Leading Beyond Legal: How GCs Navigate Decisions Outside Their Expertise

Every general counsel faces a familiar tension: the business needs to move fast, take calculated risks, and capture market opportunities. Meanwhile, Legal's mandate is to minimize the downside associated with those risks and protect the company from incurring liabilities. It's a balance that requires more than legal acumen—it demands strategic judgment, often in domains far beyond traditional legal expertise.

Consider this scenario: Your product team wants to launch a new AI-powered feature that will dramatically improve customer experience. The engineering lead assures you it's "safe," but you're asking about data lineage, model explainability, and potential bias. You're not a machine learning engineer, but you are trying your best. The CEO wants a decision by end of week. How do you provide counsel that protects the business without becoming the "Department of No"?

This is the modern reality for in-house legal leaders. You're expected to weigh in on technical architecture, operational risk, cybersecurity protocols, and emerging technologies—areas where your formal training provides limited guidance. The question is how you'll lead through them.

The Influence Challenge: Leading Without Technical Authority

The most effective general counsels have learned to exert influence beyond the boundaries of their legal expertise. This isn't about becoming a pseudo-CTO —it's about developing frameworks that allow you to ask the right questions, identify material risks, and guide decisions even when you can't personally validate every technical detail.

This approach requires translating legal concerns into the language of business impact. When advising on compliance requirements for a new market entry, one GC tracked customer churn rates and correlated them with regulatory friction points. By presenting legal guidance alongside customer lifetime value data, he transformed abstract regulatory risk into concrete business metrics that resonated with the executive team.

The lesson: Influence comes from understanding the business's pressure points and framing legal guidance in those terms, not from asserting authority based on title alone.

Recognizing When You're Beyond Your Depth

One of the most underrated skills for a general counsel is knowing when you're operating outside your area of mastery, and managing that uncertainty without undermining your credibility.

The early warning signs are often subtle: terminology that doesn't quite fit your mental model, assumptions about how systems work that you can't verify, or business pressures that seem disconnected from the legal analysis you're being asked to provide. A valuable diagnostic question is simply: "Why now?" This often surfaces the real drivers behind a request and helps you understand whether you're solving a legal problem or a business problem disguised as a legal one.

The instinct when facing ambiguity is often to either overcompensate with false confidence or to defer entirely to technical experts. Neither builds credibility. Instead, effective GCs learn to communicate uncertainty as a shared challenge rather than a personal limitation.

"Frame ambiguity as shared risk, not personal lack. Use structured clarity: here's what we know, what we don't, and what matters most."

This structured approach to uncertainty preserves credibility because it demonstrates clear thinking even when all the answers aren't available. It signals that you're comfortable operating in gray areas—a critical skill for senior leadership.

Practical Frameworks for Decision-Making Under Uncertainty

When technical depth is limited, disciplined frameworks become essential. Here are three that consistently prove valuable:

1. The Materiality × Likelihood Matrix

This simple tool helps prioritize when you're drowning in potential risks. Not every technical vulnerability or compliance gap deserves the same attention. By plotting risks along these two axes, you can quickly identify which issues demand immediate action versus which can be monitored over time.

2. Reversible vs. Irreversible Decisions

Borrowed from Amazon's decision-making philosophy, this framework is particularly useful under time pressure. Some decisions can be easily reversed if they prove wrong (reversible), while others lock in consequences that are difficult or impossible to undo (irreversible). Irreversible decisions like those involving data privacy, IP assignment, or regulatory commitments deserve slower, more careful analysis. Reversible decisions can often move forward with lighter-touch governance.

One GC applied this framework when the business needed rapid guidance on a partnership structure. She offered a phased approval: "We can greenlight the commercial terms today, but I need validation on the data-sharing provisions before we sign. Here's what I need to confirm and by when." This balanced speed with accuracy, giving the business forward momentum while protecting critical risk areas.

