Overcoming Request Inertia in Legal Work Management
Sep 4, 2025
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Changing how legal work arrives shifts in-house legal departments from reactive service providers to strategic business partners
You start Monday morning with grand plans to tackle that enterprise-wide compliance initiative, only to find your inbox flooded with contract reviews, employment questions, and marketing approval requests. By Friday, the strategic work remains untouched, pushed aside by the tide of business requests.
If your legal department feels overwhelmed with requests and stuck in reactive mode, you're not alone. We like to call this request inertia. This phenomenon occurs when requests accumulate momentum and precedence simply by arriving, regardless of their strategic importance. Incoming work sets the agenda with urgency crowding out strategy, leaving legal teams stuck in a reactive stance.
This tension between strategic ambition and reactive reality is the culmination of a century-long evolution in how corporate legal departments operate. But buried within this legal operations challenge lies the most overlooked leverage point: the humble request itself.
A Brief History on the GC Role
In the "golden years" of General Counsels (post-Civil War through the 1930s), over 75% of major corporation CEOs had legal backgrounds. In 2024, CEOs in the Fortune 500 that came by way of law were newsworthy. This century-long departure from elevating top legal thinkers corresponds with the rising prestige of Big Law and the increase in specialization across the enterprise, with MBAs taking over the role of general corporate executive.
The prominence and promise of the GC role started to shift in the 1930s with the rise of Big Law firms with specialized expertise and close ties to top law schools. In-house counsel took a backseat to outside counsel, often relegated to compliance work and liaison duties with diminished strategic authority.
In the 1970s, driven by increasing regulatory complexity, escalating outside counsel costs, and the inseparable nature of legal and business concerns in complex corporate operations, the GC role was restored to C-suite status. GCs became trusted strategic advisors spanning legal expertise and business acumen. Despite this elevated perception, crossing the gap between law and business remains less common. AI is changing the game once again, with in-house teams increasingly considering how legal can accelerate the business.
For the history buffs, Professor Eli Wald’s Fordham Law Review article, Getting In and Out of the House: The Worlds of In-House Counsel, Big Law, and Emerging Career Trajectories of In-house Lawyers, offers an exploration of how the GC role has evolved.
Who Owns the Agenda?
As legal departments grew to meet expanding demands, something fundamental shifted. The volume of work increasingly originated not from the legal team's strategic vision, but from the business units generating requests.
Even the most esteemed GCs face this tension. Despite being brought on as a strategic business partner, the role can feel like running a high-end service organization, constantly responding to urgent requests from across the enterprise.
This reactive stance presents a structural challenge built into how modern corporations operate, and it's driven by request inertia.
Where Legal Work Originates
Work flows through in-house legal departments in a few key ways, each with different levels of inherent inertia:
1. Self-Initiated Work
This is the legal team-led strategic work: building compliance programs, updating governance structures, conducting risk assessments, developing policies. It's proactive, important, and directly aligned with legal's vision for the legal function.
Low Inertia - This work has the least momentum because it lacks external pressure and can be easily deferred when other priorities arise.
2. Cadence-Initiated Work
The routine, cyclical work that keeps corporations functioning: board meeting preparation, annual SEC filings, contract renewals, quarterly compliance reporting. It's predictable and can be systematized, but requires consistent attention.
Predictable Inertia - This work has scheduled momentum with clear deadlines, making it easier to plan around but still difficult to defer.
3. Externally-Initiated Work
Requests from business units: contract reviews, employment questions, marketing approvals, M&A support, regulatory interpretations. This work is reactive by nature. It is generated by business needs rather than legal planning.
High Inertia - These requests are hardest to resist once submitted because they come with built-in urgency, stakeholder expectations, and business pressure.
Here's the challenge: When externally-initiated work dominates legal departments it carries the most inertia even if it isn’t the most important work.
The Role of Urgency Bias
Requests carry built-in momentum that goes beyond their actual urgency. They're tied to business deadlines—deals that need to close, campaigns that need to launch, hiring decisions that can't wait. But even when a request is relatively low in strategic importance, its inertia forces prioritization simply because it has entered the system and begun accumulating stakeholder expectations.
This creates what we might call "urgency bias.” This is the systematic preference for reactive tasks over proactive initiatives, driven not by actual importance but by the momentum that requests gain once they're submitted. Reactive work tends to come with deadlines, a clear achievable output, visibility, and praise when completed.
