How GCs Can Turn Legal’s Data into Strategic Influence

KPMG’s global research has found that less than one third of senior executives believe their corporate service teams deliver high-quality services. Legal sits squarely in that frame. So does HR, compliance and risk. And the pressure that follows is well documented: hiring freezes, flat or declining budgets, demands to bring more work in-house, and an expanding remit that now stretches into ESG, governance and, for many, what are being called GC+ responsibilities.

The workload is growing. PwC found that 85% of respondents to its 2025 Global Compliance survey reported a rise in the complexity of regulatory requirements over the past three years.  Resources are not growing with it. The pressure to do more with less is not a phase; it is the operating environment.

What makes this particularly striking is how little it reflects what legal departments actually do.

At the intersection of every critical decision

Legal teams are present at almost every consequential business activity. They handle the contracts with suppliers that control cost; the agreements with employees that govern HR obligations; the interface with customers where revenue is produced; and the regulatory relationships where compliance is maintained. Legal is involved whenever the business grows, restructures, takes on risk, resolves disputes or enters new markets.

No other function has that cross-sectional view of how the business creates and protects value. And yet the KPMG data says the business doesn’t feel it.

A separate piece of KPMG research found that 79% of business leaders believe silos obstruct value delivery to customers, and only one in three describe their corporate services as highly connected.

There is a disparity, not in what legal does, but in how that contribution is structured and made visible to the people it serves. question is not whether GCs have the material to change the narrative, because they do. It is whether they are ready to organize it, use it and make it count.

The data is already in the room

Every contract, every matter, every approval and every dispute contains information about how the business operates. Patterns of commercial risk, bottlenecks in supplier onboarding, recurring contractual weaknesses and emerging compliance pressures. They flow through the legal department every day.

The disparity is not one of activity. It is one of intelligence. Most legal departments are not structured to capture that data, connect it to business priorities and surface it in ways that are useful to the leadership team. Work is prioritized based on urgency and volume rather than strategic value. Contracts are managed through to signature and then largely left to operational teams, even though the obligations, renewal dates and financial exposures that accumulate afterward are precisely where risk concentrates. Research by World Commerce & Contracting found that businesses lose an average of 9.2% of annual revenue through ineffective contract management.

The shift required is not fundamentally a technological one. It is a change in how GCs think about what legal produces. Not documents and advice in isolation, but Operational Intelligence that the whole business can use.

What GCs can do starting now

Making that shift is a deliberate process. It starts with changing what legal measures, how it reports, and where it sits in the flow of business decisions. GCs can begin by:

• Auditing current work against business strategy. Assess whether legal’s workload reflects the organization’s actual priorities or whether it is shaped by whoever escalates most insistently. Prioritizing on noise is not the same as prioritizing on value.
• Replacing legal metrics with commercial ones. Stop reporting in matters and hours. Start reporting in terms the business uses: revenue protected, time-to-close, risk mitigated, cost avoided. That is the language of the leadership team.
• Getting upstream, not just downstream. Embed legal into strategic planning and operational discussions before decisions are made, not after they need legal cover. Early involvement changes legal’s role from gatekeeper to contributor.
• Connecting contract lifecycle management to matter management. Treating matters and contracts as separate workflows means legal loses visibility the moment a contract is signed. Integrating them and maintaining active oversight throughout execution are among the most direct ways to reduce financial leakage and prevent obligation failures from reaching the business.
• Surfacing patterns, not just problems. Use the data flowing through the legal department to brief the leadership team on emerging trends, recurring risks and workflow bottlenecks. That is what it looks like to operate as a source of enterprise intelligence rather than a reactive service function.
• Measuring and reporting legal’s contribution systematically. Track how legal activity connects to commercial outcomes: deals closed faster, compliance breaches prevented, supplier costs controlled and make that visible to the executive team. Value that isn’t reported isn’t perceived.
• Extending the model to adjacent functions. The same data-driven approach that works for legal applies to risk, compliance and HR. GCs who champion Operational Intelligence across these functions can lead a wider shift in how the business perceives corporate services collectively, helping to make the case that 64% of business leaders already believe: that connected corporate services would significantly improve operational efficiency.

The KPMG verdict on corporate services is a challenge. But it is also an opening. The data legal already holds is the starting point for an answer. The question is not whether GCs have the material to change the narrative, because they do. It is whether they are ready to organize it, use it and make it count.