Michaelle Noble
Senior Writer
at LawVu
Written by
Every legal leader wants the same thing.
They want to spend less time reacting and more time leading. They want legal to be embedded in business strategy rather than called in at the eleventh hour. They want their teams focused on commercial priorities instead of drowning in low-value work.
Most already have a plan for how to get there. The problem is that strategy was never a constraint. Execution is.
One story from a recent discussion with three experienced legal leaders captured this perfectly.
Mark Smolik, Chief Legal Officer at DHL Supply Chain throughout the Americas, recalled presenting legal metrics to his executive team each month. Like many legal departments, he reported on litigation, contracts, and legal activity – metrics that demonstrated the volume of work his team was delivering.
His CFO had a different perspective. “Kill the spreadsheet.”
The message wasn’t that legal’s work lacked value. It was that legal was explaining its value using measures the business didn’t care about.
Instead, his CFO offered a different challenge: to manage the perception.
That advice extends well beyond executive reporting. It highlights one of the biggest leadership challenges facing in-house legal today. Legal leaders aren’t struggling because they lack vision for the future. They’re struggling because today’s demands rarely leave enough space to build it.
The profession already knows where it’s going
There is remarkably little disagreement about where in-house legal is headed. Legal should be more strategic.
It should understand the commercial priorities of the business. It should demonstrate measurable value rather than simply report legal activity. It should embrace technology to eliminate repetitive work. It should create a capacity for higher-value advice.
These ideas are no longer controversial. They have become the accepted blueprint for modern legal leadership.
Yet many legal departments continue to feel stuck. Not because they disagree with the destination, but because they never have the opportunity to leave the starting point.
Every strategic initiative competes with today’s contracts, negotiations, urgent requests, and board deadlines. The work that keeps legal indispensable can also prevent it from evolving.
As Paula Pepin observed during the discussion, legal departments rarely suffer from a shortage of strategic ideas. More often, they struggle to consistently execute them while simultaneously running the function.
Leadership begins with deciding what legal should stop doing
For decades, legal departments have built their reputation on involvement.
The more work that flowed through legal, the greater the perception of control. Every contract, approval, and exception became another opportunity to manage risk.
That model made sense when legal’s role was primarily advisory. Today’s business environment demands something different.
Sterling Miller argued that legal leaders should increasingly measure success not by how much work they review, but by how quickly the business can move forward with confidence. That shift changes the role of legal from reviewing everything to designing systems that allow routine work to happen without unnecessary legal intervention. Self-service tools, standard agreements, clear playbooks, and defined guardrails are not simply operational improvements – they are leadership decisions about where legal expertise creates the greatest value.
That requires a difficult mindset shift.
Leadership is no longer demonstrated by saying yes to every request. It is demonstrated by deciding which work no longer requires legal’s direct involvement.
Creating strategic capacity often begins by deliberately reducing operational dependency.
Strategic influence is earned long before legal advice is given
Another theme emerged consistently throughout the discussion: influence is not built through legal expertise alone.
Business leaders rarely judge legal by the sophistication of its legal analysis. They judge it by whether legal understands the commercial objectives of the organization and contributes meaningfully toward achieving them.
That was the lesson behind Mark Smolik’s story.
The executive team wasn’t interested in how many contracts had been reviewed. They wanted to be confident that legal understood the business they were trying to build.
That changes how legal leaders should think about trust. Trust isn’t earned because legal always has the right answer.
It’s earned because legal demonstrates curiosity about the business before offering legal advice. It grows when legal leaders speak in terms of commercial priorities, operational realities, and business outcomes instead of legal activity.
The legal departments with the greatest influence are rarely the loudest voices in the room. They are the ones whose advice reflects a deep understanding of the business sitting around the table.
Transformation is a leadership discipline
The conversation eventually turned to artificial intelligence, but not in the way many discussions do.
Rather than debating which platform or technology would reshape legal first, the panel returned to a more fundamental point: transformation begins long before technology is introduced.
Technology cannot compensate for unclear processes. It cannot replace disciplined governance. It cannot create alignment where none exists.
As Paula Pepin argued, successful transformation starts with leaders creating the operational foundation necessary for change. Mark Smolik reinforced the point with a simple analogy: no one builds the roof before laying out the foundation.
The lesson extends well beyond AI.
Whether the objective is technology adoption, process improvement, or organizational change, execution depends less on the tools being implemented than on the leadership required to prepare the organization for them.
Creating time to lead may be the most strategic decision of all
Perhaps the most important insight from the discussion was also the simplest.
Legal leaders cannot expect to transform the function if every hour is consumed by running it.
That does not mean working harder. It means making deliberate decisions about where leadership time is invested. Protecting time for planning. Building systems that reduce repetitive work. Empowering teams to make decisions within clear guardrails.
Creating operating rhythms that keep strategic initiatives moving even when the day becomes consumed by operational demands.
These decisions rarely feel urgent.
Yet they determine whether strategy remains an annual planning exercise or becomes the way the legal function operates.
The legal profession has spent years asking how legal can become more strategic.
Perhaps the better question is this:
Have we created legal organizations that allow leaders the time and capacity to be strategic in the first place?
Until the answer is yes, strategy will remain an aspiration rather than a competitive advantage.
Continue the conversation
This article builds on themes explored throughout the Future of In-House Legal series, where leading general counsel share their perspectives on trust, operational leadership, business influence, governance, legal velocity, and the evolving role of the modern legal function.
Explore the complete Future of In-House Legal series
