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 Shopper Monetary Safety Bureau and the Division of Justice. With out the advantage of authorized know-how or streamlined processes, she and her group needed to manually pull 5 years of authorized complaints into spreadsheets for a number of companies.
“It took 5 years,” Tara recalled. “And it price a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands 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 group was buried in doc assortment, the enterprise groups had been pulled from their core work to seek out and ship data. Development slowed whereas compliance consumed the group.
Why Early Engagement Issues
Tara is evident concerning the lesson. “If we had embedded authorized and compliance earlier into operational processes, and had the best know-how in place, we might have diminished the time from years to months and saved hundreds of thousands.”
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 way larger than the price of prevention. Poor recordkeeping, unclear obligations, and lacking approval workflows create the identical form 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 exhibits that figuring out what must be carried out will not be sufficient. You have to doc precisely how info will probably 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 dwell in a silo. - Create A Speedy-Response Information Protocol
Even and not using a subpoena on the horizon, construct a playbook for shortly pulling key info. Establish who owns every dataset and the way it is going to be retrieved. - Use Information To Justify Sources
Tara needs she had offered a stronger case to her CEO and board for know-how funding. “It’s arduous to show the unfavourable,” she stated. “However in the event you can quantify what number of hours and {dollars} are misplaced to guide processes, you may make a compelling argument for change.”
The Cultural Shift
Maybe a very powerful takeaway is mindset. Embedding authorized early requires shifting how the enterprise sees your division. Authorized isn’t just a security web when one thing goes unsuitable. It’s a companion in designing processes that make it much less seemingly that something will go unsuitable within the first place.
As Tara put it, “The extra ready you’re, the extra you possibly can hold the enterprise rising, as a substitute of pulling folks 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 challenge launches or a brand new market opens, don’t watch for 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 truthful, balanced, and market-ready. A serial CEO and authorized tech govt, she beforehand led an organization via a profitable acquisition by LexisNexis. Olga can be a Fellow at CodeX, The Stanford Heart for Authorized 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 Regulation, lectures broadly, 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 Digital Gabby (Higher Parenting Plan), Product Regulation Hub, ESI Movement, and Notes to My (Authorized) Self, every rethinking the observe and enterprise of legislation via know-how, knowledge, and human-centered design. She has authored The Rise of Product Attorneys, Authorized Operations within the Age of AI and Information, Blockchain Worth, and Get on Board, with Visible IQ for Attorneys (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 folks’s relationship with legislation—making it extra accessible, inclusive, data-driven, and aligned with how the world truly works. She can be the host of the Notes to My (Authorized) Self podcast (streaming on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube), and her insights commonly seem in Forbes, Bloomberg Regulation, Newsweek, VentureBeat, ACC Docket, and Above the Regulation. She earned her B.A. and J.D. from UC Berkeley. Comply with her on LinkedIn and X @olgavmack.
