By Ed Simpson
- A legal issue arises.
- The founder forwards it to the COO.
- The COO emails HR.
- HR asks Finance for help.
- Finance shrugs. It’s financial year-end, and this is not the team’s priority.
- The problem is quietly filed.
It’s not resolved. It’s not assigned. It’s not even fully understood.
That’s the Legal Hot Potato – and if you’re in a scale-up without a clear legal owner, you know this dynamic too well. Legal issues arrive without context or direction. They get passed from person to person, inbox to inbox. Everyone’s too busy, too uncertain, or too cautious to take full responsibility. And so they bounce.
The truth is: no one wants to hold it. But it keeps landing back in the same places – often on the desks of your CFO or HR Director.
Because they’re the ones most likely to “kind of know” what to do. Or at least, the ones who can’t afford to ignore it.
Why it's nobody's job (but everybody's problem)
In the early stages of a business, legal felt like a distraction from growth. You outsourced the occasional contract or compliance check, dealt with it when needed, and moved on.
But that doesn’t scale.
As the business grows, so does the volume and complexity of legal work. You’re hiring more people. Entering new markets. Signing bigger customers. Facing greater scrutiny.
And suddenly, legal isn’t an ad hoc issue. It’s part of the daily operations. It just hasn’t been formally recognised as such – and definitely not resourced.
So it moves around. A commercial contract gets passed from product to finance. A privacy question ends up with HR. A procurement dispute goes to the COO.
Over time, it becomes clear: this is a cross-functional burden with no cross-functional plan.
Everyone’s slightly anxious. Everyone’s overworked. And no one’s sure what’s been missed.
The real cost of the hot potato
Let’s not understate the impact.
When legal lacks a clear owner, work slows. Decisions stall. Execution suffers. The business loses momentum not just because legal is hard, but because it’s unstructured.
This hits the CFO especially hard. You’re already managing fund raising, cash flow, cost control and investor relations. Now you’re expected to review contracts, advise on supplier disputes, and weigh in on employment clauses.
Meanwhile, your HRD is grappling with policies, employee queries, and growing compliance demands. But with no legal back-up, even routine decisions become fraught. Is this approach lawful? Can we say this in a contract? What if someone challenges it?
Neither of you were hired to carry legal. But that’s where it ends up. Over and over.
And while each issue may seem manageable, the accumulated cost is significant – in time, risk, and morale.
You don't need a full legal team - you need a plan
Most businesses at this stage aren’t ready for a full-time GC. But they are well past the point where ad hoc law firm advice and shared inboxes can cope.
What’s needed is structure. Not complexity. Just structure. That starts with visibility:
- What legal work is entering or flowing around the business?
- Who’s picking it up – and how confidently?
- What is being dealt with and what remains unfinished?
- What’s being delayed, dropped, or done under pressure?
- What’s truly high-risk, and what’s just a bit annoying?
Without this clarity, it’s impossible to prioritise, delegate, or plan. You end up firefighting. And firefighting is the most expensive form of leadership.
This is where many CFOs and HRDs find themselves stuck. Legal is too important to ignore, but too chaotic to own casually. You need a plan that brings control, not another inbox full of questions.
The audit that stops bouncing
That’s exactly what the Growth Engine audit was built for.
It’s a short no-fluff workshop designed to map your legal workload, diagnose the pinch points, and give you a prioritised action plan.
It shows you where legal work is piling up. Who’s touching it? What’s getting missed? And most importantly – what it’s costing you.
This isn’t a legal health check. It’s a leadership tool. The output is commercial, actionable, and built to support people like you: senior leaders dealing with the reality of legal work without the luxury of a legal function.
You’ll leave with a clear sense of what to fix, what to delegate, and what to ignore for now. And you’ll stop lobbing the hot potato back and forth.
Book a Growth Engine scoping session by emailing info@thelegaldirector.co.uk or giving us a call on 020 3056 8538.
Legal issues aren’t going away. But the chaos around them can. We’ll help you understand what legal is really doing to your team and how to get it off their desks for good. The audit’s quick. The insight is sharp. The relief is immediate.
FAQs
Why can’t we just keep handling legal between us?
Because it’s not working. That’s not a criticism. It’s an observation. When legal gets handled by non-lawyers, without structure, it leads to inefficiencies and quiet risk. Some issues fall through the cracks. Others are given too much weight. Most just take too long. If you can’t see what legal issues exist, or how they’re being handled, you can’t manage them. The audit changes that.
Do we need to hire someone?
Not always. Sometimes, yes, but often, what’s really needed is better triage, not a full-time hire. The Growth Engine shows you whether the volume and complexity justify a permanent role. In many cases, it’s about building a smarter system, not adding another headcount.
What will the audit actually give us?
A full, clear picture of what legal work exists in your business, whether it’s contracts, compliance, HR, data, or something else. You’ll see who’s doing what, where things are getting stuck, and what’s at risk. We then translate that into a legal heatmap, a prioritised roadmap, and a plan to manage it all, without turning your inbox into a second legal department.
