What Should a New General Counsel Do in the First 90 Days?

Kinney's first 90 days in any GC role follow the same sequence: listen to the team and their internal clients, take the hard feedback, figure out what is working and what is not, then align the legal plan against where the business is going. Only after that does she touch structure, workflow, or roles.

"Is there a legal strategy or a strategic plan that aligns with the overall business strategy? So that your people can have a direct line of sight on what they're working on day to day and how that's enabling and unlocking where the business is trying to go overall."

Alignment gets concrete fast. If the business faces a formidable competitive threat, legal's plan should cover how aggressive the company can be with marketing and advertising claims, and whether industry standards or trade groups offer an advantage nobody has considered.

If the plan is geographic expansion into a higher-risk country, legal's job is teaching the business teams to operate there compliantly and moving the entry as fast as possible.

How Should In-House Counsel Present Risk to Leadership?

Triage to the two or three risks likely to materialize, then walk in with a mitigation plan for those. Kinney calls the alternative the "torts exam answer," flagging all 20 ways a decision could go wrong. That approach paralyzes decision-making and erodes the trust a legal team needs to influence the business.

"If you give them what I'll call the torts exam answer, where you're just flagging all the parade of horribles that can happen, you're going to lose them."

Her litigation background taught her the counterintuitive part. Litigation is one risk among a set, and fear of getting sued can crowd out a bigger question:

"What if we don't take this action? What's the risk of standing still here? What's the risk to the business? And oftentimes, in my view, I think that can be the greater risk."

Kinney shared an example from a prior role. Her company faced a formidable, litigious competitor known for striking first, and the fear factor had the team asking whether strong marketing claims were worth the lawsuit.

Then they mapped what standing still would cost in market share and revenue. The math equalized the playing field, and the question became how to act from a defensible position, backed by good data, knowing the suit might come anyway.

Cecilia added a version of the same principle from her time at Cruise. The most secure software does nothing. The goal is knowing which risks are worth taking and being ready when they land.

She also pointed to the trade dress dispute over Build-A-Bear's Skoosherz plush line, a case where a legal team saw a lawsuit coming, planned for it, and backed a product the market was begging for. Squishmallow's maker sued Build-A-Bear in February 2024 over the line's resemblance to its plush toys; both sides mutually dismissed the case in August 2025.

That's the same risk-first instinct behind GC AI's piece on how great GCs think about growth, risk, and crisis management. Weigh what standing still costs before deciding a fight isn't worth having.

How Do You Build a High-Performance Legal Team With Limited Headcount?

Start by asking whether the team is working on the right things, then get ruthless about the low-value work choking its calendar. Kinney has walked into teams reviewing 100 percent of signed contracts and teams serving as the company's last-stop proofreader. Every hour there is an hour not spent on strategic work.

"You have more work than you have people to do it. So you've got to be super efficient on how you are deploying those resources."

Her go-to framework for freeing capacity:

1. Templatize as much as possible. Give business teams pre-approved contract templates with negotiation parameters. If they are within the guardrails, legal does not need to see it, or AI can review it.

2. Use outside counsel strategically. Check whether you are paying external partners for work that should stay in-house, or keeping in-house work that should be outsourced. Kinney's triage mindset pairs well with the tactics in GC AI's guide to reducing outside counsel spend with AI.

3. Maintain team boundaries. When another department leans on legal for everything, work with them to build a structure they can run on their own. Tossing the work back over the fence just sends it back to you.

On hiring, Kinney does not chase the perfect resume, because for a gap like IP plus union negotiations, it does not exist. She looks for someone smart, hungry, with substantive depth in one or two areas, and adaptable enough to run at whatever fire the business needs put out. The rest she can teach.

How Should Legal Teams Prepare for a Cybersecurity Crisis?

Assume the incident is coming and build muscle memory before it does. Kinney is blunt about this. Cyber is the most prevalent crisis most companies will face, the bad actors are prolific, and the variable you control is preparation.

"The last thing you want to do when it happens is to be figuring out what you should be doing in that moment."

Her crisis preparedness checklist:

• Line up vendors in advance. Know the first phone call: outside counsel, insurance broker, threat negotiator. Get them on your carriers' approved panels now, because credentialing vendors mid-crisis costs time you will not have.

