Domain
Legal and Compliance
How risk, contracts, and regulation shape the day-to-day — and whether the legal lens shows up at the start of the work or only at the end.
Legal and Compliance is the domain that, when it goes wrong, looks like Approval Loops with teeth. Work is shipped, then reviewed, then sent back; the team learns to add an extra week of buffer to every project on the chance that legal will have an opinion no one anticipated.
The architecture is rarely a difficult lawyer. The architecture is the absence of a fast, lightweight forum for the team to ask "is this risky?" before they spend three weeks building the thing. Without that forum, every legal review feels like an ambush.
Repair looks like a 30-minute weekly office hour, written guardrails for the common cases, and a clear escalation path for the uncommon ones. Mostly it looks like trust between two functions that historically defaulted to suspicion.
Dr. Tim Hough · ISBN 979-8-9965397-1-0 · Buy the book →
Diagnostic
If the team avoids talking to legal until they absolutely have to — and treats every legal conversation as adversarial — you don't have a legal problem. You have an architecture in which legal is only ever consulted at the worst possible moment.
Run the diagnostic
Explore this domain in depth once you have a workspace.
Deep link: /field-guide/legal-compliance
Source: Why Your Best People Stop Trying. Dr. Tim Hough.