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Expanding Beyond the GC Role | Bonus Episode
98 Plays1 year ago
Interested in expanding beyond the traditional role of General Counsel?
Join us in this episode to find out how legal leaders redefine their roles. Discover insights that transform legal professionals into strategic business leaders – from smoothly transitioning to CEO to mastering adaptive communication in enterprise strategy.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-23
Topics:
Introduction: 00:00
Evan Ferl on taking the legal landscape beyond its limits: 01:16
René Paula on enterprise strategy and adaptive communication: 06:55
Kathy Zhu on mastering the legal to CEO transition: 09:11
Vanessa Gage on navigating interim leadership challenges: 12:15
Genessa Stout on mastering legal insight and business success: 17:19
Outro: 20:30
Subscribe now for valuable perspectives on Google Podcasts/Apple Podcasts/Spotify.
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
Featured guests:
Evan Ferl: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evanferl/
René Paula: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rpaula/
Kathy Zhu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathymzhu88/
Vanessa Gage: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vgage/
Genessa Stout: https://www.linkedin.com/in/genessastout/
SpotDraft is a leading CLM platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues. Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
Introduction to Spotdraft and its capabilities
00:00:00
Speaker
Before we get started with today's episode, I want to tell you about Spotdraft. If you spend hours every week drafting and reviewing contracts, worrying about being blindsided by renewals, or if you just want to streamline your contracting process, let's talk about an end-to-end AI-powered system that'll save you time. Spotdraft is a contract lifecycle management system.
00:00:22
Speaker
that helps in every stage of contracting. From creating and managing templates and workflows, to tracking approvals, e-signing, and reporting via an AI-powered repository, Spotdraft does it all. And because it should work where you work, it integrates with all the tools your team already uses. Spotdraft is the key that unlocks the potential of your legal team.
00:00:45
Speaker
Make your contracting easier today at spotdraft.com.
Career opportunities through flexibility and complex tasks
00:01:04
Speaker
is how they were able to go beyond the GC role and expand their remit, like becoming a COO, a financial chief, or even founding their own startups. In today's bonus episode, we're looking back on some of the best advice from across the first two seasons of The Abstract so that you can make the journey to a new seat at the executive table just like they did. What we found is that flexibility in operators' perspective
00:01:31
Speaker
and a willingness to take on the kinds of complex tasks that other executives avoid will help boost you into new and exciting opportunities and roles. First up is Evan Furl, Chief Strategy Officer and GC at the HR tech firm Bambi. From his first in-house role at NASA to a brush with Corp Dev at Poshmark, Evan's been able to surpass the attorney label
00:01:56
Speaker
and move into a broader C-suite strategy role. Here's Evan discussing how he was able to leverage his GC role to get as close to the business as possible.
00:02:06
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, one of the main reasons why I even like gotten in house and like tech etc is like, I saw legal as a way to get as close to the business as quickly as possible, right? So it's like working even as just like a contracts attorney or whatever in my first job, I was like, interacting with the CEO, the CFO, like our heads up product, like and like everybody
00:02:37
Speaker
not done anything and not pushed. And there's nothing wrong with that. I remember somebody that I talked to early on in my career, they were like, do you actually want to be a GC? And I was like, yeah, of course I do.
Leveraging legal roles for business expansion
00:02:49
Speaker
I want to bring it on. And it's not for everybody. So my experiences are purely my own. My impressions are purely my own. If you just want to be
00:03:00
Speaker
a product attorney for your career awesome you should be you know like if you just want to be a commercial attorney like i worked with like a really killer commercial attorney in my prior role and like that's what she
00:03:14
Speaker
And I'm pumped for people when they find those things. It's probably the best negotiator in the company. Right. Yes. So like find the thing you're awesome at and you love to do and go do it. You know, what I always saw is like, okay, like what I think I can be awesome at is like positively influencing the business test through legal grade. And then if eventually that allows me to increase my scope, awesome. But the quickest and the most dramatic way up and in I saw was like, okay, how do I be
00:03:47
Speaker
businesses I could so like throughout my early career I tried to figure out where my gaps were and like plug those gaps you know so like anytime something came up at some total that I could be like okay how do I set myself up for success and potential general counsel rolls down the road take it you know like oh like our GC doesn't want to handle our IP portfolio anymore sweet I'll handle it you know oh like there's like this like M&A integration stuff that like
00:04:14
Speaker
off-handle it, you know? Because then, like, I sit in the next interview and I'm not just, like, BS-ing. I'm like, yeah, I've done M&A, yeah, I've done IP, yeah, I've done this, you know? And, like, I just love that, like, Swiss Army knifing kind of, like, mentality, too.
Enhancing business understanding through education
00:04:28
Speaker
And so, then, you know, from some total, I moved to VMware. VMware is, like,
00:04:33
Speaker
I don't know, it was like 150 person legal department as just like one of many, but still tried to like figure out ways to Swiss Army knife my way around there so like, you know, worked on this program where I could spend time with the corporate securities team with the M&A team spent some time with the employment and the litigation team.
