taking into account the broad range of things that we have to get involved in.

But I can be doing anything from advising at full council to sitting down in a meeting with colleagues doing a task and finish group about which projects take priority over others and why.

• What is the most rewarding aspect of your role? 

I am part of the senior structure of the council, but I'm also responsible for setting the direction and vision for my services. 

It's still about the impact, just as it was when I was first working in local government, but now it's about my ability to make an impact in the sort of service that legal is and how it complements the rest of the council and can help other services to deliver what they need to deliver in the best, fastest, and safest way.

• What would you say is the most challenging part of working within local government? 

Right now, and for the last couple of years, it's been about the financials. It will come as no surprise to anybody that finances are a real issue. We're in a time of rising costs, rising demands and shrinking budgets. So having to balance all of those things is very challenging at a corporate level and at a service level. 

I think the other thing is the sheer breadth of things that you do in a local government career; from bin collection to taking children into care, there is a huge range of things that the council does, all of which will have a legal aspect somewhere in them, whether it's the underpinning legislation or things like equality impact that you need to be aware of.

I can go into a meeting between 2pm and 3pm about libraries and then go into a meeting the hour later, which is about shutting down a household waste centre because it's not safe, and you need to be able to make that transition.

• What advice would you give to legal professionals looking to transition into public sector?

Well, firstly, do it because I think it is the best career. The law is the same, but the context is different. So, you are working in a political environment, and you are working in an environment where service to the public is the most important thing about the decision-making that we do.

So, if you're going to come into local government, I think you need to understand that, you need to accept that, you need to work with that and then take every opportunity to understand how that environment operates so that you can influence in the best way to get the best outcomes.

I think most people would expect you to have some understanding of what a council does and the breadth of things that a council does. I suppose if you go in for a senior legal role as a Planning Lawyer or a Housing Lawyer or whatever it happens to be, it's almost like your technical legal expertise is a given.

What would make you stand out is understanding some of that context and demonstrating that you do understand that. So have a look at the sorts of decisions that the council's making through its full council, through its cabinet, have a look at what its budget challenges are, have a look for where it's trying to innovate – not to get around those problems, but to understand them and suggest ways to do things differently. If you can show that context and that you understand and get that context, that makes you stand out.

The other thing I would say is that your client is not the individual who's sitting in front of you where you can give them advice that you could do X or Y, and the choice is theirs. Your client is the council, and sometimes you have to give officers in other services advice that they'd rather not hear, but it's the right thing to do for the council in terms of public law decision-making.

• What are the biggest challenges you face when recruiting legal professionals into the public sector? 

A few years ago, a number of us stopped providing trainee roles, and what that meant was that at the experienced level, it was quite difficult to recruit staff who had both the professional legal knowledge and the local government experience. 

What a lot of us have done is reinstate those kinds of programmes, either to take somebody in at the start of their legal career and develop them as a really good Local Government Lawyer, or to transition them from one type of law to another, or to bring them in from outside the local government sector, but then make sure that we spend our time developing them as Local Government Lawyers so they understand how it works in that context. We've had to shift our approach over time to respond to the market.

The phrase ‘grow your own’ is a very big thing, but it doesn't necessarily just mean coming in as a newly qualified legal professional, as it might do in private practice, or even coming in as a trainee. It can be people returning from maternity or career breaks or people simply wanting to start a new area of law.

For example, we’ve got a Team Leader who, in private practice, worked in childcare but has come into the local authority and now been promoted to Team Leader working in adult social care. So similar but different and that's entirely possible.

If I think about my career journey, although I've always been in local government, I have learnt new areas of law as I've gone along. Although I spent a long time at Leeds, I did a variety of things, things like housing law, antisocial behaviour, I had responsibility for prosecutions, I took on licensing when the councils took over alcohol licensing, and then when I moved on, I did some planning policy work.

I've had the opportunity throughout my career, because of the sector I've chosen to work in, to move around in professional disciplines, and I think that that is the reason I'm sitting where I'm sitting now.

