The work that actually matters

If you asked your executive team what your legal function is actually for, what do you think they’d say? 

Most would say something like: they review contracts, keep us compliant, flag the risks. It says that legal is useful and necessary, but it’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of strategic value. And if you think that would be their honest answer, it’s worth asking why. 

It’s because perception follows activity. If most of what legal does is visible as processing and approval, that’s the mental model that sticks. Not through any failure of the legal function’s capability, but through a failure of its design. 

Being an in-house lawyer myself, I know that most in-house teams spend the majority of their time on what I would describe as low-value, high-volume operational work. Contract reviews. Routine queries. Standard compliance tasks. Necessary work that keeps the organization moving but isn’t the type of work that requires the judgment of a trained lawyer. But if that’s what your executive team sees day to day, that’s how they’ll answer the question. Legal is the team that processes things. 

You know your team is capable of something far more significant than that. It has the ability to deliver the complex, strategic work that shapes how the business operates and grows. Work that influences decisions, manages risk at a level that actually matters, and supports the development and implementation of business strategy. That’s what makes legal indispensable. But most teams don’t spend much time there. 

Busy isn’t the same as valuable 

The problem isn’t capability. The lawyers on your team are smart, experienced, and well-qualified. The problem is capacity and positioning. 

When your team is buried in operational work, two things happen. First, they don’t have time to develop the relationships and business context that strategic judgment requires. You can’t advise on a major commercial decision if you haven’t had time to fully understand the commercial landscape. Second, and more subtly, the executive team starts to see legal as a processing function rather than a thinking function. That perception is hard to shift once it sets in. 

The executives who value their legal team aren’t just valuing their technical knowledge. They’re valuing their judgment. They need someone who understands the business and the industry in which it operates, understands the risk, and can help them make a decision they can stand behind. That’s not a legal opinion. That’s judgment. 

The result for many is a team operating well below its potential, unable to fully answer that opening question as it deserves. 

For once, the timing is right 

For many, the intent to change has been there, but the capacity wasn’t. AI has changed that. 

Most in-house lawyers think AI is about speed. Getting through work faster. While it can do that, that’s not where the real opportunity lies. The real opportunity AI gives you is the ability to redesign what your team is responsible for in the first place. The operational, high-volume work that consumes so much time and energy is exactly the kind of work AI handles well. Pattern recognition. Routine review. Standard document drafts. Structured analysis against known criteria. These aren’t easy tasks, but they’re defined tasks. And defined tasks are what AI is built for. 

That creates an opening. If AI is handling that work, your team can stop owning it. Not abandoning it but stopping the practice of having your best legal minds manually process work that doesn’t require their judgment. 

That creates capacity, and that capacity has to go somewhere. And if you’re intentional about it, it goes toward the complex, strategic work where legal genuinely changes outcomes for the business. 

Building a team that operates strategically 

Freeing up capacity is necessary but not sufficient. The harder work is developing the skills and habits that allow your team to operate at that higher level. 

That means lawyers who understand the business and its industry as well as they understand the law. Who can sit in a commercial conversation and add value before anyone asks a legal question. Who have developed deep enough relationships across the organization that they’re brought in early because people want their thinking, not because a process requires it. 

It means building visibility. Legal functions that operate in the background, quietly processing work, are invisible to the executive team. That invisibility is a problem. If people don’t know what legal contributes beyond the operational, they’ll never elevate it to the position where real decisions get made. 

And it means developing the confidence to give a clear view. Not a list of risks with every qualification known to legal practice, but a considered position grounded in legal knowledge, business context, and a genuine understanding of where the organization is trying to go. This is where I’d land and why. That’s what trust is built on. That’s what changes how your executive team answers the question. 

The question every GC should ask 

Think about your team’s week. How they actually work and where they spend time. How much of it genuinely requires their judgment, their relationships, their strategic thinking. If the honest answer is that the majority of your team’s hours are spent on operational work that AI could assist with or automate, that’s not a technology problem. It’s a design problem. 

Most legal functions haven’t been designed; they’ve grown. More lawyers hired to handle more work, longer hours when the pressure builds. That’s how the function ends up structured around volume rather than value. The fix isn’t to hire more people or work harder. It’s to make deliberate choices about what your team owns, what gets systematized, and where human judgment is genuinely required. 

That’s where AI comes in. Not as a tool to get through more work, but as the thing that finally makes redesigning the function possible. AI amplifies whatever foundation you give it. Build your function for volume and operational output, and that’s what you’ll get more of. Build it to deliver judgment, trust, and a genuine business partnership, and AI will create the space to do exactly that. 

AI can do a lot. The question is what you do with that. The legal teams that get this right won’t be remembered for the tools they adopted. They’ll be remembered for the decision they made to redesign how legal works and where it creates value. 

When your executive team is next asked what the legal function is actually for, will they give the same answer they would have given today? Or something different? Something that reflects a function that helps them make better decisions, move with confidence, and build a stronger business. 

Changing that answer has never been more achievable. AI has seen to that.