Why legal teams are becoming a source of strategic value

“Legal departments are showing that they can be leveraged to create value in addition to being a required cost centre.” In a single sentence, Christophe Roquilly, Professor at EDHEC, Honorary Dean of Faculty and Director of the EDHEC Augmented Law Institute, captures a major paradigm shift for the legal profession and how it works within organisations. Sometimes legal times still get confined to a watchdog role. But they are increasingly learning to take the initiative and earning a bigger role in achieving companies’ strategic objectives.

Complexity, Regulation and Instability: New Legal Opportunities

You would rarely find a General Counsel on the executive committee of a major company fifteen years ago. Now it has become the norm. More tellingly, former lawyers increasingly climb to the top of major companies, particularly in the United States, and the model is spreading worldwide (1). This shift reflects the legal profession’s growing role in how companies operate.

“We’re seeing a greater focus on political and regulatory issues, more litigiousness throughout society, criminal issues in business law, and increasingly sophisticated contracts and remedies. This puts legal issues at the centre of corporate strategy and makes them a key factor in the success of every project for an industrial group,” says Sabine Le Gac, who is seeing these changes firsthand at EDF. With the growing regulation of the economy, focusing more on litigation also provides safeguards when it comes to political, economic and social uncertainties. “When you operate in an anxiety-inducing and geopolitically unstable climate, you need to provide answers to key legal issues. How do you provide stability for your contracts? Can you legally withdraw from a country or from a project?” asks Christophe Roquilly.

From Problem Maker to Problem Solver

The role of the legal profession in business is changing as legal work itself becomes more important. “We are moving from a model in which lawyers were meant to protect a company from risks to one where lawyers are called to arbitrate between legal risks and business priorities and help make smart, calculated risks that create value,” says Yannick Piette. Sabine Le Gac agrees: “Lawyers are expected to offer and promote value creating solutions and weigh risks and opportunities themselves.”

This change is happening alongside a kind of cultural transformation. We are Moving away from what Christophe Roquilly calls a “posture of refusal”. The job where you simply said “no” and where your main role was to ensure legal compliance seems to be destined for the dustbin. “People eventually stop seeking you out if you don’t offer solutions. This can create damage because it means decisions are being made that involve legal issues but that don’t appear on the legal department’s radar,” says Christophe Roquilly.

Using law proactively is becoming more widespread as a strategic way to create corporate value. Apple is a well-known case study among EDHEC students. The brand is famous for its proprietary ecosystem that combines hardware, software, services and content. The company is regularly celebrated for its marketing Genius and technological innovation, but less often for its legal foundations. “But it is the legal aspects that support the entire ecosystem thanks to intellectual property, contracts with developers and partners, and complex exit clauses,” says Christophe Roquilly.

Measuring the Value of the Law

As legal work takes on a more central role, the profession is taking on new responsibilities in turn. Sabine Le Gac  describes these new legal officers as being “driven by a desire to contribute to company performance and managed for outcomes.” This involves more transactional forms of evaluation which are designed around costs and benefits—and far removed from lawyers’ traditional DNA. The main challenge is to identify the right indicators to measure how value is created (or not destroyed) by legal work.

Christophe Roquilly describes three main categories of indicators. The first relates to financial value: for example, quantifying savings from executed contractual clauses, better calibrated legal risk, or more effectively managed intellectual property. The second involves strategic value: how legal work contributes to expanding market share or reaffirming leadership. Finally, reputational value can be assessed through a company’s ability to avoid litigation, or by demonstrating a level of compliance that reassures an ecosystem of partners.

We are already seeing the need for these indicators in the field. Yannick Piette points to success fees, which, combined with a fixed fee, “account for a lawyer’s added value and align their interests with those of the client”. Sabine Le Gac also emphasises the growing importance of time as a factor in legal evaluation. This is also particularly valuable to EDF’s new CEO, Bernard Fontana. “Lead time is the time that elapses between the beginning and end of a task. It has become a key indicator for setting limits on negotiation timelines, for example, and forces people to prioritise,” says the General Counsel.