• Have you noticed any trends or changes in the legal recruitment market over the past few years? 

I think one of the interesting trends is around the trainee level with the different routes that people have now to get a legal qualification. So that is making a difference, definitely.

I also think the flexibility that we offer is a real highlight in terms of work-life balance. We have the flexible working scheme – and by that, I mean the ability to work your hours over a period of time rather than necessarily over one week or two weeks. So, I think the flexibility of local government in the recruitment market is still a big driver for people.

I think the other thing that stands out is the quality of the work. Whether we're driven by finances or changing legislation, it's not unusual for local authorities to be at the forefront of making new law. So, you might do something under a new piece of legislation, whatever that piece of legislation is, and then inevitably, because this is the way the law works, that piece of legislation is then tested in court.

One of the things in local government is that you get the opportunity to do law at that level far earlier in your career, perhaps than you would do in private practice.

• Why leadership for you? Was this always your ambition?

It was definitely not an ambition, it's something that I fell into almost by accident. I was part of the creation of a new team when I was newly qualified, and somebody had to be the Team Leader. So that ended up being me, and then over time that role developed and over my career I've had lots of different Team Leader type roles. 

Some people would say that it suits me to tell people what to do! I'm not sure I would agree with that, but what I like is the ability to shape a service and what we do with that service and being able to think about it as a system.

I've got X amount of legal resource; I can divide it up in different ways, but I can't necessarily make it any bigger. So, in the leadership role, part of my job is to make sure that it stretches as far as it can across what the council needs.

I think you can fall into leadership, but it is a skill and I think it's a separate skill to your legal expertise. Being a real expert in a particular type of law will take you so far in local government but to get to my sort of level, you do need to develop your leadership skills as well.

I think it is about understanding that leadership – management first, and then leadership – are defined skills that need to be developed just as much as your legal skills.

• How would you say you’ve reached the role of Chief Legal Officer? 

By taking the opportunities and pushing myself out of my comfort zone, something which started very early in terms of the Employers’ Association, where you went in and did tribunal work. For me, there needs to be an element of what you do every day that stretches you and puts you slightly outside of your comfort zone.

I'm not talking about sending a Childcare Lawyer in to do a four-day planning inquiry or anything like that, but every day, every week, there will be something that is slightly outside of your comfort zone, and that's where you learn. I have had tons of opportunities to do things that are slightly outside of my comfort zone, things that I've never done before, but in a really supportive environment so that you can pick those up and you can learn from them.

• What advice would you give to someone stepping into a leadership role in local government?

So I think the first thing is about that leadership skill, there will be opportunities in every place that you work for you to develop and nurture those leadership skills, whether it be briefings offered by your HR team about the best way to recruit, whether it's the opportunity to perhaps do a standards investigation for your Chief Legal Officer or do something for HR if they need an investigation done.

Push yourself outside of your comfort zone, and take those opportunities when they come. The most important thing is that everything that you push yourself to do is teaching you something new, usually teaching you something about the context in which you're operating.

So, there might be the opportunity to go along and observe (or even advise) committees – take those opportunities. The more you understand the sector, the better the decisions that you will make as a sector leader and the better you are as a sector leader, the more chance you've got of getting a Chief Legal Officer role.

• What are the key attributes you look for when recruiting into a leadership role in your team?

The first one I would say is experience of managing resources, and that can be directing people or it can be physical resources. But applying what you've got to the task that needs to be done to make sure that the task is completed successfully.

In the early stages of your career, that can be a relatively small scale or it could even be outside of legal work. It might be a voluntary activity that you do, something like that, or something that you did when you were in college, but those examples are there.

So, understand what they are. Make sure that you explain what you've done, and make sure that as your career develops, you know what your next example is going to be if you're asked about it in an interview. 

The next thing for me is people skills. Most of the resources that we direct are people and you need to be able to motivate people, to get on with people, to explain to people. You've got to like communicating, you've got to be able to get on the same level as people and explain what it is that needs to be done.

