I started my first in-house job when my son was four months old and while I was still running a business with multiple brick-and-mortar locations. So I realized early on that if I was going to be valuable, I needed to do everything I could to make every hour count.

Put differently, I needed leverage.

When law firms talk about leverage, they mean the ratio of associates to partners. More associates billing hours under each partner means more revenue and, generally, more profit.

In-house, leverage matters just as much. But it means something entirely different.

Because in-house, productivity isn’t measured in hours. In fact, the fewer hours you spend per valuable task, the more productive you are. Leverage in-house means getting more value out of every lawyer hour; it means more useful output, without a proportional increase in input.

There are a handful of ways to do that.

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Technology is a simple way to increase the value you create, without increasing your effort or the amount of time a task takes.

An obvious one is the right use of LLMs and agentic AI. You can use a specialized LLM, like GCAI, or a general one like Claude or ChatGPT to do first-pass reviews of agreements using standards you’ve set. Or have your agentic Chief of Staff prepare you for the day. I have a scheduled Claude run that prepares me for my weekly meetings with our President, as well as a daily one that flags priorities I need to be aware of, based on the company’s key goals as well as VIPs I need to give quick attention to. With help from AI, I’m both faster and better.

Today’s sponsor, Wispr Flow, is another way I use technology to gain leverage. With Wispr Flow, I can speak my emails and texts, and the tool formats the email or text appropriately, based on my preferences. This is faster than typing.

There was a time when I thought lawyers who used templates were lazy, or were taking a shortcut. I was so very wrong.

Every time you draft something from scratch, you have to think it through. That random provision that you always forget, but that has also come up half the times you’ve negotiated a similar deal, is something to remember. And even if you remember all the issues, it takes time to type it up.

In-house, your company pays for your inefficiency, because the time you spend re-drafting is time you don’t have available to use your brainpower for something new.

A template lets your company pay once, and keep benefiting for years.

The obvious candidates are the documents you see over and over: NDAs, consulting agreements, board consents, standard vendor terms. But don’t just think about company documents.

Many of the questions you answer every week can also be addressed with well-thought-out, templated answers. Why the NDA has to be signed before the demo. What legal needs before anyone signs a vendor agreement. Whether marketing can say “best in class” on the website. If you write the answer well once, your colleagues get the benefit over and over, but you never have to write it again.

One of my team’s template MVPs is an explanation of equity grants, exercises, and what to expect following exercise, that we use any time an incubated company issues equity. The issues are complex and the information we need to provide is detailed. But after dozens of reps, iterating as we go, our email anticipates and pre-addresses 90% of the questions we used to get. And our legal ops person is the one who sends it.

A big payoff comes when templates let other people do work your legal team would otherwise do itself. A sales team with a pre-approved NDA and clear fallback positions doesn’t need you for most deals. A founder with a one-page guide to equity grants asks better questions, and fewer of them.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting you rubber-stamp anything. A good template encodes your judgment: what you’ll accept, and when someone needs to call you. That’s exactly what makes it valuable.