Stories from the Collective
Best Idea Wins
Adam Frankel built NWN's first in-house legal department in 2019. Three acquisitions later he has stopped believing in the one thing every acquirer wants, and he is unusually direct about why.
Read the cover story →Featured Stories
The Index
Leaders to Watch: The People & Culture Fifty
Fifty people, culture and total rewards leaders from fifty organisations, grouped into four chapters and confirmed against each person’s own record. Recognition here is free and always will be.
Whichever Courthouse Is Nearest
College sports spent five years arguing about who gets paid. This August the argument became about who gets to play, and the answer now depends on which judge you can reach before kickoff.
Leaders to Watch: The General Counsel Twenty
Twenty general counsel, none of whom were on the last list. Twelve of them do not only run legal. The general counsel seat stopped being a legal seat, and the titles said so before anyone else did.
Litigation Leaders to Watch: The Inaugural Class
The in-house litigation chiefs who decide how corporate America litigates - chosen editorially, verified individually. The inaugural class.
Behind the Brand: The Legal Edition 2026, Edition Two
Edition One recognised twenty chiefs. Edition Two recognises the bench: 45 people across 35 organisations, at every level and every title, who built the reputation of a law firm or a legal company.
The Question the Risk Register Cannot Answer
Devon Euring left iHeartMedia in May and had a firm by the end of the month. His argument: governance can tell you what went wrong, but not who owned the decision, and that gap is where the next decade of risk lives.
Catching My Wind
A founder essay from Commercial Park in Chicago: two games of 32 under new lights, every shot short until the wind came back. The first piece to run on both Counsel Collective and 248 Collective.
Enterprise CEOs to Watch: The Inaugural Class
36 chief executives building the platforms and services enterprise leaders run on, across legal, finance, people, IT, supply chain and revenue. Verified, editorial, and not for sale.
Best Idea Wins
Adam Frankel built NWN's first in-house legal department in 2019. Three acquisitions later he has stopped believing in the one thing every acquirer wants, and he is unusually direct about why.
Reducing Hallucinations in Legal AI: Advanced RAG Architectures
Standard RAG can't guarantee hallucination-free legal AI — by design. Jose L. Sampedro Mazon on the Stanford HAI study, why the generative LLM always has the last word, and the advanced RAG architectures (Graph RAG, Judge LLMs, extract-edit, RAFT) that push the failure rate down.
Commercial First
Ana King joined a pre-revenue fintech that had gone two years without a people function and was losing the staff it could least afford to lose. Three years on: roughly fifty hires, no agency spend, and an annual people budget of twenty thousand pounds.
The Same Bet, Twice
Oscar Casanova advised on more than $30 billion in transactions at Goldman Sachs and helped scale software companies from the inside. Then he walked away to give the businesses that power the American economy the one thing they almost never get: someone who has made their bet before.
Fourteen Series. One Mission.
Each series targets a specific leadership function, lifecycle stage, or industry. Together, they form the chart of executive practice.
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