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Rising Star
Triage triage triage. You want to ask the powers at be for their priority list and focus on those.
Never “I can’t do it I’m so busy”, but instead “I want to do ensure I set aside enough bandwidth for your priorities”
I don’t know, maybe, do your job and help the gc through this?
OK, what are you looking for? Sympathy? This is your job. They pay for the times it gets more difficult.
Chief
Hold on to your butts
Definitely make sure that the GC understands when you're working at an unsustainable pace. You obviously need to step up and help pick up the slack until they can fill the role, but you want the GC to understand that they need to backfill the position.
Pro
Your company only has a GC and two Product Counsels on the entire US legal team? What's the size of this company? Generally, F500 with larger teams offer more protection against people having to subsume roles as a result of departures, which almost always materially worsens WLB.
Globally about 5000 employees, 50 lawyers. U.S. has 300 employees and is growing aggressively, it is the highest revenue in the global org but smallest by head count.
Technically my boss has approval to hire two new attorneys and another compliance officer but the org is conservative on hiring to prevent over hiring and my boss declined an additional headcount. That might change now.
Start by talking to GC about how you intend on triaging and approaching the additional work until someone else is hired. Come with a plan as I’m sure they’re busy trying to set up recruiting, but you’ll need their buy-in for the process you want to follow. Bonus points if you already have an intake process, but if not, it could be helpful to create a simple one now: a shared mailbox, Google/microsoft forms, or something that feed into a task list, and that tracks urgency/priority.
Also get good at talking to your business people about how to prioritize. Everyone thinks their stuff is urgent, but you need to manage that by giving them a realistic “spot in the line” instead of just saying no like SC2 said. You’ll specially need your GC’s support here in case people complain and escalate IMO.