But you're right: you have to prepare the ground very carefully when you ask for legal advice. If you just ask out of the blue "can we do this?" you're asking for trouble.
This. AND: There's seldom if ever much near-term personal upside for the lawyer, just downside if things go wrong --- and lawyers are a natural target for business people to point the fingers at if things do go wrong, because they're of different tribes.
Warren Buffett's longtime business partner Charlie Munger famously said, "Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower. * * * Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives." [0]
That said, good business lawyers think of themselves as kinda being business people with legal training, assessing all the relevant risks and making recommendations for the business. (I tell my students: Try to think as though you were the CEO — but remember that you're not.)
Hence why the phrase "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" exists.
Often enough, only specific trade secrets get long-term protection.
Non-commissioned crewmen on board ships conducting classified missions, not themselves cleared, can usually say everything they did; it was the officers' responsibility to keep them from knowing any classified details.
A lawyer usually cannot get in trouble for saying No. They can only get in trouble for saying Yes. They feel they're doing their jobs by saying No and they'll also use the phrase "out of an abundance of caution."
The lawyer's supervisor is very rarely going to overrule him or her and say Yes. They will just say "it's their case, they're in charge." They defer to each other that way.
This probably seems excessively cynical to you. Indeed it doesn't always turn out this way. Sometimes rationality prevails.