Actionable insights for expanding your role
Highlights
- General counsel must evolve from legal advisors to strategic C-Suite partners driving value creation.
- Effective communication requires business-first language, eliminating jargon and leading with actionable conclusions.
- Building authentic relationships and demonstrating judgment across all four value dimensions enhances executive influence.
General counsel wear many hats — guardian, risk manager, advisor — but their most critical role is a strategic partner to the C-Suite. In the current business environment, this role is more important than ever. Boards and executive teams are navigating a variety of global risks and challenges: economic uncertainty, supply-chain disruption, shifting regulatory regimes, geopolitical instability, DEI changes, and how to safely and productively use generative AI. Against this backdrop, general counsel should evolve from being merely the “lawyer in the room” to a key contributor to strategy and long-term value creation.
Unfortunately, many executives still see their general counsel as the legal voice in the room, rather than recognizing them as an integral member of the team. Why is this? First, many general counsel have accepted this limited role, either by default or because they haven’t made the effort to change how they lead, communicate, and engage with senior leadership. Second, they are not sure how to fully integrate general counsel into the team.
Research from Thomson Reuters Institute reveals a critical perception gap: C-suite executives consistently over-emphasize legal’s advisory role while under-recognizing their protective and enabling contributions. To close this gap and expand your role beyond being the legal voice in the room, consider these strategies to enhance your influence at the executive level.
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Master the business
Master the business
To influence company strategy, general counsel must gain a thorough understanding of it. Being an outstanding lawyer alone is not enough. The C-Suite seeks a general counsel who can participate in conversations about revenue, cost structure, talent strategy, and market positioning — and who knows enough about each to ask the right legal and non-legal questions.
Like spinning plates, successful legal departments must keep all four value dimensions in constant motion: Effective (delivering high-quality, practical legal advice), Efficient (optimizing resources and leveraging technology), Protect (safeguarding from legal and regulatory risks), and Enable (supporting business growth and innovation). Understanding how your work spans all four roles helps you engage more strategically with business leaders.
This begins with a commitment to expanding knowledge beyond the law. Spend time with:
- Product teams: understand what you’re selling and how it’s built
- Sales and marketing: learn who your customers are and what they care about
- Finance: understand the company’s revenue model, margins, capital structure, and risks
- Operations and supply chain: know where your vulnerabilities lie
- Internal audit: understand the risks they manage
- IT: learn how company systems are secured and backed up
- HR: become familiar with key metrics like employee engagement and regrettable attrition
Study your company’s public filings, earnings transcripts, board materials, strategic plans, yearly goals, basic financial statements such as balance sheet and cash flow, and analyst reports. Read what your competitors are doing. Request demonstrations of your company’s technology, and extend your focus beyond internal systems by staying current with industry advancements. Subscribe to trade publications, attend relevant conferences, follow key regulators and lawmakers.
When general counsel apply critical thinking and demonstrate extensive knowledge about the company and its business environment, their input moves beyond legalities to offering strategic insights. This shift enhances their perceived value among leadership.
Speak the language
When advising business leaders, it’s important to understand that their attention spans are limited and legal issues often rank lower in comparison to other responsibilities. This means that when general counsel speak, the message must be crisp, actionable, and anchored in business priorities and practicality.
The traditional legal memo is out; replaced with concise, business-first communication. Transition your writing style from a legal-focused to a business-focused approach. This means:
- Leading with conclusions, not qualifiers
- Avoiding long preambles, case citations, and footnotes
- Using bullets, headlines, charts, graphs, and other visuals when possible
- Eliminating legal jargon
The CEO doesn’t care if a claim is grounded in tort or contract law; they want to know what it means for the company’s exposure, reputation, and ability to operate.
When writing or speaking, start with this core question: “What does this mean for the business?” Then offer up the following:
- The short answer
- The risk level
- The recommended path forward
- Alternatives and their consequences
Tell your complete value story. Instead of reporting “we reduced outside counsel spend by 15%,” tell a comprehensive narrative: “We delivered value by maintaining high stakeholder satisfaction and handling more matters (Effective), reducing costs through technology and process improvements (Efficient), preventing potential regulatory fines through proactive compliance (Protect), and accelerating product launch timelines through innovative legal structures (Enable).”
This involves translating complex legal concepts into actionable insights that align with the company’s operational realities and strategic objectives, without compromising the sophistication of your advice. Use plain language. There is no need for Latin phrases or “Ye Olde English” when writing to or speaking with the business. Frame your input as part of a decision making process, framing legal advice in commercial terms as part of the business strategy, not as a constraint.
