Legal team - striking a balance between business and legitimacy
When you handle multiple companies and you are the only common thread amongst those companies, it becomes very challenging to prioritize the work. Everyone's urgency becomes your emergency. Sorting the tasks and compartmentalizing the requests are two very important skills that come in handy. However, it is very hard to make a call and categorise them into buckets.
The business folks have very weird tendencies, they stave off legal team as long as they can. Once the issue blows up then the legal team is looped in with a squeezed timeline. Each legal problem has various facets. A company signs more than a hundred documents and several of them are interconnected. All the documents like pieces of a puzzle need to be juxtaposed in a manner that covers the cracks. A single miss can render the response useless and the company will face the consequences.
Rushed legal work is expensive legal work and we should avoid both. As a professional, I respect the pressure and squeezed timelines a business team faces. However, a legal team should be extended a similar professional courtesy. We cannot trivialise a legal issue which has a tendency to blow out of proportion at times.
In addition, legal teams should also understand that they cannot be a bottleneck for any transaction and therefore they should establish an effective communication method to ensure that the rights things are being prioritised. If business is flourishing, everyone will get paid; otherwise we all will be looking for another job because the legal team failed to analyse the real risk and the deal fell through due to inordinate delays.