The In-House Lawyer Has Changed Has Your Hiring Kept Up?

Legal judgement no longer lives primarily in individual lawyers reviewing documents. It lives in systems. In templates and playbooks and approval workflows and contract libraries. The moments when a lawyer decides how far a deal can progress without escalation, or how a recurring commercial problem should be handled—those decisions, embedded into process, do more to shape how an organisation manages risk than any single negotiation ever will.

Charlie Bromley-Griffiths, senior legal counsel at Conga, articulated this shift in Legal Futures this week, and it captures something I've been watching happen across every sector we recruit into for the past few years.

That shift has profound implications for how organisations should be approaching in house legal jobs. And I think a lot of businesses across commercial, public sector, and sport, are hiring for the job that used to exist rather than the job that actually needs doing now.

What Has Changed

Two forces have accelerated this transformation: AI tools embedding into commercial workflows, and relentless pressure on in house legal teams to do more with less. The EU AI Act came into force in 2024, with comprehensive UK legislation following. The regulatory environment around AI alone has fundamentally changed what it means to be a senior in-house lawyer.

The best in-house lawyers today are not just technically excellent. They are architects. They design the frameworks through which their organisations take on commercial risk. They understand that by the time a specific contract reaches them for review, many of the most important decisions about how risk is allocated have already been made; by the templates, by the playbook, by the approval thresholds they set six months ago.

That is a fundamentally different profile from the in-house lawyer of fifteen years ago. And it is a profile that looks quite different across different sectors.

AI and Technology Companies: Legal Is Now a Product Function

This transformation plays out differently across sectors, but nowhere more dramatically than in technology.

A Thomson Reuters survey of General Counsel across 17 countries found that 21% have changed their hiring criteria specifically to require AI experience. Nearly a third of in-house legal departments have already implemented an AI tool, and 54% are considering adding one or more in the next 12 to 24 months. The technology sector led all in-house hiring growth in 2024, with a 29% year-on-year increase, driven specifically by demand for legal support in IP, data, and digital infrastructure.

For technology businesses, the in-house lawyer is increasingly a product-adjacent function. They are setting the legal parameters within which AI systems operate. They are deciding what the algorithm is and is not permitted to do. They are drafting the data governance frameworks that determine how customer information is handled at scale. When something goes wrong (and with AI-driven commercial processes things do go wrong at a scale and speed that no individual reviewer could manage) the question of who designed the underlying structure, and what judgements they built into it, becomes a legal and regulatory question of the first order.

The GCs who are thriving in technology businesses right now are not waiting for problems to reach them. They are working proactively. They are in the room when the product is being designed. They are the person who, as Bromley-Griffiths puts it, shapes "which ideas never progress far enough to appear in a contract."

What this means for hiring

Technology businesses need lawyers who are commercially fluent, operationally minded, and genuinely literate in the technology their business is building. Whether you're an AI-native startup, SaaS platform, or established tech enterprise expanding your legal function, the requirement is the same.

Legal tech experience matters, as does contract management platform experience, but the ability to think systemically, to build frameworks rather than just apply them, matters most of all. These lawyers exist, they're in high demand, and they're not always the most obvious hire from a CV, but they are findable.

Professional Sports and Motorsport Legal as Commercial Partner, Not Gatekeeper

We do a significant volume of in-house legal recruitment into sport and motorsport, and it remains one of the most enquired-about sectors we work in. The reason, I think, is that sport makes the shift Bromley-Griffiths describes unusually visible.

Formula 1 teams, Premier League clubs, and major sports organisations are commercial businesses operating at extraordinary speed, with deal cycles measured in weeks rather than months, broadcast rights worth hundreds of millions of pounds, sponsorship structures of staggering complexity, and IP portfolios that need active commercial management across multiple jurisdictions. There is no version of that environment where reactive, document-by-document legal review is sufficient.

The sports businesses that have understood this have built legal functions that sit at the heart of commercial decision-making. Research on sports organisations noted that General Counsel in the sector had become integrated across departments, helping leadership navigate risk rather than block deals. That framing has become standard. The in-house sports lawyer is in the commercial strategy meeting. They are advising on whether a partnership structure makes sense before anyone has drafted a term sheet.

Formula 1 has been particularly active in hiring legal counsel at senior level recently. The roles being filled are genuinely broad: commercial contracts, sponsorship, e-commerce, branding, licensing, data rights. What connects them is that they require lawyers who understand the business deeply enough to make real-time judgements without escalation because, at the pace F1 operates, there is often no time for anything else.

