How to Have Highly Effective Recurring Meetings with Your Manager

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Deep Dive

Effective Recurring Meetings Start with You and Compound Over Time

Most in-house lawyers have recurring meetings with their manager. Weekly check-ins. Standing 1:1s. Regular touchpoints that are easy to treat as routine or to let drift into status updates and calendar filler.

But used intentionally, these meetings are one of the highest-leverage tools you have. They can help you get unblocked faster, shape priorities, demonstrate judgment, and quietly build trust over time. This issue focuses on a few simple ways to run those meetings more effectively, so they work harder for you and for your career.

1. Prepare in a way that works for them and you.

There is a lot of generic advice floating around about how employees should prepare for meetings with their managers: “always send an agenda ahead of time,” “send an email with your wins for the week, priorities for the upcoming week, and three places you need their help,” etc. And while none of this advice is bad per se, it also ignores an important truth—your meetings will be most effective if your preparation aligns with your and your manager’s preferences and unique relationship.

The one piece of preparation advice that applies to all in-house lawyers is simple: prepare for your meeting with your manager. But what that preparation looks like will vary.

Some managers want a fully written out agenda ahead of time. Others are comfortable without one, so long as you come prepared with what you need to talk about. And still others prefer to drive the meeting themselves; for these managers, sending an agenda ahead of time may be particularly ineffective.

Find out what works for them, and then intentionally adapt your preparation so it works for both of you. For example, if they want three bullet points for discussion, and you like to write out a full agenda, write out the full agenda for yourself and distill it to three bullet points to send to them.

2. Be clear—in advance—on what you need from them to do your job well.

Before every recurring meeting with your manager, take time to figure out very specifically what, if anything, you need from them to keep your work moving.

If there’s something you need, whether an explicit decision, clarity on who needs to be looped in, alignment on risk tolerance, or advice on how to handle a sensitive situation, make that the top priority for the meeting.

These meetings are one of the few guaranteed chances you have to get unblocked. So don’t leave without what you came for.

And if the conversation drifts to other topics, be sure to pull it back before you end the call. Something like “Before we wrap, I need your guidance on one thing so I can move this forward.”

Yes, over the course of a quarter or a year, these meetings will need to cover a wide range of priorities. But on a week-to-week basis, your job is to make sure you walk out with what you need to do your job well.

Because if you don’t get clarity, direction, or a decision this week, you’ll often find yourself back in the same meeting next week—having made only incremental progress and feeling more stuck than you should.

3. Do not assume they know everything that’s on your plate (even if they gave it to you)

It’s easy to forget that managers are just people, too. They’re juggling their own work priorities and their own lives—thinking about deadlines, business goals, board expectations, and, yes, what’s for dinner and how their kids are getting to soccer practice.

Even if your manager is the only person assigning you work, they likely don’t have a precise, real-time view of everything on your plate.

I see this on my own team all the time. Someone will mention progress on a project I asked them to move forward—and I realize I had completely forgotten about it. That forgetfulness reflects trust (I know they’ll handle it or come back to me if they need help). But it also means I genuinely appreciate and need reminders of everything they’re juggling.

Your manager may remember assigning you three projects—but not the follow-ups, the stakeholder meetings, the fire drills, or the fact that two “small” asks morphed into major lifts. And unless you make that visible, they may not realize which work is crowding out everything else.

That’s why one of the most valuable things you can do in a recurring meeting is briefly make your workload visible.

This doesn’t require a long status update. It can be as simple as:

• “Here are the three things taking up most of my time right now.”

• “This new request is doable, but it will push X unless we deprioritize.”

• “I’m at capacity this week—can you help me decide what matters most?”

Done well, this helps your manager make better decisions, with accurate information. And it helps them help you prioritize appropriately. This keeps your legal team running efficiently and helps you avoid burnout.

4. Provide regular impact updates

Recurring meetings with your manager are great for the tactical. But they’re also one of your best opportunities to consistently highlight meaningful wins.

Unlike at a law firm, hours worked are not the measure of success. Impact is.

The challenge is that much of an in-house lawyer’s most valuable work is invisible. Prevented problems don’t show up. Risks avoided don’t make headlines. And the smoother something goes, the easier it is for others to assume it was easy.

That’s why it’s important to get in the habit of verbally connecting your work to outcomes.

This can be quick and matter-of-fact:

• “This is off the team’s plate now and removed a blocker for Sales.”

• “We structured this in a way that let the deal move forward without escalating risk.”

• “This approach saved time for the business and avoided a broader re-papering.”

Over time, these small updates do real work. They help your manager understand how you’re contributing, where you’re creating leverage, and why your judgment matters.

They also shape how your manager talks about you when you’re not in the room. Without these updates, they can talk about your work that they’ve directly observed. But with them, they can elevate your role internally and more effectively advocate on your behalf, whether that’s in leadership meetings, resourcing discussions, or promotion conversations.

If you don’t regularly connect your work to business impact, your manager is left to infer it. And in a busy environment, inference is unreliable.

A sentence or two each week is enough. But done consistently, it ensures your work is seen for what it actually is: high-impact, not just high-effort.

5. Raise problems and propose solutions

One of the fastest ways to make a real difference for your organization and to build trust with your manager is to raise problems early and come prepared with a point of view on how to address them.

In-house lawyers are paid for judgment, not just issue-spotting. Flagging risks is important, but what really differentiates you is helping the business think through options.

That doesn’t mean you need to have the perfect answer, but it does mean you should avoid dropping problems into your manager’s lap without any framing.

Instead of:
“This is a problem.”

Try:
“This is the issue I’m seeing. Here are two ways we could handle it, and here’s the one I recommend.”

This approach does a few important things at once. It shows that you’re thinking beyond the immediate legal question. It makes it easier for your manager to engage quickly. And it signals that you’re someone who can be trusted to operate with increasing autonomy.

Recurring meetings are an ideal place for this kind of conversation. They give you space to pressure-test your thinking, get alignment on risk tolerance, and confirm whether you’re on the right track before a problem escalates.

Over time, consistently pairing problems with proposed solutions changes how your manager experiences you. You become someone who simplifies decisions, rather than adds friction. Someone who helps the business move forward, not just someone who points out what could go wrong.

And that subtle shift can materially change your career trajectory.

Why these meetings matter more than you think

Recurring meetings with your manager are easy to treat as routine or as something to simply get through. But used intentionally, they’re one of the highest-leverage opportunities you have to shape how you’re perceived and the scope of work you’re trusted with.

When you’re clear on what you need, make your workload visible, connect your work to business impact, and bring solutions, you’re demonstrating judgment, ownership, and executive-level thinking. That makes it easier for your manager to trust you with bigger decisions and more complex work.

This is how careers accelerate. Not through grand gestures or dramatic pivots, but through consistent signals that you can be relied on to move the business forward with clarity and perspective.

Pick one of these practices and start using it this week. Over time, these small shifts compound—into more influence, broader scope, and a seat at conversations that matter.