Today's General Counsel, July/August 2025 Editor's Letter

Corporate strategy is often seen as the domain of operations, finance, or marketing. But what happens when legal expertise becomes the engine of competitive advantage?

This month’s cover story by University of Connecticut Professor Robert Bird challenges outdated assumptions and lays out a compelling framework for how general counsel can drive value at the highest level.

“Legal expertise can serve as a sustainable competitive advantage, enabling firms to unlock and capture value that might otherwise be overlooked. A sustainable competitive advantage from legal knowledge requires both executives and legal experts to collaborate closely together on important business decisions,” he explains, before going on to outline actionable steps lawyers can take to generate strategic value for the C-suite.

Rob Beard, Chief Legal and Global Affairs Officer at the materials, networking, and lasers company Coherent Corp, has a similar vision. In an era defined by uncertainty—from geopolitical shifts to technological acceleration—legal leaders are no longer just guardians of risk. They’re architects of strategy. 

That’s the central theme running through our interview with Beard, whose career has spanned sectors as diverse as finance, tech, and law.

“I expect my lawyers or the people that work in our organization to be business leaders first. People who are business leaders who look at the world through a different lens,” he says. “We look at the world a certain way—we bring certain experience to every business objective.”

Having sway with the C-suite is a career pinnacle for many senior-level attorneys—but what about those just starting out in their careers? The AI-fueled legal technology revolution has fundamentally altered the traditional career paths of young lawyers, as Noga Rosenthal, General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer of data-driven TV company Ampersand, writes in her story for us.

“AI tools are now capable of doing much of the entry-level work that once served as the foundation of a junior attorney’s training,” she explains, referencing the technology’s ability to summarize contracts in seconds, suggest redlines to agreements, and perform other tasks.

Rosenthal goes on to outline what today’s legal leaders should be doing to grow the next generation of senior lawyers at a time when more and more of the routine work that once taught them to think like lawyers is being automated. Shifting their workload to judgment-based tasks and away from document processing is just one of her suggestions.

Also in this issue: stories on employee terminations, agentic AI, technological patents, and digital deception.

And remember— this issue represents just a small sample of the content we publish every day on todaysgeneralcounsel.com. Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and X for the latest updates.

Thank you for reading!

Amanda Kaiser

Editor-in-Chief