In-house legal departments are under pressure to deliver business value, reduce risk, and increase efficiency, often with constrained budgets and lean teams. In our recent webinar, Ben Sachs, consultant at The Landing Group and author of All Rise: Practical Tools for Building High Performance Legal Teams, and Marc Mandel, General Counsel at EXOS, explored a counterintuitive truth: The key to overcoming these challenges isn't necessarily found in bigger budgets or the latest AI tools; it starts with your people.

What Makes a High-Performance Legal Team?

Ben opened the discussion by identifying four essential traits that define exceptional legal teams: trust, ownership, conflict engagement, and accountability. These aren't just feel-good concepts but building blocks that must be established in sequence. "You need trust to have ownership," Ben explained. "You need ownership to have conflict. You need willingness to have conflict in order to hold others accountable."

Marc reinforced this framework from a practitioner's perspective, noting that you can actually feel when something's missing. "If you don't have that feeling, something's wrong," he said. More tellingly, he pointed out that the business's perception of your legal team serves as a reliable external indicator. When business stakeholders aren't sharing information with your team early and often, it's usually a sign that internal team dynamics need attention first.

The Retention Crisis: Why Development Matters More Than You Think

Here's a striking statistic: 70% of in-house lawyers believe they need to switch employers to advance their careers. That should concern every legal leader, especially in today's competitive talent market.

Through extensive interviews with lawyers who've switched firms or organizations, Ben discovered a pattern: The biggest reason people leave isn't about hours, compensation, or even workplace culture in the traditional sense. It's about professional development—or the lack thereof.

"If people feel they're getting development, they'll work long hours. They'll even work for less money," Ben shared. "They feel like they're learning and growing in their roles."

The solution is surprisingly straightforward, yet it’s rarely implemented: Have regular conversations about career development. They don’t need to be daily, but they do need to be intentional. "If you have a half-hour conversation once a quarter talking about their careers, you will stand out," Ben emphasized. "And now they're like, this is the person I want to follow."

Marc takes this concept further by actively managing assignments in real-time. "I'm very carefully watching the assignments coming into the department and figuring out what's a stretch assignment for somebody that's just a little bit out of their comfort zone," he explained. The key is balance. Roughly two-thirds of someone's workload should be comfortable, while one-third should push them to learn and grow.

The Art of the Stretch Assignment

One concern many managers share is the fear of pushing people too far outside their comfort zones. But as Ben pointed out, the bigger risk is swinging too far in the opposite direction and falling into micromanagement.

"The first time you tell someone exactly how to do their job, they love it. The fear is gone," Ben noted. "But by the fifth time, you're thinking, 'Why do I have to tell this person everything?' and they're thinking, 'This person really micromanages.' You created this cycle."

Marc embraces a blameless culture approach. "I'm proud of people when they take on new things even if they do poorly at them," he said. "Doing something poorly is what you have to do before you can do it well."

This philosophy extends to how you delegate. Rather than giving someone two weeks for an assignment and expecting it the day before it's due, leaving no time for iteration or teaching, try to build in checkpoints. Ask for an early outline. Have them identify the top three issues. Create opportunities to catch mistakes and misconceptions early, providing that supportive environment while still getting excellent results.

The Burnout Detection Challenge

Burnout manifests differently across team members, making it particularly challenging to identify. Ben outlined two distinct patterns: the high performer who's producing excellent work at unsustainable hours without complaining, and the struggling team member who's spending excessive time on a small number of assignments.

Marc offered a tactical tip: "Scheduled send is a huge red flag for me. That just means someone's up late. If I'm getting an email at exactly 8:00 in the morning, that means they were up too late and they just didn't want to show it."

The solution requires both visibility and psychological safety. You need mechanisms to understand working patterns, whether through billing hours, check-ins, or peer networks. But critically, you need people to feel comfortable raising concerns without judgment.

Ben shared a powerful example from a New York firm where associates complained about burnout despite having normal hours. Rather than dismissing this as generational differences, he investigated and discovered the issue wasn't volume. It was unpredictability. Weekend work was hitting so suddenly that associates couldn't plan their personal lives. The solution involved Friday check-ins to coordinate weekend coverage and identify who needed personal time. "When you get a thread about burnout or anything else, follow up on it," Ben advised. "Don't ignore it or chalk it up to 'kids these days.' Really get inquisitive."

Redefining Role Clarity in Modern Legal Departments

In smaller legal teams—Marc suggests eight to 10 people or fewer—role ambiguity isn't a bug; it's a feature. "Lawyers have to be uncomfortable with ambiguity as a professional trait," he noted. "If you have fewer than 10 people, you have to have ambiguous roles and hire generalists."

