GCs Align With 2026 Enterprise Goals as Holiday Brain Rot Fades

Toward the end of December, when I was busy making personal resolutions that I probably broke by Jan. 2, legal departments across the world were crafting their own. But they called these “resolutions” something more formal, such as OKRs (objectives and key results), KPIs (key performance indicators), or annual goals.

Legal departments didn’t always do this. Historically, we were viewed as service providers to the company as opposed to strategic partners to the business. We didn’t control the work coming into the department, so it was difficult to come up with objectives. We also didn’t track metrics because we didn’t have the ability to.

But with the advent of legal technology, such as e-billing and contract lifecycle management, and a shift in mindset from legal as a “service provider” to a “business leader,” legal departments started developing their own annual objectives—just like their cross-functional counterparts.

Now legal can track its performance and hold itself accountable for failing to meet their goals, just like everyone else. And lawyers work best when you set a goal because reaching it is like getting an A+ in school.

I polled a few of my peers to see what was on their legal departments’ 2026 resolution lists. A couple of themes stuck out across companies and industries. And after spending the long winter break with my kids home from school, I couldn’t help but translate those themes into Gen Alpha-speak, sometimes known as “brain rot.”

Be best friends with the business. To be strategic partners to the business, legal must work collaboratively with cross-functional partners. This includes a seat at the table which allows legal to be involved at the ground floor for any major company projects and initiatives and the development of corporate strategy.

Thomas Chow—executive vice president, general counsel, and secretary at Strategy—emphasized that this mentality needs to be woven into the legal department’s culture, which is critical to “enable department wide transformation, leading to enhanced efficiency in the delivery of legal support and more effective results in driving business outcomes.”

Manisha Merchant—EVP, chief legal officer, and corporate secretary at California Bank of Commerce—summed it up best. “We expect that our business partners keep us in the loop of what their strategic initiatives are,” she said. “In that respect, we have the unique opportunity to really understand how all business lines are moving forward for the upcoming year because we need to ensure that everyone is rowing in the same direction.”

Put another way, in the words of my seventh-grader, “Legal and the business need to be besties.”

I saw this in action at a former company, where we purposely organized the legal department’s OKRs to ladder up to the business’s OKRs. For example, one business goal was to commercialize. So legal drafted goals to support these efforts, such as by establishing third-party relationships and securing permits for new markets.

We published our OKRs on the company intranet and tracked them quarterly. This demonstrated to the business that legal was being a proactive partner to support the company’s efforts so that the departments—again in Manisha’s wise words—“can continue to collaborate and work with one another to maximize the strength of the company going forward.” Or in seventh-grade lexicon, “legal and the business got rizz.”

Aligning legal’s OKRs with the business’s serves another important function: to prevent scope creep, which could lead to budget overruns. When the year is mapped out, an out-of-scope request isn’t automatically fulfilled.

Instead, it becomes a candid conversation about competing priorities and limited resources. The realistic options are to delay the request, deprioritize or combine with another project, or find the budget for outside counsel support (ideally from another department).

Use AI tools to drive efficiency. In these economically challenging times, companies are trimming budgets, controlling costs, and looking to gain efficiencies. Artificial intelligence is the magic answer for many.

Along those lines, Audrey Jean, general counsel of 3E, set forth clear directives for this year: “Ruthless prioritization; don’t do anything repeatable longer than necessary to build a form, process, or template; make sure the legal team is on pace or ahead of AI adoption, governance, and innovation in your broader company.”

Similarly, Shawn Murphy—vice president–chief legal officer and corporate secretary at Mazda North American Operations—plans to lean into AI for 2026. He aims to “spend more time exploring AI tools and uses for my legal and non-legal teams” as well to keep “providing legal support to our internal business clients using and expanding their use of AI in various ways.”

If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that you need to be adaptable. “Innovate or die,” as the saying goes. It makes sense that legal departments are trying out AI to see what works for them. Building on Audrey’s list, here are a few suggestions for approaching this resolution:

• You don’t need to boil the ocean; sometimes starting small is the best strategy while you build momentum.
• Adopting new technology follows a U curve, like the Gartner hype cycle. Expect a “peak of inflated expectations” that precipitously drops to a “trough of disillusionment.” You will eventually reach a “productive” state, but it takes patience and persistence.
• Repeatable workflows are ripe for AI agents.
• Solve for pain points to gain end user support.
• AI tools are rapidly evolving, so you may need to subscribe to and use several at once.
• Data is the best source of truth.
• Keep metrics so you can track efficiencies and report out on wins.

To all the legal departments out there, I’m sending my best wishes for you to meet your New Year’s resolutions. In brain rot speak: You got this, bruh, and then you be bussin’. (The author apologizes and has recently added “remove brain rot from vocabulary” to her New Year’s resolution list.)

Columnist Ellen Yang is the general counsel and a partner at DTO Law and previously held in-house leadership roles at Cruise LLC, Penske Motor Group, and Taco Bell. She writes about career and lifestyle for Bloomberg Law’s Good Counsel column.

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