April 2025
The Legal team’s super busy, so we’re adding value, right?
By David Curtain
How often do you see an in-house legal team with a strategic plan truly aligned to the organisation’s goals? Not recently? Never? It’s safe to say, not nearly often enough.
Legal teams are full of smart, hardworking people. The problem isn’t effort, it’s direction and alignment. Lawyers fill their days with work that feels urgent and important, but when you trace it back to what the organisation needs to achieve most, the priorities often don’t match.
The result is a familiar kind of dysfunction. Overworked lawyers who feel frustrated and undervalued despite working late nights and weekends. Stakeholders who feel Legal is slowing them down. Leadership quietly wondering how the legal team is helping them win.
The misalignment problem
Most organisations have clear strategic pillars: the goals that drive prioritisation, budget decisions, headcount decisions, and ultimately, which functions are seen as valuable.
Legal teams often operate independently of that broader strategic framework. Their plans, when they exist, often reflect priorities other than business ones.
They often include vague goals like ‘comply with laws’, ‘provide high quality legal advice to the business’ or ‘manage legal risk effectively’. These are not good strategic goals. They’re fluffy and it’s almost impossible to know to what extent they’ve been achieved. They don’t adequately align with the organisation’s strategic goals or help inform decision-making about what the team should focus on.
The consequences are real. Stakeholders feel like Legal is either missing in action or straying into territory that isn’t business critical. Lawyers who are genuinely working hard wonder why no one seems to appreciate it.
Three steps worth taking
The fix isn’t complicated. But it requires a deliberate shift in thinking.
- Start by opening your organisation’s strategic plan. Look at the actual pillars: the things the business has committed to achieving. Then ask a simple question: how can Legal actively support each of those goals? How do we help the business get there?
- From there, translate that thinking into clear, individual goals for the team, directly aligned to goals for each person in the team. SMART goals are the standard (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound), but the real test is simpler: can you tell, unambiguously, whether something has been achieved? “We will reduce the average contract turnaround from eight weeks to two” is a good goal. “We will improve our contracting processes” is not.
- Finally, manage those goals. Not the round-table meetings where everyone takes turns saying how busy they are. Regular one-on-ones. Honest conversations about what’s on track and what isn’t. Taking action. And then, critically, telling the rest of the organisation when things get done in terms that clearly link back to the organisation’s goals.
The visibility problem
Legal teams are notoriously poor at communicating their wins. If the organisation is trying to reduce costs and Legal has just renegotiated a supplier agreement that will deliver recurring savings for years, say so. Explicitly. In terms the business understands.
Teams that align their work with business strategy and ensure their output is visibly contributing to achieving key goals stop being the function nobody quite understands and start being one of the most valued in the building.