3. The Fiduciary and Disclosure Anchor

When all else fails, anchoring decisions around fiduciary duties and disclosure obligations provides a reliable North Star. Ask: "What would we need to disclose about this decision to our board or investors? What would they need to know to fulfill their oversight responsibilities?" This framework helps cut through technical complexity to identify what truly matters.

Navigating AI and Emerging Technology Risk

Perhaps nowhere is the expertise gap more pronounced than in artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Legal teams are being asked to evaluate risks in systems that even their creators don't fully understand.

The promise of AI in legal operations is significant: faster contract review, more efficient due diligence, improved research capabilities. But these tools also introduce new categories of risk that require careful management.

Consider the GC who discovered that her team's over-reliance on AI-powered contract drafting was eroding institutional knowledge. Junior lawyers were accepting AI suggestions without understanding the underlying playbook, and the team was losing the ability to explain why certain provisions mattered. The efficiency gains were real, but so was the gradual hollowing out of legal judgment.

Or take the example of calibrating AI redlines for commercial relationships. Yes, AI can identify every technical deficiency in a contract. But should it? One legal team found that their AI tool was generating 30+ redlines on agreements with key strategic partners—redlines that were legally correct but commercially tone-deaf. The team had to develop new guidelines for when to override AI recommendations to preserve important business relationships.

The risks can be more fundamental: one company's AI due diligence tool, designed to streamline document review, automatically aggregated sensitive materials into a shared folder that wasn't properly secured. The efficiency tool became a data security incident.

The key insight: AI amplifies both good judgment and poor processes. The technology doesn't replace the need for business and human context, it makes that context more critical.

Building Systems for Long-Term Credibility

The most effective general counsels don't just navigate individual decisions—they build systems that make better decisions more repeatable.

This starts with knowing how to leverage external expertise without signaling loss of control. When bringing in outside counsel or technical specialists, frame it as confidence expansion rather than substitution. One GC routinely pre-aligns messaging with her executive sponsor before engaging experts: "We're bringing in cybersecurity counsel to pressure-test our assumptions and identify blind spots—this strengthens our analysis"

Developing decision playbooks is another high-leverage investment. After several product launches revealed recurring data dependency issues, one legal team now requires a one-page data map for every new feature. This simple tool surfaces privacy and security risks early, when they're easier to address, and has become a standard part of the product development process.

Post-mortems offer another opportunity to build credibility. When a contract negotiation dragged on longer than necessary, one GC used the post-mortem to identify unnecessary approval layers. The team developed a streamlined template that cut negotiation time by 40% for similar deals. By turning a stumble into visible improvement, Legal demonstrated its value as a strategic partner.

Some teams are even using AI to examine their own biases. One GC discovered through data analysis that her team consistently settled disputes more favorably when represented by larger, more prestigious law firms, even when case merits were similar. This insight led to blind review processes for settlement recommendations that removed firm reputation from initial evaluations.

The Path Forward

The demands on general counsels will only intensify. Technology will continue to evolve faster than regulation. Business models will push into new domains where legal precedent is thin. The companies that succeed will be those whose legal leaders can operate effectively in this ambiguity.

This doesn't mean becoming an expert in everything. It means developing the frameworks, relationships, and judgment to guide decisions even when you can't personally validate every technical detail. It means knowing when to move fast and when to slow down. It means building systems that make good decisions more repeatable and learning from the decisions that didn't go as planned.

Most importantly, it means recognizing that your value as a general counsel extends far beyond your legal expertise. Your value lies in your judgment, your strategic thinking, and your ability to help the business move forward confidently, even when the path isn't entirely clear.

Take a look at your current legal playbooks and decision frameworks. Where are they optimized for legal correctness at the expense of business velocity? Where might they benefit from incorporating business metrics, technical checkpoints, or clearer criteria for when decisions can move fast versus when they need deeper analysis? The most effective legal teams build systems that protect the business and enable it to move—not one at the expense of the other.

Sandstone provides the tools needed to build and execute optimized playbooks that identify legal risks without compromising business velocity. Use our free playbook building tool to streamline your playbook generation and rollout.