Every in-house lawyer is already in the business of selling. Whether it's a budget for a CLM, a new hire, a promotion or a pay rise, every ask is a chance for someone else to see why your priority should matter to them.
Most lawyers were trained to do excellent legal work. Very few were trained in the art of internal selling. Yet for legal leaders, getting buy-in isn't a side skill. It is the job.
In our recent webinar, The GC Influence & Getting Buy-In Playbook, Sarah Ouis (Founder LawButHow) and Lily Schurra (Associate General Counsel at Sourcegraph) unpacked what it actually takes to get to yes. They shared a simple framework, FRAME, alongside hard-won stories from the in-house trenches. Here are the ideas that stood out.
The first barrier to buy-in isn't budget. It's belief.
Many legal leaders approach an ask as if they're borrowing sugar from a neighbour. They hesitate for weeks over a modest subscription. They feel "lucky" when the answer is yes. They assume legal isn't a priority, so why bother asking?
The problem with treating yes as luck is that you end up asking for a favour every time. And favours are easy to refuse.
Flip it. There is always money for what matters. The real work is making your priority matter to the person holding the budget. Your ask should come from confidence, not apology. You aren't begging for attention; you're showing that your ask is worth it.
If you don't believe buy-in is possible, nothing else in this playbook will help. That's why mindset comes first.
The same ask lands very differently depending on who hears it. Going to the wrong person can cost you months.
A CFO tends to lean in on savings, revenue recognition and anything that makes or protects money. A CEO is more likely to ask how something serves the long-term vision. A sales leader wants deal velocity. Pitch a CLM to finance and you talk about renewals missed last year. Pitch it to sales and you talk about turnaround time, because a forgotten renewal isn't their pain.
The winning move is to find the leader who actually loses sleep over the problem you can solve, and to understand them before you ask:
The best pitch you will ever give is built from their words, not yours.
Tell a CEO "we need to track our obligations to stay compliant" and you'll get a polite nod. Tell them "this frees up our capacity so we can focus on expanding into the new market" and you have their attention.
The substance is the same. The framing is everything. Three levers help:
The same principle applies to data. Your team cares that there are 30 requests pending this month. Your C-suite cares that three priority deals are blocked, and what it takes to unblock them. Same numbers, different story.
"We need a CLM" is an opinion. Opinions don't get budget.
One of the most practical stories from the session was a slow-roll approach to buying a CLM, with no big pitch deck required:
Two lessons stand out. First, don't wait for perfect data. A minimum viable data set is enough to start the conversation and shape what leadership asks for next. Second, the business often doesn't know what it wants until it sees it. Nobody asked for data from legal until they had a taste of it. Start capturing it now. The data you collect today fuels the ask you make tomorrow.
What's the worst message an in-house lawyer can get? Arguably, a lone "hey" or "got a minute?" You instantly know something vague and demanding is coming.
Now flip it. When you send an executive an unframed request, you create that same feeling. If your ask requires them to work out why it matters, what it costs and what to do next, it isn't an ask. It's homework. Busy people don't do homework on top of their work.
Make the ask impossible to say no to:
Consider a research subscription costing under $10,000 a year. Framed as a cost, it feels like a hurdle. Framed as a swap, it's a no-brainer: "We currently spend tens of thousands on external counsel for templates and research. This tool covers most of that for a fraction of the price. I only need your approval." You go from cost centre to cost saver in one sentence.
The same logic works for pay rises. Don't lead with how hard you've worked. Lead with the value: the market the company is expanding into, the revenue riding on it and legal's part in getting it done. Weighed against that, the raise is small.
Sometimes the hardest thing is walking into a one-to-one ready to pitch and realising it isn't the moment. If the CEO needs full focus on closing contracts this week, your conference request won't land.
One story made the point vividly. At quarter end, a seven-figure deal hinged on a contract with 30 amendments, seven of them missing. Legal had to ask the customer for copies, and one of the missing amendments turned out to change the new deal. The deal closed, but only just.
The ask didn't happen mid-crisis; the deal came first. It happened immediately afterwards, while everyone still felt the pain. The case wrote itself around three points:
A CLM that wasn't in the budget suddenly was. And the ask was concrete from day one: gather every customer contract and amendment into a shared repository now, while evaluating tools. Crawl, walk, run.
The window opens when the business feels the problem. Be ready when it does.
Even a well-framed ask gets turned down. The instinct is to take it personally, especially when you're the voice of reason everyone else relies on.
Instead, treat a no as information. Behind every no is an objection. Find it. Is it budget? Headcount limits? Timing? You can't solve an objection you're only guessing at.
Once you know it, get creative. When budget ruled out a full-time senior hire and a junior hire wasn't the answer, one legal leader proposed a senior lawyer on a part-time basis. It worked. Two strong candidates for one role? Perhaps it's one employee and one freelancer.
The session ended with a suggested addition to the framework: a D for Don't fall in love with the answer, turning FRAME into FRAMED. Or, as the French saying goes, if the door is closed, go through the window.
Take the example of a head of legal watching peers rise to the C-suite while their own title stays put. The advice wasn't to march in and ask for a new title. It was to find out how those peers got there, learn what each decision-maker is worried about over the next 6 to 12 months, and start solving those problems. Help the CFO improve cash flow, help sales close faster and help the CEO de-risk the future. Then let that record make the case.
That's the thread running through every takeaway. Buy-in isn't won in a single meeting. It's earned by showing, consistently, that legal is on the business's side. People support those who have supported them.
The legal leaders who get to yes aren't the ones with the best arguments. They're the ones who understand people, speak to what matters to them and make yes the easiest answer in the room.
Mindset. The right person. Their language. Real data. An easy ask. The right moment. And the persistence to find another way. That's the playbook.
