We Are Not Our Task List

Based on a real story, shared with the permission of those involved.

Two months ago, I talked with one of the lawyers on my team about his career development. Before joining us, he was the head of legal at a smaller company in a different industry, where he had managed the entire legal function, including contracts, disputes, board matters, outside counsel, and the many other matters that eventually find their way to the legal department because no one knows where they belong.

For the first year under my team, he spent a significant portion of his time on subsidiary maintenance, which is a term that describes the work required to keep our legal entities across more than 30 countries in good standing: things like annual filings, board and shareholder consents, renewals, and other formalities. It is time-consuming and important work, especially when neglected, although few chief legal officers would describe it as the most visible or intellectually challenging assignments. I was grateful that he took it on, and had done it exceptionally well.

I was eager to discuss what might come next for him. In my mind, career progression meant creating room for work that were more “strategic”: corporate governance, crisis management, and the kinds of matters that place a lawyer closer to the center of high risk decision-making. With that in mind, I suggested that we should find a way to devote more of his time to other areas. Because our legal department has a flat structure, team members could take on whatever work that interests them without worrying about staying in their swim lanes.

I could see from his expression that the suggestion had not excited him as I intended. What I meant was that I saw more in him than the assignments currently occupying his time, but what he may have heard was that I saw less value in the work he had been doing and perhaps, by extension, less value in the person who had been doing it. He told me, firmly but politely, that he wanted to finish the subsidiary maintenance work he had started, and the conversation ended there.

Two months later, when we met again, he showed me a demo of an application that he built.

That said, his first instinct was not to build an application himself. He first sought third party vendors hoping to buy one. He couldn’t find a good fit: some of the solutions did not reflect the way he worked, while others seemed to automate the existing process without reconsidering why it was needed in the first place. After a few unsuccessful attempts, he decided to take a shot at building the application himself.

Using Claude Code, he created an application with a new workflow. He drew on his day-to-day familiarity with how the work actually gets done, as well as his business judgment about what work required human scrutiny vs. what merely needed to be “good enough.” He knew the handful of countries and states where even small deviations could lead to rejection, and he tried to eliminate overengineered processes elsewhere. From there on, he iterated on the application daily, beginning with the foundational question of why a filing, consent, calendar entry, or other artifact was required in the first place, and what could go wrong if it was completed incorrectly. From there, he developed a principle of minimum viability and redesigned the underlying artifacts, filings, consents and calendars around that principle.

In addition to building the application, he simultaneously managed an M&A transaction and tricky employment matters just as any seasoned lawyer would.

In our first conversation, I had imagined that his career development required moving away from subsidiary maintenance and toward more “strategic” work. It is ironic to see that the very definition of “strategic” work, M&A and tricky employment matters, were handled the routine way, while subsidiary maintenance, the “routine” work, was executed strategically. He did that by remaining close to the work to understand why it had taken its present form, which aspects of that form were necessary, and which had persisted only because no one had found a better way.

Had he accepted the path I proposed, the work would likely need to be moved to someone else in its burdensome and uninteresting form. By insisting on finishing what he had started, he reshaped the work into something far more intellectual and enjoyable.

Looking back, I suspect that both of us harbored some misconception about the relationship between a lawyer and their tasks. I had treated his tasks as evidence of where his career was, while he might have understood my desire to change those tasks as a judgment about the value that he had contributed. It was natural for us to think that way, because organizations routinely use tasks as shorthand for status, trust, potential, and importance, even when they insist that no such hierarchy exists.

Yet a task is only a temporary arrangement between a lawyer and a problem. It may be transferred, redesigned, or even rendered obsolete, while the person who once performed it remains capable of curiosity, judgment, initiative, and invention. Those qualities are not conferred by an org chart, nor are they limited to the work a manager happens to place on someone’s desk.

At that point, all I could say to him is:

Thanks for helping me understand that we should not be defined by our tasks. Chart your own path! Because whatever you do, I trust you will do it with judgment, care, and a sense of joy that would not only advance yourself, but also those around you.

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For more practical discussions of AI governance and innovation, see GenAI for the Legal Profession: Power User Edition, AI Strategy for Legal Leaders, the Atticus AI Habits Workshop, and my Fairly AI blogs.