When I was first legal hire at a rapid scale Irish tech company, my first impulse 90 days in was to hire another full-time lawyer. I was wearing many different hats (head of the legal function, on the executive leadership team, reporting to the CEO, attending board meetings, and more) and back then I didn’t know much about alternatives to human resources.

Defaulting to more headcount can be the right next step, but not always. In those early days, I wasn’t able to justify the expense of another lawyer, so my first move was to outsource low risk, high value work to an ALSP. They not only helped with contract redlining, but they also helped with building systems (playbooks, intake and so on). I was quickly able to leverage the data I gathered in building out these systems to justify a full-time hire (and later, legal tech). 

In my work as a global community builder, I have noticed the most efficient teams invest plenty of time in building systems too. I had a conversation recently with Bryan Lee (Co-founder & CEO, Ruli AI) on why this is. His view is that most legal teams are sitting on untapped leverage, but they're too busy being reactive to see it. 

So what exactly do we mean by “building systems”? Bryan Lee took me through his four-pillar framework for this. 

The four pillars of a mighty lean team

Bryan Lee describes the foundation of a scalable legal function through four pillars. They're deceptively simple and almost universally underdeveloped.

1. Codify your judgment. 

Your playbooks, risk tolerances, and standard positions exist somewhere, often scattered all over the place (in Slack, or a long email thread, or the memory of your most senior lawyer). Write them down. When institutional knowledge lives only in people, it walks out the door with them. You're aiming for systems that work when you’re asleep. 

2. Scale your review. 

Stop reviewing every contract from scratch. Especially low value ones (which quickly becomes demoralising). Once your standards are documented, they can be applied at scale across your entire contract portfolio, consistently and quickly. 

3. Build institutional memory.

This is the one most teams skip entirely. A system that retains context means your knowledge compounds over time instead of resetting with every new matter or team change. By “context”, we mean your team's decisions, precedents, and positions. 

4. Get ahead of regulatory changes. 

I know this sounds impossible, especially in the age of AI. But the teams that earn genuine boardroom trust are the ones that anticipate regulatory shifts in a proactive way. Proactive regulatory intelligence means the business never has to ask "what do we do?" because legal has already answered.

These four pillars are what separate a legal team that scales from one that simply grows. Systems multiply the capacity of your people. More people without systems just multiplies the chaos.

On AI: intentional, not everything

Nowhere is the gap between intention and execution more visible right now than in AI adoption. Every legal team is being told to move fast. Most are paralysed by the noise.

Lori Mininger, VP of Legal & Compliance at Matic Insurance Services and a Ruli AI customer, took a deliberately methodical approach. Her team reviewed eleven different AI tools across due diligence, RFPs, legal research, and contract work, then prioritised ruthlessly, landing on two. 

The result: Matic's legal function is now ahead of every other department in the organisation for AI adoption. Because they moved most intentionally.

The lesson here is: adopt the right tools (not necessarily fewer) for your highest-pain problems, and do that well before you move to anything else.

Lori Mininger, VP of Legal & Compliance at Matic Insurance Services 

Don't forget the people!

Systems and tools are only half the answer. The teams that sustain high performance over time are the ones where people feel trusted, valued, and clear on their own growth path.

Bryan Lee’s prompt for building that kind of culture: ask each person two questions. What do you hate doing every day? And how would you propose we solve it, given that there's technology and resource that could help?

That framing does something important. It gives team members ownership in the solution, not just the problem. And it signals that their day-to-day frustrations matter, which is how you build the kind of loyalty that keeps good people in lean teams.

“People don't leave lean teams because they're too busy. They leave because they don't feel like their work matters. Show them the system they built that changed how operations run. The playbook they documented that saved the team hours every week. The process they improved that is now standard across the business. That's the work worth doing. And worth celebrating together.” 

Bryan Lee, Co-founder & CEO, Ruli AI

This article was written in collaboration with Ruli AI, an AI-native legal intelligence platform designed to help in-house legal teams work smarter, scale their impact, and prove their value. Learn more at ruli.ai.