How to Build an In-House Legal Function Ready for Cross-Industry Regulation

Cross-industry regulation is becoming a defining feature of the modern regulatory and legal environment. Across financial services, technology, energy, healthcare, and beyond, a new generation of regulatory frameworks is being designed to apply across industries simultaneously – and the pace is accelerating.  

For General Counsel, legal leaders, and hiring managers, the challenge this creates goes beyond hiring a few specialists. It requires a fundamental rethink of how the in-house legal function is designed, resourced, and positioned within the business – before the next wave arrives, not in response to it. 

This article sets out a practical framework for preparing your legal function for sustained cross-industry regulatory pressure: what to assess, what to change, and where talent strategy fits in. 

What is cross-industry regulation, and why does it matter for in-house legal teams? 

Cross-industry regulation refers to frameworks designed to impose consistent standards across multiple industries simultaneously, rather than targeting a single one. What makes the current wave distinctive is not just its volume, but its interdependency: these frameworks interact with each other, with existing industry-specific obligations, and with a firm's operational and technology infrastructure in ways that conventional legal team structures simply not designed to manage. 

The examples are already substantial. In the UK and EU, the AI Act, DORA, SDR, CSRD, and SFDR are changing compliance expectations well beyond financial services – with significant obligations for technology providers, energy companies, and large corporates. In the US, the SEC's climate disclosure framework, the FTC's expanding AI and data governance enforcement agenda, and a rapidly evolving state-level privacy landscape – led by CCPA and its successors – are creating parallel pressures across industries.  

The structural risks of an unprepared in-house legal function 

When cross-industry regulatory obligations are managed reactively – assigned to whichever team member is closest to the subject matter at the time – the risks are compounding: 

• Coverage gaps emerge. When no single lawyer owns a cross-cutting obligation, it is easy for it to fall between functions. AI governance is a live example right now: firms where legal, technology, and risk teams each assume the others are monitoring the regulatory position are routinely discovering they have no coherent internal owner. 
• Advice becomes inconsistent. Without a coordinated approach, different parts of the business receive different legal stances on the same regulatory question – particularly problematic for obligations like operational resilience or data governance, where alignment between legal, IT, and operations is essential. 
• Talent is misdeployed. Specialist lawyers hired for a specific regulatory purpose – an ESG specialist, for example – find themselves pulled into adjacent regulatory work they were not recruited or developed to do, reducing quality and increasing attrition risk. 
• Response times slow. When regulatory change arrives quickly, a function without clear ownership, escalation paths, and horizon-scanning capability will always be behind the curve. 

The firms best positioned in the current environment are those that identified these risks before they materialized – and restructured accordingly. 

A practical talent framework: Five steps to cross-industry regulatory readiness 

1. Conduct a regulatory coverage audit 

Start with an honest mapping exercise. For every significant regulatory framework currently in force or in development that is relevant to your firm, identify: who owns the legal advisory relationship, where the expertise sits (in-house, external counsel, or both), what the handoff points are to compliance and risk, and where the gaps are. 

This exercise frequently reveals that coverage is uneven in predictable ways. Established obligations tend to have clear ownership; emerging cross-industry frameworks often do not. 

When prioritizing where to act first, two factors should guide the decision: the imminence of the regulatory obligation, and the degree to which your firm currently lacks internal expertise to manage it. Applying both tests, AI governance and sustainability disclosure are the areas where most firms currently have the greatest gap between regulatory exposure and in-house legal capability – irrespective of which regulatory regime they primarily operate under. Both warrant early attention. 

2. Redesign for interdependency, not silos 

The traditional model of an in-house legal function is not well suited to cross-industry regulation. Firms increasingly need structure around regulatory themes as well as business lines, with clear ownership of frameworks that cut across the organization. 

In practice, this may mean creating regulatory lead roles with cross-functional mandates: a lawyer who owns the firm's legal position on operational resilience, for example, working across IT, procurement, risk, and operations rather than sitting within a single business unit. It may also mean building small regulatory centers of excellence for the highest-priority areas. 

Structural change of this kind requires buy-in from senior leadership, clarity about accountability, and careful design to avoid creating new silos in place of old ones. But firms that make these changes proactively are consistently better placed to respond to regulatory developments quickly and coherently. 

