SmartSuite for the General Counsel

Legal Spend & Outside Counsel Management holds each firm's engagement, budget and invoices against the matter it serves, so spend is reviewed in the context of exposure and outcome rather than as a bill to approve.

Requests from the business arrive through structured forms and route to the Legal Operations Manager, Compliance Counsel or Privacy Counsel by type, so the queue is visible and triaged rather than hidden in inboxes.

Approved templates, clause positions and playbooks are held once and reused across contracts and matters, so a junior lawyer's draft starts from the position you have already approved.

Inquiries logged in Regulatory Inquiries carry the regulator, the deadline, the counsel assigned and the exposure, so you and the Chief Compliance Officer see every open inquiry in one view.

Legal positions on vendor terms, employment matters and data handling are reflected in the Procurement Director's and HR's workflows, so the advice you gave is applied where the work happens rather than re-asked each time.

Regulatory updates are tracked with impact assessments routed to the owners affected, so you evaluate legal exposure across jurisdictions from one register rather than from a stack of counsel memos.

Granular permissions, encryption and activity logs keep privileged matters and investigations visible only to the lawyers and executives who should see them, with a record of who accessed what.

The AI Assistant in a SmartDoc field summarizes contracts and extracts obligations and renewal dates in Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), so the obligations register is populated from the documents rather than built by hand after signature.

Dashboards of matter volumes, exposure, timelines and spend give you executive-ready figures for the Chief Executive Officer and the Audit Committee Chair without a quarterly compilation exercise.

Chief Executive Officer

The General Counsel leads the legal function and sets legal strategy, advises the board and executives on legal and regulatory risk, oversees contracts, disputes, investigations and regulatory matters, owns corporate governance and the corporate secretary function, manages outside counsel and legal spend and approves compliance and privacy policies from a legal standpoint. They report legal risk to the board. The Legal Operations Manager, Compliance Counsel, Privacy Counsel and Corporate Secretary report in, and the Chief Compliance Officer and Chief Risk Officer are the closest peers.

Legal Matter Management tracks matters, disputes and regulatory inquiries with status, counsel and exposure visible in one place, so the General Counsel can see every open matter, who is handling it, where it stands and what it could cost without asking each lawyer for an update. Regulatory Inquiries holds requests from regulators with their responses and deadlines. Exposure across matters is the figure the board and the Audit Committee Chair want, and it comes from the matter records rather than a quarterly survey.

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) oversees contract review, approvals and obligations with version history, so the General Counsel can see which contracts are in review, who approved each version and what obligations the organization took on. The Procurement Director's supplier contracts and the sales team's customer contracts follow the same approval path, and obligations such as renewal dates and notice periods are tracked rather than rediscovered. When a dispute arises, the version history shows what was agreed and when.

SmartSuite lets the General Counsel review and approve compliance-related policies and evaluate regulatory impact across jurisdictions, with the policies held in Policy Management and the approval recorded against the version. The Chief Compliance Officer and the Chief Privacy Officer route policies for legal sign-off from the same record, so the legal view is captured once rather than in margin comments. For a group operating in several jurisdictions, the regulatory impact assessment shows where a single policy needs local variations.

Entity & Corporate Governance Management manages the entities, board calendars and governance records the General Counsel is accountable for, with the corporate secretary function working the records day to day. Entity details, directors, filings and board and committee meetings are held together, so a governance question from the Audit Committee Chair or a regulator is answered from the register. That is the record state corporation law, exchange listing rules and the SEC's attorney conduct rules under SOX Section 307 expect a General Counsel to maintain.

SmartSuite reports legal risk, spend and open matters to the board from the matter, contract and governance records, and Legal Spend & Outside Counsel Management holds the outside counsel budgets, invoices and performance that make up the spend figure. The General Counsel reports exposure and spend from the same source, so the board sees what is open, what it may cost and what it is costing to run. The Chief Risk Officer reads legal risk alongside enterprise risk from the same records.

The open matter list with counsel and exposure, the contracts in review and the executed contracts with obligations worth tracking, the entity list with its board calendar and the outside counsel budget by matter. With those loaded, matters are tracked from the first week, contract approvals run through the system from the next contract and the board report is built from the records at the next cycle. The Legal Operations Manager usually owns the setup, with Compliance Counsel and Privacy Counsel working their matters in the same records.