General counsel are under growing pressure to deliver more with leaner teams, and the departments navigating that pressure most effectively are the ones that have rethought how legal work gets resourced rather than simply trying to do more with the same model.
At FlexFest 2026, Mark Smolik of DHL, Mike Haven of Meta, and Rishi Varma of Cargill will discuss what that rethinking looks like in practice, drawing on experience leading legal departments at two of the world’s largest companies.
How the Resourcing Conversation Is Changing
For much of the profession’s history, building a capable legal department meant building a larger one. The assumption that headcount and capability moved together is giving way to a more deliberate approach in many leading departments, one that asks what work genuinely requires dedicated internal capacity and what is better handled through flexible talent, outside counsel, or other models.
The shift is less about cost reduction than about precision. Departments that have built flexible talent into their core operating model, rather than treating it as overflow capacity, tend to have a clearer picture of how their resources are deployed and a more adaptable structure when the volume or nature of work changes. Whether that model translates across different organizational contexts, industries, and risk profiles is among the more interesting questions practitioners are working through right now.
The Infrastructure Beneath the Strategy
Getting team composition right is as much an operational challenge as a strategic one. Departments that have moved furthest in this direction tend to have invested in the data and systems infrastructure that makes flexible resourcing workable at scale, with enough visibility into the work to make consistent, defensible decisions about how it gets staffed.
AI is adding another layer to this conversation. As automation reshapes which tasks require dedicated legal expertise and which do not, the calculus around team composition is likely to keep shifting. How thoughtful general counsel are positioning their departments ahead of that pressure, rather than reacting to it, is part of what makes this session worth attending.
Hear From Three Leaders at FlexFest 2026
Mark Smolik has served as Chief Legal Officer of DHL Supply Chain Americas for over two decades. Rishi Varma serves as Chief Legal and Ethics and Compliance Officer and Corporate Secretary at Cargill, one of the world’s largest privately held companies. Mike Haven serves as Global Head of Legal Operations at Meta, where he leads the operational infrastructure behind one of the world’s most closely watched legal departments.
All three bring implementation-level thinking to questions the broader conversation tends to treat as theoretical.
The session, “The Legal Department of the Future: Smaller Teams, Smarter Systems,” is part of FlexFest 2026. Registration is open at resources.priorilegal.com/flex-fest
