Leadership
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In-house legal teams face rising pressure to do more with less, shifting value beyond expertise to business partnership, technology, and change capability.
“In 2026, legal expertise is table stakes. What solves problems in-house is partnership with the business, data and tech literacy, and the ability to drive change,” says Kasper Riis Hansen, Head of Legal Operations and Innovation at Arla Foods.
Working at the helm of one of the largest dairy companies in the world, Hansen has a front-row seat to the pressures placed on in-house legal teams: accelerating regulatory changes; business expectations on legal to move faster and closer to operations; resources unable to keep up with the pace of demand.
In this environment, excellence in legal analysis remains essential, but it is no longer sufficient on its own; legal teams must possess business acumen, interpersonal skills, the ability to extrapolate and act upon data, as well as technical prowess.
The result of this pressure creates a dual challenge. Legal must somehow manage regulatory risk while simultaneously driving business value, and often with stretched resources.
“There’s an ever-increasing amount of work coming in, but not necessarily more resources, so we have to find smarter, more efficient ways to respond,” says Hansen.
Legal expertise is table stakes
Most lawyers enter the profession with strong legal-technical skills and a clear role identity: they are trained to be guardians of the law. They are taught to analyze issues rigorously, identify risks, and deliver correct legal answers under pressure. That foundation remains non-negotiable in the in-house role.
Conversely, today’s environment adds additional expectations, that in-house lawyers also act as business enablers and strategic value drivers, helping teams move forward with informed, practical decisions.
Yet in practice, many of the challenges in-house legal teams face are not rooted in legal complexity, rather in how legal work is framed, delivered, and experienced by the business.
Consider a familiar scenario. The business raises concerns about slow contract turnaround times and asks legal to “make the process faster.” With the best intentions, the lawyer moves quickly into solution mode. Approval thresholds are adjusted, template files are simplified, and guidance is shared. The solution is legally sound and operationally streamlined. Yet, weeks later, the frustration remains. The underlying issue was never speed alone; it was uncertainty.
Uncertainty about when legal involvement was required, where accountability sat, and how risk was being assessed. Because limited time was spent upfront understanding how the problem was experienced at the receiving end, the solution addressed symptoms rather than causes. And once the change was rolled out, no structured evaluation followed to test whether it had solved the problem it was meant to address.
This pattern is not driven by lack of competence or unwillingness. It is a predictable consequence of a profession that is trained to optimize for answers rather than outcomes, and it highlights why in-house effectiveness depends on capabilities that sit on top of legal expertise. The T-shaped lawyer, coined by Peter Connor, serves as a great analogy that represents a fundamental shift in the way we view in-house counsel.
“In-house effectiveness depends on capabilities that sit on top of legal expertise.”
Kasper Riis Hansen, Head of Legal Operations and Innovation at Arla Foods
Tech and data literacy: new ways to drive impact
Technology, automation, and AI have the potential to fundamentally amplify in-house legal work, improving consistency, reducing friction, and enabling legal teams to
scale their services beyond manual effort. Used well,
they allow lawyers to focus their attention where judgment and expertise truly matter.
Hansen sees legal technology as an integral answer to these demands, as it gives legal teams the ability to streamline their workflow, save significant time on manual tasks, and provides unmatched insights and visibility over risk. But he says as teams integrate technology into their practice, “the expectation that lawyers are savvier and more acquainted with their data and technology arises.”
“Soft skills are still underestimated in the legal profession, but they’re becoming just as critical as legal expertise.”
Kasper Riis Hansen, Head of Legal Operations and Innovation at Arla Foods
That expectation is not just about using tools – it is also about data literacy. In-house lawyers do not need to become data scientists, but they do need to be comfortable working with data, asking the right questions, and using evidence to steer priorities and decisions. Done well, data becomes a shared language with the business: it helps legal teams focus effort where it matters most and demonstrate impact beyond anecdotes.
- Spot bottlenecks in contract workflows (e.g., where cycle time is lost) and target fixes that remove friction.
- Use matter and spend trends to decide what to standardize, automate, or outsource – and what truly requires senior judgment.
- Track negotiation patterns and fallback usage to improve playbooks and templates based on evidence.
An article by Thomson and Reuters states that “the integration of AI and other technologies represents both the biggest opportunity and the biggest challenge facing legal departments today.” In-house counsel must prioritize upskilling in technology, which isn’t always easy for a profession so rooted in traditional ways of working.
