If you've worked in government tech, you've probably had a project slowed down or stopped by legal. You may also have had an attorney actually help you ship something faster. That second experience is rarer, and it shouldn't be.
It's also getting more urgent. Legal questions in government are getting harder with new technology and procurement complexity. The teams pulling ahead are the ones who've figured out how to bring attorneys in as partners. The best government attorneys aren't risk avoiders, as they are commonly perceived, but risk translators, working to find the legal path through.
At the 2026 Code for America Summit, U.S. Digital Response’s CEO Tina Walha moderated a panel with three government attorneys who have spent their careers working towards that coveted "yes": Kristin Mateo, who leads legal strategy for New Jersey's unemployment insurance modernization, Amy Pitelka, former attorney for the U.S. Digital Service at Office of Management and Budget, and Sarah Figalora Mercik, who has been with Boston's Department of Innovation and Technology for nearly a decade - first as a staff member and then as their counsel. Here's what the panel taught us about how to find them, and how to work with them:
Your attorney is a teammate, not a gatekeeper.
Don't make attorneys the external reviewers you hand a deliverable to at the final hour. They're team members who need context, relationship, and lead time. Saying “yes” requires a lot more from your attorney than saying no. “Yes” means continued accountability and engagement from your legal team. Treat the ask accordingly.
Build trust before you need it.
Attorneys take on more risk for people they trust. That's not a character flaw, it's rational. If you're working with a new legal partner, play the long game. Be consistent, be transparent, and build goodwill before you're asking for something hard. And when legal weighs in with a constraint and you're going a different direction, it's okay to say: "Here's what legal said, and here's the business decision I'm making." It's respecting their role while owning yours.
Help them understand what's at stake, in both directions.
Government attorneys spend a lot of time thinking about the risk of doing something. They hear less about the risk of not doing it. Explicitly naming the cost of inaction changes the conversation: real people who don't get services, backlogs that grow, problems that compound. A helpful framing: "If we don't do this, here is the negative impact that will happen." Risk of stasis is still risk.
Folk law can be as powerful as the law itself. Plan accordingly.
"We've always done it that way" is not a legal argument, but it functions like one. Precedent is safer for an individual attorney to defend, even when it's not actually required. You can chip away at this through socialization. Sarah talked about making it a practice to brief everyone she possibly could on the work, across the organization, before a decision point arrived. Familiarity reduces the perceived risk of a new approach. It also helps to find another attorney who will say yes. One person agreeing is an outlier; two is a precedent. And if something comparable has been done in another agency or another government, find it and show it.
Do the precedent-hunting for them.
One of the most useful things you can do is find where someone else has already done what you're trying to do. If another city, another state, or a federal agency has tackled the same problem, it’s a precedent that’s useful to your attorney. Precedent is what makes a novel approach defensible, and your attorney often doesn't have the time or the network to go find it. So do it for them: track down the other jurisdiction, the comparable program, the agency that already cleared the legal path, and bring it to the table. "Here's who else has done this, and here's how" turns an abstract risk into a known quantity. It's also a genuine act of partnership because you're not just asking your attorney to shoulder the analysis alone, you're arming them with the evidence they need to say yes.
Educate before you ask.
It's hard to advise a client on something you don't understand. Run your attorney through a demo. Sit with the team. Brief them on the technology before you need a decision. The time you spend building their context is the prerequisite for getting advice that's actually useful, not advice that's just cautious.
When you're ready for that conversation: preempt the obvious questions, clearly explain the business need, and read the statute yourself first. Statutes, even short ones, are often broader than the folk law around them suggests.
The frame that matters most.
Beneath all the tactics, the panelists kept returning to something simpler: we have a moral obligation in government to serve the public. Bureaucracy and risk aversion can't be allowed to get in the way of that purpose. The best government attorneys know this. Your job is to find them, and help them help you.
Thumbnail photo by Amy Hirschi on Unsplash
