InView Magazine: Issue 8 out now!
How has this situation been allowed to develop? To unpick this question, it’s necessary to start at the beginning, to understand why businesses need an in-house function. My first thought was that it was to do with cost; that organizations thought it would be cheaper to employ and pay lawyers a salary rather than use external law firms.
I was wrong. The very first generation of in-house lawyers were never just lawyers. They weren’t hired just to review contracts or write policies; they were brought into the business because they had a broad skill set. Well trained in the law, their value was their strategic thinking, creativity, and deep knowledge of the business. They possessed industry insight, commercial acumen, and were entrepreneurial. They were valued as trusted advisors to the executive team, not because they could recite the law, but because they could apply it in a way that unlocked opportunity, removed roadblocks, and enabled the business to move forward with confidence.
Those first-generation GCs sat at the top table not as ‘legal’, but as business partners with a legal superpower. But somewhere along the way we lost that value, and over time many in-house teams began to drift from that original purpose.
As organizations expanded, their business operations and approaches to management evolved rapidly. The language of the business changed, but legal teams didn’t always keep pace. As a result our business fluency waned, and we retreated to what we knew best: the law.
So instead of being a business-savvy function with legal expertise, we became a legal function inside a business. Our value proposition narrowed. Legal knowledge became the centerpiece of our value offering, not our broader knowledge and skill set.
Today, many in-house teams find themselves boxed into operational roles, spending their days overwhelmed by the volume of legal requests, managing risk in the margins, and firefighting issues rather than preventing them.
We’ve become used to being reactive, swamped with low-complex work and inefficient processes. This influences how we see our purpose: expert risk mitigators using our legal knowledge as shields to protect the business rather than proactive enablers who really understand the business and are more comfortable taking a balanced risk approach to drive business performance.
What’s holding us back from evolving our ways of working, from becoming a proactive rather than a reactive function?
Busyness is a major challenge. We spend our days fighting through inboxes, manually triaging requests, chasing information, searching through different systems for documents, fielding the same low-value questions time and again.
We aren’t underperforming because we lack ability; we’re underperforming because our systems, processes, and ways of working are fundamentally not fit for purpose. Our processes weren’t designed for efficiency. In fact, many weren’t ‘designed’ at all. They were inherited, modeled off private practice behaviors, reactive workflows, and using legacy business tools. Ways of working created by lawyers for lawyers, because that’s how things have always been done, and without ever really considering how to scale or operate as a modern business function.
Instead of scaling through process optimization and technology, we continue to scale by adding more lawyers. Which only compounds the issues – more inputs, more inconsistency, more friction, more noise.
It’s time to rebrand these inefficiencies. Let’s call it what it is: legal friction.
Legal friction is the drag on the business created by inefficient legal processes. It’s the slow contract review process, trying to find nefarious reasons behind every redline, that delays sales. It’s the unclear intake process and lack of prioritization that forces us to continually switch between tasks, leading to confusion for affected stakeholders. It’s the lack of visibility that frustrates everyone.
Unfortunately, it adds to the perception of the business that legal is where work goes to die.
The IDC report, The Real Cost to Your Business, considered this same issue, but rather than just considering the issue from legal’s perspective, their research went further to include the views of business leaders. Findings revealed:
Another consequence of legal friction is outsourcing: many in-house teams are outsourcing their most valuable legal work. Why? Because we’re too busy to do it ourselves.
Which means the strategic work, the big-picture thinking, the issues that develop and drive business direction, is handed to law firms. They are no more capable than us; they went to the same law schools and had similar legal training, but they have the time and the space for the deep thinking required to do that work. And because they can do the work, they’re seen by the business as value creators.
And what does that leave the in-house team with? The admin. The process. The policies. The manual tasks. We become the internal function for reviewing NDAs, updating templates, and answering “can I do this?” questions. It’s no wonder some organizations see the value in their legal functions as operational problem solvers.
The unfortunate consequence of legal friction is that it’s caused damage to our relationship with the business, and in some cases that relationship became adversarial. It’s not because the people weren’t great lawyers or because the legal team didn’t care. It’s because their way of working created tension; reactive mitigators of risk meant they said “no” too often, or too late. Overwhelm meant requests fell through the gaps or often went unanswered. There was no visibility of work across the team or for the business. Communication was patchy. The business didn’t really understand legal’s priorities, and legal didn’t have time to develop a deeper understanding of the business’s pain points.
So people went around legal. Or worse, avoided them altogether.
For years, how to get a seat at the top table or influence executives, as the first-generation GCs did, has been a hot topic of conversation. In my opinion, we’re guilty of over-intellectualizing the problem. We treat it like a personal development issue; we just need better influencing skills or more assertiveness.
Yet the truth is, we’ll never get to the top table if we’re stuck processing BAU legal admin and wrangling with our own internal chaos. The business doesn’t invite people to the top table out of sympathy. You earn your seat by showing you understand the business and its industry, that your presence adds value, and you have the ability to unlock growth and mitigate risk in meaningful ways. You need to demonstrate business fluency, not legal prowess.
We’ve been trying to solve the wrong problem. This isn’t a legal issue to fix; it’s a business problem inside the legal team. And business problems require business solutions.
It’s time for a rethink, to recalibrate from being a legal function to a business function. If we want to build a modern in-house legal function for the future, one that looks more like the first generation of strategic, creative, commercially minded advisors, we need to change how we operate.
We need to eliminate low-value work through automation, self-service and streamlined workflows; reclaim time for strategic engagement, business partnering and innovation; build legal teams by design, not just headcount; build a knowledge base to lift our capability and generate capacity; prioritize connection with the business, not distance; shift from reactive to proactive, from transactional to transformational.
In short, we need to run legal like a business function, not a legal silo.
The Connected Legal Framework, created by LawVu, is a practical model built to help in-house legal teams rethink their ways of working and reconnect with the business. It’s based on three core pillars:
We start by eliminating friction. We don’t hire more lawyers, but instead we invest in tools and systems that support us and scale. We map out legal processes, remove bottlenecks, automate what we can, and empower the business to do its own work with self-service tools. We set the business up with tools and processes, and we get out of the way. We redesign the way legal work flows, so the team isn’t buried in admin, and so legal becomes a smoother, faster and more responsive partner.
Next, we reconnect. We embed legal into the rhythm of the business, not as a separate, reactive function, but as an engaged and strategic partner. We shadow stakeholders, we listen to their pain points, and we tailor our service to fit how they work. We don’t force them to fit the way we do. We spend time learning to speak the language of the business. We shift from “What’s the legal risk?” to “What’s the best decision for the business, considering the legal context?”
Finally, we focus on value. We develop and leverage our legal knowledge to build the team’s capability to do the more impactful work. We partner more closely with external law firms to develop that deeper understanding so we can deliver the high-value strategic work the business needs to drive success. We track metrics that matter to the business, not just legal KPIs, and we find ways of sharing the impact we have. We showcase the value of an in-house legal function, so we are no longer known for what we prevent, but more for what we enable.
And we continuously improve, like any other high-performing business function.
When in-house legal teams are connected, productive and strategically aligned with the business, everything changes:
The future of in-house legal isn’t about doing more legal work. It’s about doing the right work, which combines legal with business.
Our intended purpose of value-adding business champions, like that first generation of in-house lawyers, hasn’t changed. But with modern tools, systems and thinking that allow us to scale, we can be even more impactful.
