Why the Best Product Lawyers Don’t Just Say No

What being a lawyer taught me about product judgement

Being a product and technology lawyer taught me that product judgment is not just about preferences or taste – it’s about deciding what matters, for whom, and at what cost.

Usually, good product judgment looks boring at first. It often means narrowing scope, reducing edge cases, and resisting the urge to ship something that creates more risk than commercial upside. In startups especially, there’s a temptation to confuse more with better. But in product work, as in law, what gets removed is often just as important as what makes it into the final version.

Being an in-house lawyer at companies both large and small has taught me that the best legal advice tends to be “yes, and”. Often the “and” means a business model needs to be modified, a feature changed, or the scope narrowed. In all cases, by working side by side with product and engineering, legal becomes a thought partner, and technical teams use legal as a forcing function for sharper thinking.

If a product cannot be clearly explained to legal, it often cannot be clearly explained to users, regulators, or the market either. That’s not a legal problem. It’s often a product problem.

Building a startup is improv, where the cardinal sin is using the word “no” – just as you build a coherent and interesting scene in improv on the fly, so are you building a profitable startup with product market fit in real time.

In that sense, technology law made me much more bullish on simplicity. The best products, like the best legal analysis, make hard things feel obvious in retrospect.