Chief Legal Officers: The Expanded Purview Of A Trusted Advisor

Forbes

24-03-2025

Creative Critical Thinker With Light Bulb Illuminating To Show An Idea
The trusted adviser role has become more challenging and critical than ever.
'Trusted advisor' is a moniker bestowed upon an individual or group whose wisdom, skill, experience, judgment, and authenticity have earned client trust. The relationship embodies the zenith of the client-advisor dynamic, one that extends beyond the scope and term of a contract or the legacy boundaries of functional expertise. The trusted advisor has long been esteemed by corporate leadership even if, paradoxically, its true enterprise value is difficult to quantify.
Perhaps the best way to appreciate the elevated difficulty and importance of the trusted advisor role is to consider the state of the world and its impact upon business.
Accelerating Change And Interconnected Risks
The Doomsday Clock, a universally recognized indicator of human vulnerability to global catastrophe, is the closest it has ever been to the midnight witching hour. The World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2025 cites a mélange of interrelated risks. The convergence and intensification of business, geopolitics, geoeconomics, domestic and global polarization, climate change, state sponsored armed conflict, cybersecurity, disinformation/ misinformation, and rapid technological advances have created a 'perfect storm' that business must navigate. These interconnected existential threats are occurring against the backdrop of a governance framework that is not equipped to address them. Nor is it able to respond to the global fragility the risks generate.
Public trust in institutions has cratered. The global political and economic order that has lasted for almost 80 years is teetering. The rule of law is under siege on multiple fronts across the globe. The US, long the beacon of democracy and the rule of law, has become all but unrecognizable to its long-time allies as well as a significant portion of its own citizens.
Moore's law is over; the acceleration and breadth of technological advances-notably AI- offers hope for tackling fundamental human and business challenges. But so too do those breakthroughs challenge human capacity to adapt. Consensus around an AI regulatory framework that balances risk and reward remains illusory. A patchwork approach to AI regulation will intensify an already white-hot geoeconomic cauldron and elevate the potential risk AI could pose to humanity.
The Ante Has Been Upped For Trusted Advisors
There is a correlation between the elevation of business challenges and the importance of the trusted advisor. This has upped the ante to fulfill the trusted advisor role. At a time when change has become a constant, trusted advisors must remain current, make sense of it all, and collaborate with enterprise leadership to create opportunity out of challenge. They must help to forge and implement creative solutions to challenges as well as find pathways to seize opportunities. They must galvanize human and technological resources, ensuring collaboration between them. To achieve this they must be constant learners with curious, creative, and flexible mindsets. They must be adept at synthesizing and extrapolating from large bodies of information, communicate clearly and effectively, and provide insightful, actionable, and balanced counsel across a wide range of issues, functions, and stakeholders.
If CEO's are piloting business through a perfect storm, then trusted advisors are air traffic controllers assisting them to circumnavigate it and to find a safer, less turbulent route.
To serve as a trusted advisor in the current environment requires more than it did even a few years ago. Three key 'supplemental' skillsets have emerged: (1) a voracious curiosity focused on understanding existing and emerging risk areas (technological, geoeconomic, geopolitical, climatic, etc.) while also identifying opportunities ; (2) a digital core that enables quicker, more effective processing and integration of data across different strands of an organization with a focus on how it can be applied to advance client outcomes and experience; and (3) a holistic approach to problem solving ('connecting the dots') that is collaborative, agile, and flexible.
Chief Legal Officers Have Emerged As Key Enterprise Trusted Advisors
This column first examined the changing role of Chief Legal Officers (CLO's)* nearly a decade ago, noting that corporate legal leaders are the profession's bellwethers as well as "guardians of business integrity and conscience of the company.'. A few years later, the author, noting the expansion and heightened influence of the CLO role, referred to them as 'law's astronauts' whose range of skills 'foreshadow changing expectations of all lawyers and allied legal professionals.'
Fast forward to the present. Business is operating in an altogether different world. Global change has necessitated and accelerated end-to-end enterprise transformation. That, in turn, has caused business to reimagine the legal function-how can it better serve the needs of the enterprise and its customers in a digital and AI world? CLO's are in the vanguard of that reimagination. Central to their remit is to align the legal function with the business (and customers) it serves. This will enable business to mine law's vast, untapped enterprise and customer value.
