This article is the first in a four-part series drawn from a webinar delivered by Helen Hannan Evans and Paul Clarke of The Listening People for The Centre for Legal Leadership. While the session focused on in-house legal teams, the principles apply across many expert functions, navigating complexity, alignment, and organisational influence.

Most legal teams work incredibly hard – delivering high-quality advice, handling complexity and keeping the organisation safe. But without a clear, shared legal function strategy, much of that effort remains invisible. That’s when a function can start to feel reactive, stretched and undervalued, even when the work itself is excellent.

In that context, a clearly articulated legal function strategy isn’t a luxury or a slide for away-days. It’s the map and the guardrails for everything the legal function does. It’s how you move from “we’re busy” to “we are driving these specific outcomes for the business”.

Clarity is a competitive advantage

Research consistently shows that when people understand where they’re going, performance follows:

• Employees who understand their organisation’s strategy are significantly more likely to outperform peers.
• Engagement almost doubles when people know how their work connects to the bigger picture.
• Efficiency gains can be enormous when teams focus on a small number of clear priorities rather than a laundry list of tasks.

And yet, one commonly cited study found that fewer than one in four employees can name even two of their organisation’s top priorities. That’s a clarity problem – and for legal, it translates into risk, friction and missed opportunities.

A well-articulated legal function strategy changes that. It gives your function, and the wider business, a shared answer to three vital questions:

1. Why do we exist? (What would the business lose if we weren’t here?)
2. What matters most? (Where are we focusing our limited time, money and attention?)
3. How do we work? (What behaviours and values guide our decisions?)

Closing the perception gap

Most legal leaders know there’s a gap between the value legal creates and how it’s perceived. You see this in comments like:

• “Legal slows us down.”
• “We only hear from them when there’s a problem.”
• “They don’t really understand our commercial reality.”

Meanwhile, inside the function, the picture is very different: teams working flat out, protecting the organisation, enabling deals, keeping the brand out of the headlines.

A clear strategy – and the way you communicate it – is what closes that gap. It reframes legal from “blocker” to “enabler”, from “cost centre” to “strategic partner”.

Strategy in action: from blocker to blueprint

In one global professional services firm we worked with, the initial challenge brought to us was a communication problem. The quality and risk management function, which included legal, needed to communicate more clearly and consistently with a global audience of nearly 200,000 people. However, when we looked more closely, it became clear that the root issue was not communication.

The function did not yet have a clearly articulated strategy. Without clarity on what they stood for, how they created value, or what they needed from the business, no amount of communication would land effectively.

This is what led to the listening work.

We spoke to around 200 stakeholders across service lines, markets and major account teams to understand how the function was experienced day to day, where it added value, where it created friction and what people needed from it.

The insights were eye-opening. The team discovered for the first time that many people perceived them as a blocker. Junior team members were sometimes too quick to say “no” or lacked commercial context, which created frustration. At the same time, there were strongly positive themes. When senior legal and risk leaders were involved early, they were seen as commercial, pragmatic and highly enabling.

With this clarity, we brought the global leadership team together to co-create a strategy that was grounded in what the business needed and what the listening had revealed. Together, they identified six priorities rather than twenty. Each one was directly aligned to the firm’s corporate strategy. Existing initiatives were mapped to these priorities, giving the team a shared line of sight between their work and the outcomes the organisation cared about.

From there, we helped build the communication approach to bring the strategy to life. Within months, the narrative began to shift. People understood why the function existed, when to involve them and why certain requirements or processes mattered. The perception moved from blocker to enabler, and the approach became the blueprint for how other global functions articulated and communicated their strategies.

The key lesson is that communication only works when the strategy is clear. Clarity comes from listening first, then co-creating with your team and only then communicating with consistency and confidence.

What a strong legal function strategy looks like

A strong legal function strategy never sits in isolation. It should be built directly from the organisation’s purpose, values and strategic priorities. The legal team’s purpose and focus areas must support the organisation’s wider goals, not compete with them. When the strategy is rooted in the corporate strategy, there is a clear line of sight between what the business is trying to achieve and how the legal function contributes to that success.

