The copy came back Thursday with a third round of redlines. Delight had become satisfaction. A claim about how fast the thing works had become a claim that it works. My favorite line in the campaign now reads like a warranty card.
I did what everyone does. I complained about legal to a coworker in the kitchen for eleven minutes.
Then I went and found what we had actually sent them. A Word document. An email subject line that said review by Friday. No brief, no strategy, no note about who this brand is supposed to sound like, no explanation of what we were deliberately risking and why.
We handed a risk function a page of words and asked it to assess risk. It did that. Flawlessly.
Legal did not make your copy beige, your process did, by asking a review chain to judge language nobody ever told them was supposed to sound like anything.
Three fixes, in the order they pay off.
One, brief counsel like a stakeholder instead of a checkpoint. The same deck creative got. What the brand is, who it is for, the personality decisions and the reasons behind them. A lawyer who knows you chose warmth on purpose will protect warmth. A lawyer who receives an unexplained adjective will delete it.
Two, get them in early, at strategy, not at four on a Thursday two days before the buy. Every hour of legal time you spend before the concept exists saves three hours of argument after it exists.
Three, give them a path to yes. Do not bring a bold claim by itself, bring the claim with its substantiation attached: the study, the sample size, the qualifier that makes it defensible. Patagonia did not run Don't Buy This Jacket by hoping. Somebody built the case that the company could say a true and inconvenient thing about its own product, and somebody in a legal role signed off on it.
A lawyer who knows you chose warmth on purpose will protect warmth.
Oatly has spent years in and out of fights over what it is allowed to call itself, and the voice never once flinched, because the voice and the legal position were built in the same conversation instead of in sequence. That is not a bigger risk appetite. That is a briefing habit.
I sent the brief we should have sent in February. Round four came back with two comments and one of them was a compliment.
Truffles slept on the printout of round three all weekend and Barnaby chewed a corner off it. Between the two of them that is still a lighter edit than we got in March.