Beyond heroics: five ways to build a resilient local government legal team
Marcus Smith
TL;DR
Resilience in local government legal work is a professional skill, and it’s built into how an office runs, not just individual grit. Five takeaways from IMLA 2026: build real coverage, treat capacity limits as information, define what urgent means, lead with curiosity after mistakes, and fix recurring friction instead of celebrating the rescue.
Salt Lake City hosted the International Municipal Lawyers Association’s 91st Annual Conference (IMLA 2026) in September. I spent the week alongside the many attorneys who keep cities, counties, and special districts running.
Few practices carry the kind of pressure local government counsel do. The session I keep reflecting on, Resilient Lawyering in Local Government: Surviving (and Thriving) as Local Government Counsel, opened by addressing the following issues:
- Intense public scrutiny – advice given in open meetings and debated in the local paper
- High-conflict environments – council chambers, zoning hearings, and public comment
- Elected clients – priorities that shift with the political calendar
- Constant competing priorities – a procurement review, a litigation deadline, and a request from the mayor’s office, all in one afternoon
I left convinced that resilience is a professional skill, and that it deserves the same attention we give any other part of legal practice. Here are my five takeaways from the session, each with one action to take on Monday.
1. Resilience is personal, and it’s also structural
Whilst resilience is inherently an individual skill, conversations at IMLA Annual Summit 2026 highlighted the fact that work environments can foster or erode resilience.
Legal leaders should be conscious of this and actively foster environments where their people feel supported. Factoring in the need for vacation is a critical aspect of resilience building. People need to recharge, and lawyers often feel that taking time off means compromising the integrity of their work or paying a professional price for prioritizing themselves.
Leaders can change that by making sure more than one person knows the status, history, and next deadline on every high-risk or high-profile matter, so no one’s time off holds up a council item or a court date.
Start here: Build real coverage. Make sure a second lawyer can carry each high-risk file.
2. Capacity limits are information, not an attitude problem
When a lawyer says they can’t take on any more work, that’s information a supervisor needs before deciding what happens next. Too often it gets treated as an attitude or capability problem.
If a deputy city attorney says there isn’t capacity to do three matters well, the supervisor has options: reassign one, narrow the scope, or move a deadline and tell the requesting department why. The worst response is to leave that lawyer to absorb the conflict quietly. The work still gets done, but quality slips, and the lawyer learns not to raise the issue next time.
Start here: Name a decisionmaker for priority conflicts. When priorities collide, someone with authority decides, so the most junior lawyer doesn’t have to.
3. Not everything is urgent
Urgent should mean a hard deadline and a genuine consequence of missing it. Offices that define it that way protect their lawyers from negotiating competing demands alone.
In local government, almost every request can arrive feeling like an emergency, especially when it comes from a council member or the mayor’s office. Some are, but many can wait a week without consequence. Written criteria covering the deadline, the risk of delay, and how the request ties to the council’s adopted priorities let the office triage consistently. They also give a deputy city attorney something to point to when pushing back, so the call doesn’t rest on one lawyer’s nerve.
Start here: Agree on urgency criteria. Write them down and share them with the departments you serve.
4. Curiosity makes accountability sharper
After a missed deadline, start by asking what information and assumptions shaped the lawyer’s decisions. The answer tells you what went wrong and what to fix.
That matters more in a public office, where an error can surface at a council meeting or in the local paper and the instinct is to find who’s responsible. Leading with blame gets you a defensive lawyer and less information.
Unclear direction, a redirected assignment, and a genuine judgment error each need a different fix. Starting with curiosity finds the right fix faster, and it builds the trust that surfaces problems early.
Start here: Change the first question after a mistake. Start with what shaped the decision, then agree on the correction and who owns it.
5. Stop celebrating the rescue and fix the pattern
Heroics are admirable once. When they recur, they signal a process that needs fixing.
Many public law offices run on heroics: the lawyer who stays late before every council meeting because agenda items reached legal too close to the deadline for meeting papers. That lawyer deserves thanks. But praising the rescue every time tells the team the process is fine as long as someone absorbs it, and the same late nights come back next month.
Start here: Pick one recurring friction point. Give it an owner and a review date and ask your team in 30 days whether the adjustments helped.
Why this matters beyond city hall
Local government counsel feel these pressures in their sharpest form, but they aren’t alone. In-house teams feel them too, especially at quarter-end, when business partners all need sign-off at once. University general counsel face the same flood of “urgent” requests, and juggle compliance, contracts, and board expectations with lean staff.
In every one of these settings, the lawyer is responsible for doing the work well, and leadership is responsible for setting achievable priorities and removing avoidable obstacles. When both sides own their part, the pressure stays real but becomes manageable.
From heroics to a system: where LawVu LegalOS fits
All five takeaways shift resilience from personal grit to something an office builds. And all five depend on seeing how work arrives and who’s carrying it. You can’t protect lawyers from overload you can’t see.
LawVu LegalOS is a legal operating system that gives local government legal teams that visibility in one place: intake and triage captured on one platform, so urgency is judged against agreed criteria, matter management that keeps matters, documents, and history where a second lawyer can pick them up, a business portal that answers routine questions without pulling a lawyer off a file, and out-of-the-box, filterable reports that show where workload is piling up and which requests keep coming back.
Legal teams using LawVu’s LegalOS save 12+ hours a month managing email and intake and spend 66% less time managing tasks.
The public depends on local government lawyers performing at their best. That’s far more likely in an office built to support them than in one that runs on heroics.
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Marcus Smith is a lawyer and Community Evangelist at LawVu, where he works with general counsel, in-house professionals, and legal operations leaders across government, higher education, and industry.
