Why the distinction matters more than ever, and what to do about it.

In my work as a global community builder, I am often asked if the legal function I built from scratch was lean or stretched thin. I was confused the first time I was asked this question. I didn’t really understand the difference! If you’re a small team relative to workload and the wider business’s headcount, aren’t you invariably stretched thin?!

But when I thought about it, I realised the two concepts are fundamentally different. Running a lean (but mighty) team isn’t the same as being stretched thin. When I was a GC and first legal hire at a rapid-scale tech company, I started off as the latter, but quickly built out the former. 

A lean team is intentional. It knows where its time goes, has systems that scale, can operate without humans (where appropriate), and can prove its value. A stretched-thin team, on the other hand, is constantly in survival mode, reacting to whatever lands on the desk, and constantly burnt out. 

The data tells us most legal teams are in the second camp. According to the KPMG 2026 Global General Counsel Outlook, around 8 in 10 in-house legal professionals report that their workload and complexity are rising at the same time, and yet the solution isn't more headcount. Nearly 7 in 10 GCs say they plan to invest more in technology than in talent.

I recently sat down with Bryan Lee (Co-founder and CEO at Ruli AI) to talk through what separates the teams that are genuinely mighty from the ones that are just running on fumes. Here's what came out of that conversation.

The first step nobody takes: knowing what you actually do

You can't fix what you can't see. And many legal teams have very limited visibility into where their time actually goes.

Bryan Lee’s starting point is always the same: before you change anything, map the work. What does your team spend most of its time on? Where is the repetition? What are the repeat requests from the business that eat hours every week without anyone noticing? A goldmine for automation and outsourcing. 

“One framework I use is a keep/stop / start exercise run with the whole team:

- What should we **keep** doing?

- What should we **stop** doing?

- What should we be doing that we're **not**?

- What's challenging you right now?

It sounds simple, and it is. But it does two things at once: it gets honest data on where time goes, and it gives your team permission to say what's actually hard. That combination is rarer than it should be.”

Bryan Lee, Co-founder & CEO, Ruli AI

The pattern Bryan sees repeatedly is what he calls the “admin trap” — work that the team needs to do to function, but that actively takes time away from critical legal work. Answering the same question for the fifth time. Tracking down a template someone has asked for again. Repeat requests from the business that could be solved once, systematically, but instead get handled one by one, forever.

Where there's repetition, there's leverage. That's where the work of building a lean team begins.

From cost centre to value driver (but you have to build the case first)

Here's the cycle most legal teams are stuck in: they can't prove their value because they're too busy being reactive, and they stay reactive because nobody sees the value they're delivering. Round and round.

Breaking out of it requires doing something uncomfortable: investing time now to save time later. Documenting decisions. Building guides. Creating the systems that mean the next time someone asks the same question, there's already an answer.

And then, critically, reporting that value in business language, not legal language.

Not "we advised on 47 matters this quarter." Instead: contracts turned, outside counsel, spend avoided, risks caught before they became problems, deals unblocked, revenue enabled. What this tells you about where you need more (or different, more appropriate) resources.

The diagnostic: five questions to ask this week

The best place to start is honest self-assessment. Ruli AI’s five-question diagnostic cuts through the noise:

1. Can you quantify what your legal team spends most of its time on?

2. If your best person left tomorrow, would your playbooks survive?

3. Can a new hire find your standard positions without asking you?

4. Does the business see legal as a value driver or a cost centre?

5. When was the last time you asked your team: "What should we stop doing?"

If you answered no to more than two of those, your team isn't lean. It's stretched thin.

The good news is that none of this requires a large budget, a legal ops function, or a transformation programme. It requires clarity on where the work actually goes, and the discipline to start building systems around what you find.

That's where the journey to a mighty lean team begins.

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.