Premier League clubs are similarly active. The legal complexity of a modern football club; transfer agreements, broadcasting revenue distribution, image rights, compliance with financial fair play regulations, player contracts intersecting with commercial arrangements, data protection obligations across a fanbase of millions, has grown to a point where a well-resourced in-house legal function is a competitive necessity.

What this means for hiring

Sports organisations often ask us whether sector experience is essential when evaluating in house legal jobs. It rarely is, at the level of technical legal skills. The commercial contracts lawyer who has spent five years at a media and entertainment business, or a TMT practice, brings skills that transfer directly. What matters far more is commercial instinct, the ability to operate in a fast-moving environment where decisions need to be made without complete information, and genuine comfort operating as a business partner rather than a gatekeeper. If your organisation is thinking about bringing in-house legal resource for the first time, or expanding an existing team, the talent pool is wider than you might think.

Local Authorities and Public Sector Bodies The Underreported Hiring Trend

As a general counsel recruiter, this is the trend I want to spend a moment on, because it is the one least covered in mainstream legal media, and it is real and growing.

We have seen a marked uptick in enquiries from local authorities and public sector bodies at senior legal level over the past 12 to 18 months. We recently worked on a number of police mandates and have consistently been seeing an increasing number of Director of Legal Services, Monitoring Officer, and Deputy CLO mandates from councils and public authorities that are dealing with challenges that have no easy precedent.

The pressures on local authority legal functions right now are unlike anything in recent memory. Budget constraints have stripped teams in some councils to the point of fragility, at exactly the moment when the legal complexity of what those authorities are being asked to do has increased substantially. Regeneration programmes. Procurement reform following recent legislation. Housing delivery under renewed political pressure. Adult social care responsibilities. Climate and planning obligations. The intersection of AI with public decision-making which carries specific public law implications that private sector businesses do not face in the same way.

The challenge Bromley-Griffiths identifies, that legal judgement lives in process design and that the architecture of those processes is where real risk management happens, is arguably more acute in the public sector than anywhere else. A local authority's legal team is not just managing commercial risk. It is, in many cases, the mechanism through which the authority ensures it is acting lawfully at all. Decisions made at scale, through delegated functions and automated processes, carry judicial review risk if the legal infrastructure behind them is not properly designed and maintained.

Senior legal leaders in the public sector are also facing a talent retention problem that the private sector does not have in quite the same way. While senior in-house private sector salaries increased 15-20% over the past three years, public sector pay rose 3-4%. The lawyers who stay in public sector legal are often doing so out of genuine commitment to what the work means, but that commitment is not unlimited, and the pipeline of senior public sector legal talent is thinner than it should be.

What this means for hiring

Public sector and local authority organisations looking to make senior legal appointments need to think carefully about what they are offering beyond salary. The opportunity to lead, to shape governance, to build something lasting—these things matter to the best candidates. So does flexibility, which the public sector has often been more progressive on than the private sector. So does the nature of the work itself: a Chief Legal Officer at a major public authority is doing work of genuine societal importance. That's a powerful differentiator in competitive hiring markets, yet it's consistently underutilised in recruitment messaging.

The Question Every Board Should Be Asking

Bromley-Griffiths closes his piece with a challenge: that how legal work is described and evaluated needs to keep pace with how judgement is actually being exercised.

For organisations doing the hiring, the implication is clear. The in-house lawyer who adds the most value in 2025 is not the one who reviews the most contracts. It's the one who designs the processes through which contracts are managed, who sets the commercial parameters that colleagues operate within, who shapes decisions before they become problems.

How to identify this in interviews

Ask candidates to walk you through a process they built rather than a deal they closed. Probe how they would structure legal intake for your business, not how they'd handle a specific contract. Listen for candidates who talk about eliminating legal bottlenecks, not just mitigating legal risk. Specifically: "Describe a recurring legal issue you solved by changing a process rather than reviewing more documents." The quality of their answer will tell you everything.

What we look for

At JMC Legal, as a specialist legal counsel recruiter, we assess candidates on evidence of systems thinking, have they automated workflows, designed playbooks, trained non-legal teams? We test for commercial fluency by asking how they've enabled deals, not just protected the business from them. And we reference-check for collaboration with non-legal functions, not just technical legal competence.

When you hire a General Counsel, Legal Director, or first in-house counsel, you're buying a judgement architect. The question is whether your job description, interview process, and expectations reflect that. Most don't, yet. That's the gap worth closing.

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