In my latest “Notes to My (Legal) Self” interview, I sat down with Senne Mennes, co-founder of ClauseBase and former lawyer at DLA Piper Brussels. We talked about his journey from practicing IP law to building document automation tools. But what stuck with me most wasn’t the technology. It was how his relationship to risk changed.
This isn’t just a founder story. It’s a blueprint for in-house legal teams trying to modernize. If you are in-house and still reviewing contracts like every mistake is catastrophic, this conversation is your permission slip to build a different model. One based on iteration, calibration, and speed.
Risk Minimization Is Not a Strategy
Senne put it plainly. “As lawyers, we’re trained to turn over every stone. That works if your only goal is to avoid mistakes, but it also makes for very slow progress.” That mindset may serve you well in litigation or regulatory response. But it is death to innovation. Especially if your team is tasked with enabling commercial velocity, supporting product launches, or building internal tooling.
The old posture was protect and review. The new posture is build and improve. Legal still needs to manage risk, but not by defaulting to zero. Instead, legal needs to get good at identifying which risks actually matter, which ones are tolerable, and which ones can be flagged and remediated through systems.
Stop Aiming For Perfect Drafts. Start Building Feedback Loops.
ClauseBase didn’t launch because Senne had a grand vision. It launched because he and his co-founder were stuck in a loop of inefficient drafting inside a global law firm. They didn’t like the tools they were using. So they built the ones they wished they had.
That’s the part most in-house teams miss. Innovation doesn’t require a moonshot. It starts when you stop settling for broken systems. Maybe your team redlines the same indemnity clause every week. Or you spend hours harmonizing NDAs. Or your product counsel still copy-pastes playbooks into emails.
All of that is fixable. Not by doing the work harder. But by systematizing the judgment behind your work. What makes a clause acceptable? What language actually triggers friction? Which terms do you really care about, and which ones just need to be tracked?
This is where TermScout lives. In the layer between raw contract text and actionable intelligence. When you certify a clause or benchmark it against market data, you are not just speeding up the deal. You are creating a feedback loop. One that improves with every contract you touch.
Lawyers Rarely Feel the High. That’s the Problem.
In the interview, Senne shared why lawyers often fear risk. “As a lawyer, you’re trained to minimize risk, but you don’t get to experience the upside. The business does.” That disconnection is part of why lawyers stall innovation. They see the cost of mistakes, but not the benefit of speed.
To build better legal systems, that mindset must change. You can’t calibrate risk if you never connect it to reward. The best in-house teams are not just blocking bad outcomes. They are engineering for good ones. They see how faster review leads to more revenue. They see how clearer contracts reduce negotiation cycles. They track the upside. And they own it.
Perfectionism Is Not Professionalism
Senne also talked about how hard it was to create content in the early days. “Some of those three-minute videos took me ten or fifteen takes. I was trying to be perfect.” Eventually, he realized no one cared about perfect. They cared about useful. They cared about real.
That applies to legal too. You can polish a contract forever. But that doesn’t make it better. Clarity beats cleverness. Speed beats precision when the risk is low. The goal is not to eliminate all ambiguity. The goal is to build systems that know when it matters.
That’s what TermScout’s clause ratings and contract certifications are designed to do. They help legal teams stop over-lawyering and start standardizing. Not blindly. But strategically. You don’t need to flatten nuance. You need to channel it where it counts.
To Build Trust, Codify Judgment
Senne’s transition from lawyer to founder mirrors the shift many legal departments are starting to make. From reactive to proactive. From craft to infrastructure. From gut instinct to data.
None of this happens overnight. But it doesn’t require magic. Just a different way of thinking. One where legal stops being the department of no and becomes the engine of trust. The team that makes clear what’s acceptable, what’s fair, and what’s possible.
Risk management isn’t about saying no. It’s about building systems that let the business say yes: faster, smarter, and with confidence.
Watch the full interview with Senne Mennes here.
Then ask yourself this: What would change if your legal team treated contracts as systems, not artifacts? What if you stopped aiming for perfect, and started optimizing for speed, clarity, and learning?
The future isn’t built on instinct. It’s built on infrastructure. Let’s get to work.
Olga V. Mack is the CEO of TermScout, an AI-powered contract certification platform that accelerates revenue and eliminates friction by certifying contracts as fair, balanced, and market-ready. A serial CEO and legal tech executive, she previously led a company through a successful acquisition by LexisNexis. Olga is also a Fellow at CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and the Generative AI Editor at law.MIT. She is a visionary executive reshaping how we law—how legal systems are built, experienced, and trusted. Olga teaches at Berkeley Law, lectures widely, and advises companies of all sizes, as well as boards and institutions. An award-winning general counsel turned builder, she also leads early-stage ventures including Virtual Gabby (Better Parenting Plan), Product Law Hub, ESI Flow, and Notes to My (Legal) Self, each rethinking the practice and business of law through technology, data, and human-centered design. She has authored The Rise of Product Lawyers, Legal Operations in the Age of AI and Data, Blockchain Value, and Get on Board, with Visual IQ for Lawyers (ABA) forthcoming. Olga is a 6x TEDx speaker and has been recognized as a Silicon Valley Woman of Influence and an ABA Woman in Legal Tech. Her work reimagines people’s relationship with law—making it more accessible, inclusive, data-driven, and aligned with how the world actually works. She is also the host of the Notes to My (Legal) Self podcast (streaming on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube), and her insights regularly appear in Forbes, Bloomberg Law, Newsweek, VentureBeat, ACC Docket, and Above the Law. She earned her B.A. and J.D. from UC Berkeley. Follow her on LinkedIn and X @olgavmack.
The post From Risk Aversion To Risk Calibration: What Senne Mennes Taught Me About Building Legal Systems That Learn appeared first on Above the Law.