Conni Gibson did not set out to describe a communications problem when she spoke at Norton Rose Fulbright's recent technology summit. She was talking about her role as general counsel at Interac, and what it actually demands of her day to day.

"I feel more like a risk manager than a lawyer," she said.

That framing deserves more attention than it typically gets, particularly in organizations where legal and communications still operate as separate functions with separate timelines.

Gibson's argument is straightforward: a strong general counsel is an executive first. That means sharing responsibility for where an organization is headed, rather than advising solely on how it avoids liability. She describes her role as one of effective challenge: knowing when to slow a decision down because the balance between commercial opportunity and risk has shifted too far in one direction.

That kind of judgment does not operate in isolation. And it cannot be communicated well without preparation that predates the pressure.

Legal review and communications strategy are not the same thing

Organizations that come through significant crises with their reputations intact tend to share one characteristic: they were able to explain themselves clearly and credibly before the story got away from them. That capacity is built in advance, not improvised under pressure.

Legal review determines what an organization can say. A communications strategy determines what it should say, when to say it and how to frame it for audiences who are not reading the underlying documents.

In most organizations, these two functions still work in sequence. Legal reviews a draft. Communications publishes it. By the time that process runs, the window for shaping the narrative has frequently closed.

Gibson's description of Interac Corp.'s risk appetite framework makes the gap concrete. The organization maintains documented positions on where it is prepared to accept financial, legal, regulatory and reputational risk. These are consequential executive decisions with real public dimensions. In most organizations, communications has no seat at the table when those positions are set.

That matters because every risk category she named eventually has a public-facing moment. Reputational risk cannot be managed without a communications function engaged from the start. Regulatory risk frequently demands external explanation, especially when findings or enforcement actions follow. Financial risk disclosures need to reach and resonate with audiences well beyond legal counsel.

The gap between what an organization decides and what it can credibly say under pressure is a planning problem… and one most organizations discover too late.

What alignment between legal and communications actually looks like

For senior legal and communications leaders, the implication is structural. Crisis preparedness cannot live in legal alone, and it cannot live in communications alone. The holding statements, escalation frameworks and spokesperson protocols that determine how an organization responds in the first hours of a crisis need to be built together, tested together and owned jointly.

Gibson's approach at Interac, where legal, risk and communications function as integrated disciplines rather than sequential ones, reflects where resilient organizations are heading. Legal judgment and public credibility have to move at the same speed, toward the same goal.

At Sovereign Advisory this is the work we do with senior legal, executive and communications teams: building the preparedness infrastructure before it is needed, so that when a crisis arrives, the response is grounded rather than reactive. If the alignment Gibson describes is something your organization is still working toward, we'd welcome a conversation on how you can get there: calendly.com/matt-sovereigncomms

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