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Scaling an in-house legal team is not just about hiring more lawyers or buying the latest AI tool. Here’s what the best legal leaders are doing differently:
Legal teams today are operating under a different kind of pressure. Contracts are coming in faster. Business expectations are higher. And a new wave of AI-powered tools is hitting the market every week. But here's the thing; the teams that are actually scaling well aren't necessarily the ones with the best technology. They're the ones that got the fundamentals right first.
That was the central thread running through SpotDraft's recent webinar Contracts Control and Confidence How Legal Leaders Build Scalable Legal Teams, where legal operations expert Lucy Bassli and seasoned in-house general counsel Eugenia Bergantz sat down with host Allison Green, Senior Account Executive at SpotDraft, to talk candidly about what building a scalable legal team actually looks like in practice.
When legal teams decide they want to scale, the instinct is usually to hire more lawyers or buy a new tool. Both speakers pushed back hard on this reflex.
Lucy Bassli put it plainly: the missing ingredient isn't headcount or software, it's planning. Too many teams skip the foundational work of understanding how work actually flows through the department, who owns what, and where the real bottlenecks are. Without that clarity, even the best technology gets configured around broken processes. That’s a recurring theme in how to scale legal teams, where aligning structure, trust, and hiring decisions is what creates real leverage.
Eugenia Bergantz brought this to life with her own experience. When she joined Druva as the first in-house attorney, the company was at $40M ARR with a US-only focus. She could manage solo. But the moment the business went global and started pursuing government contracts, the cracks appeared not because of revenue growth, but because of the expanding scope. That's when she realized scalability isn't about how much you're doing today, it's about whether you can sustain it six months from now. That evolution mirrors the reality of being a first legal hire and then expanding the function during growth.
Both speakers were aligned on what legal hiring needs to look like going forward and it's a meaningful departure from the traditional model.
Eugenia described what she actively screened for in every hire: the ability to adapt. Can this person learn a new workflow? Will they actually use the tools you implement? Are they flexible enough to grow with the organization, or are they solving only today's problem? She was direct about the fact that plenty of lawyers would agree to use a new CLM in an interview, then quietly avoid it once onboarded.
Lucy described a hiring team she'd spoken with recently that was running interviews for a commercial lawyer. Every candidate that came through was technically excellent — deep experience in contracting, solid negotiation instincts. And yet the hiring manager felt something was missing. What was absent was any sense of how these candidates thought about technology, operations, or the evolving role of legal in a modern business. Excellent lawyers, presenting themselves exactly as they would have five years ago.
The implication for legal leaders: when you hire now, you're not just hiring for a role. You're hiring for a mindset. That shift toward curiosity, adaptability, and business acumen is central to building a legal team that's ready to embrace AI, especially as legal departments rethink whether they need only traditional attorneys or a broader mix of operators, specialists, and legal ops talent.
Perhaps the most pointed observation of the session came from Lucy's call for a fundamental identity shift inside in-house legal departments. Too many teams, she argued, still function like a mini law firm inside a corporation — waiting to be consulted, referring to internal stakeholders as "clients," and delivering advice from a careful distance rather than being embedded in the business.
This posture made sense in a different era. It doesn't anymore. As AI tools increasingly allow business teams to self-serve on routine legal tasks, the value of in-house counsel has to be strategic,not procedural. Legal teams that are still operating in reactive mode are going to find themselves increasingly sidelined.
The alternative is to show up as a business enabler. To understand where the company is going, align the legal function to those goals, and be in the room designing the growth — not approving it after the fact. That same call to integrate legal more deeply into business strategy shows up in 10 Powerful Statistics of Lawyers for 2025, which highlights how in-house legal leaders are increasingly expected to contribute directly to business outcomes.
When the conversation turned to how legal leaders should prioritize investments, both speakers pointed to the same foundation: you need to understand how your team is actually spending its time before you can make a credible case for anything — more headcount, a new tool, a process overhaul.
Eugenia made the case for tracking ruthlessly. What is your team doing? Where is the time going? What's getting pushed to outside counsel because the internal team is buried in routine work? That data is what turns "we're overwhelmed" into a real business case.
Lucy acknowledged the chicken-and-egg problem — you need data to justify technology, but technology gives you better data — and offered a simple workaround: start counting manually. How many contracts are coming in? What type? How long are they taking to close? These three data points are still elusive for most legal departments, and yet they're the minimum floor for any serious conversation with a CFO.
For teams trying to operationalize that discipline, building a data-forward legal team offers a useful framework for defining objectives, choosing KPIs, and using metrics to make stronger business cases. And once legal teams begin using real benchmarks and negotiation history to guide decisions, they can move closer to the kind of data-driven contract negotiation that improves both speed and consistency.
One of the session's most practically useful frameworks came from the discussion on risk. Eugenia laid out a clear approach: map your company's actual risk appetite based on its stage, industry, and regulatory environment. Compare your contract terms to competitors. Establish clear thresholds — what always gets negotiated, what never gets reviewed, and what gets delegated — and align those thresholds with the CEO and CRO, not just internally within legal.
Lucy was candid about the alternative: a legal team that tries to review every contract as a unique, high-stakes event will never scale. The underlying instinct to find every possible issue in every document is, in her words, already flawed — because legal isn't even seeing every contract the business executes. The goal isn't to eliminate risk. It's to make sure the business is taking the right risks, knowingly, with legal's input shaping that decision rather than blocking it.
The throughline across the entire conversation was ownership. The legal teams that are scaling effectively aren't waiting to be told how to operate. They're designing the guardrails. They're setting the thresholds. They're bringing data to the table and having proactive conversations with the C-suite about what the department will and won't review, and why.
That kind of leadership requires a different posture than most legal training produces. It requires thinking like a business operator who happens to have a law degree, not a lawyer who occasionally interfaces with the business.
As Eugenia put it, the tools are there. The capability to increase productivity by 30 to 40 percent through smart AI adoption is real and available right now. But none of that lands without the process clarity, the right hiring mindset, and the organizational trust that makes it stick.
The teams getting this right aren't waiting for the perfect roadmap. They're building it.
This post is based on SpotDraft's webinar "Contracts, Control, and Confidence: How Legal Leaders Build Scalable Legal Teams," hosted by Allison Green, with guests Lucy Bassli and Eugenia Bergantz.
Watch the webinar recording here.
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