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In Mel Brooks' classically outrageous film The Producers, shyster Max Bialystock assails nervous wreck accountant Leo Bloom with the demand: ‘So, you're an accountant?' ‘Yes, sir, I am, sir,' quavers the hapless Bloom. ‘Then account for yourself!' roars Mr Bialystock with theatrical flourish.

While local government lawyers are certainly not accountants, some might do worse than follow Mr Bialystock's advice and account for themselves – at least in the sense of asking themselves why they exist – as they assemble at the University of Warwick over the next few days for their annual weekend school. The answer might seem a bit like Basil Fawlty's obvious: ‘Why, to provide legal advice and support to our authorities, duh!'

But there might lay the problem. For if legal typecasting is one of the key factors excluding many lawyers from dining at the corporate top table, any howls of protest will ring rather hollow if much of the typecasting is actually coming from lawyers themselves.

Going back to basics then, what are lawyers for? The answer to that must be to make creative use of the law and its mechanisms to help clients create the outcomes they want and to prevent those they don't. For fascinating a discipline as the law may be, no client will shell out hard-won budget or cash for the theoretical advancement of legal science. Clients want a result. So understanding precisely where the client is coming from – getting under the skin – and shaping the relevant part of the world to the client's specification will gain vital brownie points.

On the other hand, when a busy chief officer seeks fast and pithy advice, a long academic disquisition, delivered late, but laboriously setting out a comprehensive range of arguments and counter-arguments while fastidiously avoiding any clear and practical way forward, is unlikely to win friends and influence the right people.

An intuitive understanding of what is needed to make your client's life easier and the ability to think outside the legal cage to deliver desired results is likely to get your name mentioned positively where it counts.

One of the difficulties is that those who labour long, expensively and hard to become lawyers, and get the framed certificate, are reluctant to give up that sense of self-definition. But it's not so much a question of giving it up, more a question of wearing it proportionately and using the skills to make a positive difference. So those who want to make progress should put themselves forward to take part in, or lead, corporate projects.

Therefore, find a way of getting onto the radar of key elected members and chief officers, and build a reputation as a fixer – ie, someone who can make things happen rather than say why they can't.

Organise your time effectively – learning to distinguish between the urgent, the vacuously strident and the important – and avoid the temptation of getting immersed in simply what brings comfort rather than what is needed.

Lawyers were once top officers of choice in local government. And following the wide demise of the town clerk and the advent of the chief executive in 1974, many lawyers continued in, and to be appointed to, these positions.

Now the number of lawyer chief executives is relatively small. And many members (together with their senior officer colleagues) do not find the prospect of a lawyer chief executive particularly attractive. From a corporate point of view the local government lawyer brand often seems to have become somewhat devalued into a rather risk adverse commodity supplier of legal widgets.

However, local government lawyers are very much more than this. With their experience of large and diverse swathes of local authority operations, their analytical ability and capacity to sift out relevant flakes of gold from volumes of dross, plus their facility in shifting mode from macro to micro as appropriate, they are admirably suited to playing a leading role in key corporate projects and partnerships.

But a light kept burning under a bushel will merely leave the owner in the shadows.

That is of course not to say local government lawyers should cease to function as such, they must continue their excellent work as high-calibre practitioners. Keeping most of the legal mechanics subliminal while focusing on creating valued outcomes and making a difference in major corporate projects is likely to get you noticed for the right reasons. For if all LG lawyers heed Bialystock they may once again start to bloom.

Nicholas Dobson is a partner at Pinsent Masons