Legal readability: why in-house legal functions lose influence and how to get it back

Alexandre Verrien, former Legal Director France & Europe at Dell Technologies, examines why in-house legal teams often lose influence despite growing capability and argues that the real issue is not competence, but readability.

In-house legal teams have never been more competent.

More specialisation.
More tools.
More frameworks.
More technology.

And yet, across organisations, the same frustration keeps coming back:

“We are involved too late.”
“Leadership doesn’t really understand what we do.”
“We’re good but not influential.”

This is not a capability problem.
It is a readability problem.

Competence is no longer enough

In most organisations, legal teams are technically strong but systemically opaque.

They deliver quality.
They mitigate risk.
They protect the business.

Yet they remain peripheral to strategic decisions.

Why?

Because the organisation cannot decode their value.

Not because that value does not exist but because it is not legible at decision speed.

Readability is not communication. It is structure.

Let’s be clear.

Readability is not:

• personal branding,
• visibility for visibility’s sake,
• marketing wrapped in legal language.

Readability means this: can the organisation understand without effort:

• who legal is,
• what legal contributes,
• when legal should be involved,
• and how legal accelerates decisions rather than slows them down?

If the answer is “it depends”, then legal is already too late.

A useful comparison: finance never has this problem

Finance is not necessarily more talented than legal.

But finance is perfectly readable.

Everyone understands:

• what finance owns,
• what finance produces,
• when finance must be involved,
• and what happens if it isn’t.

Legal, by contrast, often operates in a grey zone:

• overlapping scopes,
• unclear ownership,
• inconsistent entry points,
• and messages that change depending on who is asking.

This is not subtlety.
This is noise.

What happens when legal becomes readable (a real example)

When I took over the legal function in France at Dell, the issue was not competence.

It was opacity.

Overlapping legal perimeters, teams presented as complementary but perceived as competing, business leaders unsure who to contact, for what, and when.

The first move was not technical.

It was structural and narrative:

• clarify responsibilities,
• assume individual strengths,
• designate clear legal counterparts per business line,
• embed legal upstream, not at the end of the chain.

That structure was then explicitly explained to the executive team.

The message was simple:
Legal is not here to slow decisions down.
Legal is here to secure the business trajectory early.

The effects were immediate:

• earlier involvement,
• fewer frictions,
• clearer recognition of individual contributions,
• and a fundamentally different perception of legal.

Nothing changed in competence.
Everything changed in readability.

The pattern is always the same

Across organisations, the same causal chain appears again and again:

Lack of opportunities
⬇
Lack of recognition
⬇
Unclear posture and authority
⬇
Low readability

These are not separate problems.
They are mechanically linked.

You cannot recognise what you cannot understand.
You cannot trust what you cannot predict.

Readability is a leadership skill, not a personality trait

This matters:

Readability is not about being louder, more charismatic, or more extroverted.

It is a professional skill built on three pillars:

1. Professional identity

Clear scope. Clear role. Clear ownership.
Not in theory, in this organisation.

2. Perceived maturity

The ability to calibrate messages, risk and recommendations to the right decision level.

3. System acceleration

Not blocking. Not dominating.
Making decisions possible.

These dimensions evolve.
They can be assessed.
They can be worked on.

Nothing here is fixed.

This applies far beyond General Counsel

This is not only a GC issue.

It affects:

• in-house lawyers,
• legal operations,
• hybrid legal roles,
• extended legal teams,
• any legal function operating in a complex system.

Wherever legal interacts with the business, the same question applies:

Are we understandable, usable, and predictable at the right moment?

The real payoff: internal and external

Internally

Readable legal functions:

• are involved earlier,
• see their recommendations accepted faster,
• gain natural access to governance,
• are trusted without over-explaining.

Recognition follows clarity.

Externally

Readable legal professionals attract:

• speaking invitations,
• teaching opportunities,
• mentoring requests,
• strategic collaborations.

Not because they promote themselves but because people know what they stand for and why they matter.

Influence follows clarity

In 2026, influence will not belong to the loudest legal voices.

It will belong to those who make things clear:

• clear roles,
• clear value,
• clear intervention levels,
• clear contribution to business outcomes.

The good news?

Readability is not innate.
It is not reserved for a few.
It is a strategic leadership competence.

And like any strategic competence, it can be developed deliberately.

Final thought

The real question is not:

“How can legal be more visible?”

It is:

“How can legal become so readable that recognition and influence become inevitable?”

In-house legal leadership in 2026 will be built on clarity or it will remain marginal.

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