The Future of In-House Legal: Shifting From Activity to Outcomes—Webinar

Ensuring your corporate legal department delivers maximum business value is more stressful than ever as modern organizations demand rapid, strategic execution over traditional risk aversion.

In a recent webinar with Today’s General Counsel, David Lancelot, Chief Legal Officer at LawVu, hosted a panel of prominent legal leaders to discuss how legal teams can successfully navigate the operational and cultural shifts reshaping the industry. The session, “The Future of In-House Legal,” tracked how general counsel must transform their underlying operating models, altering how professionals approach legal strategy, execution, and technology integration before advising their executive boards.

Mark Smolick, Chief Legal Officer at DHL Supply Chains Americas, noted that while legal teams have historically focused on pure legal accuracy, the profession has entered a new phase centered on commercial influence.

“Being present is not the same as being influential,” he said. “We have to ensure that we are more business people who happen to have legal training, rather than lawyers with degrees hanging on the walls just waiting to give legal advice”.

Key takeaways from the session:

• Understand the true meaning of trust: Legal professionals can no longer just sit in a silo and provide unsolicited advice. To bridge the gap with business leadership, general counsel must deeply understand the commercial objectives of their enterprise and communicate using the shared language of financial margin and corporate strategy.
• Integrate a “time to yes” mindset into your workflow: Modern legal departments must shift their metrics away from internal activities—like the raw number of contracts reviewed—and focus on business outcomes and deal velocity. By implementing playbooks, self-service tools, and AI for routine drafting, legal leaders can disengage from low-value tasks and dramatically accelerate commercial speed.
• Look beyond technology to foundational execution: The broader challenge of legal transformation relies heavily on process optimization and change management. Effective legal leaders must slow down to properly map out their workflows and address team resistance before deploying advanced legal tech, ensuring they fix systemic bottlenecks rather than simply automating broken processes.

Protecting your organization while enabling rapid growth requires a more deliberate and modern approach to operational leadership. Watch the full recording to learn how to shift from basic legal protection to advanced value creation.

Read more about LawVu’s take on the evolution of the in-house legal profession in this Today’s General Counsel article.