When Tara Trantham talks about the cost of delay, she is not speaking in hypotheticals. As the chief legal officer of a billion-dollar publicly traded company, she faced simultaneous investigations from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Justice. Without the benefit of legal technology or streamlined processes, she and her team had to manually pull five years of legal complaints into spreadsheets for multiple agencies.

“It took five years,” Tara recalled. “And it cost hundreds of millions of dollars in expenses and lost productivity.”

The impact was immediate. On the day the company had to publicly disclose the investigation, its market capitalization dropped by roughly $250 million. The operational toll was just as severe. While the legal team was buried in document collection, the business teams were pulled from their core work to find and deliver records. Growth slowed while compliance consumed the organization.

Why Early Engagement Matters

Tara is clear about the lesson. “If we had embedded legal and compliance earlier into operational processes, and had the right technology in place, we could have reduced the time from years to months and saved millions.”

The insight applies well beyond regulatory investigations. In contracting, the same principle holds. When legal is looped in only after a dispute arises or a key deadline is missed, the cost of remediation is far higher than the cost of prevention. Poor recordkeeping, unclear obligations, and missing approval workflows create the same kind of disruption Tara faced, just spread across more contracts and more stakeholders.

Tactical Ways To Embed Legal Early

Map The Process, Not Just The Policy
Tara’s experience shows that knowing what needs to be done is not enough. You must document exactly how information will be collected, stored, and accessed well in advance of any requests from regulators or counterparties.
Integrate Legal Into Core Systems
If your sales, procurement, and operations teams use different tools, legal should have visibility into all of them. Contract terms and obligations cannot live in a silo.
Create A Rapid-Response Data Protocol
Even without a subpoena on the horizon, build a playbook for quickly pulling key information. Identify who owns each dataset and how it will be retrieved.
Use Data To Justify Resources
Tara wishes she had presented a stronger case to her CEO and board for technology investment. “It is hard to prove the negative,” she said. “But if you can quantify how many hours and dollars are lost to manual processes, you can make a compelling argument for change.”

The Cultural Shift

Perhaps the most important takeaway is mindset. Embedding legal early requires shifting how the business sees your department. Legal is not just a safety net when something goes wrong. It is a partner in designing processes that make it less likely that anything will go wrong in the first place.

As Tara put it, “The more prepared you are, the more you can keep the business growing, instead of pulling people away from it to handle preventable crises.”

For in-house leaders, the challenge is to make early engagement a habit, not a reaction. The next time a major project launches or a new market opens, do not wait for the first sign of trouble to get involved. Build the connections, processes, and visibility now — before the cost of delay becomes the headline.

Olga V. Mack is the CEO of TermScout, an AI-powered contract certification platform that accelerates revenue and eliminates friction by certifying contracts as fair, balanced, and market-ready. A serial CEO and legal tech executive, she previously led a company through a successful acquisition by LexisNexis. Olga is also a Fellow at CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and the Generative AI Editor at law.MIT. She is a visionary executive reshaping how we law—how legal systems are built, experienced, and trusted. Olga teaches at Berkeley Law, lectures widely, and advises companies of all sizes, as well as boards and institutions. An award-winning general counsel turned builder, she also leads early-stage ventures including Virtual Gabby (Better Parenting Plan), Product Law Hub, ESI Flow, and Notes to My (Legal) Self, each rethinking the practice and business of law through technology, data, and human-centered design. She has authored The Rise of Product Lawyers, Legal Operations in the Age of AI and Data, Blockchain Value, and Get on Board, with Visual IQ for Lawyers (ABA) forthcoming. Olga is a 6x TEDx speaker and has been recognized as a Silicon Valley Woman of Influence and an ABA Woman in Legal Tech. Her work reimagines people’s relationship with law—making it more accessible, inclusive, data-driven, and aligned with how the world actually works. She is also the host of the Notes to My (Legal) Self podcast (streaming on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube), and her insights regularly appear in Forbes, Bloomberg Law, Newsweek, VentureBeat, ACC Docket, and Above the Law. She earned her B.A. and J.D. from UC Berkeley. Follow her on LinkedIn and X @olgavmack.

The post Why Waiting For A Crisis To Involve Legal Will Cost You Millions appeared first on Above the Law.