Episode Description:

If you were building a £200 million factory, you wouldn’t just hire an architect and hope the building manages itself. You would have a Project Manager, a schedule, and a budget. Yet, when companies face a £200 million DOJ investigation, they often hand the keys entirely to external counsel, and then wonder why costs spiral and timelines drift.

In this episode, we challenge the "hidden assumption" that dominates corporate compliance: that if you hire the best lawyers, the investigation will manage itself.

Drawing on deep field experience, we explore the critical threshold where an investigation stops being a legal exercise and becomes a management problem.

We explain why your best lawyers, while essential for legal judgment, are structurally ill-equipped to manage enterprise execution, cost velocity, and organizational drag.

Tune in to discover:

• The "Capital Project" Paradigm: Why large investigations behave less like court cases and more like major infrastructure projects—and why you need to govern them that way.

• The Cost Fallacy: Why focusing on legal fees is a mistake. We explain why "time compression" is the only metric that matters, and how to achieve it.

• Legal Judgment vs. Execution Governance: How to separate these two functions so your lawyers can focus on the law, while your business retains control of the timeline.

• Directing vs. Enduring: How to stop your investigation from becoming a "standing condition" that bleeds resources and leadership attention for years.

• The Escalation Matrix: Practical steps for deciding exactly when to bring in a project manager so you don’t over-engineer a simple problem or under-manage a crisis.Whether you are a CEO facing a crisis or a Compliance Officer trying to regain control, this episode offers a blueprint for turning a chaotic legal battle into a managed business objective.

Stop outsourcing your governance. Start directing your investigation.