Trade shocks, decarbonization demands and rising stakeholder scrutiny are forcing corporate legal teams to operate as strategic nerve centres rather than back-office risk filters, and few sectors feel that pressure more than steel.
Lisa Marcuzzi leads corporate affairs, legal, and diversity and inclusion for ArcelorMittal Dofasco and ArcelorMittal Canada’s steel businesses, but she did not move in-house to slow down her career; she moved because private practice kept her too far from the decision centre. After years as a partner, she had built a broad-based practice that, as she puts it, felt “almost like a GC, but external.” However, the traditional model of outside counsel meant she was brought in to diagnose problems, not to own the choices that followed.
The in-house role promised a different kind of pressure and accountability. “You become really core to the team,” she says, describing the shift from advising a roster of clients to serving as regional general counsel for ArcelorMittal’s Canadian operations and executive team member for ArcelorMittal Dofasco. Instead of handing over a memo and stepping aside, she now sits with business leaders as they weigh legal risk against commercial reality, reputation, and political exposure, and then live with the consequences for years, not weeks.
Few environments test that judgment more than steel. “Everything is big here,” she says. Capital projects run from hundreds of millions to the billions, involve complex regulatory processes, and attract intense government and community attention, yet the legal team cannot arrive at the contracting stage and call that good governance. “We need to be there from the start,” she says, explaining how her group now works at the front end of major initiatives, shaping bid structures, allocating risk, aligning incentives and building practical ways to solve disputes.
That early involvement is not about drafting the cleverest clause; it is about controlling what can be controlled when capital is at risk. Her team maps approvals and consultations with various stakeholders as “critical paths,” identifies where permitting and stakeholder engagement could stall execution and treats government relations as a core project discipline, not a political add-on. Done well, that work “will enable the project”; done poorly, “you’re going to come to a halt … with really huge consequences.”
Tariffs have turned steel into a live-fire exercise in this kind of risk management. “It’s anything but predictable,” she says of a regime defined by layered sectoral and global measures, Canadian countermeasures, shifting policies and sudden quotas. For a multinational with operations in Canada, the United States, Mexico and Europe, those moves hit supply chains, costs and market access simultaneously, leaving customers and suppliers asking questions while governments use trade as political leverage. Marcuzzi treats tariffs as “a core strategic issue, not just legal or compliance,” weaving trade considerations into how contracts allocate risk so that no single party absorbs all the risk on the trade front. The legal team works to build resilience through diversified supply and documentation that can withstand scrutiny.
Legal’s role in that Canadian manufacturing environment, she argues, is to connect the legal, trade and business strategy and to push executives to abandon the idea that tariff turbulence will pass. “Trade disputes and tariffs are here to stay. And anybody that’s sitting back and saying, oh, we’re going to go back to the way it was, is in trouble,” she says. Her focus instead is on embedding resilience “into the business and how we operate,” even when the rules shift without warning and enforcement expectations harden.
If trade is forcing steel producers to rethink how they move product, ESG and diversity are forcing them to rethink how they define responsibility. Marcuzzi rejects the idea that ESG is fading into the background; what is changing, she argues, is the level of accountability. ESG, including equity, diversity, and inclusion, used to be “aspirational” with “softer statements,” but it now requires a measured, transparent approach. Legal’s task is to make sure “our commitments are accurate, the data is reliable,” and that if the company falls short, it can explain why and accept scrutiny.
Inside this landscape, the division of labour between in-house and external counsel has also shifted. Marcuzzi still relies on outside firms for pensions, environmental matters, M&A, and big-ticket litigation, but she is not looking for sprawling research projects. “I do not want a 50-page memo,” she says. She expects “practical recommendations,” clear instructions followed at speed, and a willingness to act as an “extension of the in-house team” rather than a detached advisory shop. She invests time in giving firms the same context and risk parameters she provides to the ArcelorMittal in-house team.
Her advice to private practice lawyers eyeing a jump in-house is to consider the broader context. Be honest about whether you want to “be part of something bigger, a business,” not just advise from the sidelines, she says. Accept that the job is not to produce perfect answers but to decide what should be done when the risks are known, but the path is still messy. “You’re making the calls with imperfect information, with not as many resources, and we’re holding hands and living with the consequences,” she says. For those who want that responsibility, the trade-off is clear. She describes the in-house role at ArcelorMittal Dofasco as “the right spot for me,” and in a sector where nothing stays still for long, she shows no sign of stepping away from the turmoil.