How Do You Build an In-House Legal Team That Drives the Business?

A legal team drives the business when its lawyers understand the commercial goal behind each request, calibrate to the organization's appetite for risk, and treat "remove risk from this contract" as one move among several instead of the whole job. Morris argues the "department of no" reputation comes from unclear ownership and unclear mandates, which lead to hiring lawyers whose reflex is to shut risk down the way a Big Law firm would.

Morris put it this way:

"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."

His fix starts with a question he asks constantly. What is the ultimate business and commercial goal in this moment, and do your lawyers know it? A lawyer juggling an HR issue in one country, ten commercial contracts, and a product question is trying to get things off the list, and the bigger picture disappears unless the GC lays it out explicitly.

Connect the dots between your team's queue and the company's goals, be as transparent as the role allows, and you get better output plus a side effect Morris cares about: happier, more engaged lawyers who stay.

How Do In-House Lawyers Get Embedded in the Business?

An embedded lawyer sits in the weekly team meetings, product stand-ups, and sales kickoffs of the group they support. A lawyer who hears about decisions in a quarterly recap is on call, which is a different job. Morris presses each lawyer on his team with the same test: tell me which meetings you attend with the group you support, and what their cadence is.

Morris, on where the relationship gets built:

"Are you getting yourself in those meetings? Are you building deep relationships with the customers you're supporting? 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?"

Is it in the job description? No. Should you do it? His words: hell yeah. It happens once or twice a year, and the people you support need to know you and trust you, which matters more, he notes, the more remote a company runs.

Is your team embedded? 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 know when it is?

• Do the people I support know me outside of Slack or Zoom?

What Should a Lawyer Do in a Product Launch Meeting?

Listen first. Figure out who the decision-makers are and what each person's role is, which Morris calls EQ work more than lawyer work. Then issue-spot. The questions that surface repeatedly are privacy and data security, followed by international nuance, like a product team planning with a US or UK lens that has skipped mainland Europe's privacy laws.

Add small bits of value without interrupting the flow. If something means the company cannot launch, step in. The rest of the time, the goal is subtler: become the lawyer the team describes as "part of the team."

How Does a Legal Team Build Political Capital?

Political capital comes from early wins: a closed deal, a smooth product launch, a problem caught before it cost the team three weeks of rework. Demonstrate a couple of times that you are there to get the product shipped in a compliant way, and the invitations start coming on their own. Until then, expect to push.

Morris, on the moment resistance dissolves:

"...they understand you're not there to check boxes, you're there to get the product launched like they are, obviously in a legally compliant way, it becomes very easy. But in the beginning, you have to push a little."

Pushing means escalating. It means going to the head of product or head of marketing, whoever controls the meetings you need, and making the explicit case for your team. The concern Morris hears in return is predictable. Is legal going to slow us down, and will people still speak freely with a lawyer in the room?

Set that at ease up front, then let the wins do the arguing. At his last two companies, the process started with Morris knocking on doors to get his lawyers into the room. It ended with a note from a team member: "Is it okay if I'm coming up to HQ next week? I was invited to the R&D offsite." His answer: yes, a thousand times yes.

When Should a General Counsel Say a Hard No?

Nearly all legal risk reduces to financial exposure or reputational damage, and both can be escalated as business judgments: what is the magnitude, what is the likelihood, and who makes the call. The hard no belongs to the rare category where the downside is criminal. At TripAdvisor, that category showed up as a question from Product and Sales: can we sell travel into Cuba?

Morris, recalling the answer:

"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 go spend time with you in a jumpsuit in prison."

The instructive part is what came next. Morris kicked off a nascent government affairs practice, traveled to Cuba, and spent close to a year in discussions with officials on both sides. TripAdvisor and Airbnb went on to be among the first platforms licensed to sell Cuban travel packages when the window opened under a prior administration.

Morris flags the trap for younger lawyers here. They can err so far toward "we can't do it" that the business internalizes it and starts routing around legal. The forgiveness-versus-permission question is a dialogue, and the answer changes by vertical. Airbnb and Uber took educated, eyes-wide-open risk where laws lagged their products. That works in travel. As Morris puts it, it does not work in cybersecurity.

