There’s a version of in-house legal that most organizations have experienced: the team that receives a contract at the finish line, marks it up, and sends it back with twelve issues and a two-week turnaround. Everyone’s frustrated. The deal slows. And somewhere in the process, legal gets the reputation it never quite shakes, the team that blocks things.

But that version of legal is increasingly obsolete. Particularly in high-velocity sectors like managed security services, where deals are complex, contract structures are tripartite, and the commercial and operational models must move in tandem. In that environment, a reactive legal function isn’t just slow. It’s a structural liability.

The shift that’s happening quietly in the most effective organizations is legal becoming part of the deal fabric rather than a checkpoint at the end. That means understanding how revenue is recognized, how services are scoped, and where the friction points in a contracting process tend to accumulate. It means building playbooks and templates that solve recurring problems before they appear, rather than treating each deal as a unique negotiation from scratch.

It also means rethinking what collaboration across functions actually looks like. When legal sits alongside sales and operations rather than downstream from them, something changes. Issues surface earlier. Solutions get built into the process. Deals that would have stalled move forward, not because legal lowered the bar, but because the right questions were asked at the right time.

The implications for how organizations structure their legal teams are significant. A legal function that contributes at that level requires more than technical expertise. It requires commercial fluency, a tolerance for ambiguity, and the ability to influence decisions rather than just advise on them.

SecurityHQ’s Salome Chigubu spoke recently about exactly this kind of evolution, what it takes to practise law as a genuine business partner in a global MSSP environment, and what distinguishes legal teams that accelerate growth from those that inadvertently constrain it.

Her perspective is worth reading in full. Read more.