Key takeaways:
- Clarify purpose early – Understand what decision is needed and what the business is trying to achieve before giving advice.
- Set realistic timings – Agree deadlines upfront, manage urgency and be honest about capacity and constraints.
- Define scope and output – Be clear whether the request needs a quick steer, detailed review or options-based advice.
- Communicate simply and practically – Use plain English, focus on risks/impact/recommendations and avoid unnecessary detail.
- Build trust and enable self-service – Strong relationships, visibility and tools/templates reduce repeat demand and improve alignment.
Put a service level agreement in place agreed with the business. And measure your performance against it annually.
Ian White - In-house legal consultant
1. Be clear on timing
This tends to be the first point I try to clarify/ manage. It’s less about saying “I’m snowed under, sorry”, and more about setting/ negotiating realistic timescales – and part of that is understanding how urgent the request actually is. As part of that exercise, I find it’s always useful to educate the business on how long things actually take – e.g. explaining that the seemingly universal assumption of us being able to comply, in-time, with a “can you just look over this 75-page contract quickly before COP” at 4:30pm is certainly a myth!
Timing can be negotiated against quality/ detail too. In other words, if the window of response is particularly tight, I often offer a “high-level” / “exceptions-only” review, instead of a more in-depth one.
As an aside, not timing per se, but certainly linked to it is the power of saying no. We’re all used to getting “legal” requests which aren’t really legal in nature and so, when that happens, be confident and take no shame in declining the request – but, offer alternatives if you can, like redirecting the stakeholder to the appropriate team, or any third-party resources which might help.
2. What’s the end-goal?
Alongside timing, nailing-down the stakeholder’s objective is vital for managing expectations. It may seem obvious what the commercial aims are when you get a request but, once you do some digging, what the business is trying to achieve may not be as first thought.
Ensuring you have that clarity on end-goals helps both us as lawyers and our stakeholders to tailor the depth and speed of our advice, and to focus our input on the key/ relevant aspects only.
3. Ditch the legalese!
Finally, on the broader theme of manging expectations with the end-result of your advice, remember to keep it commercial, practical, and clear. In practice, this means ensuring the likes of:
- translating any complex/ legalese advice into plain English, which can be understood by your stakeholder team.
- offering practical solutions/ alternatives if the through-road isn’t as clear as the business would have hoped.
- using the “BLUF” formula – i.e. provide your headline synopsis “bottom-line-up-front”, with any deeper analysis to follow.
Gethin Bennett - Assistant Legal Counsel, The Royal Mint
This starts long before the first request comes in – when you set out your stall as to what your service provides. An organisation could become paralysed if every decision or every contract has to go through Legal Services, so it’s important to establish where you add value and where your involvement is not adding value.
For the latter category, you should teach the business to fish with training, self-service resources and so on. It’s also important to – collegiately and constructively – remind the organisation that your role is to look after the client organisation, which means sometimes the answer won’t be ‘yes’.
I don’t believe in internal SLAs for managing expectations for legal advice, as sometimes the answer to the question “how long?” is “it depends”, but I do think it’s important to have some rules of thumb e.g. requests for advice will be acknowledged within 3 working days (but you do it in 2).
Each matter will be different, but after intake, it’s just about communication – understanding what your instructing officer wants, why and by when (ideally) allows you to establish the resources involved – then you slightly under-promise but then deliver ahead of timescales.
If something else comes up, you have some padding in your timescales. Chunk the problem up "I’ll get initial thoughts to you by X date, then we may need to discuss further (I have some time that week), before we go back to the other side and hopefully, they’ll get back to us promptly, but we’ll have done our first bit".
Keep the instructing officer updated at key junctures and when you over-deliver, tell them! “Luckily, I was able to do this sooner than I thought” as it means the instructing officer is going to be feeling more positive about it from the second they open the advice or email. When something has to slip (hopefully as the exception) tell them why but set out a new plan and hopefully they will be understanding.
Sam McGinty – Director of Legal Services, University of Nottingham
One of the biggest risks for in-house lawyers is misaligned expectations.
When someone asks for “a quick view”, they may want reassurance, just a green light, or a detailed risk analysis. If we don’t clarify that early, we risk over engineering the answer or under delivering on what they actually needed.
Here’s how I approach it.
1. Clarify the minimum resources needed
I find tickets for legal requests invaluable. No lengthy or complex forms are needed. It is about quickly clarifying the minimum people, data and systems needed to complete the request:
- What decision needs to be made?
- By when?
- What context or documents are either of us missing?
This immediately turns “Can Legal look at this?” into a scoped piece of work with agreed inputs and timelines. Tickets and a unified intake for work requests helps organise tasks to speed up responsiveness on both sides from the requestor and me.
Defining scope, requirements and roles is an ongoing task that needs to keep improving to meet the current context. Get things going, keep them moving and close the matter speedily.