This overlapping coverage serves multiple purposes. It enables truly flexible PTO policies. Marc's approach is simple: "Take all your PTO whenever you want as long as it doesn't create too many people out of the office at the same time." It also prevents burnout by ensuring team members can genuinely disconnect, knowing someone else can pick up their work.

But Ben added an important caveat for in-house counsel: Don't limit yourself to being "just the lawyer." The most valuable in-house lawyers position themselves as business partners. "If you want to be more effective in your role, be very curious about the rest of the business," he advised. Take marketing heads to coffee and ask about their challenges. Understand the larger strategy before reviewing agreements. This business development mindset, or treating internal clients like external ones, transforms you from a reviewer of contracts to a true counselor.

💡Build a legal function that drives strategy, not just compliance.

The Feedback Loop That Drives Performance

Perhaps the most revealing indicator of team health is whether people feel comfortable giving honest upward feedback to leadership. "If I had only one question to ask to figure out if this is an A+ team or not," Ben said, "it would be, 'Do people on this team feel comfortable giving honest, upward feedback to the boss?'"

Unfortunately, this remains rare. Two major barriers exist: lack of trust and lack of technique.

Building trust requires showing people that honesty doesn't get their heads chopped off. "When you react defensively that one time they came to you with a problem, especially if you're more senior, you've scared them off," Ben warned. "They tested it, and if you fail that test, they're not coming back."

But feedback also requires technique, or knowing how to word difficult conversations. Both positive and constructive feedback must be concrete and specific. "If you say to somebody, 'Hey, that was great,' that doesn't land the same as if you said, 'I looked at section three of that deal sheet. You made that look easy, but I knew you had to untangle a lot of knots. Nice job'," Ben explained.

Interestingly, positive feedback can be even more effective in writing. "They will save that email," Ben noted. "They'll show their spouse. It lands differently." And it reinforces your credibility for when you do need to have constructive conversations.

Navigating the Remote Reality

For teams working remotely or in hybrid environments, the fundamentals don't change, but the intentionality must increase. "You're not going to run into them at the water cooler," Ben observed. "So you have to create that time."

Marc's fully remote team maintains connection through daily or near-daily contact, a Thursday social hour (with no formal agenda), and annual off-sites focused purely on team bonding. "It's not a ‘Redo our strategy summit’," Marc clarified. "It's ‘Let's go to Topgolf, get some dinner, see a basketball game’."

The key insight is that proximity doesn't guarantee communication. Some remote legal teams work beautifully in concert, and others, everyone shows up but never leaves their offices to talk to one another. What matters is the deliberate effort to connect.

Technology as Enabler, Not Replacement

The conversation inevitably turned to AI, and Marc's perspective was refreshingly pragmatic: "It's there as your assistant to do as much of your work for you in a first draft form as it can. You're still responsible for your work."

He shared an innovative example of how his team uses AI for contract reviews of AI tools themselves. By creating a detailed prompt that checks for seven key issues in terms of service, business stakeholders can now self-select the best option from three alternatives before submitting for legal review. "Now we have one contract review instead of three," Marc explained.

Ben added a crucial career perspective: Throughout his career, whenever some people tried to protect their jobs by ring-fencing their roles, they always lost. "Whereas the people who saw change coming and led the charge on their own jobs, they cannibalized their own roles. They got better roles. Every time."

The message for legal professionals is clear: Lean into technological change. Be the person managing multiple streams rather than the cog in the wheel.

💡Take the first step toward an AI strategy that strengthens (not replaces) your legal expertise.

Building Trust Beyond Your Team

None of this matters if your legal department isn't trusted by the broader business. Marc emphasized that trust must exist "up and down the organization, people across departments having trust in their counterparts."

This means carefully considering how you deliver difficult messages. Rather than killing a sales deal, Marc suggests positioning it as, "You really don't want to close this deal because you don't want to be the person associated with this risk," or, "let's go talk to the CEO about this because I'm uncomfortable, and neither of us should make this call."

Ben built on this with a powerful analogy about customer service. The difference between saying "unfortunately, the computer won't let me change your ticket" and saying "let me see what I can do... I talked to my supervisor... I tried everything" is profound, even when the answer is ultimately the same. "You're positioning yourself as a partner and not an opponent," he explained. "We are partners trying to figure out the business and legal mix."

The Path Forward

Building high-performance legal teams requires intentional investment in your people. It means having development conversations, creating psychological safety, providing concrete feedback, and positioning legal as a true business partner rather than a reactive function.

The good news? These aren't mysterious qualities that some leaders possess and others don't. They're learnable skills and implementable practices. The question isn't whether your team has potential but whether you're creating the environment for that potential to flourish.

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