Speed, scale, and the death of legal latency
Lisa Mather on the future of in‑house legal
Business teams moved forward, and legal stepped in at key moments to assess risk, interpret regulations, and provide guidance. The model was built for a world where decisions unfolded over longer timelines, and complexity could be managed in sequence.
That world no longer exists.
According to Lisa Mather, Head of Legal – Risk and Compliance at Fetch, the most important shift shaping the future of in-house legal is not simply technology or structure. It is speed. Businesses now operate on compressed timelines, scale rapidly across markets, and make decisions in environments defined by incomplete information. In that context, the traditional cadence of legal work is increasingly out of sync with how organizations operate.
The consequence is not just inefficiency. It is friction.
Closing that gap requires more than working faster. It requires rethinking how legal delivers value – moving from a reactive function to a system that enables the business to operate at speed, with clarity and confidence.
Legal has long been optimized for precision. Advice is carefully constructed. Risks are thoroughly assessed. Outputs are designed to be complete, defensible, and correct.
Those instincts remain important. But in modern organizations, timing has become just as critical as accuracy.
Businesses operate on mind-boggling timelines today. There’s an expectation that legal will keep up.
This creates a new kind of risk. Not incorrect advice – delayed advice.
A perfectly reasoned answer delivered too late can still slow a product launch, delay a deal, or create unnecessary friction in decision-making. In fast-moving environments, latency becomes a liability.
This is the central tension Mather highlights: “Legal is not struggling because it lacks expertise. It is struggling because its delivery model is misaligned with the speed of the business.”
The decline of the traditional legal memo is often framed as a shift in communication style. As Mather notes, “nobody needs a 20-page memo anymore.”
But the memo itself is not a problem. It is a symptom of how legal has, historically, operated.
A model where:
That model breaks down when decisions need to be made quickly and iteratively. Modern business leaders do not need exhaustive analysis in isolation. They need guidance that is clear, contextual, and actionable. They need to understand not just what the risks are, but what to do next.
This shift aligns closely with Sterling Miller’s emphasis on “time to yes” as a defining metric for legal performance. The value of legal is increasingly measured not by how thoroughly it analyzes a problem, but by how effectively it helps the business move forward.
For years, legal leaders have talked about becoming strategic partners for the business. Today, that expectation is no longer aspirational. It is operational.
“We’re not some ivory tower team sitting outside what’s going on,” states Mather.
Legal is increasingly embedded in the flow of decision-making – involved earlier in product development, commercial strategy, and operational planning. But this shift is not just about proximity. It is about participation.
Legal is no longer simply reviewing decisions. It is helping shape them. This requires a different kind of lawyer.
One who can:
This is where Mather’s perspective intersects with Mark Smolik’s. Embedding legal within the business does not automatically make it influential. That influence depends on whether legal is seen as enabling progress rather than slowing it down.
The most important structural shift Mather describes is the move toward platform thinking: “Legal isn’t just a department anymore. We’re a platform that supports legal service delivery across the organization.”
This is a fundamental change in how legal operates. A department processes work, but a platform enables others to operate.
In practice, this means legal is no longer responsible for handling every request directly. Instead, it builds systems that allow the business to handle routine matters independently while ensuring appropriate guardrails are in place.
A modern legal platform typically includes:
This model allows for legal scale without increasing headcount at the same rate as demand. It also changes how legal interacts with the business.
Instead of being a bottleneck, legal becomes infrastructure.
This idea connects directly to Bjarne Tellman’s broader point that legal must evolve in line with how businesses scale. As organizations become more dynamic and interconnected, legal must move from a reactive model to one that operates continuously alongside the business.
In global organizations, building this kind of platform requires coordination across regions, regulatory environments, and business units – a challenge Bill Deckelman explores in leading legal transformation at scale.
One of the most persistent challenges legal teams face is the mismatch between how businesses grow and how legal functions are structured.
Companies expand into new markets, launch products more quickly, and increase operational complexity in compressed timeframes. Legal teams rarely grow at the same pace.
There’s a gap between how businesses are scaling and how legal teams traditionally operate.
That gap creates friction. Requests pile up. Turnaround times increase. Business teams begin to look for ways to bypass legal for routine matters.
The instinctive response is to add more lawyers. But that approach does not solve the underlying problem. It simply increases capacity within a model that does not scale effectively.
The real solution lies in redesigning how legal work is delivered.
This is where Mather’s platform model connects with Paula Pépin’s emphasis on execution. Building a platform is not just a conceptual shift. It requires operational discipline – designing processes, implementing systems, and driving adoption across the organization. At enterprise scale, this gap becomes even more pronounced, requiring structural changes to how legal operates globally – as Bill Deckelman outlines in his perspective on legal transformation.
Historically, legal performance has been measured through activity. How many contracts were reviewed. How many matters were handled. How many hours were spent. These metrics are easy to track. But they say very little about impact.
Modern legal teams are beginning to shift toward outcome-based measurement.
Mather points to metrics such as:
These metrics reflect how legal contributes to the business, not just what it produces. They also reinforce a broader shift across the future of in-house series.
Legal is moving away from being evaluated as a cost center and toward being understood as a function that enables performance.
As operating models change, so does the composition of legal teams. Modern legal functions increasingly include professionals with expertise in:
If you’re only hiring people with law degrees today, you’re missing opportunities.
These roles expand what legal can do. They allow the function to design systems, manage complexity, and deliver services at a scale. But they also change how legal defines itself.
It becomes less of a profession organized around individual expertise and more of a coordinated system designed to deliver outcomes.
This shift reinforces a broader pattern across the series. Legal is becoming more multidisciplinary not just to increase efficiency, but to increase its ability to operate as part of the business and to increase its positive impact.
The legal function has historically been slow to change. But the forces shaping modern organizations, namely speed, scale, data, and complexity – are now reshaping legal as well.
The teams that succeed will not simply work harder or adopt new tools. They will redesign how legal departments operate and integrate across the business.
They will build systems that allow legal to scale in alignment with growth of the business. They will deliver insight at the pace decisions are made. And they will position legal as an accountable enabler of progress rather than just a checkpoint in the process.
The success of future in-house legal teams will be defined not by how well they keep up. It will be defined by how effectively they help the business move forward.
