Here’s what I’d do if I was starting as a GC in 2025

? Global pandemic

? Inflation crisis

? AI revolution

Lawyers have had an eventful few years. COVID forced 5 years of tech adoption in a few months; the inflationary downturn gave us perhaps the most acute expression yet of ‘do more with less’. AI threatens, or rather promises, to change the nature of legal work entirely.

So how should a GC, or Head of Legal (or otherwise most senior in-house lawyer) approach starting a new role in 2025, and how does that differ from 5 years ago?

(p.s. If you’re looking for a new role, check out our curated in-house legal jobs board)

The old way

Here’s a pretty solid plan for a new GC in 2020:

1. Start off with a 90-day plan template. Meet all senior leadership ASAP.
2. Unearth what’s on fire, lightly smouldering and barely even warm
3. Collect together your historic contracts universe into a spreadsheet
4. Set up a training session / sessions for your colleagues on why contracts create risk and need to run through legal
5. Set up training sessions for other key risks - data privacy, any regulatory issues, and so on
6. If you’re big enough, evaluate your legal operations maturity versus the CLOC framework to spot gaps
7. Start thinking about a beauty parade for your law firm panel (and get the budget request in)
8. Work out the breaking point at which your task volume can prove that successful business case for a paralegal or junior counsel

That seems perfectly reasonable. It’s the foundational beginning of many an impactful legal department.?

But given how much has happened in recent years (I didn’t even include the land wars and failed banks), it’s not how I’d set out for success as a new GC in 2025.?

The new way

It was perfectly rational a few years back to start out with an understanding of ‘how things have always been done’, and, dare I say it, to hoard tasks to make the case for more headcount sooner rather than later.

Things have changed. Here’s the new way:

1. Think from first principles about the legal tasks in your company

Legal tasks were happening, somehow, the week before you joined - they can run that way for an extra week or two while you take the time to dig into their root causes. Go slow at first so you can go faster - much faster - later. Front-loading your understanding of the organisational risk appetite fits here.

2. Look for opportunities to put legal tools safely in the hands of non-lawyers…

Why make a painstaking case to bring one person into legal when you could invite the whole company into the team instead? Business colleagues don’t want to be blocked by legal anymore than you want to block them.?

Why make a painstaking case to bring one person into legal when you could invite the whole company into the team instead?

If you can find ways safely to let them self-serve, you can stop a whole swathe of lower-risk work from hitting your desk in the first place. AI is making this easier by the day. A technology strategy is more viable and faster to implement than a hiring strategy in 2025.

3. … but model a healthy scepticism about accuracy and compliance

You might be able to get dozens of colleagues cosplaying as paralegals and contract administrators, self-serving on their commercial agreements and negotiations. But what they can’t do is instinctively subject new AI tools and processes to the ‘sniff test’ of an experienced lawyer.?

Everyone from the most junior salesperson to the CTO is going to be looking to legal to be the grown-up in the room when it comes to privacy and compliance. Get a grip on the risks and opportunities presented by your company’s AI footprint. Set the tone early.

4. Actively experiment with models and tools

We’re running a survey at the moment and overwhelmingly it looks like the CEOs and CFOs that GCs report to want them to use AI more than they do right now. So make sure you’re informed - what’s Claude best at vs ChatGPT? What are the issues with DeepSeek? Does Perplexity hallucinate?

Overwhelmingly it looks like the CEOs and CFOs that GCs report to want them to use AI more than they do right now

You can bet that the GCs actually breaking ground here (hi Tom Hambrett , Andrew Cooke ) are all over the latest developments. The difference is that they are ‘doing’ while others are just talking and researching. Follow their lead and default to action.

5. Don’t go it alone

The swerve from an environment with tonnes of lawyers in a law firm to one or two in a mid-market company can be dramatic to experience. Even GCs in their 4th or 5th role can find themselves feeling isolated when it comes to a particular head-scratching problem only a lawyer should tackle.?

Thankfully, nowadays there are lots of communities for like-minded in-house lawyers to get together and leverage their collective wisdom. I’ll mention our own - join us at juro.com/community - but our friends at Crafty Counsel do an excellent job, as well as US equivalents like the L Suite.?

Fundamentally it’s a really exciting time to be starting a new in-house role. AI is reimagining legal in real time, and there’s nowhere you can drive that change faster than in a senior in-house role at a forward-thinking company.?

What would you do differently today versus in 2025?