A few months ago, a colleague outside of legal needed a contract renegotiated, and my team used our automation and AI tools to pull together everything we needed and turn it around faster than we could have a year ago. I was proud of the timeline. We beat our own ambitious SLAs.

I expected the colleague to be thrilled.

They weren't. The result was as good as it would have been the slow way, and we got there faster. But the colleague seemed almost let down. Something about the exchange had felt transactional in a way it hadn't before. They missed going back and forth with an actual person about their specific problem, and they almost seemed to feel like the lack of human interaction meant we (the legal team) cared less about them, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

I'd spent the last few years measuring AI's success in my department by speed and quality, asking whether it made us faster, better, or both. I hadn't accounted for a third factor— whether the person on the other end still felt like legal was in it with them.

I've been Red Cell's GC for four and a half years now, which turns out to be long enough to develop firm beliefs about how to run a legal department . . . and then find out some of them were wrong. I'm fine with that.

So today, I'm sharing four things I believed about running a legal team that I don't anymore, starting with speed itself.

“Your job is to be a strategic partner, not just a legal advisor.” That’s Kate Tyers, Global Legal Director, in Summize’s Legal Disruptors report. The data backs her up.

You’re expected to shape strategy, manage risk and adopt AI – usually without any extra headcount or budget. That’s not legal leading. That’s legal carrying more weight with the same hands.

Our Legal Disruptors report found 89% of teams already use AI, yet 58% are unsure how to turn that into a more strategic role.

So, we asked the GCs who have made that shift. Inside are four practical principles for moving from gatekeeper to strategic partner, with the specific steps they used to get legal leading.

👉Read the Legal Disruptors report

As you've heard me say before, I believe in AI's potential for in-house legal departments. That hasn't changed.

Until recently, I measured AI implementation success in exactly two dimensions: were we faster, and was the work as good or better before. If both were true, that was a win: the business was happier and we'd gotten there for less, whether in headcount or outside spend. I still believe increasing efficiency is one of the best uses of AI in a legal department.

What I missed was an additional dimension. The contract renegotiation I mentioned above was faster than anything we'd done before, and the work was every bit as good. Our colleague still walked away feeling like something was missing from the exchange itself, which wasn’t a dimension I’d previously considered.

Now I ask an extra question: did the business partner on the other end still feel like we were part of the same team, or did they just feel like a technology processed their request.

I wrote about this tradeoff before, in the Doorman Fallacy, AI, and in-house legal. If you're still working out where AI fits in your practice, it's worth a read as you think through which tradeoffs make sense — this one included.

I used to chase what I thought was the sweet spot for my team's schedules: every day full, but never double-booked, with a mix of meetings and heads-down time, split between the work we'd planned and whatever came out of those meetings. Getting there was hard (we rarely actually managed it) but I thought if we ever hit that mix, it meant we'd found the right balance.

I was wrong. An in-house lawyer whose day is entirely meetings and heads-down work isn't at capacity. She's over capacity.

A schedule like that has no room for strategic thought, which is a practice worth starting early in a career and only gets more important with seniority. It has no room for relationships with colleagues, which make lawyers more effective and make the job better to do (more on how here, and why it matters here). It has no room for the inevitable curveball — the urgent, important thing that wasn't on anyone's calendar. And maybe worst of all, it has no room for real learning and growth.

I expect all of that from my own schedule. So why wouldn't I expect it from my team's?