The Entrepreneurial Mindset Every In-House Lawyer Needs Today

Deep Dive

Mindset Shift: Doing exceptionally well at the same old thing . . . is still doing the same old thing. To maximize our impact, we need to innovate.

Most of us who made it in-house did so through hard work and perseverance.

Less present, at least for me and many of my peers I’ve talked to about it? Creative thinking and experimentation.

We accepted the tasks we were assigned, learned the accepted best approaches to completing them, and then did them exceptionally well.

We excelled in college and law school by learning how to ace tests and papers.

We excelled in our clerkships and in our firms by delivering high quality research and written work-product on demand.

We typically didn’t need to decide whether we were directing our energy in the right direction, or whether there might be a better way to do thing. Because we were working on the task assigned.

And that likely all made sense then. Because academic and law firm landscapes are changing less rapidly than in-house practice or the business world.

But as in-house lawyers, if we simply accept the tasks that are assigned to us - by our managers in our own department, or by our colleagues - and then we do them to the best of our ability, we are missing out own key opportunities to contribute.

To be clear, we should still do our work to the best of our abilities. As our years of conditioning in school and as junior lawyers taught us.

It’s just not enough.

Here’s why regular measurement, experimentation, and iteration is essential in-house:

Effective in-house lawyers understand that they are key parts of the business.

They are not just risk mitigators and they are certainly not the “Department of No.”

And in-house lawyers tend to have more autonomy and flexibility in how we do our jobs compared to associates at a firm or lawyers in many government roles.

The most effective in-house lawyers understand that making the most impact on the business requires using the flexibility of being in-house to regularly try out new ways of doing things.

These lawyers understand that experimentation is not only an important way to improve the legal department’s impact. It’s also necessary for legal departments to stay relevant.

In-house departments that don’t iterate on their processes, because the change may be rejected or may not turn out to be an improvement, never build better processes. The 10% revenue lost to slow contract turnaround time, or 5% value lost to a weak provision in a contract playbook, compounds over time.

In-house departments not implementing AI in their workflows, because AI is new and poses certain risks, are already falling behind those who are implementing it responsibly. I recently received a counterparty’s NDA by email from an AI bot, which then negotiated with my team (who reviewed the NDA using an AI tool customized to review for our NDA standards). The whole process was completed with less than 20 minutes of human work. Imagine how much work those departments using humans to do first level review of NDAs are losing!

In-house departments not willing to try new ways of working together and cross-functionally, like by establishing working groups dedicated to attacking key business challenges or by observing each other’s processes to learn pain points, don’t become the most effective team players.

The risk of failure when iterating or experimenting can be scary.

But stagnation means guaranteed failure over time.

This is true even for in-house lawyers.

Here’s how you can iterate like an entrepreneur:

As lawyers, we spend a lot of time thinking analytically.

We know that if A then B, and if B, then C, it is also true that if A then C, but not necessarily true that if C then A.

But LSAT-like logic isn’t enough.

Entrepreneurs understand that a decision to maintain the status quo is a decision to reject all other options - and so they are constantly experimenting and optimizing.

It’s the same thing for in-house lawyers.

We need to adopt the practice of regularly measuring, evaluating, and questioning our tools, approaches, and processes throughout our work.

Here are a few questions to get you started:

• What processes and tools do you use to review and negotiate NDAs or other standard contracts? How can you change the processes so that legal professionals spend less time on the review, negotiation, and execution?

  • Things to thing about if you haven’t already: self-service NDAs for colleagues and clients; use of an NDA or contract playbook and/or AI to expedite the review; use of automation to send negotiated NDAs for signature.

• How can you improve information sharing within the legal department and across your company, using new tools or approaches?

  • Things to think about if you haven’t already: implementing trackers for repetitive processes or shared tasks; automating notifications to colleagues when tasks relevant to them are completed; experimenting with different forms of asynchronous updates, such as video messaging and/or slack updates.

• How does the department stay on top of key regulatory and legal changes, and how could you streamline that process?

  • Things to think about if you haven’t already: using an intentional approach to law firm updates (such as having an assigned person collect and summarize for the team); use a tool, like ChatGPT, to send you weekly summaries on key legislation relevant to your industry; sharing this task with another department that may be interested, such as compliance, and splitting up the work by time frame or topic.

A quick note on this: technology, and AI in particular, is changing FAST. If you haven’t already, start getting comfortable with it ASAP.

Here are three wins you can look forward to when you start iterating like an entrepreneur

1. Increased efficiency. Investing the time to find better approaches can feel like a burden, but the reward is that when you identify areas for improvement and find the ways to make them better, you save time (and often can save your company money) in the long run.

2. More fulfillment at work. One of the best things about finding better ways to do things, is that the changes you identify can create time and space for the lawyers on the team to do more meaningful or rewarding work. Plus, for many of us, identifying efficiencies is itself fulfilling!

3. Increased measurable impact. If your process of experimentation and iteration is data based - and it should be - then not only will you have made positive impact on the business, but you’ll be also able to prove it. This is really useful when it comes time to ask for more resources, opportunities, flexibility to try a new approach, etc.

I hope this newsletter inspires you to experiment with something new!

If you do, please let me know how it works out.