Ask a general counsel how their team decides what to work on this week, and most will describe some version of triage: whoever asked first, whoever shouted loudest, whoever happens to be a director. Ask them why a particular contract got delayed, and they usually can't give you a reason that would satisfy anyone outside legal.
The real issue is prioritization, and it often costs legal teams the one thing they need most: a strategic seat at the table.
Strategic prioritization means tagging every piece of legal work against the organization's real strategic goals, so the loudest voice in the room stops deciding what legal works on next. Done well, it turns a legal team from a reactive service function into one the business comes to for strategic advice in advance.
Many legal teams operate in a service center way. Work comes in, gets acknowledged, gets a deadline and gets worked in roughly the order it arrived, or the order dictated by whoever has the most seniority or the loudest voice. There's rarely a direct and visible link between what legal is doing on any given day and the strategic initiatives the business is trying to achieve.
That's a dangerous position to be in. If you can't explain why a piece of work matters (excuse the pun) beyond "someone asked for it," you can't defend your team when the workload exceeds your capacity, which it always eventually does.
I've written before about linking legal work to strategic business priorities and the impact it has on legal. This post is the mechanics behind that idea, matter by matter, showing exactly how the link works once you build it.
Think about a pharmaceutical company selling twenty-five different products (brands) at any given time. Only a handful of those, maybe five, are the ones leadership has decided to prioritize over a given period: the brands they want to grow, the ones losing patent protection and need a new strategy to stay competitive. Every function in that business, from manufacturing to sales, aligns its effort around those five.
Legal is not always invited into those alignment exercises, even though a huge share of its work is directly connected to those same five brands. A vendor contract for a factory upgrade. An employment agreement for a new facility director. A sales agreement for the region where that brand is expanding. None of it looks urgent on its own. All of it is buy-side or sell-side work in service of a strategic goal the rest of the business is already being measured against.
The shift is simple to describe and genuinely useful in practice: tag every matter, every contract, every piece of work against the organization's strategic priorities. It doesn't matter whether it's buy-side, sell-side, employment, compliance or a straightforward commercial contract. If it connects to one of the goals the business has already committed to, it gets prioritized. If it doesn't, it sits lower on the list.
This does two things at once. It gives legal a defensible, business-aligned reason for sequencing work, and it surfaces, in plain terms, exactly what gets displaced when someone demands to jump the queue.
In practice, that means a GC needs three things in place before the first difficult conversation happens:
None of this requires new headcount. It requires legal to know, at any given moment, which of its own priorities are strategic and which aren't.
Here's where it gets interesting. Say brand twenty-five isn't one of the five strategic priorities, and its general manager escalates to complain to a group GM that legal is too slow. A GC operating on strategic prioritization doesn't get defensive. They pull up the list of matters currently in flight, show exactly how each one ties to a strategic goal, the group GM's own bonus depends on, and ask a single question: which of these would you like me to drop, so I can pick up that matter instead?
That question moves the power dynamic. The GM now has three options. They can insist legal drop a strategic matter anyway, in which case there's now a clear record of why that decision was made and who made it. They can back off and let the GC keep doing what they're doing i.e. good work aligned to the business’s goals. Or they can recognize the real issue: legal is under-resourced for the volume of non-strategic work still coming in and offer to help fix that.
All three outcomes benefit legal. None of them were available before the work was tied to strategy.
If I had to put the whole idea on a business card, it would be this: you don't win a seat at the top table by asking for one, you win it by proving, matter by matter, that your work is already holding that table up.
This isn't limited to contracts, nor to any one department's version of "important." It applies to every matter a legal team touches, because the test is the same every time: does this work move the organization toward a goal it has already committed to achieving?
Doing that consistently, and the shifts become visible. The business stops seeing legal as the team that processes requests and starts seeing it as the team that helps the organization win. It happens when prioritization stops being something legal talks about and becomes how the team works, day to day, matter by matter.
This is, at its core, what I mean when I talk about Operational Intelligence: legal knowing what it's working on, why it's working on it, and how it connects to the business. Prioritization is where that intelligence starts.