The Road Not Taken: This Is Why We Do It

When an in-house legal department shows improvements to its processes, it can claim credit towards corporate initiatives.

Last week I wrote about attention that the benefits of a “growth mindset” are receiving from companies as part of an effort to change corporate culture. As I wrote it, I could hear the imaginary tirades from my legal colleagues in response to a corporate directive instructing the Legal Department to demonstrate a collective movement towards a “growth mindset.”

Normally, we tease our curmudgeonly colleagues with a few remarks about how much old people don’t like loud music or kids on the lawn and we all (some begrudgingly) fall in line with the corporate directive. My colleagues have a point though, some corporate operating policies do not translate well to legal work. But inapplicability has never been an excuse not to get on board with the rest of the company.

And so, when I wrote about growth mindsets last week, I heard the hypothetical wails of my colleagues: “This doesn’t apply to us. We do it this way for a reason. Changing will cause more problems than it is worth.” In many ways, they are right. We do things a certain way for a reason.

Legal, specifically, has an interest in inertia: we have to move on deadline and accurately. Mistakes make more of an impact with Legal. If you do it the way it has always been done before, at least then you have the defense of doing it the way that had worked before. But has anyone thought about how and why the first person did it “that” way so long ago?

The truth is, all of our colleagues feel the pressure of being fast and accurate. Information comes to them at all times of day and through all kinds of media. It is foolish of lawyers to think that our friends in finance, supply chain, or research don’t want to keep doing things the way they’ve been doing things. This is an area where our colleagues in industry are a little further ahead of us. They use business processes.

If you took 20 minutes to think about how and why you go through an action, and formalize the result, you have a business process. Business processes are a daily part of business for organizations that are regularly audited or require accuracy. Business processes are built on thought, reliability, and traceability. Once the process has been formalized, everyone can rely on the process as a tool to make sure they are doing their job properly. If they followed the process, anything that fell through the cracks can be blamed on a deficient process instead of a deficient person. 

A business process serves the same purpose as “doing things the same way,” but with more thought and formal collective concurrence of the why and how. Legal, of course, is fact specific, and generally not identically repeatable, but that doesn’t dismiss the value of reviewing with a critical eye what we do out of habit or history and putting in the thought to turn it into a process. When the “habit” is turned into a process, a whole universe of areas for initiative improvement opens up.  And thus, when we immediately send a new request for an unusual business model to finance for their take, or provide the same risk summary to specific business divisions, what happens because it is a good idea and makes sense, eventually becomes a habit, until no one remembers why finance has a say in the business model before Legal gives its input and the briskly written risk summary has now become a Bible. These are the things “we’ve always done” that deserve a second look.  

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When you know what you are doing and why, you can improve on it. When an in-house legal department shows improvements to its processes, it can claim credit towards corporate initiatives, even those initiatives that aren’t wholly applicable to us.


Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at C.harrisonforst@gmail.com.

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