Source: Above the Law
Olga V. Mack’s recent conversation with Senne Mennes co-founder of ClauseBase and former DLA Piper lawyer wasn’t just another founder story. It was a masterclass in why the traditional legal mindset is killing innovation.
The insight that landed hardest? “As lawyers, we’re trained to turn over every stone. That works if your only goal is to avoid mistakes, but it also makes for very slow progress.”
Slow and steady might win some races. But in business, it’s the death of innovation.
The Old Posture vs. The New Reality
Traditional legal training creates professionals obsessed with risk minimisation. Every clause is a potential liability. Every negotiation point is a hill to die on.
That approach works in litigation. It’s catastrophic when your job is enabling commercial velocity, supporting product launches, or building internal systems.
The shift Mack identifies is fundamental: from “protect and review” to “build and improve.” Legal still needs to manage risk—but not by defaulting to zero tolerance. Instead, teams need to identify which risks actually matter, which are tolerable, and which can be managed through systems rather than manual review.
The Lawyer’s Dilemma: All Cost, No Upside
Mennes articulates a core problem: “As a lawyer, you’re trained to minimise risk, but you don’t get to experience the upside. The business does.”
This disconnection explains why lawyers instinctively stall innovation. They see the cost of mistakes vividly. The benefit of speed? That accrues elsewhere.
The best in-house teams aren’t just blocking bad outcomes they’re engineering for good ones. They track how faster review cycles generate revenue. They measure how clearer contracts reduce negotiation friction. They see the upside. And they own it.
Perfectionism Isn’t Professionalism
Mennes shared how early content creation paralysed him. “Some of those three-minute videos took me ten or fifteen takes. I was trying to be perfect.” Eventually he realised: no one cared about perfect. They cared about useful.
The same applies to legal work. You can polish a contract forever. That doesn’t make it better.
Clarity beats cleverness. Speed beats precision when the risk is low. The goal isn’t eliminating all ambiguity it’s building systems that know when ambiguity matters.
From Craft to Infrastructure
Mennes’s journey from lawyer to founder mirrors the evolution many legal departments must make: from reactive to proactive, from craft to infrastructure, from gut instinct to data.
Legal needs to stop being the department of no and become the engine of trust. The team that makes clear what’s acceptable, what’s fair, and what’s possible.
Risk management isn’t about saying no. It’s about building systems that let the business say yes faster, smarter, and with confidence.
The Question That Matters
What would change if your legal team treated contracts as systems, not artefacts? What if you stopped aiming for perfect and started optimising for speed, clarity, and learning?
The future isn’t built on instinct. It’s built on infrastructure.
Read more: Above the Law
