Federica Pavesi, General Counsel at AideXa Bank in Italy, challenges the idea that Legal creates value by being involved in every decision, and considers what it means to build a function that is indispensable where judgement matters and unnecessary where it doesn’t.
I hope that, in 5–10 years, one way we will measure the success of a General Counsel is by how many decisions no longer need to reach the Legal team.
That may sound counterintuitive. Legal departments have traditionally demonstrated their importance by being involved: more matters, more processes, more decisions requiring Legal sign-off.
Technology gives us an opportunity to reverse some of that logic.
If we can build clear frameworks, embed legal thinking into processes and give colleagues better tools to make low-risk decisions autonomously, then Legal can spend less time being a mandatory checkpoint and more time on the decisions where judgement genuinely matters.
I don’t think the Legal function of the future should aspire to be everywhere. It should aspire to be indispensable where it matters and unnecessary where it doesn’t.
One thing I try not to do is confuse leadership with having the best idea in the room.
If someone in my team proposes a different way of doing something, my first question is not “Is this how I would do it?” but “Is there a good reason not to try it?”
This sounds simple, but I think it is one of the hardest parts of managing experienced professionals. The longer you have done a job, the easier it becomes to find ten reasons why a new idea might not work. And sometimes you are right. But if every new idea has to survive the experience of the most senior person in the room, very little will ever change.
Of course, there are areas where experimentation is not appropriate. We are lawyers; some mistakes have consequences. But not everything is high risk.
A template, a workflow, the way we use technology, even the structure of a meeting: sometimes the best thing a GC can say is, “I wouldn’t necessarily have done it that way. Let’s try it.”
For me, agility starts there.
I think one underrated quality is being comfortable not winning every argument.
Lawyers are trained to build the strongest case, identify weaknesses in the opposing position and defend their conclusions. Those are valuable skills. But leadership sometimes requires the opposite instinct.
You can give the best legal advice in the room and the organisation may still choose another course because legal risk is only one of the risks it has to consider.
A good GC needs to know when an issue is genuinely non-negotiable and when, after making the risks clear, the decision belongs to someone else.
I think the same applies inside the Legal team. If people learn that challenging the GC means entering an argument they are expected to lose, eventually they stop challenging the GC.
Being right is useful. Creating an environment in which other people are willing to tell you when you might be wrong is much more valuable.
I would change the idea that Legal sits on one side and “the business” sits on the other.
I have never particularly liked the expression “business partner” for lawyers, because it can unintentionally reinforce that distinction: as though the business exists somewhere else and Legal is an external partner to it.
We are part of the business.
Our role is not simply to protect the organisation from what might go wrong. It is to help the organisation achieve what it wants to achieve in a way that is sustainable, responsible and legally sound.
Sometimes that means saying no. Much more often, I think, the interesting question is: if we cannot do it this way, how can we do it?
The best Legal functions are not the ones that prevent organisations from taking risks. They are the ones that help organisations understand which risks are worth taking.