New Frontiers in Legal Innovation

Historically, the legal sector has not been closely associated with innovation. Now it is emerging in every direction. Christophe Roquilly offers a broad definition: “Innovation involves creating new legal solutions, new types of contracts and new structures. It affects how the job works, the degree to which it is centralised or in the field. It involvestechnological resources, digitalisation, and  integrating AI into value chains. It also involves the way we manage talent, teams and legal expertise.”

AI is one of the issues that generates the most questions, fears and hopes when it comes to the role of legal professions in companies. “The legal community is unanimous,” says Sabine Le Gac. “AI is already disrupting the way we work. It frees up lawyers’ time so they can focus on complex matters which require group work and the ability to persuade people.” Yannick Piette also highlights that AI is also making transformative changes through specialised models like Harvey (2). “I’m partner, which didn’t prevent me from completing the equivalent of three weeks of AI training over separate modules. Everyone must do it, and we assume that younger lawyers are going to have to a certain level of ease with the tool.”

The EDHEC Augmented Law Institute recommends continuous benchmarking and testing to facilitate uptake of emerging technologies. Monitoring can be done among peers, within bar associations, or through professional organisations such like AFJE, the French Association of In-House Counsel. It can also be done in places like the Legal Changers club (3), launched by the EDHEC Augmented Law Institute in partnership with Septeo Legal Suite, which allows the legal ecosystem to exchange best practice.

Lawyers’ ability to innovate is closely linked to a broader culture of agility. “It is essential to encourage risk-taking and allow for experimentation. That is not a given since, in principle, lawyers are trained to protect against risk and keep things secure,” says Christophe Roquilly. The Director of the EDHEC Augmented Law Institute quotes Robert Hersant, a famous French media owner, who wrote in 1987: “To avoid being one war behind, one must be one law ahead.”

Behind the witticism sits a forward-looking lawyer. “Agility means giving yourself the ability to take a step sideways. It is about thinking ahead, directing investment more intelligently and better informing technological choices,” says Christophe Roquilly. Sabine Le Gac adds a nuance: “In reality, lawyers have always innovated without knowing it. They get called in for every new project or challenge and their job is to find solutions, always new ones.”

Legal Leadership Comes of Age

As the legal function becomes more strategic and innovative, its position in the org chart is evolving accordingly. It is moving from a supporting role to full alignment with corporate strategy.

“We are moving towards roles that are increasingly integrated at company and global levels and which are called to set out roadmaps to support company strategy, from executive management down to operations,” explains Sabine Le Gac. The same movement is visible at project level. Lawyers now get consulted starting at the design stage, and not just when it is time to “draw up the paperwork and put things into legal shape”, she says. “We are co-designers and architects of solutions, both for legal departments and for executive management,” says Yannick Piette.

For leadership through the law to become effective, however, it needs to be underpinned by a degree of initiative. “When it comes to communication and influence, in particular, in-house legal teams must not apologise for existing. They need to assert themselves and show they are indispensable,” says Christophe Roquilly. The cultural battle starts in education, and it is part of the mission of the EDHEC Augmented Law Institute. “EDHEC’s programmes try to show both those who intend to pursue a legal career and others that the law underpins most major business decisions,” says Christophe Roquilly.

References

(1) « L’extraterritorialité du droit américain : un levier de domination économique mondiale », Portail de l’Intelligence économique, Calypso Hugon, 27 mai 2025 - https://www.portail-ie.fr/univers/2025/lextraterritorialite-du-droit-americain/

(2) Harvey is a generative AI platform specialising in law, which offers bespoke large language models to law firms and in-house legal teams.

(3) The Legal Changers Club, launched by the EDHEC Augmented Law Institute in partnership with Septeo Legal Suite, is a community of leaders bringing together influential and innovative heads of legal affairs – ‘legal changers’ from companies across various sectors – to share ideas, innovate and shape the future of legal practice - https://alll.legal/club-legal-changers/

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