This habit helped you succeed. But now that you're in-house, is it holding you back?

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Deep Dive

You’ve always done what’s asked. It’s what got you here. But what if that mindset is holding you back now that you’re in-house?

We were rewarded in school for learning what was presented. We advanced in law firms and landed in-house roles by responding to assignments with technically sound work, delivered on time and with minimal handholding. Again and again, we were given clear criteria for success, and we met them.

But in-house, that’s just the starting point.

Providing sound legal advice and catching contract issues is important. But it’s also just the baseline. Business-minded lawyers know that to drive real value, we need to go further: proactively spotting and capitalizing on opportunity.

Legal is often uniquely positioned to do this. Whether it’s improving workflows, uncovering new business opportunities from regulatory changes, or helping teams collaborate more effectively, legal sees things others don’t.

Yes, a business partner will absolutely appreciate that you flagged an inappropriate license to confidential information buried in a third-party NDA. But only legal is likely to realize that AI could have surfaced that issue faster, freeing up time for more valuable work. And if more NDAs are negotiated on your paper, that creates even more space for legal to focus on strategic, business-driving initiatives.

If you want to maximize your impact in-house, you need to go beyond solid but reactive advice. You need to focus on continuous improvement and find ways to add value before anyone asks. It’s a huge opportunity.

From Lawyer to Operator: Start Thinking Like an Owner

In 2014, I went from Big Law associate to juice bar founder. And I quickly realized that the approach to work that helped me succeed as an associate wouldn’t cut it as a business owner.

No one told me what to do each day. Choosing what to work on became just as important as how to get it done.

Owners don’t wait for direction. They can’t afford to. They build, test, learn, and iterate.

When I went in-house, I realized something interesting. The best in-house lawyers act like owners. They treat their role like a startup within the company, focused on delivering value and evolving constantly to do it better.

And while there is no rubric or measuring stick, there are some questions you can ask to help you get started thinking like an owner:

• What problems slow the company or our department down again and again?

• Where are we stuck in outdated ways of working?

• Are there areas where we’re over-optimizing for perfection, when faster progress would serve us better?

• Are there places where a little bit of upfront work now, could save us dozens of hours of work on a go-forward basis?

A Few Places to Start Experimenting:

1. Intake and Triage
Streamlining intake frees up legal time and helps the business get answers faster.

• Set up a legal front door tool or build a lightweight intake form

• Use automation to route common requests

• Train business users on existing self-service tools—and build more if bandwidth allows

2. Contract Review
Not every contract needs a deep dive; focus your energy where it matters most.

• Create a contract playbook for consistency and speed

• Use an LLM for first-pass review of NDAs and MSAs

• Track turnaround times to measure impact

3. Cross-Functional Collaboration
Better collaboration means fewer surprises, stronger relationships, and faster execution.

• Host a quarterly cross-functional retrospective to identify shared pain points

• Embed a lawyer in key business team meetings once a month

• Co-create FAQs with Sales, Product, or Compliance

4. Revenue Focus
Legal can help accelerate deals by reducing friction without increasing risk.

• Review common friction points in terms of service or terms of sale; revise where appropriate to speed deals without undue risk

• Improve templates to reduce redlines and accelerate time to signature

5. Staying Current
Instead of drowning in legal updates, create systems to surface what really matters.

• Assign one team member to digest and summarize the most relevant updates

• Use AI to generate weekly briefs on legal and regulatory developments

The Bottom Line

Being a great in-house lawyer is about more than just answering questions well. It’s also about asking better ones, spotting opportunities others miss, building systems that scale, and finding ways to deliver more value, without waiting for someone to tell you to.

Start by thinking like an owner, not just the excellent student or law firm lawyer you once were.

Pick one area. Try something new. Learn, adjust, and build. Do this over and over again.

That’s how legal shifts from service function to strategic driver.

What’s one area you could start experimenting with this week?

We’re halfway through 2025!

Can you believe it? For me, January crawled and February wasn’t much faster. But the months since have felt like a total blur.

Whether the year has flown by or felt like a slow burn, now’s a great time to check in on your goals, both personal and professional.

One of mine was to launch this newsletter by the end of Q1, and I did it. I’m so glad you’re here! Your reading, replies, and feedback are what keep me motivated to keep going.