Allison Wallace, chief legal officer (CLO) at Businessolver, has a simple test for how the legal team can be most effective at Businessolver: How often does the legal team come in early to discussions? Wallace is committed to ensuring that her legal team serves as a growth and enablement engine at the benefits technology firm, particularly when an initiative entails partnerships, employee wellbeing, data, and the future of artificial intelligence (AI).
Wallace underscores that she never wants her legal team to be thought of as business or goal prevention. Legal teams can support more effective cross-functional collaboration by being brought in early to help assess opportunities and risk rather than triage fire drills. The CLO says to ensure effective collaboration, legal meets with various teams and divisions within Businessolver on a consistent and routine schedule. The goal is to bring legal into the earliest stages of work as an expert partner and strategist.
“One of the ways we can be most effective is to get involved early and often,” Wallace explains. “That way we can help guide decisions instead of trying to be the firefighters later on. We can be much more effective if we’re helping our partners be proactive instead of reactive.”
This proactive approach aligns tightly with Businessolver’s culture, which is built around being a change agent within the healthcare space and using technology to make benefits more human and empathetic. Proactive collaboration means legal can help teams, like HR, shape policies that both comply with an ever-changing regulatory landscape and reflect the company’s commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The collaboration, Wallace says, is intentional and bidirectional. Legal isn’t mandating; they’re supporting. Her team brings regulatory insight, especially regarding state-by-state benefit and leave rules and the ever-changing privacy landscape, to help HR teams achieve their goals.
“If HR is successful, so are we as employees,” Wallace says.
Regarding her team, Wallace says that what differentiates her team is a collaborative mindset. The work culture at Businessolver, she says, prioritizes a “one team” mindset and empowers everyone—including legal—to walk into cross-functional meetings aware that everyone involved (HR, sales, IT, operations, and more) brings their own specialized expertise to the table.
The real value, the CLO explains, lies in taking legal expertise and applying it strategically and empathetically to the challenges at hand.
“It comes down to how do we do what we do in a way that meets the needs of our business, our clients, and our employees,” Wallace says.
One way to meet those needs is through AI and the opportunities it can being to the business. Wallace is committed to ensuring that AI is utilized as effectively as possible within her team and across the organization. AI is already a significant part of the company’s technology stack: Businessolver’s proprietary benefits AI, named Sofia, resolves a significant share of member inquiries about their benefits and helps HR teams be more strategic with anticipatory insights. Similarly, Wallace’s team has helped bring on enterprise-level AI tools to support day-to-day work across the business.
Similar to how she approaches her team within the larger organization, Wallace states her case frankly, “Legal cannot be AI-preventative.”
She frames her role as guiding the responsible use of AI by asking how tools are architected from a privacy and security standpoint, where data flows, what guardrails apply, and how emerging laws and ethical norms should shape deployment. To stay abreast of this ever-changing field, Wallace and her team are continually educating themselves to stay two steps ahead.
“Good partnership isn’t about assigning out roles. It’s about aligning on how we work together and how we use technology to assist us in producing results,” Wallace says.
