How to Run Legal Like a Team Sport: The Key to Visibility, Ownership, and Impact

In sports like soccer, football, rugby, volleyball, and racing, even the most talented player can’t carry the whole team. You need strategy, clear roles, and trust in each other’s execution. The same goes for in-house legal teams.

As businesses scale, legal becomes a nexus point, collaborating with sales on deals, guiding HR through sensitive matters, advising the board on business decisions, and more. But too often, legal work is still treated like an individual sport: lawyers end up working in silos, taking on as much as they can without structure or support.

It doesn’t have to be that way and it definitely shouldn’t as this way of working often results in burnout, duplicated effort, low team morale, and too much time spent on repetitive tasks instead of strategic, high-value work. 

The most effective legal teams operate less like solo contributors and more like high-performing teams. Those with shared context, structured playbooks, collaborative tools, and mutual accountability move quickly and get ahead.

So, let’s take a look at the lessons legal take away from high-performing sports teams and explore how to apply these in practice. 

Lessons from High-Performing Teams

Every successful sports team, from World Cup champions to Olympic relay squads, thrive on more than just raw talent. They win because they operate with discipline, clarity, and trust. And while legal isn’t usually thought of in the same breath, these same principles can transform how legal operates inside a business.

1. Clear Roles and Ownership

In well-established, successful teams, no one’s asking, “Who’s responsible for this?” as ownership is defined, not assumed. The same should apply in legal. Every matter, task, or process has a lead, even when multiple stakeholders are involved. Clear accountability avoids duplicate work, missed deadlines, and that dreaded “sorry, I thought you were handling it” moment.

2. Trust and Delegation

Winning teams don’t micromanage. They set standards, align on goals, and let people do their jobs. In legal, this might mean empowering team members to run with matters autonomously, or enabling business users to self-serve on common requests, freeing up legal for more strategic work.

3. Constant Communication

Great teams don’t leave each other guessing. Whether it’s through live updates, weekly check-ins, or cross-functional syncs, high-performing legal teams build habits that keep everyone in the loop. For legal, these rituals ensure stakeholders always know the status of their requests, help spot bottlenecks early, and create space for ongoing alignment and improvement.

4. One Source of Truth

On the field, teams rely on a single scoreboard – they don’t each keep their own. Everyone knows the score, the time left, and what’s at stake. High-performing legal teams need that same shared visibility. When intake, triage, matter tracking, decisions, and reporting all live in one place, there’s no confusion about what’s happening or who’s responsible. It aligns the team, builds trust, and makes collaboration the default.

How to Apply These Lessons in Legal

Based on the lessons learned from how sports teams operate, here are four practical, repeatable ways to create alignment, accountability, and momentum across the legal function and the business.

👩‍⚖️ Assign Matter Ownership

Just like a play needs a point guard or a striker, every legal request needs a clear owner. Defining who’s responsible for a matter and triaging it the moment it comes in eliminates ambiguity and ensures nothing slips through the cracks. Ownership also builds accountability, making it easier to set priorities and measure performance.

🔔 Share the Game Plan Across Functions

Business teams shouldn’t be left wondering what’s happening with their request. Whether it’s a contract review or a compliance query, legal should be transparent about where things stand and what’s next. This doesn’t mean flooding inboxes with updates, but rather building lightweight, repeatable ways to keep stakeholders in the loop. 

For example, a matter management software that tracks progress in real time and auto-updates requesters at key milestones (i.e. when a matter is picked up, sent for review, or marked as complete) can dramatically reduce back-and-forth. Tools like Checkbox allow legal teams to set up these flows without coding, so updates happen automatically and consistently, without adding manual overhead.

💻 Enable Smart Self-Service

With sports, players don’t need to ask the coach how to tie their shoes or warm up. They’re trained with routines and tools that let them handle the basics so the team can focus on game-time decisions. Legal should work the same way. By building self-service pathways for routine, low-risk work like NDAs, policy acknowledgements, or standard approvals, legal teams can reduce interruptions and free up time for more strategic, high-impact matters. With tools like Checkbox, these self-service workflows can be automated and governed in a way that maintains legal oversight without requiring legal input at every turn.

⚙️ Standardize the Playbook

Sometimes legal operates through informal or outdated knowledge. This could be what someone remembers from last time, or what’s buried in an old email thread. High-performing teams run plays, and for legal, this looks like standardizing common workflows to ensure consistency, reduce risk, and give new team members a fast way to get up to speed.

Example: How Hines Scaled Legal Like a Team

When Hines’ legal team set out to improve how they worked with the business, they weren’t trying to overhaul everything at once. They were trying to solve a very real problem: how to support a fast-growing global operation without adding headcount or sacrificing the quality of their legal processes.

Rather than force a top-down change, the team chose to start small by introducing a self-service process to handle NDAs, which had become what they called a “buzzing fly” problem: individually minor, but collectively distracting. The impact was immediate. Over 1,000 NDA submissions were processed in the first year, with business users able to move faster and legal freed up to focus on more strategic matters.

Additionally, with a centralized process in place, legal could now track every request, see who was working on what, and reduce the back-and-forth that had previously drained time and energy. Business users didn’t have to wonder where their request stood. Legal wasn’t chasing updates. Everyone was playing from the same scoreboard.

By treating legal more like a team sport, complete with clear roles, repeatable plays, and shared context, Hines was able to scale its legal impact globally, without scaling headcount. And in doing so, they built not just better processes, but better partnerships across the business.

Key Takeaways

Modern legal teams are risk managers, collaborators, enablers, and strategic partners. And fulfilling that role takes alignment, structure, and a shift away from individual heroics toward team-based execution.

The most effective legal teams operate like high-performing sports teams. They define roles clearly. They trust each other to execute. They rely on shared rituals and visibility. And they use the right systems to ensure everyone is playing from the same game plan.

This means building smarter ways of working through standardized playbooks, clear matter ownership, and shared context that cuts through the chaos.

So, if your legal team still feels like it’s playing a solo sport – reactive, siloed, and stretched – this is your opportunity to rethink how work gets done. Because when legal operates like a team, the whole business wins.

Want to see how in-house legal teams are building shared visibility, smarter workflows, and self-service at scale? Book a demo and explore what a legal service hub could look like for your team.