I’ve worked with in-house lawyers for nearly two decades, and still too often I’m seeing a kind of uneasy relationship between legal teams and the businesses they serve. There’s a distance between them that shouldn’t be there. And there’s definitely a perception problem.

It feels like many managers actually have a bit of bias against their in-house lawyers: the suspicion that they’re just not as instinctively commercial or entrepreneurial as they could be. That they don’t fundamentally share the same sense of purpose and urgency. That their lawyers are overly, unnecessarily, risk averse and sometimes even actively obtuse and obstructive.

They see Legal as a bottleneck and there’s a sense that in-house lawyers aren’t acting in concert with the rest of the business, and that for them, legal priorities trump commercial ones. And this is alienating them from the rest of the business.

But to be clear: this thinking has no basis in reality.

And worse still, when you hold the legal team at arm’s length, you’re penalizing your business. What works much better is to recast how lawyers are viewed.

Putting lawyers at the center

How does that work?

Well, to start with, here’s a basic question: Where do lawyers sit in your business? Lots of people seem to think they’re somewhere at the edge, detached and away from the commercial stream of the business. But that’s very wrong.

If you instead think of lawyers as being at the very center of every business, you’re nearer the mark. This is demonstrated by the fact that every time a business generates value, its lawyers are always sitting right there, brokering the key transactions. They are core to the business’s operations. Think about it.

• When suppliers are engaged and costs are fixed, lawyers are there.
• When employees are hired, terms are agreed and their value and retention is secured, lawyers are there.
• Lawyers are involved in ensuring that the business generates revenue from customers.
• And lawyers are central to mitigating regulatory risk and exposure.

In summary, lawyers are present when- and wherever value is being created. They’re at the center of your business.

Then we get on to why that matters.

It’s simply that if we start to understand that lawyers are central in the business, we can then start to take advantage of the opportunities it creates.

Opportunity knocks 

What I’m seeing increasingly is that smarter, forward-focused businesses do understand that’s it’s possible to exploit the unique position of their lawyers - and they’re already doing it.

What does it mean in practice?

Well, it starts with in-house lawyers shaking off any residual private practice mindset. So, for example, when a contract is signed, they need to embrace the idea that they don’t have to wave it goodbye and move on to the next matter. In-house lawyers can play an active role in the lifecycle management of the contract. (And, by the way, that’s huge for most organizations because the costs of mismanaged contracts are eye-watering.)

But even more than that. With more integration and visibility of the business’s overarching aims, objectives and strategies, in-house lawyers are in a unique position to deepen their contribution to the business’s overall results.

By aligning priorities with corporate strategy and understanding the broader context of their work, everything in-house lawyers draft, review and negotiate can benefit the business’s goals, plans, targets, strategies, relationships, behaviors and outcomes.

And I’d go so far as to say that everything in-house lawyers draft, review and negotiate can also influence the business’s goals, plans, targets, strategies, relationships, behaviors and outcomes. Lawyers can actively drive business success.

We need to stop thinking of Legal as out there at the edge and only about drafting legally sound contracts, identifying risks, and resolving disputes at the request of the business. A reactive function.

Legal departments should instead be empowered to adopt a much broader, more proactive role, becoming genuine strategic partners at the center of the business - which is good for lawyers, and good for the businesses they serve.