Steno’s General Counsel says efficiency wins only change how the business sees legal when the team decides what to do with the capacity it gains.
Your legal team shortened the contract review cycle, trimmed the vendor list, and put AI-assisted intake in place. By every measure it was given, the function is performing. And yet the budget conversation still opens with the same question: how do we reduce legal spend?
Writing for Law.com’s Corporate Counsel, Carly Savar, Steno’s General Counsel, takes on that disconnect in “If the Legal Department Doesn’t Want to Be Viewed as a Cost Center, It Needs to Start Behaving Like It Isn’t One.”
Key takeaways:
What Carly Argues
Carly opens with a scene most in-house leaders will recognize. The technology works, the metrics look good, and legal is still pulled into conversations after decisions are made. Her explanation is that cost-center thinking has hardened into an identity. Legal departments spent decades proving their value by doing more with less, and many now judge their own technology decisions by that same standard, counting fewer hires and fewer vendor contracts as the win. Those numbers answer an operational question. They say nothing about whether the team is doing anything different with the time it got back.
Carly sees that identity running out of road for two reasons. Legal’s role in business decisions is growing, with privacy, data governance, AI regulation, and employment law all calling for legal input at the start of a decision. And AI-assisted workflows, vendor consolidation, and automated intake create capacity. What a team does with that capacity is a choice, and she argues most departments aren’t making it explicitly.
The legal teams that have shifted their standing began by deciding where they wanted to contribute, then built the infrastructure to support it. In practice, that means working with finance and operations on growth plans that are legally sound from the outset, mapping regulatory requirements before the business commits to a new market, and speeding up deals instead of acting as the final checkpoint.
Here’s an excerpt from Carly’s article, where she separates fiscal responsibility from identity and explains why the order of operations is the whole game:
There is a distinction between the pressure to function as a cost center and the choice to be defined as one. Exercising financial scrutiny is central to a GC’s role. But the error lies in equating a legal team’s fiscal responsibility with having an identity as a cost center. The first is a professional obligation, the second is a strategic concession.
…
The teams that used their technology investment to alter their organizational role did not begin with the tools. First, they decided where they wanted to contribute and then developed the operational infrastructure that made the contribution possible. The technology aligned with the strategy. In most legal departments, however, these steps are reversed.
Carly leaves readers with a practical question: when your team gets an afternoon back, who decides how it’s spent? If the answer is nobody, expect the next budget meeting to open the way the last one did.