Being “just the advisor” is why in-house lawyers don’t get invited into the room

General Counsel who see their job as advising rather than deciding are only half performing the role. Adrian Moffatt, Executive General Manager Legal and Corporate at Ausco, has built a named framework for closing that gap, and a public following of in-house lawyers to match. 

I had managers early in my career, good managers, capable ones, who still would not take me into executive meetings. Naively, I thought it was about hierarchy. I no longer think that. I now believe it was lack of self-confidence, based on the lack of clear guidance on how a great modern legal leader should operate; as well as a lack of the kind of sophisticated managerial techniques that Adrian espouses. A manager who has never had the psychological safety to hand over the microphone will never learn how to do it for someone else, and the habit gets passed down a generation at a time, unexamined, until it looks like the natural order of things rather than what it actually is, a failure of nerve dressed up as caution. 
 

That failure of nerve sits underneath a more structural problem for our profession, one I spoke about at length with Adrian Moffatt, who runs the legal function at Ausco Modular, Australia and New Zealand’s largest modular construction company. He heads a lean legal team, four lawyers covering two countries, but the reach of his thinking is much larger than his headcount. Over the past 18 months he has become one of the most followed voices in in-house legal leadership, not by writing about contracts or compliance, but by relentlessly making one argument: general counsel are deciders, not advisors, and the profession has spent decades settling for less authority than it was ever entitled to claim. 

Deciders, not just advisors 

The half we are missing is deciding. Legal training builds advisors. It teaches us to spot the issue, weigh the authority, and hand the client a reasoned position, then step back. That model works inside a law firm, where the client owns the decision and pays by the hour for the analysis. It breaks down the moment you sit inside the business as an executive, because an executive who only analyzes and never commits is not, in any functional sense, an executive. Adrian names this directly. As he puts it, a general counsel who sees the job as purely advisory is “only half performing the role.” 
 

He makes the comparison concrete by pointing at the CFO, the one executive whose remit sits closest to legal in the org chart. Nobody expects the CFO to lay out three funding scenarios and go quiet, and then to push back if asked to decide, citing “professional responsibility.” The business expects a recommendation, because the CFO’s job is to own the numbers well enough to have a view. Legal owns something just as material, the organization’s risk position and its regulatory reality, and yet we are the one function still culturally permitted to shrug and call that professionalism. It is not. It is abdication with better manners.  

I have long believed we are deciders, not just advisors, and then I heard Adrian say the same thing, unprompted. When two people arrive at the same insight independently, it usually means the insight was always true and the profession was simply slow to say it out loud.  

Trust is demonstrated, not declared 

Building trust as general counsel works the same way. The second half of Adrian’s thinking is quieter but just as consequential, and it has to do with how confidence moves through an organization. Most general counsel will say they trust their junior lawyers, but few will hand them the floor. Adrian’s practice is worth repeating. He brings junior team members into executive meetings, briefs them beforehand on exactly what to raise, and then, critically, backs them out loud once they have spoken. In his words, that public affirmation “passes my confidence,” so that the executives in the room extend the same trust without needing to be asked. 
 

It inverts how most legal leaders think about their own value. The instinct, especially early in a GC’s tenure, is to be the single point of contact the business relies on. Adrian’s model does the opposite. He treats himself as a conduit for other people’s credibility rather than a bottleneck for it, and the payoff is structural because trust that reaches a junior lawyer directly, without being filtered every time through the GC, is trust the business can access without waiting on one person’s availability.  Adrian is scaling his function through leadership, his businesspeople build the trust to directly access his team, and he is then able to move up the ladder to successively more strategically impactful roles. 

Avoiding the bypass

The clearest artifact of Adrian’s thinking, and the reason his content travels as far as it does, is that he has put a name on a habit rather than leaving it as a vague virtue. He calls attempts by our business partners to avoid interacting with legal “the bypass.” Adrian’s focus is not on becoming a stronger gatekeeper – it is on reframing the situation as an opportunity for legal to dig deeply into the objectives of the business. I have sat through enough of these requests myself to know how tempting it is to reactively answer the question you were asked. Adrian trains his team to resist that temptation. The first question he has trained his team to ask when work comes in is “what are you trying to achieve.” 

That single question changes what follows. Once the actual objective is on the table, the lawyer is no longer the person standing between the business and what it wants. Legal are no longer something to be avoided, to be bypassed. They become the person who can see a path the business could not see on its own, because they understand both the goal and the terrain.  

Adrian is equally firm on the second half of the method, and this is the part I wish more legal leaders would adopt. Options are not enough on their own. A lawyer who lays out three paths and declares no preference has technically done the analysis. They have functionally done nothing, because the business still has to do the deciding that legal was better positioned to do in the first place. Adrian’s instruction to his own team is to put a recommendation based on a deep understanding of the business’s objectives on the table alongside the options, one they are free to reject, but one that exists.

What to do with the time you get back

Adrian’s third argument is the most useful, and the one most legal leaders will find hardest to act on. It asks them to spend their scarcest resource, visible effort, on work that has nothing to do with substantive legal work. He is unambiguous that legal expertise alone never built his career. Curiosity about the business, and a willingness to take on the work nobody else wants, did far more. “Put your hand up and you do get these opportunities to expand beyond legal,” he told me. 

He has done this himself. By repeatedly putting his hand up for jobs outside his remit, he now also oversees Ausco’s IT team, its HR function and its corporate services team, and he stepped in to run finance for a period when the CFO was unavailable. None of that sits on a law school transcript. All of it now shapes the judgment he brings to actual legal advice. It is the same principle I saw play out at eBay, where the lawyers who understood the business strategy ended up with far more influence than the ones who focused on ever more detailed drafting. 

The sequence Adrian recommends to lawyers earlier in their careers holds regardless of company size, sector, or which legal technology sits underneath the function. 

• When a business team escalates a problem, start by asking what they are trying to achieve, not just what instructions they were given. 

• Offer options plus an explicit recommendation. Do not lay out a menu of choices with no stated position. 

• Bring junior lawyers into executive level meetings, prepare them on what to raise beforehand, and affirm their contribution publicly afterward so trust transfers directly to them. 

• Volunteer for work outside the legal remit that your general counsel or leader does not want to do. It builds visibility and relationships without treading on anyone’s toes. 

• Redirect time freed up by AI toward business facing, non-legal growth activities rather than letting it get absorbed into more low-value legal work. 

That last point matters most, and it is where I think the profession is at real risk of getting complacent. AI is already removing meaningful volume from the reactive end of legal work, the first pass review, the routine redline, the familiar question answered for the hundredth time. That capacity will either be reabsorbed into more of the same reactive low-value work, because that is the path of least resistance, or it will be redirected deliberately toward the proactive, business facing, relationship building, non-legal work that builds a career and a function’s standing.

Adrian’s own trajectory, from legal leader to also running technology, HR, and briefly finance, is the clearest available proof of what the second choice compounds into over time. Most legal leaders will default to the first option, because it is easier to measure. The ones who choose the second are the ones who end up in the room where it happens 
 
In 18 months, Adrian’s writing on these ideas has reached more than 20,000 in-house lawyers. That reach is evidence that the profession has been waiting for someone to call it out, that the job was always bigger than advising. The lawyers who act on that first will not need to be invited into the room; they will already be in it. That is a shift worth putting your hand up for. 

Listen to the full conversation with Adrian Moffatt on The Legal Leaders Podcast to hear how his LinkedIn following grew past 20,000 in-house lawyers in just 18 months, and the story of seconding his own team members to a different office for a week with no agenda at all.