By GAIL North America

“To me, an impact lawyer is someone who uses legal tools creatively to expand what’s possible for mission-driven organizations. The role is part architect, part strategist: translating purpose into durable structures, balancing risk with action, and ensuring that innovations actually reach the people and communities they’re meant to serve.“

By Leslie Cornell, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Social Finance, Inc.

This series by GAIL North America spotlights our members across the United States and the diverse ways they are practising impact law. Through their stories, you’ll discover how lawyers are using their skills, knowledge, and creativity to drive meaningful change, whether they work in law firms, organisations, non-profits, or as independent practitioners.

Being an impact lawyer isn’t defined by a job title or by practicing impact law full-time. It’s about a commitment: using legal expertise to create positive outcomes for people and the planet. In each installment, we’ll share how members of our community are weaving this commitment into their careers, championing justice, sustainability, and equity in ways big and small.

For this article, we hear from Leslie Cornell, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Social Finance, Inc.

Describe your area of practice

I serve as General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer of Social Finance, where I oversee legal strategy across a portfolio of impact-first funds and innovative financing vehicles. Social Finance is an impact finance nonprofit and registered investment advisor. Fundamentally, our charitable purpose is about systems change and bringing the right kind of capital to address a given challenge. We build partnerships across sectors and issue areas, and we blend different kinds of capital to achieve measurable impact. My work sits at the intersection of nonprofit law, transaction structuring, investment management, tax, and regulatory compliance.

Please share your view on what it means to be an ‘impact lawyer’

To me, an impact lawyer is someone who uses legal tools creatively to expand what’s possible for mission-driven organizations. The role is part architect, part strategist: translating purpose into durable structures, balancing risk with action, and ensuring that innovations actually reach the people and communities they’re meant to serve. I don’t think it’s a specific area of the law, all law is impact law. Find a specialty you like and can excel in and you can pivot it toward impact.

Why do you think it is important for lawyers to think about their work from an impact perspective? 

Legal frameworks often determine whether good ideas can scale. When lawyers only optimize for risk, we can inadvertently narrow the field of vision and suppress momentum. Thinking from an impact perspective shifts the analysis: I’m not here to preserve a perfect risk profile. We’re here to get capital moving toward measurable outcomes. So, the real risk is paralysis. If we over-engineer protections and stall innovation, we’ve failed before we’ve started.

Briefly describe your journey as a lawyer and how you came to focus your practice on making a positive impact on people and planet?

I went to law school because I wanted to work in service of others and, at the time, I thought the public sector was the best way to do that work. I ended up working in public finance at Chapman and Cutler LLP which allowed me to connect public sector, nonprofits and the financial markets in ways that I had never contemplated. Public finance and transactional work gave me important lessons in collaboration that are necessary in the impact space. We’re all working together to launch a project. Every stakeholder has individual needs or constraints but we ultimately want the same end goal. Ultimately, connecting finance to impact was a real ‘aha’ moment for me, I remember when I first heard the term “impact investor” and it very quickly became the career path I knew I wanted to pursue. The opportunity to do impact finance full time at Social Finance was so unique at the time, I picked up my life and moved from Chicago to Boston to take the opportunity and I have been at Social Finance ever since (though now based in DC).

What drew you to GAIL?

GAIL reflects the community I want to be a part of in this field: a space where practitioners wrestle with the complexity of aligning law, finance, and purpose. I’m drawn to the values of openness, rigor, and shared learning, and to its commitment to developing and connecting lawyers who bring creativity, humility, and courage to impact work.

What’s something you’re surprisingly good at that’s not on your resume? 

I have participated in a number of speed-puzzling competitions to complete jigsaw puzzles as quickly as possible. I’m mediocre in the world of speed-puzzlers but pretty fast by average standards!

Find out more about joining GAIL here.