David Morris has spent two decades building legal teams that are solely focused on driving the business forward. As general counsel at TripAdvisor, he helped take the company public, opened new markets, including Cuba, and built a government affairs function from scratch.
At Vivid Seats, David guided the company through a $2 billion deSPAC transaction, right in the middle of COVID. He now leads legal at cybersecurity company Snyk. His throughline across all of it is this: 'legal isn't the department of no, it's the department of how.’
“How do we get this done? How do I achieve the goal of the company?” David always asks. “That's how I think of reframing the traditional understanding of legal function from people who may be skeptics.”
Viewing Your Legal Department as Business Architecture
The "department of no" reputation doesn't come out of nowhere. It comes, David argues, from unclear ownership and priorities, which unfortunately leads to poor hiring decisions. Are you hiring lawyers whose impulse is to shut down potential risk like a Big Law firm? Or are you hiring lawyers who see their job as removing risk from a contract and moving to the next one?
"There are a lot of law departments that have people who see things in a very linear way: ‘I look at this contract, I must remove risk.’ And that isn't the only way to look at it," David said.
He recommends a reframe: understand what risk is, calibrate to your organization's appetite for it, and make sure your lawyers are operating with full context about what the business is trying to accomplish. This last part, he warns, is harder than it sounds.
“Here's another way to think about this: what is the ultimate business and commercial goal that the business in that moment is trying to get at? And do your lawyers understand it?” David asks. “Because a lot of times, they're just trying to get stuff checked off the list, but not understanding the larger picture as to what's happening in the organization.”
As General Counsel, it's your job to connect the dots between your team’s priorities and the company’s overall business goals. Offer your team transparency about what the business is doing, why it matters, and how legal fits into it. You’ll see happier, more engaged lawyers and a better work output, David says.
Getting Legal in the Room Where it Happens
The difference between a legal team that's embedded in the business and one that's merely available comes down to one question: which meetings are you actually in?
David isn’t referring to the quarterly business reviews where you meet with the execs. He’s talking about the weekly team meetings, the product stand-ups, and the sales kickoffs where the real business decisions are happening.
“Are you getting yourself in those meetings? Are you building deep relationships with the customers you're supporting?” David asks. “If you're supporting a sales team and they have their sales kickoff that a lot of B2B SaaS companies have, are you going out with them after eight o'clock at night?”
His test is simple: if you ask a lawyer on your team what meetings they attend with the group they support and the answer is ‘we do a quarterly recap,’ they're not truly embedded. They're on call.
Is your team truly embedded in the company? Ask yourself:
Which standing meetings am I in with the teams I support?
Do I know each department’s top three priorities this quarter?
Have I been to their offsite, and do I even know when it is?
Do the people I support know me outside of Slack or Zoom?
Note from CZ: One of my proudest moments as product counsel was when the team invited me to their offsite. Turns out, it was at one of those faux skydiving wind tunnel things, which is exactly as absurd as it sounds. But that was the moment I knew I'd made it. You need that in-person bonding time to build real relationships with the departments you serve.
Building Political Capital Before You Need It
Getting your team into the right rooms is one thing, but earning the right to stay there is another. David's framework for earning your seat at the table is fairly unglamorous: find the early wins, demonstrate you're there to get things done, and let your reputation build from there.
"When they understand you're there to get the product launched like they are, obviously in a legally compliant way, it becomes very easy,” David said. “But in the beginning, you have to push a little."
Unfortunately, that often means escalating situations when necessary: going to the Head of Product, the Head of Marketing, whoever controls access to the meetings you need to be in, and making an explicit case for your team. It’s important to frame Legal as a resource for their team, rather than a threat to their autonomy.
The concern David hears most often is some version of: is legal going to slow us down? Your job as GC is to ensure that legal is the function moving everything forward. Win a deal. Smooth a product launch. Catch something early that would have cost the team three weeks of extra work. Do that a couple of times, and the invitations will start coming on their own.
When "No" Means "Not Yet": The Cuba Case Study
Most legal risk, David will tell you, boils down to two things: financial exposure and reputational damage. Both are real, both can be escalated, and both are ultimately business judgments. But every once in a while, you get a question where the calculus is genuinely different. At TripAdvisor, that question was: can we sell travel into Cuba?
"It was one of the very rare times where I had to say ‘sorry, we actually can't do that right now. Because I don't want to spend time with you in a jumpsuit in prison,’" David recalls.
But David's instinct wasn't to stop there. Instead, he spun up a new TripAdvisor government affairs function, traveled to Cuba, and met with officials on both sides for nearly a year. TripAdvisor and Airbnb were eventually among the first platforms given licenses to sell Cuban travel packages when the regulatory window opened.
The lesson David learned was just because something isn’t possible now, doesn’t mean it will always be. Younger lawyers especially tend to stop at the first sign of risk and the business hears it, internalizes it, and starts avoiding Legal as a result.
Why GCs Need to Engage With Regulators
Ten or fifteen years ago, a $100M SaaS company could reasonably get away with avoiding regulators. The mindset was: mind your own business, don't break any laws, and move fast.
"The government is now a lot less predictable than it was 10 years ago,” David said. “You can't just put your head in the sand."
The truth is that Big Tech isn't waiting around for legislators to come to them. Meta employed 65 lobbyists in 2024. That's one for every eight members of Congress. These employees are actively shaping rules for compliance at scale, which will have big implications for smaller orgs. If you're not a part of those conversations, there's a real chance someone else is writing the regulations that govern your business.
Smaller organizations can benefit from hiring a single lobbyist whose primary job is intelligence. Namely, mapping the agencies and congressional offices most likely to affect your vertical, flagging what's coming, and giving you enough lead time to do something about it.
Regulatory cycles run two to four years, not two to four months, and that timeline shock alone catches most tech leadership off guard. The broader principle, as David frames it: a GC's value is in seeing around corners. If you know what’s ahead, you’ll be better prepared to guide your company through it.
The Legal AI David Can’t Live Without
David has plenty of experience onboarding e-billing tools, contract management platforms, and board portals at every company he’s worked at. Every time, he was forcing his team to get on board. GC AI was different.
When David’s free trial ended and the budget was tight, his team offered to give up other tools to keep it. GC AI had become that critical to Snyk’s legal workflow.
"That has never happened in my career before,” said David. “No one was ever this excited about any legal technology. Ever."
What AI is doing, in David's words, is accelerating the work in-house lawyers already do. That means faster research, sharper contract review, and less need for outside counsel. The lawyers who thrive will be the ones who combine strong AI fluency with the relationship instincts no tool can replicate.
That's exactly what GC AI is built for. See what your team has been missing and give the best legal AI a try for free today.
