Alice Davidson and Jenna Hunt built such a dynamic partnership between Tipalti's legal team and the rest of the business that they accidentally created a whole new problem: their focus on legal department efficiency worked so well that legal became the go-to for everything. The sales team can't find an important document? Ask legal. Marketing needs someone to proofread a press release? Legal will do it. Random operational question that nobody owns? You guessed it…legal.
"We almost did too good of a job," Jenna, Tipalti’s Head of Legal Ops admitted. "Now we've almost become the Department of Default for things. They trust us too much. We've been too helpful."
It's a problem most legal teams would love to have: how often do you hear about in-house lawyers complaining they're too trusted, too integrated, or too valued by the business? But here's the thing: when you're Tipalti, a global fintech company processing payments across 200 countries, 120 currencies, and 50 payment methods, and your legal team is busy hunting for typos, you've got a scaling problem.
Turns out, legal operations teams need non-lawyers to handle the work that doesn’t require a JD, so the lawyers can practice law.
Jenna and Alice solved their team’s capacity issue by reimagining what their legal team did, and how they approached hiring.
Key actions to replicate:
Create a legal ops role that owns intake, triage, and playbooks.
Train non‑lawyers to summarize clauses, draft executive summaries, and run workflows.
Use decision trees so the business can handle standard NDAs and vendor playbooks without legal review.
How Legal Ops Improves Legal Department Efficiency
When Alice joined Tipalti as General Counsel, she inherited a team of brilliant legal minds that included both attorneys and non-attorneys.
Back then, Jenna was an administrative assistant who supported the company’s commercial team. In reality, her day-to-day job included admin work, in addition to handling project management and comms between legal and the rest of the company.
Jenna's background in customer service gave her a lens the lawyers on the team didn't have. She could translate legalese into information the sales team understood. She could spot when a training email was full of too much jargon for the average reader. She knew what customers were likely to say when presented with new terms in a renewal contract.
"Alice saw my day-to-day and said, ‘let's create a formal legal ops role," Jenna recalls. "Definitely kudos goes to Alice for recognizing that's what I was doing and allowing me to create that function and roll with it."
The creation of a real legal ops function helped organize how Tipalti’s legal team worked, but what made the difference in their productivity was how they approached staffing.
Alice and Jenna began intentionally shaping the team to attract top in-house lawyers, as well as skilled admin and ops hires that could protect the attorney’s valuable time.
"The infusion of the traditional legal with legal ops and having non-attorneys on the team is part of the secret sauce," Alice explained. And she encourages her team members to push back when they disagree, because different viewpoints make the team stronger.
Note from CZ: I spent my early years as a lawyer at Amazon, where "Disagree and Commit" was a core leadership principle. The best teams I saw, whether legal, engineering, or product, all operated this way. Not because hierarchy didn't exist, but because getting to the right answer mattered more than being right. Alice and Jenna built that same dynamic, but in a legal function. And it shows.
Becoming ‘Bilingual’ Means Blending Business + Legal
When Jenna first started at Tipalti, she noticed lawyers were sending compliance emails and running training sessions that other lawyers loved, but made little sense to other teams. Department leads would nod along, too intimidated to admit they had no idea what "indemnification" meant or why jurisdiction clauses should matter to them.
"You're speaking a different language, they don't have the same background, the same context, the same training that you guys do," Jenna explains. "So we need to make this ingestible if we actually want them to learn and empower them to be able to do that, right?"
Jenna’s background enabled her to understand what landed with people who weren't lawyers. And Alice, Tipalti’s GC, uses the same approach when it comes to company comms.
"I put the memo into GC AI and had to dumb it down for me. Even me, the GC of this company, has to do that," Alice admits.
After seeing early successes, Tipalti built this review practice into their workflow. After a vendor contract is signed, Alice’s team runs it through AI to generate an executive summary for the leadership team, which includes user limits, renewal terms, and key obligations. You know, the stuff that matters when you're managing the relationship three years from now.
Practical steps to become bilingual:
Require executive summaries for signed contracts.
Use templates and annotated playbooks aimed at non‑lawyer readers.
Measure adoption by asking business leads if they can act on the guidance without legal help.