Demonstrate judgment
Judgment is your superpower. It sets you apart from external counsel and gives you a voice in the C-Suite and boardroom. However, good judgment doesn’t happen by accident — it requires a repeatable framework. When faced with a decision, ask yourself these questions:
- What is opinion versus fact?
- What are the material facts and do I have them all?
- Who is impacted and how?
- What does our risk profile tell us?
- What are the intended and unintended consequences?
- Who else should weigh in?
- What do company policies say we should do?
- What’s the right thing to do?
Good judgment also means knowing when to advocate versus defer, push versus pause, and speak versus staying silent. It means advising the CEO with courage when needed and admitting when you don’t have the answer. This isn’t always easy to do and takes practice, but general counsel who exercise consistently sound judgment — in crises, gray zones, and daily operations — become someone who is heard and relied upon.
Be the truth teller
In a time marked by political polarization, culture wars, and regulatory fragmentation, general counsel must be the company’s nonpartisan anchor. You are the truth teller and that means:
- Delivering facts without spin
- Avoiding fearmongering or sugarcoating
- Framing decisions in terms of risk, not ideology
- Acknowledging tradeoffs and stakeholder concerns
- Delivering insights to executives that may be unwelcome but necessary
- Making sure the right people are making decisions
For example, if a company initiative carries legal risk in one state and reputational risk in another, say so plainly. Offer solutions but be honest about costs and constraints. Don’t lecture and avoid the moral high ground. Instead, help the business understand the landscape and make principled, informed decisions based on the best information and advice you can provide. Be consistent in how you analyze problems. Let your credibility be your north star.
Boards and CEOs increasingly look to general counsel to help navigate public scrutiny, legal gray zones, partisan political challenges, and stakeholder activism. General counsel who calmly deliver well-balanced guidance that is grounded in reality become the executive team’s trusted guide.
Build relationships
Relationships build influence. To wield influence, general counsel must become a trusted peer among the executive team. That means investing time and energy into authentic relationships with C-suite colleagues. Start by:
- Being present
- Showing up for more than just legal issues
- Asking other executives about their goals, pressures, and worries
- Looking for ways to help
- Being visible in town halls, offsites, and team events
Work on your executive presence. Do you speak with confidence and brevity? Do you project calm under pressure? Are you collaborative or defensive? Your demeanor will shape whether others view you as a leader or a lawyer. Humor, humility, empathy, and discretion matter. Be someone who keeps confidences, is generous with credit, and refrains from unnecessary criticism of colleagues or business units.
Finally, engage in informal interactions — grab coffee, join social events, ask colleagues about their families. These simple gestures and moments build trust, which is the foundation of influence. In a polarized, high-stakes world, general counsel who are approachable and respected become the ones others turn to first.
Scale your impact
Finally, the best general counsel do not try to do everything. They lead strong teams, delegate well, embrace technology, and use data to drive clarity. The Four Spinning Plates Model reveals that all four plates require constant, interconnected attention. Efficiency gains free up resources for strategic enablement. Effective advice prevents disputes, reducing protection costs. Strong protection builds trust, enabling bolder business strategies.
For example, they:
- Use artificial intelligence tools for contract review, issue spotting, and compliance tracking
- Develop dashboards to visualize risk and legal trends
- Delegate low-value tasks to allow time for strategic focus
- Co-lead cross-functional committees on critical issues
- Align legal team objectives with company OKRs to demonstrate business partnership
- Design metrics across all four value dimensions, not just efficiency measures
- Strengthen data quality to build a solid foundation for decision-making
Most importantly, they position the legal function as a business driver, not a bottleneck, ensuring the department reflects the business as agile, tech-enabled, and aligned to growth. A critical contributing factor to misalignment is that most legal departments’ metrics anchor solely to the ‘Efficiency’ plate, limiting legal’s perception to a cost center, not a value enabler.
The general counsel role has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. Challenges are steeper, scrutiny is sharper, and the stakes are higher. But the opportunity is also greater. Modern general counsel are not just managing legal risk — they are shaping corporate behavior, influencing company culture, and protecting the company by maximizing value creation and minimizing value destruction.
To lead at this level, you must think like an executive, speak like a strategist, and act like a confidant. Instead of viewing yourself as a lawyer who works in a business, realize that you are a business leader with deep legal expertise. The key is demonstrating your complete value story across all four dimensions of legal impact — moving beyond the limiting cost-center narrative to become a strategic business partner creating value through effectiveness, efficiency, protection, and enablement.
The Value Alignment Toolkit empowers legal departments to finally tell their complete value story, shifting from perceived cost centers to strategic partners and securing resources and recognition for their full contribution.