Realising this potential, however, requires curiosity and a baseline understanding of how technology can be embedded into daily legal work. Importantly, technology rarely just makes existing processes faster. It often changes how legal services are delivered, through automation, self-service, or decision support. Such shifts demand communication, expectation management, and adaptation on both sides of the lawyer–business relationship.
It’s no coincidence that lawyers who hesitate to embrace technology often cite change as the real concern. Meaningful adoption does not merely introduce new tools; it changes established ways of working.
The power of soft skills
The growing importance of emotional intelligence is something Hansen has identified through his career. “Soft skills are still underestimated in the legal profession,” he says, “but they’re becoming just as critical as legal expertise.”
Proximity turns insight into impact
Strong in-house lawyers distinguish themselves through their ability to operate as true business partners. That partnership is built through proximity to the business, allowing them to understand commercial context, the pressures stakeholders operate under, and the trade-offs they face in real decision-making.
When lawyers are seen as accessible and proactive counterparts rather than reactive reviewers, legal is brought in earlier, where it can shape outcomes rather than constrain them. Legal judgment becomes more actionable, trust increases, and friction is reduced. Business partnering is not about saying yes more often, but about framing advice in a way that helps the business decide and move forward with confidence.
Change capability is legal capability
A frequently underestimated dimension of in-house legal work is service delivery. Much of what legal introduces into an organization – policies, templates, approval flows, and tools – represents change to how people work.
Yet lawyers are often hesitant to fully engage with the change this implies. Communicating why something is introduced, explaining how it should be used, following up on adoption and adjusting based on feedback rarely form part of formal legal training. As a result, even well-designed solutions risk low uptake or workarounds if service delivery is not treated as an explicit responsibility.
In-house lawyers who develop change capability recognize that the success of legal solutions is inseparable from how they are received, understood, and experienced by their users.
Having empathy and the ability to communicate effectively contribute to one’s influence on others, which for lawyers acting as advisors to the business, is vital. For Hansen’s role in legal operations, this is particularly important, as he must drive the adoption of new technology within the business.
“You have to really convince your stakeholders to embrace change and new ways of working,” he notes. Which is no mean feat when the people you’re dealing with are time-strapped and don’t want to waste precious hours learning a new process for something they’re already doing.
“The most important learning for me has been that regardless of who you are speaking to, you need to address what’s in it for them,” Hansen advises. “Keep in mind who you are talking to, what their interests are, what their struggles are, and really cater to those.”
Looking ahead: learning, leadership, and relevance
Hansen has observed that while counsel are taking it upon themselves to embrace technology and adapt to the T-shaped model that business demands of them, universities are falling behind. “T-shaped capabilities beyond legal expertise is getting too little attention in the traditional law schools,” he says. “Our investment really needs to be in the youth who are the next generation of in-house counsel.”
The gap left by outdated legal education is therefore not just a pipeline concern, it starts in the earliest stages of a lawyer’s career. The habits and mindsets formed in law school, traineeship, and early practice shape what lawyers prioritize and how they approach problems. When that early training focuses almost exclusively on legal analysis over service delivery, technology and business partnership, the capability gap reverberates throughout the profession precisely as in-house teams are being asked to meet higher business expectations. That is why this cannot be solved by individual upskilling alone: universities and other early-career training pathways must adapt too.
The encouraging reality is that none of these capabilities are fixed traits. Business partnering, change capability, and technology and data literacy are learned skills that can be developed at any stage of a career. It is never too late to acquire them, but doing so requires lawyers to consciously step beyond the comfort zone of legal analysis and engage more deeply with how their work creates value in practice.
At the same time, this is not an individual challenge alone. It is equally a leadership issue. Legal leaders shape what is prioritized, what is rewarded, and how teams are prepared for the future. If in-house lawyers are expected to operate as trusted partners rather than reactive specialists, leaders must actively steer their teams in that direction.
The traditional legal service delivery model, built on bespoke advice, manual processes, and linear workflows, is no longer sufficient. Businesses increasingly expect legal support that is accessible, scalable, and embedded into how work is done.
Technology and AI are central to this shift. Not as replacements for legal judgment, but as accelerators of consistency, capacity, and reach. “Lawyers will not be replaced by AI. But lawyers who do not embrace technology and new ways of working in their daily practice will increasingly be overtaken by those who do.”
In that sense, the future of the in-house role will not be defined by who knows the law best, but by who is able to combine legal expertise with partnership, adaptability, and the confidence to evolve.
