When Legal Thinks Like the Board, Speed Might Beat Perfection

In-house lawyers are at our best when we stop thinking like “just” lawyers.

We need to know the law and give great legal advice. But we’re most effective when we do that in a way that helps the business move forward.

That requires a different mindset than the one we learned in law school or at firms. In-house legal success is measured by business impact, not by perfecting an airtight legal analysis.

I learned this firsthand. As a former founder, and now as a general counsel at an incubator that launches multiple startups every year, I’ve seen how much more effective legal teams become when they adopt business principles.

The lawyers who add the most value think like business leaders by setting priorities, balancing risk, and finding opportunities. In other words, the job isn’t to be a lawyer inside a business—it’s to be a business leader who happens to be a lawyer.

The good news? We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The business world has already written the playbook. And the more we borrow from those lessons, the more effective we become. Here are a few of the most important ones.

When everything is a priority, nothing is. Every ambitious company has a long list of things it could do to move forward. But leaders know the real key to progress is picking one or two priorities that matter most and putting disproportionate time and resources behind them. When you try to chase everything, you usually end up with nothing that moves the needle.

In-house legal teams face the same challenge. We will always have more we could do to be useful than we have time and bandwidth to do well. But if we want to have real impact, we must direct the bulk of our energy toward the work that advances the company’s top goals.

That requires clarity. First, we need to understand what the business is aiming for. Then, we need to set legal goals that push those ambitions forward.

For example, if the business’s top priority for the quarter is speed-to-revenue, legal’s priority might be improving internal processes and resource allocation to help the business close deals faster. Or the legal team might take a different approach and prioritize creating templates and playbooks that empower sales to close deals without involving lawyers.

Either way, the legal team has identified the most important thing and spends time on that. What the effective legal team won’t do is get distracted by some other massive project—such as rolling out new companywide compliance training—when that’s not the priority.

What you choose to work on is at least as important as work quality. Whether you’re a CEO or a GC, getting the most important thing done is most important. For example, negotiating decent terms for and closing an essential contract is significantly more useful than negotiating ideal terms for a contract that doesn’t really matter.

If expanding a new product line is the company’s top quarterly goal, and the legal team spends all its time negotiating contracts in support of the old product line, it doesn’t matter how great those contracts are. Perfect work product isn’t particularly valuable if the outcome doesn’t meaningfully move the business forward.

Sometimes, it’s worth sacrificing perfection in the interest of moving faster. Business leaders and effective in-house legal departments understand that certain essential deals or projects are important enough that getting them as close to “perfect” as possible is a good investment of time and energy. But other tasks just need to get done.

The low-stakes vendor contract for a tool your team needed last week probably doesn’t need to have a perfectly worded force majeure provision. But it does need to be signed quickly if not having the tool available is delaying important initiatives.

You need to know your risk appetite—and it will vary. Every business has a different tolerance for risk. That tolerance shifts depending on circumstances, even within the same company.

A startup trying to break into a new market may be willing to take on aggressive partnership terms to move quickly, while a more mature company preparing for an initial public offering may lean heavily toward caution and conservatism.

The risk tolerance may depend on the type of risk, too. For example, appetite for compliance risk may be different than appetite for putting revenue at risk.

An in-house lawyer’s job is to help the business understand which risks are worth taking, which are unacceptable, and how to balance speed, opportunity, and protection. That judgment call is context-dependent. What makes sense in Q1 when growth is the top priority may look very different by Q3, when fundraising is around the corner.

Build your systems for 18 months in the future. When securing an office, smart founders of high-growth companies know they need to sign a lease on a space that will work for them by the time it’s built out in a year—and that will last the length of the lease—it can’t just be big enough to accommodate today’s team.

Smart in-house lawyers similarly plan ahead as they build out their systems and processes. This means creating playbooks even while they are a team of one, building out self-serve processes for colleagues while volume is low, and making compliance decisions based on the idea that the company will one day be on regulators’ radar, even if the company is tiny today.

By adopting these lessons from the business world, in-house lawyers can become more than just legal advisers. When we prioritize effectively, adjust our approach to fit the context, and plan ahead, we can become true partners, driving meaningful impact and growth for our companies.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Heather Stevenson is general counsel at Red Cell Partners. Earlier in her career, she left Big Law to found a juice bar before returning to practice as an in-house lawyer.

Write for Us: Author Guidelines