Gary Mintz On The New Operating Model For In-House Counsel
- cosmonauts
- May 19
- 6 min read
For years, innovation and automation have defined the rhythm and resilience of modern legal departments. Yet even as technology evolves, human judgment remains at the heart of the profession.
What’s changing is the expectation for legal teams to deliver that judgment with far greater speed and precision.
That evolution will be front and center at Legal Innovators California this year, especially during the panel “Automating Away The Pain” on In-House Day. We're thrilled to welcome Gary Mintz, Vice President & Deputy General Counsel, Miro, to be one of the panellists.
As an operationally focused attorney and executive with a unique combination of legal and business experience, his presence promises perspectives on designing workflow and navigating efficiency pressures in the AI era.
Until then, Gary joined us for an insightful pre-agenda interview on the future operating model for in-house counsel.
Below are a few early insights he shared ahead of the big day!
How do you define the boundaries of your role as Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, particularly when legal judgment overlaps with commercial decision-making?
I define my role as making sure the business understands the legal risk, the range of acceptable paths, and the consequences of each path. I do not think the legal team should disguise business risks as legal advice.
Where legal judgment overlaps with commercial decision-making, I try to be explicit about which hat I am wearing. If something is legally required, I say that clearly. If something is a risk tolerance question, I frame it that way. If the decision belongs to the business, I give a recommendation, explain the tradeoffs, and then help the team move quickly.
The best in-house lawyers are not just issue spotters. They are decision enablers. Our job is to protect the company, but also to help it compete. That means we need enough commercial fluency to understand what the business is trying to achieve, and enough discipline to avoid becoming the business owner ourselves.
For me, the boundary is that Legal owns the risk analysis and recommendation; the business owns the commercial decision, unless the decision would put the company outside the law or outside our core risk principles.
Legal innovation is a big topic right now, but it can sometimes feel more like a trend than a real shift. From where you sit, what has genuinely changed about how in-house legal teams work over the past few years and what has stayed the same?
What has genuinely changed is the expectation of speed, scale, and operational maturity. In-house legal teams are no longer measured only by the quality of their legal analysis. We are also measured by how quickly we enable revenue, how well we manage repeatable work, how clearly we communicate risk, and how effectively we use technology and data.
As an example, a few years ago, legal operations and automation were often treated as support functions. Now they are central to how a serious legal department works. Contracting workflows, self-service tools, intake systems, AI-assisted review, playbooks, and data dashboards are becoming part of the core legal operating model.
What has stayed the same is that human judgment still matters most. The tools have changed, but the hard part is still knowing when a risk is theoretical, when it is material, when to escalate, and when to let the business move. Technology does not replace a human in the loop.
When you hear someone say their legal team is “innovative”, what does that mean to you? What would you need to see to believe it, rather than just hear it?
When someone says their legal team is innovative, I do not assume that means they simply bought a new tool or launched a pilot. To me, innovation means the legal team has changed the way work gets done in a way that measurably improves the business.
I am metric-driven, so I would want to see evidence. Are contracts closing faster by a factor of X? Are Y% of low-risk matters being handled through self-service? Are lawyers spending measurably less time on repeat questions and more time on strategic work? Are we capturing data that helps us improve the system over time?
Innovation also has to survive contact with real users. A beautiful workflow that nobody uses is not innovation. A modest tool that removes thousands of repetitive questions from the legal team may be highly innovative.
The test I use is simple: did this innovation reduce friction, improve decision speed while maintaining quality, or create capacity for higher-value work, and can you measure it? If yes, the innovation is real.
If you were advising a lawyer who is just starting in their in-house career today, what skills would you tell them to spend the most time building - skills that most law schools and law firm training programmes are not currently teaching but that will matter enormously in five or ten years?
For in-house counsel, I would tell them to build five skills that most legal training still does not teach well.
First, learn the business. Understand how the company makes money, how products are built, how customers buy, how sales cycles work, and where the company is trying to win. Legal advice gets much better when it is grounded in the business model.
Second, build judgment around risk. Learn to distinguish material risk from theoretical risk. In-house teams lose credibility when every issue is treated as equally serious. I always tell my in-house team to "take the win" where they can. That means accepting 'good enough' over 'perfect.' This is a different approach than outside counsel needs to take.
Third, become a strong communicator. The ability to turn legal complexity into a clear recommendation is one of the most valuable skills a lawyer can have. Executives do not want a law school exam answer. They want to know what you recommend, why, and what happens if they choose a different path. It needs to be succinct, digestable, clear, and convincing.
Fourth, develop technology and data literacy. Lawyers do not all need to become engineers, but they need to understand how systems work, how data moves, how AI tools are trained and evaluated, and how technology changes risk allocation.
Fifth, learn process design. A lot of in-house impact comes from improving the system, not just answering the next question. If you can redesign a workflow so that 500 low-risk requests never need bespoke legal review, you have created more value than if you personally handled all 500 brilliantly. We should all be looking at process through the lens of Legal Operations, even if you have a Legal Ops team.
What is one thing you genuinely believe about the future of the legal profession that most of your peers would disagree with, and what makes you confident enough to hold that view even when others push back?
You know what's interesting? Traditionally Legal has never been early adopters of new technology. In fact, by design, we tend to take a 'wait and see' approach. But AI is different. AI is one of the only times I can remember where Legal was an early adopter.
With that as context, I believe a meaningful portion of traditional legal work will become productized much faster than many lawyers expect. Not all legal work, and certainly not the hardest judgment calls, but a lot of the work that currently consumes legal team capacity. Many lawyers still assume that because legal work is complex, it cannot be systematized. I think that is only partly true. Legal judgment is complex. But many legal workflows are highly repetitive: intake, triage, first drafts, contract review against a playbook, policy Q&A, issue spotting, negotiation fallback positions, approval routing, and knowledge retrieval.
AI will accelerate that shift because it makes legal knowledge easier to access and apply inside workflows. The winners will be lawyers who know how to turn their expertise into scalable systems. The lawyers who resist that shift may still be excellent technicians, but they will have less influence over how legal work is delivered. The profession may debate the pace, but the direction is clear.
What key message do you hope attendees will remember after your session at Legal Innovators California?
The message I hope people remember is that legal innovation is not about chasing technology. It is about changing the legal function so it can deliver better judgment at greater speed and scale.
AI is powerful, but the real opportunity is not simply to make lawyers faster at old ways of working. The opportunity is to redesign legal work: what should be self-service, what should be automated, what requires expert review, what data we should capture, and how legal teams can become better business partners.
The legal teams that succeed will not be the ones with the most tools. They will be the ones that combine judgment, systems thinking, and trust. Technology matters, but trust is still the operating system of an effective legal department. If the business trusts legal, it will use the system's legal builds. If lawyers trust the systems, they will adopt them. If leadership trusts the data, legal gets a stronger voice in company decisions.
That is the future I think is worth building: legal teams that are faster, more scalable, and still anchored in excellent judgment.
What resonates most from Gary’s perspective is that while AI is a transformative force, the greater inflection point lies in rearchitecting the very fabric of legal work and enabling legal teams to transcend their traditional role to become strategic catalysts for the business.
We’re eager to hear more about how he is helping eliminate the chronic friction points faced by in-house legal teams at Legal Innovators California this June.
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