Right People, Right Work

John Bennett, CEO & Founder at Melius, urges legal teams to stop mismatching talent and start aligning the right lawyers with the right work. 
 

Square pegs in round holes…

I’ve seen it time and again in legal teams. Senior lawyers drafting NDAs. Junior lawyers wrestling with complex regulatory issues. Everyone doing a bit of everything, and nobody doing what they do best.

Let’s be frank – it’s madness.

It’s enough to keep a GC awake at night: the waste of talent, the inefficiency, the slow erosion of morale as people spend their days on tasks they’re either overqualified for or ill equipped to handle.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most legal teams have no clear view of who should be doing what. We’ve fallen into patterns, developed blind spots, and normalised inefficiency.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Start with something deceptively simple: a work allocation audit.

For two weeks, track where time actually goes. Who’s doing what, at what level, and for how long?

The results are always eye-opening. In one team I worked with, we discovered their head of legal was spending 40% of her time on routine contract reviews that could have been handled two levels down. 
 
Next, be brutally honest about skills versus tasks. Map your team’s capabilities against your workload and spot the mismatches. 
 
Then comes the hard part: redesigning your workflow.  
 
Pushing work down where appropriate. Elevating strategic matters. Creating clear swim lanes. 
 
The impact is immediate. Costs come down. Turnaround times improve. But most importantly your team starts to thrive rather than just survive. 
 
The right lawyer, doing the right work, in the right way. 
 
It sounds simple. But it’s transformative. 
 
What’s your experience? Is your team operating at the right level, or are you still watching square pegs being hammered into round holes? 

About the author: 
 
John Bennett is the founder of Melius and has over two decades of experience as a GC and COO. 

John was raised in Yorkshire and that no nonsense upbringing helped shape John into the problem solver he is today. 

Having started his professional life as a trainee solicitor at Eversheds’ Leeds office in the late 1990s, John practised at Eversheds as a commercial contracts lawyer with a focus on technology law. He spent over two decades leading and transforming legal teams in some of the world’s biggest financial institutions before establishing Melius in 2023. 

Melius is a legal consultancy offering legal operations and fractional GC solutions to in-house legal teams. For more details, please click here. 

Email: jb@meliuslaw.co.uk 

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