Legal creates no value. None.
That's the claim. I’ve heard it too many times, from business people and lawyers. I’ve even started to question the profession itself.
Let me show you the root of the problem. Take Hormozi's value equation. Fill it in for your own work.
Value = (Dream Outcome × Perceived Likelihood) ÷ (Time × Effort)
Go on, try it right now.
I bet you froze on variable one. Me too. Not because our work has no value, but because nobody ever taught us to measure and demonstrate it.
Here's an example of how this formula should work. Sales want deals closed fast. Imagine you've built a reliable system: Sales emails the deal terms and gets a clean contract back a minute later. That is close to infinite value to Sales. The dream outcome is exactly what they wanted, the system is reliable so they trust it will land, and the time and effort it costs them is almost nothing. A big number on top, near zero on the bottom, and the value shoots up.
Now let me show you how to fill the formula in, one variable at a time.
I know that defining value might not be easy. Reply and tell me which variable you have an issue with.
1. Dream outcome: stop inventing it
My first instinct was to sit alone and define the value. Wrong move.
The dream outcome lives in my customer's head, and my customer, as an in-house lawyer, is the business. So you should extract the outcome the same way a founder runs customer discovery before building a product. You go and ask.
Take MY CUSTDEV PROMPT. It will give you 5 questions that you can fire at your customer.
You are likely to have a portfolio of customers: Sales, Product, CFO, CEO, the Board. You are providing a different service to each, and every one is dreaming about something different. So you should interview them all.
Your customer | What they might be dreaming about |
|---|---|
Sales | Deals closed in milliseconds |
CEO | We enter the next market and make millions |
The Board | I can sign off and sleep at night |
Notice what's not on that list: "legal protection", "compliance", "lawsuit avoided". Because nobody lies awake dreaming about the legal stuff. Except for lawyers.
Your goal here is to help customers reach their dream outcome. Your dream outcome is the good thing your customer wanted that you made possible.
Legal turns what the business wants to do into something it's actually allowed and able to do.
Frame your value as "a lawsuit that didn’t happen" and it will mean zero in the formula. And guess what? Zero multiplied by anything is still zero.
If you can't name your dream outcome you just haven't asked the customers yet. Go do the interviews.
2. Perceived likelihood: don’t lower it
Perceived likelihood is confidence that the dream will actually land. It’s subjective. Like everything else in this formula.
Every "it depends," "that's risky," "we can't guarantee that" subtracts confidence. The customer hears "this might not work," and the odds of their dream, in their head, just dropped.
So change the default answer. It's never "no". It's:
"Let me see what's possible and how to arrange it."
Even when your gut says "no", especially then, you come back with options, each with its risk translated into a number. Then the business decides, because the business owns the risk.
Below is the vocabulary. Steal it.