Every legal team has been told to benchmark, copy, and standardize what others are doing. The phrase “best practice” feels safe. It signals professionalism and alignment with industry norms. Yet in reality, it can become a trap. Best practices in legal often freeze the way teams think about value, they optimize the past rather than prepare for the future.
By the time a process becomes a best practice, it is already built for a world that has moved on. In a fast-changing landscape, what was once prudent quickly becomes rigid. The danger isn’t in following best practices, it lies in mistaking them for strategy. As a result, legal leaders who rely on yesterday’s playbook eventually find themselves invisible to today’s opportunities.
When Best Practices Turn into Stagnation
Best practices in legal operations reward conformity. They make things predictable but often predictable in the worst way. You stop asking questions. You stop listening for weak signals of change. Meetings become about compliance with the process, not progress in outcomes.
For General Counsels, this mindset quietly erodes influence. Business leaders move faster and expect flexibility, while legal stays anchored to systems designed for another decade. The cost isn’t just inefficiency. It’s trust. Once the business senses that legal’s answers are outdated or procedural, it stops asking the right questions altogether.
To stay relevant, GCs must realize that certainty is often the enemy of growth. What looks safe on paper can be dangerous in practice when the market shifts underneath it. The mindset that once made law firms dependable can make in-house teams irrelevant if it is not updated for today’s speed of change.
Replace Best Practices in Legal with Next Practices
Forward-looking legal teams have started using a new term: “next practice.” It captures a mindset of active learning. Instead of asking, “What is everyone else doing?” they ask, “What should we be doing next?”
Next practice is not about rejecting standards. It is about treating standards as temporary. Every process, policy, or template should have an expiration date. The expectation is that everything can and should evolve.
A GC who operates in this way builds a department that learns continuously. Every quarter, pick one area, contracting, compliance, governance, AI policy, and question its assumptions.
For example, ask: What’s new in the market? What do our clients need now? How can this be faster, clearer, or safer for the business?
The shift is subtle but profound. Instead of chasing best practices, you start designing next practices that are specific to your business context, regulatory environment, and risk appetite.
Moving Beyond Best Practices in Legal Departments
To move beyond best practices in legal departments, treat your department as an adaptive system. The transition is cultural, structural, and metric-driven.
1. Build Structured Curiosity
Institutionalize learning. Add “What changed since last quarter?” to your leadership agenda. Ask business partners where friction still exists and fix those pain points before they grow.
2. Make Every Template and Policy a Living Product
Everything: policies, playbooks, templates—should have version numbers, owners, and review cycles. If a clause hasn’t been touched in two years, it’s time for an audit. This keeps content relevant and aligned with evolving laws and expectations.
3. Redefine Metrics of Maturity
Traditional metrics like contract volume or response time matter, but they don’t measure adaptability. Add indicators such as percentage of updated documents, processes improved in the last six months, or cycle time reduction after reinvention. Use these metrics to prove to your executive team that legal’s innovation is measurable and business-aligned.
4. Empower Decision Makers at the Edge
Some of the best next practices come from those closest to the work. Give junior lawyers and cross-functional partners permission to challenge outdated norms. Reward experimentation and thoughtful risk-taking.
The Contracting Example
A global SaaS company once relied on an “industry standard” MSA, copied clauses, outdated indemnities, and privacy terms from a pre-AI world. It was compliant but irrelevant.
The GC initiated a quarterly “next practice” review. Each cycle, one clause was examined through three lenses: legal accuracy, business value, and user experience. Within a year, the MSA was 40 percent shorter, deal velocity improved by 30 percent, and escalations dropped significantly.
The win wasn’t just a better contract, it was a team that learned to evolve as part of its routine work.
Lessons from the LegalTech Market
The same principle explains why most “best practice” legal tech tools struggle to scale. Investors are not funding static compliance platforms. They fund systems designed to adapt. The startups that thrive build tools capable of evolving with customer feedback, regulatory change, and workflow data.
Your legal department is no different. If your systems cannot learn, you will always lag behind the business functions that can. Flexibility, not compliance, is the new signal of competence.
How to Lead Beyond Best Practices
Start by questioning everything that feels comfortable. Pick one recurring process and ask how it could be simplified or automated.
Retire one outdated template each quarter and replace it with a shorter, cleaner, data-driven version.
Design “sunset reviews” for policies and handbooks to prevent organizational drift.
Host internal “innovation audits” to spot where legal is protecting history instead of enabling the future.
Share success metrics openly with your business counterparts so they see legal as an accelerator, not a bottleneck.
The New Definition of Excellence
Legal tech investors have already moved on from best practices. They no longer fund static compliance tools, they invest in adaptive systems that learn, update, and improve.
Excellence used to mean consistency and precision. Now it means adaptability and speed. The leaders who thrive won’t be those who follow best practices in legal perfectly, but those who replace them before anyone else does.
Best practices in legal maintain. Next practices multiply. The choice is between preserving what once worked and creating what will work next.
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At OlgaMack.com, shares bold insights, hard-earned lessons, and forward-thinking strategies to help in-house legal professionals thrive. As a visionary in-house legal technology leader, strategist, innovator, and coach, Olga is redefining what it means to lead with purpose, and how Focus as a Legal Advantage can shape the future of the profession.
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