As a result, legal departments find themselves in a perpetual state of catching up, always responding to the latest crisis instead of building systems that prevent crises from occurring.
Prioritization Frameworks Fail Without Structure
Many productivity frameworks suggest using the Eisenhower Matrix to categorize work into four quadrants:
Urgent + Important: Crisis management, critical deadlines
Urgent + Less Important: Interruptions, some requests
Not Urgent + Important: Strategic planning, prevention, development
Not Urgent + Less Important: Busywork, time wasters
The framework makes intuitive sense: focus on Quadrant 1 (urgent and important), eliminate Quadrant 4 (neither urgent nor important), delegate Quadrant 3 (urgent but less important), and invest time in Quadrant 2 (important but not urgent).
But, you can't apply the matrix while trapped by request inertia.
The accumulated momentum of unstructured requests makes it nearly impossible to apply any prioritization framework effectively. When requests are not structured on arrival, legal teams end up spending time just figuring out how to prioritize.
Beyond Reactive Mode
Not all teams are stuck in reactive mode. The degree to which request inertia dominates varies significantly by company size, industry, legal team maturity, and how well the department has established boundaries and processes.
The solution isn't to eliminate externally-initiated work. Business demands are legitimate and unavoidable. Legal teams that embrace structure and efficient workflows can counteract request inertia and preserve capacity for strategic work.
Legal Operations Best Practices
For any prioritization framework to work in legal, three conditions must be met to counteract request inertia:
1. Structured Intake
Requests must arrive with enough information to assess their urgency and importance without extensive back-and-forth clarification. This reduces the momentum that poorly-defined requests gain through repeated follow-ups and escalating stakeholder attention.
2. Volume Visibility
Legal leadership needs clear insight into the volume, type, and flow of incoming work to make informed resource allocation decisions and resist the pull of individual high-inertia requests.
3. Protected Capacity
The legal team must have bandwidth to actively shift resources toward important but non-urgent initiatives, rather than simply reacting to whatever arrives next. This means creating explicit buffers against request inertia.
Many legal departments rely on simple email and spreadsheets to organize work. It's no wonder request inertia dominates when legal operations teams lack proper systems to counteract it.
The Request as Leverage Point
The request itself can change the dynamic and break the cycle of request inertia.
Every piece of externally-initiated work begins with a request. How that request is structured, processed, and managed determines whether it becomes a source of inertia that derails strategic priorities or a strategic asset that enhances the legal function.
When requests are properly structured, they counteract inertia by:
1. Reducing Noise
Clear, complete requests eliminate the back-and-forth clarification cycles that consume enormous time and create additional momentum through repeated stakeholder touch points.
2. Unlocking Capacity
By reducing communication time spent clarifying poorly-defined requests, legal teams can reallocate time toward higher-value work, including strategic initiatives that would otherwise be overwhelmed by request inertia.
Generating Intelligence
Well-structured requests create data about legal demand patterns, enabling better resource planning.
Enabling Automation
When routine requests flow smoothly through efficient processes, legal teams can automate low-risk, non-urgent work and apply appropriate friction to high-inertia requests that aren't strategically important.
The Compound Effects of Defeating Request Inertia
The beauty of focusing on request structure is that improvements compound, creating a virtuous cycle that progressively reduces the power of request inertia:
Better requests → Less clarification time → More available capacity
More capacity → Better ability to work on important but non-urgent projects
Strategic project completion → Improved systems and processes
Better systems → Even more efficient request handling and resistance to inertia
Efficient operations → Enhanced credibility with business stakeholders
This creates a self-reinforcing system where small improvements in how requests are handled unlock progressively larger strategic opportunities by systematically reducing the dominance of request inertia.
From Service Provider to Strategic Partner
The path from reactive service provider to strategic business partner doesn't require a massive organizational restructuring or a doubling of headcount. It starts with overcoming request inertia at its source: the individual request.
By applying structure, process, and intelligence to how requests flow through your legal department, you create the external force necessary to counteract request inertia.
The humble request may seem like the least strategic aspect of legal work, but it's actually the most overlooked leverage point for transformation. Clarity at the request level dissolves inertia and creates the space for higher-value work.
Ready to move beyond reactive mode? Request a demo to see how Coheso's structured intake platform helps legal teams overcome request inertia and reclaim strategic capacity.
