Rich Laws – WesBanco

Rich Laws had already done this once. Nearly 13 years earlier, he had walked into Northwest Bank with a mandate to build its legal and compliance departments from the ground up, and he’d spent over a decade shaping that vision into something durable. So, when WesBanco was searching for a strong leader to build and guide their in-house team, Laws recognized the shape of the challenge immediately, even if the stakes felt different this time. As senior EVP, chief legal counsel and corporate secretary, he wasn’t just joining a legal team. He was building an in-house function that hadn’t existed in this form before.

Rich Laws | WesBanco | Senior EVP, Chief Legal Counsel & Corporate Secretary

WesBanco has spent over 150 years establishing itself as a community-focused, regional financial partner, and that legacy is central to how Laws approached the assignment. The company and its subsidiaries build lasting prosperity through relationships and tailored solutions, offering retail and commercial banking alongside trust, brokerage, wealth management and insurance services across a footprint that has grown to 10 states following a recent expansion into Florida. Headquartered in Wheeling, West Virginia, WesBanco leverages the reach of a large institution while preserving the local focus that has defined it for generations. For Laws, that combination of scale and community identity became the backdrop against which he would assemble something entirely new.

Laying the first bricks

After assessing WesBanco’s legal needs, Laws moved quickly, assembling a cohesive, capable and motivated team within just a few months. He recruited specialized attorneys to oversee distinct areas of the business, including commercial banking, consumer banking and litigation, applying lessons he had carried with him from his years at Northwest Bank.

“We have completed our first buildout of the in-house legal team, the first in 100-plus years,” says Laws.

That growth mirrors what has been happening across WesBanco more broadly. The bank has expanded its market share and geographic reach, most recently entering Florida, and Laws is focused on ensuring his team is prepared to support future growth opportunities. His team is positioned to be a driver of that growth rather than a bystander, supporting the business with an eye toward speed, efficiency, and soundness and safety as WesBanco pursues its next chapter.

Building that team required an unusually deliberate hiring process. Laws personally met with all candidates, interviewing each with business colleagues, fellow lawyers and executives across the organization, a collaborative approach that spanned six to eight months. He has come to see hiring as one of the most consequential responsibilities a manager carries, particularly in a profession where technical competence is often assumed.

“When I’m interviewing lawyers and paraprofessionals, the science part is taken care of when it comes to experience,” says Laws. “What I’m honing in on is the art part: can you communicate effectively with businesspeople, and do you have the courage and curiosity to explore new ideas and modern ways of doing things that may have otherwise been in place for many years”

An art, not a science

That distinction between science and art runs through nearly everything Laws does. Legal skill, he believes, is the baseline expectation. What separates a good in-house lawyer from a great one is the ability to translate complex legal concepts into language the rest of the business can act on, and to build the kind of relationships that make legal a genuine partner rather than a gatekeeper.

It’s part of why Laws has grown cautious about hiring attorneys who spent years entrenched in traditional law firm culture. He has found that his most effective hires are lawyers who came from private practice but never felt fully at home there, professionals hungry for a different kind of impact.

“I’m reluctant to hire lawyers who have been in law firms for a long time because they’re so accustomed to problem-solving and communicating in a certain way,” says Laws.

Relationship-building, as Laws describes it, is less a checklist item than an ongoing discipline. He and his team are simultaneously developing internal processes, governance structures and cross-functional relationships designed to help legal integrate smoothly with the business and its support functions. The goal is for legal to become a seamless, trusted part of how WesBanco operates, not a department the business has to work around. As part of that modernization effort, Laws and his team have also begun developing specialized portals to streamline communication with outside counsel, digitize processes and manage the large amount of data that a modern in-house department generates. All of this acts as a broader push to bring legal technology into a function that has historically lagged behind.

Honesty, courage & empowerment

Law’s approach to leadership is built on three principles he often returns to: honesty, courage and empowerment. He wants his team comfortable challenging the status quo, suggesting new approaches and embracing a disruptive mindset when the moment calls for it, all in service of solutions that make legal faster, leaner and more effective in partnership with the business.

That philosophy extends to how Laws talks with the people he leads and hires. Early in his career, he relied on scripted interview questions, a method he eventually abandoned as ineffective and impersonal.

“I will always stipulate that they have had great careers if they have been selected for an interview, but I like to talk to them as people to find out what truly drives them and where their passions lie,” says Laws.

That instinct to build without recruiters, relying instead on trusted personal networks, shaped the team he ultimately assembled. He looked for curiosity, courage and resiliency in equal measure, traits he considers harder to teach than legal doctrine. His team is now spread across multiple states, meeting weekly to align on priorities and gathering in person quarterly, a rhythm designed to keep a distributed group connected as the department continues to mature.

Walking & chewing gum

Laws is candid about the disruption reshaping his profession. Younger attorneys are increasingly moving directly into in-house roles rather than starting at law firms, some arriving with an MBA, LLM and JD earned in tandem. When acting as an adjunct professor at Penn State Law since January 2020, Laws had a front-row seat to that shift, and he’s intent on making sure WesBanco’s legal department reflects where the profession is headed rather than where it has been.

That includes an openness to artificial intelligence and data that many legal departments have been slow to embrace.

“With AI, let’s not be scared of the dark,” says Laws. “We’re in a fast-moving and disruptive world.”

Yet Laws is equally insistent that modernization doesn’t require abandoning what has always worked. WesBanco’s culture, he says, is genuine, and its people enjoy each other’s company as much as they respect the institution’s history. Balancing that legacy with forward motion is, in his view, entirely possible.

Laws holds a degree focused on political science, philosophy and art history from Juniata College and a JD from Widener University, cum laude, and his path to WesBanco wound through eight years in private practice, nearly seven years as senior legal counsel at ING Bank, and 12 years at Northwest Bank before he arrived in Wheeling in August 2025. Outside the office, he’s a devoted Penn State Nittany Lions fan, and his ideal evening involves swimming and cooking in the backyard with family, including a daughter who recently began her own criminology studies at Penn State and a son now in 10th grade. It’s a full life built the same way he’s building WesBanco’s legal department: deliberately, honestly and with an eye toward what comes next.