Legal creates no value. None.
That's the claim. I’ve heard it from the business people who treat lawyers as parasites on business. I’ve heard it from lawyers who lost faith in the profession.
Let me show you the root of the problem. Take Hormozi's value equation and prove them wrong. 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.
So let me show you how to fill it in, one variable at a time.
By the end of this post you’ll be able to understand how to define the business value of the job you do.
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 doesn't live in my head. It lives in my customer's head, and my customer as an in-house lawyer is the business.
So you don't define outcome, you extract it, the same way a founder runs customer discovery before building a product. You go and ask.
And you don't have one customer, you have a portfolio of them: sales, product, the CFO, the CEO, the board. You're not a single-product function. You're selling a different service to each of them, and every one is dreaming about something different.
Your customer | What they're actually 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. Take THE CUSTDEV PROMPT. It will interview you and give you 5 questions you might want to ask your customer.