I suppose the final thing really is about flexibility. No two days for me are the same, and it probably wouldn't be for any leader in my team. Yes, they might work within a smaller defined area than I do, but you've got to be able to be flexible. You might come in expecting to do three things that day and you might go home having not touched any of them. However, you might be able to point to something that came in that morning that you'd resolved by the afternoon, which is equally valuable.

It might not be your urgent matter either, especially if you’re leading a team of people. Something that somebody else is working on might suddenly take a strange turn, whether it be court work or a big property deal or something, and that person might need your support to make sure everybody stays calm and you work your way through it. 

• What qualities are required for effective leadership?

It can knock you when you expect to get something done and then something else comes up. So I suppose if I was to pick the top quality, it's resilience.

That is the ability to pick yourself up, not everything is going to go right all of the time for you or for the teams that you're leading. But, tomorrow is another day, as they say. It's that resilience, that ability to pick yourself up and carry on, and never lose sight of where you're trying to get to.

It’s a normal part of working life, the highs come with the lows, and just because something’s not worked out doesn’t mean it was the wrong thing to do or that it was your fault – sometimes things just happen!  

And that's what then tracks back to your people skills, because it's no good being the sort of leader - for me - who would then say to people, ‘why did you do that?’ You need to be the sort of leader who says, ‘…and what, if anything, can we learn from that?’

• What would you say is special about working as a leader within local government? 

It's that ability to make a big impact with your legal work, to be able to drive around where you work or where you live and go, ‘I had a small part in that.’ And I think that's really, really special.

And I think most of the people that work in local government legal careers have the same feeling at whatever level, that they're making a difference. If you can harness all the people who want to make a difference, into a really strong team, you can move mountains.

I've worked with some fantastic trainees and Junior Lawyers and when I look at now what they're achieving, either in my council or in different councils, it does make you feel really proud and there is something for me about growing, not only our own staff, but that next generation of really good Local Government Lawyers who we can hand the baton on to and they can carry on.

I feel like a proud parent, it really does make you feel like that when somebody really performs to the top level at the best of their ability. And you know, if I ever saw someone that I'd worked with as a Junior Lawyer get a Chief Legal Officer post, I would be so happy for them.

• What does the future look like for legal services in local government? How do you see the recruitment landscape evolving? 

I think the future for local government law is bright. Local government will always need Lawyers and so much of the legislative programme that successive governments have followed has an impact on the powers and duties of local authorities.

I don't think they're going to run out of the need for Local Government Lawyers anytime soon.

But the future is also challenging for the reasons that we've already touched on, not least the finances, rising demand, rising costs, shrinking budgets. But I think that that in itself is an opportunity, because that almost makes you push the boundaries of the law that you practice to see whether we can get really good outcomes in a slightly different way, that is still within the law and is still appropriate and safe.

I think for the future of recruitment, I can see councils continuing to develop their own staff, continuing to prioritise training posts or career swap posts. I think that flexibility within roles is going to be increasingly important. If somebody wants to develop more than one string to their bow, that is something I think most Chief Legal Officers would say, ‘Thank you very much. Wait there, I'll find you something completely left field to do.’

So, I think the future's bright… challenging, but bright.

From a culture perspective, local government is such a team, and so for me, a big part of my career development has been the networking with others in similar positions in other local authorities. If I want to just get a second opinion on something and there's nobody in my team who does it, I will simply pick up my phone, pick up one of my contacts and go, ‘Is it me or would you do this?’ 

I love that and for that reason, I will always make time for networking and staying in touch with colleagues.

About Wakefield Council

Wakefield Council is committed to delivering high-quality services that support residents, businesses, and communities across the district. With a focus on innovation, sustainability, and inclusivity, the council plays a vital role in shaping the future of the local area. From housing and social care to education and infrastructure, Wakefield Council works to enhance public services and improve the quality of life for all.

As a key employer in the region, Wakefield Council offers a wide range of career opportunities across various departments. The council is dedicated to fostering a positive work environment that values diversity, professional development, and employee wellbeing.

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