3. Build a regulatory horizon-scanning capability 

Cross-industry regulation rarely arrives without warning. The frameworks that are creating the most significant compliance challenges today all went through extended consultation and rulemaking periods before coming into force. Firms that tracked those processes had time to build expertise, update frameworks, and engage with external counsel strategically. Those that treated them as future problems until they became current ones did not. 

A functional horizon-scanning capability does not require a large team, just someone with a clear mandate to monitor regulatory pipelines – such as consultation papers, legislative progress, enforcement trends, and industry guidance – and to translate what they find into actionable intelligence for the legal function and the wider business. 

This role is often undervalued in legal function design, but it is one of the highest-leverage investments a firm can make in the current environment.  

4. Recalibrate your external counsel strategy 

Cross-industry regulatory complexity is changing how in-house legal teams should use external counsel. The traditional model – primary relationship firms for transactional work, specialist counsel retained for known regulatory needs – is increasingly inadequate when the regulatory landscape is moving across multiple fronts simultaneously. 

Firms managing this well are doing two things differently. First, they are being more deliberate about which regulatory areas they build genuine in-house depth in – typically the highest-frequency, highest-stakes obligations – and which they continue to manage through external relationships. Second, they are investing time in briefing their external counsel on the business context, ensuring that specialist advice is calibrated to the firm's specific regulatory exposure rather than being generic. 

The goal is not to reduce external counsel spend for its own sake. It is to ensure that the combination of in-house expertise and external support is designed for the actual shape of the regulatory challenge – which in most firms today is broader and more cross-cutting than it was five years ago. 

5. Benchmark compensation against the whole market 

Demand for lawyers who can navigate cross-industry regulatory complexity has expanded across every major market, and all are competing for the same pool of regulatory specialists. The competitive set for in-house legal talent is broader than most hiring managers assume, and compensation benchmarks need to reflect that reality. 

Before going to market for regulatory legal hires – especially at the senior end – ensure your salary bands and total package reflect current market rates for the specific specialism you are hiring into. Larson Maddox's range of global compensation guides provide up-to-date salary benchmarks across key industries, and are a practical starting point for positioning offers that close. 

Hiring in-house legal talent for a cross-regulatory environment 

Structural redesign and talent strategy are the same workstream, meaning the changes outlined above only deliver value if the firm can attract, develop, and retain the lawyers capable of operating within them. In practice, this requires focusing on four key hiring priorities: 

• Hire for regulatory breadth as well as depth 

The lawyers most valuable in a cross-industry regulatory environment combine genuine expertise in one or two areas with the intellectual range to engage credibly across adjacent frameworks. At the senior level, digital literacy and ESG expertise are increasingly baseline expectations – candidates who do not hold both will find their advisory scope limited as obligations in these areas continue to deepen. 

• Prioritize commercial and cross-functional capability 

Demand is highest for lawyers who combine regulatory knowledge with the ability to communicate risk clearly to senior stakeholders and work constructively across legal, compliance, risk, and technology functions. Regulatory credentials open the door, but commercial advisory capability and cross-functional fluency determine long-term impact. 

• Invest in development, not just recruitment 

Given the pace of regulatory change, even recently hired specialists will need continuous development to remain current. Firms that build structured development programs – including secondments to regulators, cross-functional project assignments, and engagement with external regulatory networks – retain talent more effectively and build more resilient teams. 

• Work with a talent specialist who understands the brief 

Hiring for cross-industry regulatory capability requires a clearly defined brief and a strong understanding of the legal talent market. For firms that choose to work with external recruiters, partners with specialist knowledge of in-house legal hiring and the regulatory environment can help assess candidates against the combination of capabilities each role requires. 

Specialist recruiters also maintain networks of both active and passive candidates, including experienced lawyers who are not actively applying for roles but may be open to the right opportunity. This can help firms benchmark the market, refine role scope, and identify talent that may be difficult to access through traditional hiring channels. 

How Larson Maddox helps build in-house legal functions ready for cross-industry regulation 

The surge in cross-industry regulation is not a temporary condition. Governments and regulators are changing their approach to systemic risk, which will continue to generate new obligations for the foreseeable future. That means auditing coverage regularly and honestly, redesigning for interdependency, building horizon-scanning capability, and investing in the talent strategy to support it all. 

Larson Maddox helps firms build that capability. We advise on team design, compensation benchmarking, and hiring strategy for in-house regulatory and legal roles across key industries. If you are assessing gaps in your legal function or hiring for new regulatory demands, our team can help you secure the talent to support that change. Request a call back today to learn more.