When Does a Company Need a Government Affairs Function?

Sooner than leadership thinks. Morris puts the threshold at roughly \$100 million in ARR. By then a company needs at least an intelligence-level government affairs effort, because regulatory cycles run two to four years and rules being drafted now will bind you later. Fifteen years ago, a smaller company could mind its business and keep its head down. Morris is blunt that the era is over.

Morris warned:

"Government is now a lot less predictable than it was 10 years ago. ... You can't put your head in the sand."

Big Tech is already in those rooms. Cecilia pulled a number mid-episode. Meta employed 65 lobbyists in 2024, one for every eight members of Congress. Morris defines Big Tech as companies above \$75 billion, and his warning is that their government affairs teams shape bills and regulatory discussions to be workable at their scale and onerous at yours.

Smaller companies cannot match the spend, and don't need to. His starter play is one lobbyist whose job is intelligence. That means mapping the agencies and congressional offices likeliest to touch your vertical and flagging what's coming with enough lead time to act. A GC's value, in his framing, is seeing around corners, and you cannot advise a board on what you cannot see.

How Is AI Changing In-House Legal Work?

AI is accelerating the work in-house lawyers already do: faster research, sharper contract review, and less dependence on outside counsel for the first 75% of an answer. At Snyk, Morris watched the usual adoption dynamic invert. He has rolled out e-billing, contract management, and board portals across a career in legal ops, and each time he dragged the team along. This time the team pulled him.

When the GC AI free trial ended and budget was tight, his lawyers offered to give up other software to keep it. Morris, on his reaction:

"That never happened in my career before. No one was ever this excited about any legal technology. Ever."

The team found things to cut, GC AI became a daily part of the workflow, and the GRC compliance function he managed adopted it too. That momentum outlasted Morris's tenure. Alexis Palmer, Snyk's Senior Managing Counsel, now cuts time on major legal tasks by half or more.

The outside counsel math changed alongside.

Projects Morris used to hand to firms whole, say a 20-hour privacy workup, now start in-house: his team gets roughly 75% of the way to an answer, then asks the firm to check direction and catch the nuances that need a true subject-matter expert. Twenty hours becomes five.

He watched that pattern lower hours billed on matters that suit it, with a Jevons-paradox twist he and Cecilia land on together: when you accelerate, you get more done, open more questions, and take more shots. For the mechanics of where those hours come from, see how to reduce outside counsel spend with AI.

His adoption advice for GCs with mixed-enthusiasm teams is carrots before sticks. Run a free trial, ask each person to give it the old college try on a real task, a research question or a contract redline, and let the early adopters make the case. A word salad of a prompt works well enough to hook people, and skill builds from there; free legal AI classes shorten that curve.

On the law firm side, Morris is direct with friends at firms that are waiting it out: the choice is adopting AI or, in five years, effectively not being there.

And for young lawyers? Morris expects AI to raise the bar. The questions they can answer, the volume they can produce, and the quality expected of their writing all go up. Fluency is now table stakes, and the differentiator is the relationship instincts no software replicates. The skydiving offsite, in other words, still matters.

What Career Advice Does Morris Give In-House Lawyers?

He gives two rules. Do not get pigeonholed, and say yes to the formative detours. Morris started as an M&A lawyer, then did hundreds of commercial deals, then government affairs, then legal ops, and credits the range for the GC seat. The vivid version is Singapore.

With a seven-month-old at home, his company asked him to cover a three-month Asia-Pacific maternity leave. He named his terms as a joke, the company said yes the next day, his wife said yes, and running a regional legal team from Singapore became the experience interviewers still ask about.

Those windows close as life gets more complex. When one opens, take it.

Recommended Reading

• How Great GCs Think About Growth, Risk, and Crisis Management: the growth-and-risk framing Morris lives by, from GCs who have run it at scale.

• Always Be Calibrating: Former Salesforce GC David Schellhase on Prioritization and the Overton Window: more on calibrating legal to the business's appetite for risk.

• Why Judgment Is the New Superpower for In-House Lawyers in the Age of AI: where AI raises the bar and human judgment becomes the differentiator.