That is an impression of legal departments informed by what tends to be poor staffing of such departments and/or poor management scapegoating the legal departme

That is an impression of legal departments informed by what tends to be poor staffing of such departments and/or poor management scapegoating the legal department. I used to have a very poor opinion of legal departments until I had the opportunity to work with legal departments staffed seemingly exclusively with people who were at least as sharp as the folks in engineering. Turns out, good legal departments are as interested in solving problems as good engineering departments.