Building stronger partnerships between legal and sales teams for business success
The world has witnessed many epic rivalries — Rome and Carthage, Ali and Frazier, Nebraska and Oklahoma, Godzilla and King Kong. Yet, few match the enduring intensity of the friction between corporate legal departments and sales teams. As an in-house lawyer, you’re likely familiar with the following grievances:
- “Legal: The Department of ‘No’”
- “Legal is too slow”
- “My deal is stuck in legal”
These criticisms can be painful, not because they’re true, but because they overlook key issues. Contract delays often stem from incomplete information, unrealistic timelines, insufficient contract discipline, or inadequate preparation by the sales team. Yet, the legal department often bears the blame. This misperception hinders collaboration and erodes trust, impacting the morale of the department.
However, this can be turned around. Image a scenario where your legal team is not just a support function but a trusted partner to sales — a true competitive advantage. With intentional effort, a few mindset shifts, and structural changes, you can change the narrative. This playbook is designed to help in-house counsel transform the legal-sales relationship and become indispensable allies in driving revenue.
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Speak the same language
Effective working relationships start with mutual understanding. Lawyers and sales executives speak different dialects of the same business language — one based on risk and another based on reward. Bridging this gap requires frequent communication, empathy, and patience.
Start by organizing an orientation session with your sales leadership. Come prepared with a contract annotated in plain English and walk through each section. Explain what indemnities are, why a cap on liability matters, and how jurisdiction clauses affect resolution timelines. Strive for clear communication without technical jargon. Approach interaction with respect and collaboration, focusing on clarity and mutual understanding rather than asserting legal superiority.
Then, switch roles and give the floor to the sales team. Ask what contract terms frustrate them, which parts of the legal process slow them down, and what objections they face from customers. Listen closely with intent and openness.
You’ll likely uncover blind spots on both sides. Maybe your indemnity clause is overreaching, or sales is promising deliverables that aren’t feasible. This dialogue often uncovers simple fixes that remove persistent bottlenecks. More importantly, it builds trust — the grease on the skids of effective internal collaboration. Showing the sales team that you are invested in their success and willing to be flexible goes a long way in winning new fans of the legal department.
Modernize your contracts
Many contract templates were built by lawyers for lawyers many years ago. These documents, often dense and outdated, can be difficult to understand and may heavily favor the company. While they aim to offer maximum protection, they can cause frustration both internally and externally. In a world of agile negotiations and fast-moving deals, the company’s contract templates must serve as assets, not obstacles.
Since it has likely been a while, audit your standard agreements and make sure this becomes an annual practice. Assess their readability. Are they jargon free, balanced and competitive with current market standards, and structured for swift execution? These changes can make your contracts surprisingly easy to sign:
- Use plain language: Simplify contracts and cut legalese. Contracts should be clear enough for a knowledgeable professional outside the legal field to understand.
- Make risk allocations mutual: Concepts like indemnity and limitations on liability can often be mutual without exposing your company to undue risk.
- Pre-approve fallback positions: Create playbooks for the business with tiered clause options that sales can reference in real-time.
Updating your templates is a strategic move that can streamline negotiations, minimize redlines, and foster goodwill with counterparties and your own team. When the sales team recognizes legal as a business enabler rather than a hurdle, collaboration and satisfaction significantly improve.
Embrace risk
In-house legal teams are trained to protect the company, but excessive caution can have adverse effects. Unnecessary aversion to risk delays deals and leads to over-engineered protections that cost the business valuable opportunities. Instead of aiming for zero risk, focus on identifying and prioritizing the risks that truly matter to the company.
Begin by consulting with business leaders to understand the type of risks they are willing to take to secure deals. This approach acknowledges that risk tolerance may vary by contract and value, emphasizing that risk management is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Use that knowledge to create a framework to distinguish between deal-breakers and acceptable risks. For example:
- Red-level risk: Illegal terms, regulatory violations, IP ownership gaps.
