In the past, trade compliance wasn’t exactly the kind of topic that gets a room buzzing. But when the goalposts keep shifting, as they have with recent tariff updates and growing geopolitical tensions, it’s been a hot topic that the whole world is following. Last month, a small group of seasoned trade compliance professionals—a mix of legal leaders, trade counsel, and in-house specialists — sat down for an off-the-record roundtable hosted by Paragon Legal.
Here’s the distilled version: no one has all the answers, but several clear patterns are emerging for in-house teams trying to stay ahead of the risk curve.
No one likes to admit that “do nothing” might sometimes be the best legal advice, but that’s exactly where many companies have landed. For businesses with exposure to fast-moving tariff updates (often through social media), caution is often the only defensible position. Leaders at the roundtable shared a common refrain: they’re actively monitoring developments, modeling scenarios, and building optionality into business plans—but holding off on wholesale changes unless and until things stabilize.
Why? Because premature over-corrections can burn more capital and goodwill than they’re worth. If you lock in new supplier relationships or renegotiate complex agreements too early, you risk being caught flat-footed when things shift again. Timing matters.
If the past several years have taught legal teams anything, it’s this: single-threaded supply chains are legal landmines waiting to happen.
Several participants detailed how their companies are broadening supplier bases, dual-sourcing critical inputs, and proactively mapping alternatives across geographies. This isn’t just about procurement efficiency; it’s about legal risk containment. If one supplier gets hit with a punitive tariff or compliance issue, operations can pivot without triggering contractual defaults or revenue shortfalls.
Legal’s role here isn’t academic. Contract structures, jurisdictional exposure, and enforceability questions become front and center as companies rebalance sourcing strategies. The best-prepared teams aren’t waiting for procurement or business units to loop them in—they’re embedded upstream.
While the headlines tend to focus on costs and volatility, several legal leaders pointed out a less obvious silver lining: market disruption creates leverage.
Some are using this window to renegotiate supplier terms that had grown stale, building in greater flexibility through volume commitments, pricing adjustment clauses tied to tariff changes, and audit rights to verify supplier compliance. Others are rewriting force majeure provisions to reflect today’s far messier global reality. Compliance leaders are treating the current environment as justification for long-overdue internal upgrades: tightening country-of-origin review processes, investing in better trade classification tools, and improving documentation to strengthen defensibility in the event of audits or enforcement actions.
In short: regulatory pressure can be a forcing function for modernization. The smartest legal teams are using it that way.
Beyond these themes, one of the clearest throughlines from the discussion was the growing integration of Legal into cross-functional trade and supply chain strategy. Gone are the days when Legal sat on the sidelines reviewing contracts after-the-fact. Today, legal leaders are directly engaged with operations, procurement, compliance, and finance to help structure the entire approach to trade risk.
In many organizations, Legal is participating in standing cross-functional committees, procurement “war rooms” for active supplier negotiations, and quarterly planning cycles to align legal strategy with business shifts in real time. Whether it’s advising on sourcing moves, helping craft internal training for business teams, or evaluating new compliance software tools, Legal is not a backstop. Increasingly, they’re part of the first line of defense.
Some teams are also investing in more targeted internal education by developing practical playbooks for procurement and business teams, building just-in-time training modules tied to live trade developments, and hosting live workshops to walk teams through country-of-origin classifications, tariff scenarios, and contract risk assessments.
At Paragon Legal, we work with in-house legal teams who are in the thick of these challenges, advising on contract renegotiations, supplier strategy, and compliance process design.
If your team is facing hard decisions on trade risk, sourcing shifts, or cross-border legal exposure, let’s talk.
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