2. Set out what I need and what I’ll provide
Early on, I’m explicit about three things:
- The information I need to give meaningful advice.
- Which roles need to be providing information such as Engineers, Compliance or Security.
- The type of output they’ll receive (risk summary, recommendation, options, or sign off).
Publishing wikis that are easily digestible to product and process owning teams helps them take things forward without needing approval or review.
Stakeholder facing self-service tools can be a lengthy piece of work to implement, but I have found piloting such tools in the Legal team is a good place to start build training data for their long-term development.
Proactive simple framing manages expectations on both sides. It also creates shared ownership on the outcome, as stakeholders are empowered and understand that the legal advice is only as good as the information provided.
This is a key way to avoid frustration on both sides (me and the requestor) from not being able to answer questions and being unclear on the required outcome.
3. Distil complexity into influence
Legal analysis can be intricate. But most requestors don’t need or want the full internal reasoning, they are looking to pair up with someone to deliver a new process or product. Before responding, I ask myself:
- What are they trying to achieve?
- What decision are they making?
- What do they need to hear from me to move forward - are there things they aren’t aware of or need to focus on?
I play back my understanding and summarise complex issues into three sharp bullet points: a good structure is - the risk, the impact, and the recommendation.
The detailed reasoning still matters to lawyers. We need to have worked through it. But we don’t always need to expose every layer. Doing so might actually reduce the impact of the advice. Holding back the complexity is often what makes the advice land. When someone asks for “a quick view”, they may want reassurance, just a green light, or a detailed risk analysis. If we don’t clarify that early, we risk over engineering the answer or under delivering on what they actually needed.
Jonathan Friend - UK & EMEA Lead Senior Privacy Counsel at Wise
Recently, we’ve started sharing regular legal updates and news articles to give the wider business a better sense of what we’re working on. Our latest update covered changes we’re making to our contracts due to the rise in AI use among suppliers, updates linked to new consumer contract guidance, and some of the major projects we’re currently drafting for. It’s been a helpful way to show colleagues the volume and variety of our work — and to reassure them that we’re always thinking ahead on behalf of the business.
We’re also trying to make it easier for people to handle simpler legal tasks themselves. For example, we’ve created guidance on how to complete our NDA template and offer training for teams who use NDAs regularly. It means straightforward matters don’t get held up, and colleagues feel more confident dealing with them.
And whenever someone comes to us with a request, we make a point of checking deadlines and understanding what’s genuinely urgent. We’re honest about our capacity, and if a deadline isn’t realistic, we’ll say so — politely but firmly — and suggest what is workable. That openness helps everyone stay aligned and avoids surprises.
Camilla Beevor – In-house Lawyer at Historic Royal Palaces
There will always be pressure to deliver legal advice faster than can safely be done. Managing expectations is a core part of the in-house lawyers’ role. But it’s easier to manage expectations if you can develop the following with the people you are advising:
- Alignment: are you speaking to your internal clients about what’s critical for them? This is essential for prioritisation.
- Credibility: have you demonstrated a track record of delivering key pieces of advice on time? Have you organised yourself that you are working as efficiently as possible?
- Trust: if people trust you, they will be more forgiving if you need to deprioritise their work when something urgent comes up. But people need to know you to trust you. People hate dealing with a mailbox. Make yourself known and visible to the business. Don’t let your legal front-door become something to hide behind.
- Respect: always be polite but equally don’t set false expectations by over-promising. You do need to be able to challenge unreasonable requests.
Michael Phillips - Head of Legal (Advice and Central Functions), Schroders Personal Wealth
A lot depends here on what the expectations are. Some are straightforward in that it may be simply a question of having a clear communication about timings and questions being asked. But what is more nuanced but also essential to the role of the in-house lawyer is engaging with clients on what they are trying to achieve and what role they think legal advice has to play in developing their plans or reaching a decision.
Getting clarity on this from the outset really helps particularly where the colleague is perhaps new to interacting with lawyers or new to the organisation. It’s always worth establishing whether someone has just been told to “check this with legal” but hasn’t been told why.
The impact and nature of legal advice will vary depending on how early in the decision-making process it has been sought. So, it’s important to establish if this is early on and whether what is being sought is help identifying absolute legal blockers or major risks that will help shape a project to design out friction and uncertainty from legal challenges as much as practicable.
In this situation, it may actually be that the lawyer can expand the client’s expectations of the value that legal advice can add. That could be around scoping out alternatives, helping set realistic timelines for legal approvals/regulatory processes and sharing institutional knowledge of how other teams have tackled similar issues or how challenges have arisen/ been solved in the past.
It’s very different if the lawyer is being brought in at the last moment as a tick box exercise – that will need a different kind of expectation management if the advice can’t deliver an instant “green light”. There needs to be an open and constructive conversation about how much risk is acceptable and how that analysis will be set out for senior decision makers.
Rebecca Staheli - Head of Competition and Regulatory Law, BBC