Chief Legal Officers have emerged as key trusted advisors to the C-Suite and Board. Their expanded purview is emblematic of the reimagination of the legal function by business to better serve its needs as well as to improve customer outcomes and experience. The elevated strategic value of the CLO reflects a blurring of legacy corporate departmental boundaries, cross-functionality, data-sharing, and the creative, responsible utilization of technology (notably artificial intelligence). It also derives from the speed, complexity, interconnected constellation of risks, and unrelenting change endemic to digital and AI-era business.
CLO's also play an important role in fashioning and implementing business integration, a holistic enterprise strategy that promotes agility, resilience, and rapid problem solving/opportunity capture. Success hinges on the rapid mobilization and collaboration of material workforce, supply chain, strategic partner data, and IT resources. That includes human resource integration as well as fashioning strategies that promote collaboration of human and technological assets. CLO's also play a key role in AI, data, and emerging technology governance.
Paradoxically, while the trusted advisor role CLO's play is widely acknowledged, quantifying its value—especially beyond the narrow 'legal' realm-- remains elusive. Nonetheless, a high level of trust between the CLO and the legal team is crucial evidence to support the enterprise value of the legal function. The Deloitte 2024 Chief Legal Officer Strategy Survey found that 85% of respondents report very or extremely high levels of trust between legal and the enterprise. This cuts across what Deloitte characterizes as the 'Four Faces' of the CLO role: strategist, catalyst, guardian, and operator.
The CLO's unique multi-dimensional enterprise role positions it as a trusted advisor not only to the C-Suite and Board but also to business unit leadership as well as other stakeholders. That requires balancing competing interests and building consensus through trust. In a world that increasingly demands hyper specialization, the CLO must have broad, diverse experience, expertise that extends beyond the narrow parameters of 'legal,' engage in multidisciplinary and multidimensional thinking, and draw from each of its multiple roles to offer holistic insights that spark new solutions.
The trusted advisor must collaborate- not compete- with other enterprise trusted advisors. To borrow from 'Dirty Harry,' they must know their own limitations. The trusted advisor role is a hybrid of an individual and team sport. CLO's are not law's sole trusted advisors. As the author noted in a 2017 Forbes article, trusted legal advisors need not be lawyers. Even more so, trusted advisors must work across disciplines, geographies, personality types, perspectives, and egos with their peers. The goal is not to be 'right' but to contribute to the best informed business judgment.
CLO's require high emotional intelligence, outstanding communication skills, authenticity, curiosity, and humanity. They must be good listeners, questioners, and be open to learning without regard to the source's rank or experience level. CLO's must be perpetually curious, unabashedly creative, ethical, practical, and trusted. They are strategic and operational business leaders who leverage their legal expertise and experience across disciplines, business functions, and the enterprise. This helps to explain why a growing number of top CLO's have transitioned to the CEO role.
Key Challenges of The CLO As Trusted Advisor
Chief Legal Officers confront a wide range of existing and emerging challenges whose scope, complexity, convergence, and existential importance are within the ambit of their trusted advisor role. Here is a sampling interconnected macroeconomic and geopolitical forces that are elevating the degree of difficulty and uncertainty confronting business. In each instance-notably in the areas of risk management and governance-CLO's are intimately involved. This illuminates the vastly expanded role of CLO's not only in new substantive areas (e.g. tech and data-related, IP protection, supply chain, etc.) but also in domestic and global affairs that impact business.
Geopolitical Risk
Armed conflict, proxy wars, tectonic shifts in the global world order, geoeconomics (see below), and the 'AI race' are elevating corporate risk and uncertainty. CLO's play a direct role in forging and implementing not only 'legal' strategy in those areas but also wider enterprise strategic initiatives. A recent Reuters article rightly posits that legal leadership 'must now be geopolitical analysts.' This impacts, among other things, supply chains, corporate finance, workforce deployment (and safety), regulatory and compliance, and governance issues.
Geoeconomic Fragmentation
Geoeconomics is the pursuit of power politics using economic means. Tariffs, trade wars, and a complex, fluid patchwork of regulatory and compliance issues have elevated the constraints upon free trade. What was until recently an integrated global economy has quickly morphed into an increasingly fragmented, polarized, and volatile marketplace. Shifting government policies are adversely impacting business, rattling financial markets, and disrupting supply chains. The microchip industry has become the epicenter of geopolitical tensions, a reflection of the intersection of global politics, technology, economy, and business. CLO's are in the midst of these issues.
