InView Magazine: Issue 7 out now!
Cory Sumsion and Greg Lorenzon have built and led multiple commercial engine rooms for well-known international businesses. They teamed up recently with David Lancelot to discuss how in-house legal teams can scale commercial contracting, drive efficiency, and accelerate their businesses.
For decades, in-house legal teams have been judged through the narrow lens of cost control. Success was measured in external counsel savings, headcount efficiency, or average contract turnaround time. In many organizations, legal has been treated as a cost center – reactive, overloaded, and often excluded from strategic conversations.
But as global businesses face rapid transformation, this model is not only outdated, it is actively harmful. Legal’s potential to be a competitive advantage is left untapped when its people are drowning in contracts, amendments, and emails.
David, CLO and EVP of Advocacy at LawVu, framed the challenge succinctly: “Our profession and how we run the function is going through a pretty significant transformation. A good legal function facilitates the business, and a great legal function accelerates the business.”
The concept of the in-house legal “engine room” includes the people, policies, processes and technology that allow the legal function to run at scale – handling the high-volume, low-risk work efficiently, while freeing lawyers to focus on what truly matters. It is not simply a question of efficiency. The real reason to do this goes deeper. It is about giving legal the time to operate as businesspeople with legal skills, not siloed technicians. It is about reshaping culture so lawyers are partners in growth, not gatekeepers of risk. It is about modernizing the legal function, so it finally catches up with sales, HR, and finance, all of which already rely on fit-for-purpose systems and data-driven processes. And above all, it is about acceleration – removing the noise of low-level work to create space for legal teams to anticipate opportunities and shape strategy.
As Cory, Head of Commercial Legal at Signifyd, explained: “If you’re always bogged down on the menial administrative, just the day-to-day type work, you’ll never be able to have your head up high enough in order to see where actually you can assist the company as more of a partner… in order to help drive the business.” The cost of failing to build such an engine room is missed opportunities, heightened risk aversion, and a legal team perpetually absent from the “room where it happens”.
At the heart of the model is a mindset shift: if you’ve done something three times, don’t do it again – build a process. This requires lawyers to step away from the ingrained belief that every contract must be reviewed, every clause marked up, every comma debated. Instead, the focus becomes: what truly adds value? As Cory put it, “There is a focus… of having a risk-based approach. These are what we care about as a company. This is what is going to cause potentially more issues. So, let’s just focus on this and get those done.”
Greg, Associate General Counsel at Clearlink, agrees that vision is key: “Having a clear, concise vision is so pivotal… Once leadership can conceptualize that, you can start rolling it out incrementally, demonstrating the value, and that’s where it really takes off.”
That vision translates into disaggregation: ensuring the right resource handles the right work. In practice, this is what Cory and Greg call “the funnel approach.” High-volume, low-risk work – NDAs, SOWs – can be templatized, automated, or handled directly by business teams. Moderate-risk matters are managed by contract managers or paralegals, guided by playbooks and technology. Only the truly strategic, complex, or sensitive issues reach the senior lawyers or subject-matter experts at the bottom of the funnel.
As David recalled, “Thousands of sales agreements can be processed monthly without touching them… by the time you get to the bottom of the funnel, 40–50 percent of the workload has already been automated or expedited. The commercial lawyer now has the bandwidth to partner with the business.” The results can be dramatic. He told how at eBay Classifieds, disaggregation and risk-based policies reduced commercial contract workload by 40 percent initially, and ultimately up to 90 percent.
Engine rooms run on policies, the most critical of which is a risk-based matrix agreed between legal and business leadership. Under a certain contract value, no legal review is required. For marketing or HR reviews, only specified risks trigger escalation. Standard paper, standard clauses, or pre-approved vendor terms can flow straight through without legal input. “We need a policy that’s agreed by the business, agreed by the CFO,” said David. “Here’s the policy: under this amount, we’re not looking at it anymore. It doesn’t have this; we’re not looking at it anymore. That works.”
Centralization is another non-negotiable. For the funnel to work, everything must enter through a single intake process. Without it, requests scatter across inboxes, favorite lawyers, or ad hoc conversations, creating blind spots and duplication. Greg explained: “When you don’t have an intake process, people just go to their favorite attorney. You lose the ability to have oversight and visibility into everything the company is doing. You lose the ability to leverage arrangements or agreements, to shortcut the process.” Yet intake must be kept simple. “You don’t want to have a three-page, 50-question approach because nobody wants to fill that out,” Cory cautioned. “Get the basic information you need… and then collaborate.”
Modern technology is what makes this scalable. For too long, legal lagged behind other functions. Finance had SAP, sales had Salesforce, HR had Workday. Legal had email. That era is ending. Today, contract lifecycle management, matter management, and intake platforms are intuitive, cloud-based, and integrate across enterprise systems. “The right technology is pivotal and transformative,” Greg stressed. “Not just in terms of having a centralized repository, but having a uniform way to assess risk, make sure things are done consistently and correctly.”
But success depends on how new tools are adopted. Big-bang implementations rarely work. The smarter path is progressive: start with champions in one region or business unit, build momentum, communicate wins, and scale gradually.
Perhaps the most overlooked benefit of the engine room is data. Intake and workflow systems generate insights into demand, turnaround times, and bottlenecks. Cory recalled the early days: “We just didn’t have the ability to see that kind of information… as we got more sophisticated tools, out-of-the-box reporting was already ten times better. It gave you the ability to see where you need to put your emphasis and the benefits of everything you’re putting together.” Data allows legal to speak the same language as the business – charts, metrics, benchmarks – transforming invisible effort into visible value.
None of this is easy. Lawyers are trained to focus on details, not to redesign processes. Business partners may resist change. Leaders may fear that automation undermines job security. Cory has addressed that concern directly: “There is sometimes a perception that if I free up my time, that’s my job security… The important talk track is you didn’t free up your time just to do less – you freed up your time to do more of what matters. Now we are adding more value for you, CEO, for you VP. I’m there now at your offsites, in your team meetings. I’m part of that team.”
Over time, the benefits speak for themselves. At eBay, once bandwidth was freed up, Greg’s team expanded its scope, taking on privacy contract negotiations, becoming certified experts, and further increasing value to the business. Success bred momentum, and momentum drove cultural change.
The in-house legal engine room is not a theoretical model. It is a practical blueprint already transforming leading organizations. It begins with purpose: legal as a driver of business acceleration, not a cost center. It requires cultural change, operational discipline, risk-based policies, centralized intake, disaggregated workflows, modern technology, and a relentless focus on data. Most of all, it requires leadership willing to articulate a powerful “why”. Or as David concluded: “The purpose is to get to a place where we are a value driver and not a cost center.”
The message for legal leaders and for businesses choosing their legal tech partners is clear: build your engine room; build it now.
