"Every in-house lawyer has felt the shift. Product cycles are shorter. Launch pressure is higher. AI is everywhere. Engineering leaders expect legal to keep pace with changing architectures, new data flows, and features that update weekly. Yet most companies hire product counsel the same way they hired them ten years ago. They look for a privacy expert, or a commercial generalist, or someone who has worked at a tech company before. They hope this combination will magically translate into strong product instincts."
"Product counsel is no longer a reactive role. It is a design role. When you hire the wrong person, problems do not appear immediately. They build quietly inside product decisions, accumulating debt that eventually surfaces as risk, delay, or misalignment. That is why writing the right job description is not an HR exercise. It is a product risk management strategy."
Product cycles have accelerated and launch pressure has increased, driven by AI and rapidly changing architectures and data flows. Engineering leaders expect legal to keep pace with frequent feature updates. Hiring based on traditional credentials—privacy expertise, firm pedigree, or prior tech titles—often fails to produce effective product counsel. The core requirement is dynamic capability: the ability to sit in design meetings, evaluate purpose, user value, edge cases, and operational dependencies, and make decisions when documentation is incomplete. Poor hires cause accumulating technical and compliance debt that manifests as risk, delay, and misalignment. Job descriptions should prioritize behaviors and judgment as a form of product risk management.
Read at Above the Law
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]