Hiring The Wrong Product Counsel Is A Silent Product Risk

Good products move fast. Great products move fast with the right lawyer at the table.

Why Product Teams Need a Different Kind of Lawyer Now
Every in-house lawyer has felt the shift. Product cycles are shorter. Launch pressure is higher. AI is everywhere. Engineering leaders expect legal to keep pace with changing architectures, new data flows, and features that update weekly. Yet most companies hire product counsel the same way they hired them ten years ago. They look for a privacy expert, or a commercial generalist, or someone who has worked at a tech company before. They hope this combination will magically translate into strong product instincts.

It rarely does.

The truth is that most product counsel job descriptions miss the work that actually determines whether a lawyer will thrive in this role. They focus on static experience, not dynamic capability. They describe responsibilities, not the behaviors that drive good judgment. They emphasize subject matter expertise, even though the hardest part of product counseling is not knowing the law but applying it to ambiguous, fast-moving systems.

Product counsel is no longer a reactive role. It is a design role. When you hire the wrong person, problems do not appear immediately. They build quietly inside product decisions, accumulating debt that eventually surfaces as risk, delay, or misalignment. That is why writing the right job description is not an HR exercise. It is a product risk management strategy.

The Hidden Cost of Hiring on Traditional Legal Credentials
Most job descriptions still reward the familiar pattern. Strong law school. Prestigious firm. Attractive titles. Maybe a line about “partnering cross-functionally.” Nothing in this description tells you whether the candidate can sit in a design meeting and help product managers evaluate a feature’s purpose, user value, edge cases, and operational dependencies. Nothing tells you whether they can make a call when documentation is incomplete, data is messy, or the team is under pressure to ship.

Traditional signals do not predict product judgment. They do not measure how effectively someone can translate engineering choices into legal implications or map business goals to compliance constraints. They do not speak to how a lawyer handles ambiguity, disagreement, or high-velocity decision cycles.

This gap is why product leaders often feel like legal is slowing them down. It is also why many lawyers feel unsupported or misunderstood in product-led environments. The mismatch starts at the job description stage.

Why Most Product Counsel Job Descriptions Fail
A typical product counsel description reads like it was copied from a generic in-house role with a few product words sprinkled in. These descriptions create three practical problems.

First, they attract candidates who excel at analysis but not at the counseling side of the job. They signal that the company values precision over momentum. Second, they fail to identify whether a candidate understands product lifecycle thinking. A strong product counsel must be able to forecast risk before it materializes and guide teams before decisions lock in. Third, they say nothing about how a lawyer should reason about emerging technology. Many products now integrate AI, automated decision systems, dynamic data flows, and global user bases. A job description that does not capture this complexity sets both the attorney and the company up for misalignment.

The result is predictable. Companies hire someone capable and well intentioned, yet the relationship between product and legal becomes strained, reactive, and slow. It feels like a personality issue. It is usually a structural one.

A Better Approach: Describe the Work the Lawyer Will Actually Do
When you shift the job description to match the actual work, everything changes. You stop screening for résumés that look impressive on paper and start screening for judgment, adaptability, and communication. You attract lawyers who understand that their job is to help build the product, not only protect the company from the product.

A strong product counsel job description highlights how the lawyer collaborates with product managers, engineers, security, and design teams. It describes how they will make decisions when the facts are incomplete and when timelines are tight. It articulates the mental models they will need to apply across privacy, safety, ethics, compliance, and business strategy. It sets expectations not for perfection but for principled, repeatable reasoning.

This shift seems simple. It changes everything.

Why This Matters Even More in the Age of AI Products
AI has amplified the gap between traditional legal hiring and modern product counseling. When features rely on models that evolve over time, generate new data types, behave unpredictably, or integrate with external systems, the legal questions cannot be answered with static checklists. The lawyer must understand how the feature works, how it will be used, how it could fail, and how those failures map to regulatory, operational, and reputational exposure.

That kind of work requires different capabilities than those described in most legal job descriptions. It requires the ability to reason through uncertainty and help product teams navigate tradeoffs, not only identify risks. It requires comfort with technical detail without being intimidated by it. It requires the ability to ask good questions early enough to influence design, not after the fact.

If your job description does not reflect these expectations, your hiring process will not find the lawyer who can meet them.

Shaping the Next Generation of Product Lawyers Starts With Better Specs
The white paper resource you shared, the Free Customizable Product Counsel Job Description Template, does something most job descriptions rarely do. It focuses on product judgment, lifecycle thinking, and cross-functional decision making. It treats the role as strategic, not administrative. It translates product realities into legal expectations so companies hire for capability, not convenience. You can find the customizable version here.

This template helps teams avoid the unforced errors that come from misaligned expectations, vague responsibilities, or static models of what product counsel should look like. While the resource goes deep into structure, language, and hiring criteria, the central idea is simple. If you want a lawyer who can influence how products are built, your job description must reflect the work of building.

If You Want Better Product Judgment, Invest in Better Product Training
Hiring well is only one part of the equation. Developing the skill set is the other. Product law is not something most lawyers learn in school or practice. Even experienced attorneys often need support developing the instincts required to work at the speed and complexity of modern product development.

If you are hiring or training product counsel, you can explore additional tools for developing these skills, including early access to Coach Frankie, the Product Law beta. Frankie is designed to help lawyers build real product judgment through practical scenarios, decision cycles, and structured coaching. You can sign up here.

Done well, this combination of clear expectations and targeted skill building strengthens your entire product organization. It reduces friction. It accelerates launches. It builds trust. Most importantly, it ensures your legal team is equipped to guide the business through the next wave of product and technology shifts.

Great product counsel is not an accident. It starts with knowing what the job really is and hiring for the capability to do it.

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Olga V. Mack is the CEO of TermScout, where she builds legal systems that make contracts faster to understand, easier to operate, and more trustworthy in real business conditions. Her work focuses on how legal rules allocate power, manage risk, and shape decisions under uncertainty. A serial CEO and former General Counsel, Olga previously led a legal technology company through acquisition by LexisNexis. She teaches at Berkeley Law and is a Fellow at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. She has authored several books on legal innovation and technology, delivered six TEDx talks, and her insights regularly appear in Forbes, Bloomberg Law, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and Above the Law. Her work treats law as essential infrastructure, designed for how organizations actually operate.