- Yellow-level risk: One-sided indemnities, long-tail liabilities, unfavorable jurisdiction.
- Green-level risk: Minor inconsistencies, word choices, meaningless boilerplate issues.
Work with business leadership to build out this framework, so everyone is on the same page from the C-suite to the front-line salesperson. Then negotiate accordingly. Your job is not to eliminate risk, but to understand the company’s risk tolerance and facilitate deals that align with those parameters. It’s important to rely on the judgment of the business leaders rather than imposing personal risk aversion.
A practical approach builds credibility. By shifting your focus from eliminating every risk to engaging in collaborative discussions, your legal expertise becomes a valued asset rather than a directive. This approach builds a partnership with the business, ensuring your role is integral and beneficial rather than sidelined.
Get out of the way
Not every contract needs a lawyer. An NDA for a product trial doesn’t warrant the same scrutiny as a multimillion-dollar customer agreement. Yet too often, the legal department insists on reviewing everything to the nth degree — leading to bottlenecks and burnout. Just like in the movie “Frozen”, it’s time to let it go. Scale the legal department’s ability to get contracts done by delegating with discipline. For example:
- Build a self-service contract library with pre-approved templates
- Train sales and operations on when and how they can use them
- Implement a contract management system with clause libraries, approval routing, and audit trails
You can also deploy decision trees or checklists to guide non-lawyers on when to escalate to the legal team. For example, if a deal exceeds a certain dollar value or includes custom intellectual property (IP) terms, it triggers legal review.
This kind of smart delegation reduces friction, accelerates deals, and frees legal to focus on higher-value tasks. Risk increases slightly, but as noted, not all risks require mitigation by legal. When you build systems that enable speed with guardrails, everyone wins.
Collaborate with sales
Relationships thrive with proximity. Finding ways to embed the legal team with the sales team will pay off in spades. Start by simply attending sales meetings. Being present is one of the most powerful ways to build trust. Make it a priority to join:
- Weekly pipeline meetings
- Quarterly sales meetings
- Regional strategy sessions
- Deal desk reviews
- Yearly sales kickoff meetings
Be anywhere and everywhere when it comes to partnering with the sales team. Even if you’re mostly listening, your presence shows investment. By participating in these meetings, you gain valuable insights into upcoming deals, business priorities, revenue targets, strategic customer relationships, key concerns, and potential legal challenges before they arise.
By engaging with the sales team, you will also learn what they value most from their legal partners, such as speed, clarity, and creativity. This understanding allows you to calibrate the legal department’s approach to better meet their needs and enhance collaboration.
Lastly, being part of the team allows you to offer quick legal insights when appropriate, dispel myths about deals being made in legal, and highlight joint wins. Moments like this reinforce that legal is a business enabler, not a hurdle to navigate.
Technology is your friend
In-house legal departments are poor users of technology compared to other corporate functions. Fortunately, that’s starting to change. Implementing the right technology can dramatically reduce the friction between legal and sales. Consider the following:
- Contract lifecycle management (CLM) to create, store, and manage contracts
- E-signature integration for seamless approvals and closing
- State of the art intake tools to ensure legal gets the right information to begin the contract process
- Appropriate AI tools to speed drafting, redlines, and review of contracts
- Checklists to standardize the contract drafting process
The right technology not only streamlines internal processes but also sends a strong signal that the legal department is committed to efficiency and modernization — just like any other part of the business. That goes a long way with sales teams under pressure to perform.
There isn’t a magic incantation that can erase years of friction between legal and sales overnight, but there is a playbook. It starts with the mindset of wanting to be a partner with, and not just a service provider to, the sales team. Both the sales and legal teams want to win. It may be up to you to show sales that you’re on the same side — you just have different roles to play. Thomson Reuters technology, including Practical Law, provides the tools you need to facilitate smooth transactions, support business objectives, and contribute positively to closing deals.
