When the Law Becomes the Brake: Why the Fix Lies Not in Legislation but in Timing

It is not the legal review that slows projects down, but the moment at which it begins.

In many public authorities the same sentence comes up whenever a project stalls: legal has not signed off yet. The sentence sounds like an explanation, but it is usually a description of the wrong symptom. The legal review itself is not the problem. The problem is the moment at which it first takes place.

The review comes too late, not too strictly

In my advisory practice I keep encountering the same pattern: a department spends months developing a project, shaping the concept, the process and the communication, and only sends it for legal review once it is finished from a specialist point of view. For the legal team, this is the first contact with the project. They see a finished construct, not a set of open questions, and at this late stage they have to challenge things that already feel settled. What looks like an obstruction from the outside is in truth a necessary review, taking place at the worst possible moment.

This order is no coincidence, but follows the logic of separate responsibilities. Departments often understand legal review as the last step before implementation, not as something that accompanies development. Legal teams, in turn, are rarely given the resources or the mandate to get involved early in projects whose outlines are still unclear. Both sides act consistently within their own logic. The result is nonetheless a hand-off that only kicks in once corrections are at their most expensive.

In practice, this cost logic is regularly underestimated. A legal assessment obtained during the concept phase of a project usually changes no more than a single assumption or a form of words. The same assessment, obtained after the specialist work has been completed, may change process steps, communication material and timelines all at once. The effort of correction therefore does not grow in a straight line with the delay, it accelerates the later the review takes place. It is precisely this effect that creates the impression that the law itself is the brake, when in fact it is merely engaging at an unfavourable point in the process.

Legal review as an early warning system, not a final gate

The decisive difference is not whether legal review takes place, but when. If it is placed at the end of a project, it inevitably acts as a brake, because any objection at that stage means revising work that has already been completed. If it is placed at the start instead, it acts as an early warning system. A lawyer brought in early can raise, in a half-hour conversation, the very objection that would later cost weeks of rework, while also pointing out scope the department did not previously know it had.

This shift requires no new organisational structure and no additional post. It requires a different rhythm of cooperation. In concrete terms: legal contacts are not brought in only at the end of a project, but already at the stage where the aim and the broad outline are fixed, though nothing has yet been worked out in detail. A short exchange at this point costs little time, because it responds to questions rather than to finished documents. But it changes the role of legal review from after-the-fact control to ongoing guidance.

A further effect of this early involvement is often overlooked in practice: it also changes the relationship between the two areas. Where legal only ever appears as the final authority, departments tend to develop a certain defensiveness, because every objection is experienced as after-the-fact criticism of work already done. Where legal is instead involved from the outset as a sparring partner, this perception shifts. Objections are then less often understood as an attack and more often as part of a shared development process. This shift in perception cannot be ordered into existence, but it arises almost automatically once cooperation begins earlier.

What this means in practice

Four consequences follow from this observation for public authorities that want to reorganise how their departments and legal teams work together.

First: the point of contact with legal review belongs at the start of a project, not at its end. A brief coordination conversation during the concept phase does not replace a later formal review, but it prevents that review from becoming a surprise.

Second: legal questions should be raised in small, clearly defined units rather than presenting an entire concept at once. Anyone who clarifies a single question early gets a quick, concrete answer. Anyone who sends a finished concept for review risks a wave of objections that reinforce one another and are hard to prioritise.

Third: responsibility for the timing of involvement lies with the department, not with the legal team. Legal teams can rarely tell on their own when a project is ready for an initial assessment. That initiative has to come from the side driving the project.

Fourth: senior managers who want to introduce this change in rhythm must model and demand it explicitly. As long as the expectation within the organisation is that legal reviews at the end, the behaviour of departments will not change, no matter how often early coordination is officially recommended. A cultural shift like this needs visible examples: a project that moved through review noticeably faster and more smoothly because of early involvement is more convincing than any written instruction.

It is also worth looking at the resourcing question, which discussions of this topic tend to skip over too quickly. Early involvement initially means additional meetings for legal teams, which need room in an already busy schedule. This additional meeting load, however, stands against the considerably greater effort caused by a late, comprehensive revision. Anyone who does not address this comparison openly risks early involvement failing for lack of capacity, even though it saves time overall.

The brake is rarely in the law itself

Anyone who complains about strain in the cooperation between departments and legal teams should first examine the timing of involvement before calling for stricter rules or more staff. Experience from numerous public-sector projects shows: where legal review runs alongside a project from the start, it becomes a tool that spots problems early. Where it only appears at the end, it becomes a symbol for everything supposedly blocked from the outside, even though the real cause lies in the organisation’s own workflow.

This is an uncomfortable insight, because it shifts responsibility back to where public authorities can actually act: their own organisation of cooperation. But that is also the good news. A changed approach to involving legal teams costs no additional resources and requires no change in legislation. It requires only the decision to start legal review earlier, rather than fearing it later.