What an executive summary contains
Clause name (e.g., indemnity, termination)
What the clause says in one sentence
Business impact and recommended owner
Renewal or notice deadlines to track
Note from CZ: I learned this lesson the hard way. Years ago, I litigated an early Salesforce contract dispute. The case hinged on a single internal email where someone had clearly explained how the license structure worked. That clarity, even three years after the deal closed and all the original dealmakers were gone, saved the client significant money. Clear communication is your insurance.
Practicing at the Top of Your License
Alice likes to say, "I'm a full-time business person with a legal background.” It's the kind of statement that makes traditional lawyers wince, but it's this same mindset that allowed Tipalti's legal team to scale without chaos.
When Alice took on the role of GC, the team was already well-staffed, but headcount alone doesn't solve capacity issues. While Alice’s team had plenty of brainpower, their day-to-day was bogged down by work that wasn’t moving the company forward. This included the “quick reviews” and “this will only take five minutes” requests that seemed to consume the team’s entire day.
"Negotiating NDAs is not how lawyers practice at the top of their license," Jenna said. "We added all those little tasks up and realized that's where we were spending the bulk of our time. We kept pushing the strategic initiatives down the priority list because of the daily asks from the rest of the company."
Alice’s team started with the low-hanging fruit: playbooks that codified Tipalti's standard positions, automated workflows for pre-signed contracts, and training that empowered employees to handle routine matters themselves. Business teams got standard playbooks, decision trees, and automated workflows for standard NDAs. Legal only saw the exceptions.
This freed up Alice’s associates to do legal work, including advising on international expansion, navigating regulatory complexity, and supporting acquisitions.
"I always say I want our lawyers practicing at the top of their license," Jenna says.
It sounds simple. It's not. Because to practice at the top of your license, you first have to acknowledge what's at the bottom, and then systematically eliminate those tasks from your day-to-day. This means saying no to work that feels urgent but isn't strategic. It means investing time upfront to build systems that save time later. It also means trusting non-lawyers to handle things that don’t require a law degree.
If your team reviews dozens of NDAs and routine contracts monthly, a purpose‑built legal AI can automate summaries and playbooks so non‑lawyers and business teams can self‑serve. See how GC AI’s Playbooks automate contract review and compare GC AI to generalist tools like ChatGPT and legal platforms like Harvey.
Strategic Planning That Works
This collaborative mindset also extends to how Tipalti approaches goal-setting. Most legal teams set OKRs in January, check them once mid-year, and by December discover that half the list is now irrelevant and the other half never got done. Sound familiar?
Tipalti's legal team took a different approach. They built their annual planning around three core pillars, and let everything else stay fluid with the needs of the business.
Three Pillars to Strategic Goal-Setting:
A thriving and engaged legal team
Strong partners across the business
Operational excellence
Instead of focusing on task tracking and arbitrary due dates, Alice’s team kept their strategy broad and their tactics flexible. Company goals were layered on top of the three pillars, and specific OKRs were built from there. And every quarter, Tipalti reviews what's moving the needle and adjusts company goals as needed.
When priorities conflict, as they often do, Alice asks the business to decide which items her team should focus on.
"I'm telling them, out of these 10 things, we're gonna be able to accomplish four by the end of the quarter,” said Alice, “You tell us which four you wanna see."
This is how synergistic goal setting works: legal knows what's possible, and the executive team knows what's urgent. Together, they decide what outcomes matter most.
How AI is Changing Legal Department Efficiency.
When Alice and Jenna talk about the future of AI, they're refreshingly pragmatic about technological advances and how AI will benefit lawyers.
"It's never going to displace us, it's just going to make us more efficient," Alice explains. "As we feed our models and the models get to know our business, I just think it's just going to become that much more powerful."
If there’s one big takeaway from our conversation with Alice and Jenna, it’s this: AI isn't replacing lawyers. It's eliminating the work that shouldn't require lawyers in the first place.
Jenna calls GC AI the team's "super intern,” and she's right. And much like an eager intern, the more AI understands your business, your risk appetite, your standard positions, the more useful it becomes. Generic AI gives you generic results. An AI platform that knows your company deeply gives you leverage. For in-house teams who are already stretched thin, this edge is significant.
"Don't be afraid to do things differently,” Alice advises. “I think particularly in the space where innovation is king... the legal profession is the last to be disrupted and one that probably needs the most disruption."
Want to hear the full conversation? Alice and Jenna dive deeper into their AI workflows, team dynamics, and what "giving them something to talk about" means in practice.
