Every in-house lawyer has heard some version of "legal is the bottleneck." Usually from a salesperson, usually at 4pm on the last day of the quarter, usually about a contract that just landed in their inbox an hour ago.
At a recent SpotDraft x IHC webinar event, Sarah Gatti, (Head of Legal, Zappi), Michael Moore, (VP, Head of Legal, Company Secretary, Glean) moderated by Spotdraft’s COO Akshay Verma sat down to actually pull that claim apart. Not to defend legal's ego, but to figure out where the real gap between legal speed and business speed comes from and it turns out it's almost never about lawyers working slowly. It's about lawyers being handed one puzzle piece and expected to somehow see the whole picture.
Here's what actually came out of that conversation.
Sarah didn't dodge the premise; yes, there's a gap between legal speed and business speed, and there arguably should be one. Slowing things down to catch undue risk is literally what legal is there for. But she was equally clear that being a perfectionist is not the same as being good at the job. Her actual priority isn't the perfect contract; it's the contract that works for the business, works for the customer, and gets the revenue in the door.
The tension isn't legal vs. business. It's legal doing its job well enough that it stops feeling like a separate team at all.
Michael's framing here is the most useful one from the whole session: when someone messages a lawyer with "hey, can you look at this paragraph," they're handing over one piece of a jigsaw puzzle; no box, no picture of what it's supposed to look like. The lawyer then has to go do all the detective work just to understand the actual question, before they can even start answering it.
His fix is a fixed set of things he needs up front on any request:
Skip this step, and every request turns into a scavenger hunt before the actual legal work even starts. That's not a lawyer being slow. That's a lawyer doing unpaid intake work that nobody scoped for.
Both panelists pushed back hard on the instinct to just work top-down through whatever list is in front of you. Sarah's point: the first thing in isn't usually the highest-impact thing, and something further down your list might actually resolve three other items at once if you tackle it first.
Her actual prioritization runs on: is it revenue in or revenue out, and how close is the deadline. Simple on paper but she's built real structure under it. Everything routes through one Slack channel, visible to the whole team, so whoever has bandwidth can grab it instead of everything funneling through one person. And she's set SLAs so prioritization isn't a vibe, it's a documented commitment the business can actually hold her team to.
Michael's version of the same idea, in his words: he optimizes for business impact first but not exclusively. He described fixing an HR process with zero dollar value attached, purely because it had real human impact on one employee. Both, ultimately, are prioritization systems built on the same principle: decide the rule in advance, in public, so you're not re-litigating priority every single time something new lands.
When asked what actually moves the needle day to day, Sarah didn't hesitate: self-serve and clear, communicated prioritization are doing most of the heavy lifting, more than almost anything else a legal team can do.
Self-serve kills the "legal is slow" narrative directly if the business can answer their own question in two minutes instead of waiting two hours, that's not a bottleneck anymore. And when priorities are communicated openly instead of enforced quietly, it stops feeling arbitrary. Sarah's marketing team, for instance, knows they're not first in line during quarter-close; not because legal doesn't value them, but because the reasoning was actually explained.
Michael's biggest theme, and arguably the most useful reframe of the whole session: contracts, Slack threads, support tickets, complaint logs; none of it is fundamentally different from a code repository or a product design repo. It's all just data. And once you start treating it that way, AI stops being a nice-to-have and starts being the actual infrastructure.
A few ways he's using it in practice:
Both agreed: legal velocity absolutely correlates with revenue, but not for the obvious reason. It's not that fast legal work single-handedly closes deals faster. It's that being responsive; actually acknowledging a request lands, giving a timeline, not letting things disappear into a black hole; is what lets the go-to-market team manage the relationship with confidence. Deals rarely die from legal taking three days on something. They die from silence.
Sarah's other point is worth sitting with: how a negotiation goes with legal often predicts how that customer relationship will go long-term. A counterparty that fights over every clause in an NDA is telling you something about what they'll be like as a customer.
The closing idea from Michael is one every in-house lawyer should tattoo somewhere: if you're generally calm, responsive, and say "yes, here's how we make this work" most of the time, then the rare moment you say "no, we absolutely cannot do this" actually lands. People listen. But that only works if you've earned it; you don't get to cry wolf and still be believed the one time it actually matters.
Nobody in this conversation argued legal should just move faster. They argued for something more specific: get the full context before starting, build a system for prioritization instead of relying on instinct, make self-serve genuinely easy, track the data so you can prove your speed instead of just claiming it, and stay calm enough that your one "no" actually means something.
Legal was never the bottleneck. The absence of a system was.
Stay tuned for more events here.