Corporate Governance (international)
Corporate governance has been impacted by the spike in geopolitical and geoeconomic tension and uncertainty. A sampling of areas—all under the purview of the CLO—include: (1) governance of geopolitical risk, (2) compliance, (3) supply chain management, (4) contracts and litigation, (5) government relations, (6) investor/public relations, (7) senior executive and board expertise, and (8) an integrated strategy that is holistic, fluid, and capable of real-time adjustment and crisis management. All are within the expanded purview of the CLO as enterprise advisor.
Corporate Governance (Domestic)
Domestic polarization and calcification of political divides along ideological lines has heightened the difficulty of corporate governance and domestic government relations. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is an example. Not long ago a core element of corporate policy and ethos, recent Executive Orders have flipped the script and 'cancelled' them in Government agencies, higher education, business, etc. The abrupt shift on this and other issues will influence corporate culture, workforce, workplace, talent management, business practices, regulatory strategies, and governance. This will likely impact corporate governance well beyond the US, resulting in a widespread shift in the global business environment. These issues are also within the purview of CLO trusted advisors.
AI Integration and Governance
The debate whether AI is more hype than the next big thing is over. Investment in AI—especially among multinationals-remains white hot. The latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI reveals that large companies are implementing structural changes designed to extract future value from massive gen and agentic AI investment.
AI is already being applied to achieve scientific breakthroughs, a harbinger of its potential to help solve some of humanity's pressing challenges. For example, the recipients of the 2024 Nobel prize in Chemistry 'developed an AI model to predict proteins' complex structures. The Physics Prize winners were recognized 'for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.'
CLO's will be in the vanguard of creating and implementing strategies that integrate AI within the legal function, the many business units it regularly serves, and across the enterprise. Likewise, they will play an important role in AI governance. As my good friend Richard Susskind asserts in his new book on how to think about AI: ' balancing the benefits and threats of artificial intelligence - saving humanity with and from AI - is the defining challenge of our age.' CLO's, again, will be central to that discussion, especially in ethics and consensus building.
Crisis Management
As the CLO's sphere of influence in corporate risk management has expanded, so too has the role become more directly involved in crisis management and brand protection. The glacial pace of the legal process is out-of-synch with the real-time speed of business. Crises often occur with little or no warning; a rapid, reasoned, coherent, consistent response is essential. No matter the cause, geography, or nature of the crisis, the sound judgment of the CLO is an important element of the enterprise response. Trusted advisors are most needed in high stakes, fluid, complex situations that require multidimensional analysis and balanced, creatively pragmatic counsel. They are challenged to operate at the speed of digital and AI-era business, not legacy law. A digital core (data, tech, and cloud grounding) will facilitate that.
The Rule Of Law
The rule of law in the United States is in critical condition. The Government's escalating attacks on judges, law firms, prosecutors, law schools, the American Bar Association, and other institutions and individuals committed to defending the Constitution and the rule of law are unprecedented. This imperils not only American democracy but also other democratic sovereign nations. It impairs America's standing in the world and sends a chilling message to our allies (especially NATO members) that long held mutual-defense commitments are no longer iron clad.
Business can no longer count on the solid foundation that the rule of law has long provided it. Nor can it count on America's checks and balances to rein in efforts to consolidate power within the Executive branch. What were once seen as conflict of interest 'red lines' in Government have been swept away, leaving open the possibility that the US is quickly morphing from the rule of law to rule by law.
Several tech Goliaths and companies that rely heavily on Government contracts are bowing to the pressure of an avalanche of norm-defying Executive Orders. Many businesses, fearing reprisals, are remaining mute in the wake of withering personal attacks against individuals and organizations challenging the Executive actions. No matter the response, business is adversely affected by attacks on the rule of law, tariff threats, trade issues, and the uncertainty of the current business environment. The rule of law is foundational to the health of all business and the economy.
Conclusion
No area of the CLO's trusted advisor role is presently more important or challenging than providing sage counsel to the C-Suite and Board on an appropriate response to the attack on the rule of law. The primacy of this issue extends beyond any individual business, industry, or sector. A collective response by business would be powerful. It should not be crafted as a polemic but as a pragmatic assessment of why, from the business perspective, the rule of law serves the national interest in a multiplicity of clearly articulated ways.
By ensuring such a collective message is delivered by leading businesses, CLO's and other trusted advisors would confirm that the trust reposed in them is well-placed and their role is incalculably valuable.