• Store cell numbers several layers deep. Your normal communication systems will be down. You need a way to reach the operational people in the field who get the business back up, not only the crisis team.

• Define board escalation triggers in writing. IT flags thousands of events on a regular basis. Decide in advance at what point routine flagging becomes a crisis the board hears about.

• Run cross-functional tabletops with a third-party facilitator. Include ops, commercial, and supply chain, not only IT and legal. An outside facilitator surfaces gaps your internal team will not.

That last item is where the episode's most instructive story lives. During a tabletop, Kinney's third-party facilitator introduced a scenario drawn from a prior client: systems down, a notice out to employees, and an employee tweet about the outage going viral before the company had assessed the threat or made a formal statement.

Suddenly, the external narrative was running ahead of the internal response. Kinney's team tightened its employee communications protocol as a direct result, covering a gap they would never have found on their own.

What Makes M&A a Career Opportunity for In-House Lawyers?

In M&A, legal helps shape what the company becomes. Kinney contrasts it with litigation, where the facts have already fallen into place and the lawyer's job is narrating what happened.

In a deal, the business will look different when the work is done, and legal helps decide how.

"Here you actually get to shape the story and that's super exciting to be a part of."

Her advice for lawyers new to M&A: roll your sleeves up, get immersed in diligence, and read every finding through one lens: once this closes, what will I have to solve, and what is the plan?

Where she has seen deals go wrong is integration. If the larger company swallows the smaller one wholesale, it loses the value that made the target attractive in the first place, so finding the blend is the secret sauce.

How Should In-House Counsel Use Legal AI?

Treat it like a new hire, and pick a platform trained for legal work. Kinney compares skipping AI to refusing the internet 25 years ago, and on a team with more work than people, she sees efficiency as non-negotiable.

On the show she cited a study she had read, which she recalled as finding that AI gives law firm lawyers around four hours back per week, roughly a 10% capacity gain on a 40-hour week.

The gain only materializes with the right working style. She credits that lesson to Wharton's Ethan Mollick, who frames a new AI deployment as a new hire. Set it free with no coaching and it fails.

"If it's not giving you the answers that you want, you've got to speak to them like a human being would."

Give it context, background, and feedback when the output misses, the way you would coach a new hire rather than re-run a search. Kinney is also a fan of legal-specific AI over consumer AI. Legal language and legal context differ from the wider world, and she wants a platform working where her team does, with security her IT team has signed off on.

Cecilia built GC AI on the same premise. She was in-house counsel herself before founding the company, and she built the product for lawyers doing that job, not for outside firms selling legal services by the hour.

That's why a platform trained specifically on legal work beats consumer AI for lawyers like Kinney. It was built by someone who lived the same problem.

What Separates Great Legal Leaders?

Business fluency and focus. Kinney's parting advice is to teach your team to be business partners who happen to have legal skills. The language of business is numbers, and lawyers need to speak it. Lawyers who understand the dynamics of the P&L shape their risk analysis in terms the business hears.

"A lot of lawyers, myself included, originally went to law school to avoid numbers altogether. And if we come in speaking in the way that is normal to us, we're not communicating with our clients."

Her grounding practice applies that same discipline to risk. Crawl before you run, in her words. Walk into a role with 25 great ideas and chase all 25, and you spread the peanut butter too thin.

Pick the three best, embed them, prove the impact, and park the other 22, even when clients keep calling about them. Her favorite part of the job is building. She likes looking at the white space, figuring out how the business gets there, and being on the team that does it.

Kinney's case for legal AI comes down to one constraint. There is more work than people, so every hour has to count.

Recommended Reading

• Why Judgment Is the New Superpower for In-House Lawyers in the Age of AI: Former Unity CLO Anirma Gupta on why judgment, not speed, is what sets in-house lawyers apart in an AI-driven practice. Pairs with Kinney's "treat legal AI like a new hire" framing.

• Performance Without Ego: How Verkada's Legal Team Earns the Trust of the Company: Verkada's Bill Berry and Ariana Goodell on building a high-performing legal team through humble hiring and early involvement. A direct companion to Kinney's team-building and trust playbook.