1 April 2025

Want Legal to Be Valued? Align With the Business Strategy.

It’s hard to express how often I see Legal teams that are flat out, putting in huge hours and managing ever-growing workloads, yet feeling undervalued. It’s like Legal is speaking a different language from the rest of the business.

I ‘ve been there — in a business that was growing fast, but Legal wasn’t part of the key strategic discussions, often an afterthought left to clean up a mess. My welcome pack was a stack of breach notices from regulators. The sales team was driving growth, while we were dealing with compliance issues. It was a classic case of misalignment between the business and Legal.

This isn’t unique. Often, it’s not that Legal isn’t adding value, but that there’s no shared view of what success looks like. And in most cases, the gap comes down to alignment.

That alignment has to be built in from the core basis of how Legal supports the business. What’s the business trying to achieve? Is it growth, cost control, reducing regulatory risk — or a combination of these? Whatever the goals are, Legal needs to shape its work priorities around them. That might mean Legal preparing more customer-friendly contract terms, helping customer-facing teams better manage sensitive issues, or making smarter resourcing decisions — anything that helps the business hit its targets efficiently and with risk well-managed.

Once that’s clear, Legal can focus on the work that actually makes a difference for delivering the business strategy and demonstrate their contribution to outcomes. Often that means giving lawyers a licence not to ‘sweat the small stuff’ and focus on bigger priorities. This requires discussion and agreement on those priorities, and how lesser issues will be managed.

From there, it’s about making outcomes visible. Not in legal speak— in business terms. You can’t just say, “We dealt with 50 matters this week.” No one outside of Legal knows what a ‘matter’ is, how much work it takes or what useful outputs it generates. You’ll get a very different reception if you tell your Exec team, “Our work helped us launch the product,” or “Redrafting these customer terms reduced sales time to close by 30 per cent.” It’s not about taking on more. It’s about doing the right work and making the impact visible.

If you’re not sure how to define or explain the value Legal brings, you’re not alone. Most teams are flat out, short on time, and not set up to lead that kind of change on their own.

That’s where we come in. At Front Foot, we help legal teams figure out what value looks like, find the right way to create it, and report it in a way the business understands. We don’t just talk about demonstrating value — we help you generate it.