Several years back, I remember watching a relatively senior colleague confidently explain aspects of the law to members of a sales team. He explained what the law said, how it worked in practice, and how it applied to our company.

The sales team was grateful for the explanation and the clarity.

There was just one problem: he was completely wrong.

He’d explained the law, how it worked, and how it applied incorrectly. He had certain aspects flipped around, and identified as essential portions that didn’t even apply to our business.

As it happened, the person explaining wasn’t a lawyer, though because of his job, he knew a lot about the law. Fortunately, I (even as a relatively junior lawyer at the time) was able to un-confuse things smoothly. It hadn’t been his job to know the law, and it’s okay that he got it wrong. That’s not why I’m telling this story.

I’m talking about it now because it was an interesting learning experience for me. It got me thinking about how our colleagues actually measure our performance and decide whether we are “good” colleagues as in-house lawyers. It clearly isn’t just about how well we know the law.

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An LLM can hallucinate a perfect-sounding legal citation and still sound authoritative. In-house lawyers do the same thing to colleagues. If you speak with enough confidence and clarity, you'll be believed even when you're wrong.

The interesting part isn't that he was wrong. It's that nobody thought to question him.

Colleagues outside legal usually don't know the law. That's not a knock on them, it's your job to translate it. But it also means they have no way of knowing when you're getting it wrong.

This interaction was a great reminder that when giving legal advice is not a great time to fake it ‘til you make it. In fact, it’s a terrible time.

Any time you have information or skills that the people around you don’t, you need to be very clear on what you know to be true, what you think is true but you need to confirm, and when you’re outright guessing. That doesn't mean waiting for 100% certainty before you say anything (that’s really annoying for your colleagues and a surefire way to stall your progression in-house). But it does mean labeling your confidence level so people know what they're getting.

Be transparent about your confidence levels.

But I took away something much bigger and more interesting too. What you’re actually judged on.

The first thing I noticed in that interaction was just how much the sales team trusted the colleague with the bad advice. While you don’t want to give bad advice (obviously) you want colleagues to trust you implicitly.

Obviously.

Your job is easier if people assume you know the law. But that assumption is also the ceiling on how impressive it makes you. For in-house lawyers, knowing the law is the bare minimum — your colleagues assume you clear it before they've even met you. Being seen as excellent requires more.

Relationships make people actually want to work with you.

Think back to the sales team in my story. They didn't trust the colleague's read on the law because he'd proven himself on hundreds of contracts (again, he isn’t even a lawyer). They trusted him because he was someone they already worked with, and who had a history of showing up to help solve their problems. He felt like someone who “got” them.

That's how trust gets built in-house.

You can use the same dynamic, deliberately, and with correct legal advice attached instead of confident guessing.

The relationships in the last section get you trust with the people who already know you. But many of the people who'll decide whether you get promoted, called upon to support an interesting deal, or invited into the room when it matters, don't personally know you at all and may never have worked with you directly.