How G&A Gets Great: 4 Lessons to Maximize Legal’s Partnership With Business Units
Some lawyers land at companies with great legal and business team partnerships. Others don’t and must build them one by one.
In every business, success depends on well-oiled partnerships – and the resulting benefits of clear communications, managed expectations, and leadership alignment.
But achieving these takes more than mere cordiality across cubicles.
Legal, in particular, must understand what other teams need to be successful, while establishing trust and rhythms that advance the needs of multiple stakeholders.
For this guide, we interviewed two senior leaders – a CFO and director of legal who’ve led from both sides of legal and G&A team partnerships. Through trial and error (and within startups and public company environments) they’ve learned how to extract better business results using cross-functional relationships.
Read on for their hard-won lessons on how legal can elevate partnership performance.
A blueprint for performant partnerships
Partner-centric cultures enjoy a synergistic effect where the sum is greater than its parts. But achieving this requires rethinking what partnership means. For instance, good communication is necessary for partnership success, but it doesn’t define it.
Some legal teams need to evolve their view of partnership. Others may need to unlearn habits or prioritize new ones. If you’re ready to be a nimbler, productive, and more adaptable business partner, here are a few starting points:
Lesson 1: Your role is actually Legal+.
Partnership begins with an understanding that someone must first champion it. This requires embracing the role of initiator – a responsibility that won’t show up in a job description.
Research suggests that eliminating functional silos requires an outwardly looking, commercially focused orientation in G&A staff.
Ashlyn Donohue, director of legal at LinkSquares, believes lawyers and legal ops staff should embrace the idea of existing as operational glue. Her first tip for initiating (or improving) partnership: regular road shows.
According to Donohue, “Every legal team member needs to plan for more than just legal work. They should also have a concrete plan for maintaining relationships with other departments.” This means more than just office fly-bys.
“Go out to coffee, ask questions, and keep meeting until you get to know the goals, problems, and opportunities that exist for stakeholders in finance, marketing, IT, and HR.”
In particular, emphasize the teams and functions that are a) most voluminous, and b) most complex.
But don’t stop there. Business performance, including adopting new processes or developing policies, requires increased coordination. “Legal should sit in on other departments’ critical meetings, too,” suggests Donohue.
The point isn’t to cross swim lanes but to ensure that one G&A team keeps a cross-functional view of how teams operate. They can quarterback changes, unlodge stuck processes, and pollinate ideas across teams that may not otherwise interact. And legal is best suited for this.
Lesson 2: Our objectives > my objectives.
It’s easy for legal staff to lull itself into habits of predictable tasks. When legal operates as a genuine business partner, however, individuals will flex their day-to-day work to match organizational priorities.
Although the shift is subtle, Luigi Testa, chief financial officer at Linksquares, notes that when legal embraces the role of service provider, partnership outcomes soar.
“The best legal partners prioritize what makes the business run,” says Testa. “Not all risks, concerns, or contract issues are equal. Legal offers true partnership when it spends time on the things that help more efficiently close business.”
Some legal teams are exceptional at creating processes, templates, and checklists to keep workflows on track. Others are known for being contract buffs, redlining away every ounce of risk. While these skills may be important, they may not always be primary.
Further, when business priorities change, legal priorities must also change.
“Legal should remember its priorities are not self-determined,” shares Donohue. “It could be selling widgets or establishing a new entity, but when overarching goals shift, we must be prepared to reassess.”
This also requires legal to both seek out problems and understand why other departments do what they do around a faulty issue or process.
“If you’re just ticking the box in terms of going along with a workflow, you’ll never understand how to make improvements," says Donohue.
Lesson 3: Don’t just be friendly, be useful.
Yes, good partnership requires good relationships. But this requires more than surface level sociability.
Most legal teams take first steps of relationship building – like coffee meetings or the occasional offsite. Fewer establish the deep trust required for partnership; the type that can weather good or bad, agreements and disagreements.
The difference comes down to consistency and dependability.
Legal’s reputation as a partner grows when it becomes fluent in the language of other business stakeholders: fast, accurate, and reliable data.
Testa cites an example of legal partnership during Linksquares’ $100 million Series C fundraise. “We closed the round in about 70 days, in part because legal had answers to every question we threw at them.”
He encourages legal to up their partnership by avoiding binary answers and offering honest insight instead. “We had investors asking unpredictable questions, but legal stepped in as a partner because they had perspective backed by data. They didn’t spend two weeks Ctrl F-ing their way through a contracts repository.”
Of course, this requires evaluating automation and other productivity-enhancing disciplines, like adopting tools and technology or tools to understand what hundreds or thousands of contracts say.
Lesson #4: Plan, think, and work – in weeks, months, and years.
Legal can squander opportunities to deliver value because of “vision myopia” – or focusing too much on a specific time horizon.
One place this lurks: When legal staff gets comfortable being reactive, like handling fire-drills or other one-offs, instead of fixing short-term issues to free time for what’s important (but not urgent).
To be genuinely transformational, legal needs to tie short-term, strategic responses to long-term vision. This demands commitment to day-to-day activities that translate to long-term goals – without losing adaptability as goals or contexts shift.
A simple starting place: Legal leads in introducing processes, technology, and automation around routine activities that could eventually balloon when the company scales.
This doesn’t just mean buying a tool or suggesting a workflow change – but pushing for genuine process or tool adoption and eventual replacement of the inefficient alternative.
“Activities like procuring software, onboarding, or signing contracts become a bottleneck. By addressing these early, even if they have the bandwidth today to handle them manually, legal can keep from becoming an eventual bottleneck,” shares Testa.
These improvements create margin to handle mid- and long-term needs, like fundraising or entity setup. Says Testa: “Otherwise, when you need the space to execute high-priority initiatives, you’re dealing with the wild west of daily, rote, activities.”
Donohue pushes legal to view activities through a data lens as well. “Assess the value and impact of any proposed work or task, including how often an issue comes up and whether accomplishing it brings you closer to explicit near-, mid-, or long-term goals.”
Naturally, this assumes that legal understands what business stakeholders want or need in the future.
“If legal and its business partners aren’t meeting to daydream about the future state, then it needs to either meet more or shift the agenda of some existing meetings,” warns Testa.