Yeah, people often approach legal in the wrong way: people often want to ask "is this OK?" and have the lawyers say "yes", but basically no lawyer is going to say that for almost anything. Instead you need to ask them to explain what the risks of different courses of action are and take a view as to whether they are important or not.
That's been my experience, but unfortunately _that's_ where cargo culting comes in. As part of $NEW_WEBSITE_CHECKLIST we have to "check with legal" which inevitably involves a laundry list of stuff like this, and the default is to accept what legal says, unless we _really_ don't like the answer at which point we're going to do it anyway...
Legal counsel is there to advise, not to design product UX. Some companies have bonehead policies like “you must develop whatever Legal advises” but that’s a choice the company is making. Sensible companies treat their in house counsel as advisory, and weigh the risks like they would weigh any other risks.