At its simplest, a practical legal strategy has three layers.

1. Purpose: why we exist

This should be a concise, business-focused statement that reflects the organisation’s purpose and describes the value legal brings. Examples include:

• “We enable sustainable commercial growth while protecting what matters.”
• “We turn complex risk into confident decisions.”

The purpose should connect directly to the outcomes the business cares about. It should go beyond describing legal activity and instead articulate the function’s contribution to the organisation’s goals.

2. Strategic priorities: where we focus

These are the areas that matter most over the next few years and should align clearly with the organisation’s strategic priorities. Most legal teams have three to five such priorities. Examples include:

• Business enablement, such as improving deal velocity or supporting new market entry
• Risk and governance, such as regulatory readiness or strengthening controls
• Operational excellence, such as better use of technology, data or external partners
• People and culture, such as building commercial capability or supporting team development

If your team cannot easily remember the priorities, they are unlikely to guide day to day decisions.

3. Values and behaviours: how we work

These describe how the team shows up for the business and should align with the organisation’s values. Examples include:

• Being pragmatic and proportionate
• Working collaboratively and getting involved early
• Staying curious about the business model and risk appetite

Values only matter when they are observable in everyday behaviour and when people can describe what they look like in practice.

When you bring these three layers together on a single page, you create a powerful tool. A legal function strategy should be simple enough to explain in five minutes and memorable enough for people to repeat in many different conversations. Most importantly, it should show a clear connection between the organisation’s strategy and the contribution of the legal team.

From “busy” to “impactful”

Ultimately, a well-articulated strategy enables legal to change the conversation:

• From “We’re overloaded” to “Here are the four things we’re prioritising because they move the dial for the business.”
• From “We’re risk-averse” to “We help you take smart, informed risks while protecting the organisation.”
• From “We’re not understood” to “We’re telling a clear, consistent story about the value we create.”

That’s why strategy matters now. Not as a theoretical exercise, but as the most practical tool you have for aligning your team, influencing stakeholders and elevating the impact of your function.

A well-articulated strategy is one of the most powerful tools a legal function can have. It clarifies purpose, focuses effort and strengthens alignment with the organisation. Most importantly, it gives the business a clear understanding of the value that legal brings.

If you are thinking about developing or refreshing your legal function’s  strategy, this is the moment to start. Begin with clarity, involve your stakeholders and build a strategy that strengthens both your team and the organisation as a whole.

This article is the first in a four part series on articulating and communicating legal strategy. The next three articles explore how to listen effectively, how to engage your team in co-creating a strategy that they own and how to communicate the strategy so that it sticks.

Other articles in this series include:

• Listening: The strategic superpower legal teams often overlook
• From corporate strategy to legal function strategy: How to engage your team in the translation
• Making it stick: How to communicate your legal function strategy so people actually use it

To discuss how we can support you in building a clear legal function strategy, please get in touch with us. We would be very happy to help.

FAQs 

1. Why do legal functions struggle to articulate their strategy clearly?
Because most teams evolve organically based on business demand, firefighting and inherited priorities. Strategy often exists implicitly, but rarely gets written down, tested with stakeholders or communicated consistently.

2. How detailed should a legal strategy be?
Not very. The most effective strategies fit on a single page. If people can’t remember it and repeat it, it won’t drive behaviour.

3. How many strategic priorities should we have?
Usually 3–5. More than that stops being a strategy and becomes a task list. Strategy is fundamentally about choosing what matters most.

4. How often should a legal strategy be updated?
Annually is typical, aligned with the organisation’s planning cycle. But the strategy should remain alive – reviewed quarterly and adapted when business priorities shift.

5. What’s the difference between a legal strategy and the legal team’s BAU work?
BAU work keeps the organisation running. Strategy defines the areas of intentional focus that create the most value, shape behaviour and improve outcomes for the business. Strategy helps the legal team distinguish between the BAU tasks they should and shouldn’t take on.