Digital Sales Myth #1: Compliance is a legal problem
Dick the Butcher* believed revolution should begin with knocking off the lawyers, because they were the ones who maintained order.
But order isn't created by lawyers.
It's created by systems.
Over the past 15 years I've worked on the sales pathways of some of Australia’s largest enterprises. Its a journey that has meandered through highly-regulated industries like insurance and energy, where millions of dollars move through digital funnels every day.
Each organisation had its structural and cultural quirks, yet a recurring pattern is remarkably consistent:
Digital wants to ship.
The lawyers are holding things up.
The sheer volume of transactions flowing through enterprise pathways means small problems can create enormous consumer law exposure very quickly.
This is why nothing is permitted to go live until a lawyer has reviewed it.
And yet risks and issues continue to fall through the cracks.
I've seen how significant risks go unnoticed when everyone is under pressure. But much of that pressure is created by poorly coordinated operating structures and defensive behaviour.
After a major incident, business units have a tendency to retreat further into their functional silos. These are the conditions under which risk flourishes.
Fragmented ownership leads to inconsistent messaging.
Terms, conditions and disclaimers proliferate.
The fine print in the footer may contain something important, but you'd need a master's degree in industry jargon to decipher what it actually means.
When this happens everyone loses, including the customer who simply wants to understand what it is they'll get in return for their hard-earned money.
Don't blame the lawyers.
Most in-house legal teams are overworked and operating within a delivery model they didn’t design. Even highly capable lawyers are rarely trained in digital governance, experience architecture or operational systems design.
InACCC v Trivago, the Federal Court made clear that compliance is not just about whether information exists somewhere. The overall impression created by a digital experience is what matters.
In other words, compliance with consumer law is not confined to whether a representation is accurate in isolation. Content hierarchy, interface design, ranking systems and comparison logic all contribute to an overall impression that may mislead.
The answer isn't more lawyers. It's better systems.
Legal obligations need to be translated into standards digital teams can design and deliver against. Those standards can be embedded within workflows, design systems and delivery processes.
This is the scaffolding digital teams need to produce experiences that are optimised to mitigate legalandsales risk.
Lawyers have an indispensable role to play in defining obligations, but the design of standards and systems is a cross-disciplinary activity by necessity. That collaboration matters.
TheTrivagocase demonstrates that modern compliance risk is shaped by the interaction between legal interpretation, interface design, content clarity, information architecture, and customer journey.
This means no single discipline can fully own or mitigate the risk.
Cross-functional standards create shared ownership and reduce ambiguity. They turn legal judgement into something operational teams can repeatedly execute against without escalating every decision back through legal.
That's how you can make compliance BAU, instead of something that's managed reactively through bottlenecks and hot fixes.
This is how you empower digital teams to optimise with creativity and certainty.
It also how you liberate precious legal capacity and direct it toward higher-value work like:
- proactive advice
- creative problem solving
- strategic judgement
- systemic risk reduction
- continuing professional development
Many large organisations still rely on reactive reviews and fixes.
The commercial opportunity lies in co-designing systems that produce digital experiences optimised to comply and convert.
*Dick the Butcher may (or may not be) a fictional villain plucked from the pages of the playHenry VIby William Shakespeare (which I've never read).