What I Didn't Know When I Started Building a Legal Team in a Nonprofit

Sep 7

6 min read

Leadership Blogs | By Priyanka Mali, Head, Legal & Compliance, Development Consortium

Building a Legal & Compliance function may begin with contracts, policies, processes and managing risk. But as an organisation grows, the work becomes just as much about people, trust, judgement and leadership. In this edition of DC Leadership Blogs, Priyanka Mali reflects on what she did not know when she began building the Legal & Compliance function at Development Consortium, and what the journey has taught her about helping an organisation move forward, building a team that does not depend on one individual, and making room for both empathy and accountability.

When I started building the Legal & Compliance function at Development Consortium, I had a fairly clear idea of what a good legal function should look like. We needed strong contracts, clear policies, reliable processes and systems that would help the organisation manage risk and remain compliant as it grew.

All of that was true. What I understood much less at the time was how much of the job would actually be about people.

Legal is not always a function that nonprofits choose to build separately, and there are good reasons for this. Resources are limited, projects understandably take priority, and external counsel can provide specialist advice when required. But as an organisation grows, the nature of its legal needs changes too. There are more people, more partnerships, larger grants, new projects, safeguarding responsibilities, donor requirements and decisions where the legal answer is only one part of a much bigger organisational question.

Legal must help the organisation move forward

I have seen that evolution closely at DC, and perhaps the biggest change has been in how I think about the purpose of the legal function itself.

A good legal function cannot exist only to protect an organisation from risk. It also has to help the organisation move forward.

That sounds simple, but it changes the way you work. Instead of asking only, “Can we do this?”, you start asking, “What are we trying to achieve, what are the genuine risks, and how can we do this responsibly?”

To answer that well, Legal cannot work in isolation.

Some of the most useful things I have learned over the years have come from conversations with colleagues in Finance, HR, Operations and project leaders. An agreement may look perfectly reasonable from a legal perspective until Finance explains how a particular provision will work in practice. A solution to an employee issue may be legally sound but make little sense without understanding the context from HR or the manager involved. A project team may explain something happening on the ground that completely changes the way we think about a risk.

Being a good lawyer within an organisation therefore requires a certain amount of humility: knowing when your expertise matters, being willing to say when you don't know something, and recognising when someone else's perspective matters more.

Trust changes the conversation

It also requires trust.

For me, one of the most encouraging signs of how our Legal & Compliance function has grown is when colleagues involve us before they technically need to. The conversation is no longer only, “Here is the agreement, can you review it?” Sometimes it is simply, “We are thinking about doing this. Can we talk it through?”

I value those conversations because they tell me that Legal is being seen not just as an approval point, but as a partner.

Building a function is not the same as building a team

Perhaps the biggest lesson, though, has come from building the team itself.

When you have been involved in creating a function, it is very easy to become the person who knows the history behind everything. You know why a process exists, why a particular decision was taken and what happened the last time a similar issue came up. There is always a temptation to keep answering the questions yourself because it feels quicker.

At some point, you realise that this is not really building a team.

A strong team cannot depend on one person having all the answers. People need context, opportunities to make decisions, space to disagree and room to make mistakes and learn from them. Over time, I have come to see leadership less as being the person with the answers and more as being of service to the people you lead, creating the space for them to grow into their own judgement and responsibility.

The best leadership, to me, is rarely about being at the centre. It is about helping other people become stronger. That also means noticing people.

Nonprofit work moves quickly. We finish something difficult and almost immediately begin talking about the next thing. At that pace, it is surprisingly easy to overlook the thought someone put into a piece of work, the problem they quietly solved, or the responsibility they took without being asked.

People need to know that their contribution has been seen.

I understood this more clearly through our Organisational Needs Assessment. One of the things we heard was that, as the organisation had grown, people wanted greater connection and appreciation. That feedback shaped our organisation-wide retreat, where we created space for teams to showcase their work, understand what others were contributing and recognise each other's efforts.

The experience reinforced something simple for me: when you ask people to speak, what builds trust is what you do after they have spoken.

There is room for both truth and grace

The same principle applies when things are difficult.

Legal & Compliance inevitably becomes involved in some of the hardest moments within an organisation: grievances, investigations, safeguarding concerns, performance issues and situations where there may be no outcome that makes everyone happy.

Those experiences have taught me that empathy and accountability are not opposites. There is room for both truth and grace in the way we lead.

You can listen carefully and still disagree. You can hold someone accountable and still treat them with dignity. You can make a difficult decision without losing compassion for the person affected by it. For me, leadership is not tested only by whether we make the right decision, but also by how we treat people when those decisions are difficult.

Systems matter, but people build the function

Policies give us structure and consistency, but they cannot do that work for us. A grievance process works only when people trust it enough to use it. A safeguarding framework matters only when people feel safe enough to speak, and a legal function works best when colleagues believe that the people behind it will listen before they advise.

When I think about what makes me proud of our function today, it is therefore not a particular policy, agreement or process.

It is seeing the team become more confident in its own judgement. It is seeing colleagues across functions come to Legal early because they trust the conversation. It is watching people take ownership without waiting to be told exactly what to do, and it is knowing that the function is becoming less dependent on any one individual.

I believe nonprofits should invest more intentionally in their legal capacity as they grow. Strong Legal & Compliance teams certainly help protect organisations, but their responsibility goes further. They help organisations be good stewards of what has been entrusted to them: their people, their resources, their relationships and the responsibility that comes with trying to serve communities well.

They can help programmes make better decisions, build stronger partnerships, protect people and take thoughtful risks in pursuit of their mission.

But if there is one thing I understand differently now, it is that you don't build a strong legal function simply by building good systems. You build it by investing in good people, giving them room to grow, treating them with dignity and earning the trust of those around you.

The systems matter. The work matters. But so does the spirit in which we do that work: whether we lead with humility, extend grace when it is needed, speak truth when it is difficult, and remember that leadership is ultimately an opportunity to serve rather than to be important.

Perhaps I should have known that when I started.

I am grateful I have been given the opportunity to learn it along the way.