Scaling Legal in 2026: Amidst Regulations and Compliance

Session highlights (with timestamps):

^04:44 The panel highlights that legal teams are now being judged not just on risk reduction, but on their ability to help the company move quickly, enter markets, and ship products.

^05:44 Edward Nasti explains that for small-scale teams, legal often survives on "hustle" and institutional knowledge, but this model becomes fragile as a business grows.

^07:47 The discussion notes that a lack of visibility makes it difficult for legal to earn leadership's trust when requesting headcount or budget.

^08:54 Edward Nasti shares that his first hire was a legal ops lead, as the role serves as a "strategic engine" for speed and data rather than just back-office support.

^11:10 To manage high-volume work at Alpaca, Edward prioritized standardizing templates, improving fallback clauses, and defining clear approval thresholds.

^16:13 When dealing with outdated regulations, Edward suggests understanding the "regulatory objective" and the harms the framework intended to prevent.

^20:10 Edward argues that in-house legal teams are best positioned to help shape regulation because they understand practical market dynamics and product impact.

^22:36 To balance speed with regulation, Edward suggests categorizing risk into three buckets: reversible risk, structural risk, and existential risk.

^31:11 The discussion emphasizes using data to prove value, such as identifying which deals are stuck in legal or which terms cause the most friction.

^37:04 A common mistake in adopting legal tech is buying software before defining the operating problem or identifying where the actual bottleneck exists.

^41:26 Edward advises starting with the most painful workflow the business already wants fixed, rather than a theoretical future use case.

^42:42 The session suggests involving the broader team early in the tech decision-making process to improve long-term adoption and buy-in.

^53:02 The session closes with the message that legal should scale by becoming "better infrastructure" rather than becoming a "larger gate."

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"A legal leader who only understands law, I think, is going to struggle in today's business environment. You really need to understand customers, market structure... product architecture, revenue pressure, regulatory direction... Otherwise, your advice... might not necessarily be as valuable."
— Edward Nasti, VP and Head of Legal at Alpaca

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