When Tara Trantham talks about the price of delay, she will not be talking in hypotheticals. Because the chief authorized officer of a billion-dollar publicly traded firm, she confronted simultaneous investigations from the Client Monetary Safety Bureau and the Division of Justice. With out the good thing about authorized expertise or streamlined processes, she and her staff needed to manually pull 5 years of authorized complaints into spreadsheets for a number of businesses.
“It took 5 years,” Tara recalled. “And it value a whole lot of tens of millions of {dollars} in bills and misplaced productiveness.”
The influence was speedy. On the day the corporate needed to publicly disclose the investigation, its market capitalization dropped by roughly $250 million. The operational toll was simply as extreme. Whereas the authorized staff was buried in doc assortment, the enterprise groups had been pulled from their core work to search out and ship information. Development slowed whereas compliance consumed the group.
Why Early Engagement Issues
Tara is obvious in regards to the lesson. “If we had embedded authorized and compliance earlier into operational processes, and had the proper expertise in place, we might have diminished the time from years to months and saved tens of millions.”
The perception applies effectively past regulatory investigations. In contracting, the identical precept holds. When authorized is looped in solely after a dispute arises or a key deadline is missed, the price of remediation is much increased than the price of prevention. Poor recordkeeping, unclear obligations, and lacking approval workflows create the identical sort of disruption Tara confronted, simply unfold throughout extra contracts and extra stakeholders.
Tactical Methods To Embed Authorized Early
- Map The Course of, Not Simply The Coverage
Tara’s expertise reveals that realizing what must be executed will not be sufficient. You need to doc precisely how data will likely be collected, saved, and accessed effectively prematurely of any requests from regulators or counterparties. - Combine Authorized Into Core Methods
In case your gross sales, procurement, and operations groups use totally different instruments, authorized ought to have visibility into all of them. Contract phrases and obligations can’t stay in a silo. - Create A Speedy-Response Information Protocol
Even with out a subpoena on the horizon, construct a playbook for rapidly pulling key data. Establish who owns every dataset and the way it is going to be retrieved. - Use Information To Justify Assets
Tara needs she had offered a stronger case to her CEO and board for expertise funding. “It’s laborious to show the destructive,” she mentioned. “However if you happen to can quantify what number of hours and {dollars} are misplaced to handbook processes, you can also make a compelling argument for change.”
The Cultural Shift
Maybe crucial takeaway is mindset. Embedding authorized early requires shifting how the enterprise sees your division. Authorized is not only a security internet when one thing goes fallacious. It’s a companion in designing processes that make it much less probably that something will go fallacious within the first place.
As Tara put it, “The extra ready you might be, the extra you may hold the enterprise rising, as an alternative of pulling individuals away from it to deal with preventable crises.”
For in-house leaders, the problem is to make early engagement a behavior, not a response. The following time a significant venture launches or a brand new market opens, don’t await the primary signal of bother to get entangled. Construct the connections, processes, and visibility now — earlier than the price of delay turns into the headline.
Olga V. Mack is the CEO of TermScout, an AI-powered contract certification platform that accelerates income and eliminates friction by certifying contracts as honest, balanced, and market-ready. A serial CEO and authorized tech govt, she beforehand led an organization by means of a profitable acquisition by LexisNexis. Olga can be a Fellow at CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and the Generative AI Editor at legislation.MIT. She is a visionary govt reshaping how we legislation—how authorized programs are constructed, skilled, and trusted. Olga teaches at Berkeley Law, lectures extensively, and advises corporations of all sizes, in addition to boards and establishments. An award-winning common counsel turned builder, she additionally leads early-stage ventures together with Virtual Gabby (Better Parenting Plan), Product Law Hub, ESI Flow, and Notes to My (Legal) Self, every rethinking the follow and enterprise of legislation by means of expertise, information, and human-centered design. She has authored The Rise of Product Lawyers, Legal Operations in the Age of AI and Data, Blockchain Value, and Get on Board, with Visible IQ for Legal professionals (ABA) forthcoming. Olga is a 6x TEDx speaker and has been acknowledged as a Silicon Valley Girl of Affect and an ABA Girl in Authorized Tech. Her work reimagines individuals’s relationship with legislation—making it extra accessible, inclusive, data-driven, and aligned with how the world really works. She can be the host of the Notes to My (Authorized) Self podcast (streaming on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube), and her insights often seem in Forbes, Bloomberg Regulation, Newsweek, VentureBeat, ACC Docket, and Above the Regulation. She earned her B.A. and J.D. from UC Berkeley. Observe her on LinkedIn and X @olgavmack.
