I don't think it's about understanding. Lawyers are pretty smart. But there's no upside to you as a corporate lawyer if you advocate for taking risks. Even if you think you're on solid legal footing, you're going to miscalculate sooner or later, or run into a hostile regulator. And then, it's on you.
Conversely, there's no real downside to being too conservative, especially if engineers and leadership are entirely deferential to you because they don't understand your field (or are too afraid to speak up.)
Although this is also somewhat true for security, privacy, and safety organizations, their remit tends to include "enabling business." A safety team that defaults to "you shouldn't be doing this" is not going to have much sway. A legal department might.
"But there's no upside to you as a corporate lawyer if you advocate for taking risks. "
This is a great trope, but as anyone who ever worked with me or plenty of others would tell you, this is both totally wrong, and most good corporate lawyers don't operate like this.
Effective corporations have legal departments who see their goal as enabling business as well, and that requires taking risks at times. because the legal world is not a particularly certain one either.
There are certainly plenty of ineffective corporate legal departments out there, but there are plenty of ineffective engineering, security, privacy, product managmenent, etc orgs out there too.
This is exactly how Elon Musk crushes competition.
His entire team including legal/hr/finance and not just engineering, has the culture of risk taking. Elon Musk is no genius, but his Material Science Engineering, risk taking and first-principle efficiency is unparalleled.
By focusing on Musk's shitty personality, his critics always gets wrong about why he can still be successful despite Musk being a douchebag
Conversely, there's no real downside to being too conservative, especially if engineers and leadership are entirely deferential to you because they don't understand your field (or are too afraid to speak up.)
Although this is also somewhat true for security, privacy, and safety organizations, their remit tends to include "enabling business." A safety team that defaults to "you shouldn't be doing this" is not going to have much sway. A legal department might.