In-House Lawyers Deserve Better Tools

The Beginning: The path to in-house counsel

Nearly every in-house lawyer begins their career at a law firm, where years of private practice sharpen legal expertise. Spotting complex issues, identifying risks, and zealously protecting clients through delivery of high-quality advice is prized and rewarded. Law firms offer robust resources for deep legal research and strong incentives for excellence: more billable hours mean bigger bonuses and greater career success. But moving in-house shifts the expectations of what it means to be a great lawyer.

As in-house counsel, you’re not just providing legal advice - you’re also responsible for implementing it and managing the consequences. You also only have a single client, and their business success – especially in deal negotiations – is often directly linked to your engagement and performance. Excessive legal research and overly cautious contract reviews can slow deals, frustrate colleagues, and create unnecessary bottlenecks that harm the client you are trying to protect. You can’t simply deliver a memo, contract draft, or risk analysis and move on.

The Challenge: Keeping Up with Business

Adding to the challenge, in-house lawyers are expected to be both legal and business experts. Unlike in private practice, success isn’t measured by billable hours, making long meetings and complicated contract redlines less valuable. Business teams tend to view legal advice through a risk-based lens, and don’t always give it the weight you would have thought when billing them $1,000/hour while in private practice. At the same time, ignoring legal risks or failing to understand the company’s risk tolerance isn’t an option. The business still expects top-tier legal advice but now paired with executive-level business acumen – someone with both insight across the enterprise and strong commercial judgment.

Unfortunately, many of the powerful tools available to law firms don’t follow lawyers in-house. Most legal tech is designed for private practice, where automation supports a billable hour business model. In-house counsel needs automation that fosters efficiency, collaboration, and business success. Of course litigation risks remain a concern, that is not the day-to-day work of most in-house counsel, who are far more likely to be hard at work developing strategic programs for legal compliance, business function advising, product advising, or contract review.

That last one – contract review – is where V4 Final come in. Nearly every in-house lawyer, regardless of their designated role or strategic important to the business, will review contracts. Not in the “let’s make this a contract that my law professor would be proud of” type of way, but in a “we need this deal done” type of way. And that is where technology is failing in-house counsel.

The Solution: V4 Final

V4 Final is built specifically for in-house lawyers. Our AI-powered platform empowers legal teams to be exceptional business partners by helping them:

• Discover critical insights within the business

• Understand their business clients

• Prioritize workload for maximum impact

• Drive success for the company

If your success as in-house counsel depends on:

• Rapidly synthesizing contract clauses and redlines

• Understanding legal and operational impacts on the business

• Aligning contract risk with business goals

• Quickly identifying and advising key decision-makers

Then you need V4 Final.

What’s holding your legal team back from becoming a true business partner? Drop your thoughts in the comments or sign up for updates to see how V4 Final can transform your in-house legal team.