00:04:52
Speaker
All while still doing my like key regular commercial job as well. And it's like okay like how like like how do I just take on as much as I can while still doing good work of course just like keep building, keep building myself and especially building a resume, because I think plenty of people lie on their resume and they go pretty far anyway so I probably could
00:05:16
Speaker
you do even more. Like I built that foundation. That was also one of the reasons why I like went back and got my MBA is I was like, okay, how many GCs out there have an MBA? Not many. I mean, at least at least back then, maybe more do now. And I was like, okay, like that's because I, I would find myself sitting in M&A meetings, meetings with finance meetings with accounting and so on. And I was like, I, I can't talk to any of this.
00:05:39
Speaker
So it's like, how do I enable myself to talk to it in a really thoughtful way? And going back and taking those finance classes and those accounting classes, we took HR classes, we took IT classes, et cetera. Then all of a sudden, I can speak to this stuff. I'm not an expert in any of it. But then you start to show the business that you can make those connections, that you can actually
00:06:01
Speaker
speak the language of other people and other organizations, right? And like just kind of like slowly building these building blocks until eventually I got to a point where I was just like, all right, like I'm ready to go try and be a GC if somebody will let me go be a GC. And then after that happened, I like my first opportunity to kind of grow and expand out of that was that hired when I remember like the CFO pulled me aside and he was like, hey, you want to take on an additional team? And I was just like,
00:06:29
Speaker
Yeah, of course I do. And he was like, Do you want to know what the team is before you agree to taking on the additional team? Like, no, when the CFO asks you if you want to do additional stuff, you say absolutely. Like, it doesn't matter what it is, I'll do it. So that was the operations team that hired and then like, that was like kind of my first step out, outside of
00:06:52
Speaker
I feel like kind of the momentum started that like, yeah, I still wanted to be a GC at that point, but I wanted to be a GC plus other things.
Transitioning from legal to entrepreneurial roles
00:07:01
Speaker
What were those other things? And have, I mean, maybe I'll pause there cause I've been super long winded about this answer, but that, but since then I've gotten the opportunity to, you know, expand beyond the role, which has been super special.
00:07:12
Speaker
It's one thing to move into another department within an organization or to take on responsibility for a new function. But how does a GC move to building their own company from the ground up? After taking on huge challenges at established names like Cravath, Swain & Moore, HSBC, and Amazon's Audible, Rene Paula launched and sold his own startup, Sonar, and then took that experience to grow a consultancy at Bionic.
00:07:40
Speaker
This is what Rene has learned it takes to expand into a general leadership role from his time as a founder.
00:08:01
Speaker
that kind of selling aspect probably was super helpful to have been a founder and have to sell my idea over and over to people to like get the engineers and even get a company to build your prototype. Everybody's like saying, we have so many opportunities, what would I pick up your idea to help you with it, right? So the constant selling and then be able to truly bring down the strategy to like a few sentences and explaining extremely well.
00:08:25
Speaker
with like extremely senior people. I think that's what was super helpful. Then otherwise, the rest is about just, you know, what I tell my kids, you have to be super comfortable with many languages, right? I'm not just talking about speaking languages, right? Like, yes, I speak Spanish and my kids now speak Spanish, like they're learning Mandarin. It's about like, you have to be extremely good at math, finance, accounting. You have to be able to, you know, code.
00:08:48
Speaker
you can, right? And so like, some of the things that happened within my time at Bionic was simply that, as I spent time there, I came in, I was like, wait a second, I'm not sure these numbers work, right? So I started digging into it. And our unit economics were not working.
00:09:04
Speaker
And so as for the management team, I sort of pound the table, like our numbers are incorrect. So I ended up taking over the finance team, right? Then you start thinking about like actual deploying people, consultant business. I'm like, wait a second. Like we are assigning people like incorrectly. Like this is not the way it should be done. And then next thing you know, I ended up taking over operations. And so like being able to question things because you are dangerous enough in this other quote unquote languages, right? I think it's what made me successful at Bionic as we went to sell the company.
00:09:34
Speaker
Um, I was able to then also articulate to Accenture. And what was the secret sauce that we had? Cause there's a lot of this also sounds a bit just out there, right? Sure. Uh, that would made it worthwhile for them. Renee isn't the only lawyer on our podcast to take on a chief executive role as the CEO of streamline AI. Kathy zoo also knows that experience as in-house counsel can prepare you to steer your company. Here she is sharing what it was like to move in to her current position.
00:10:03
Speaker
Oh, it was incredible. You know, I just really couldn't wait to get started because when I came on board, you know, we already had five paying customers and they were pretty much all saying the same thing, which is, Hey, streamline is solving this problem that we've all been dealing with, you know, with chaos.
00:10:21
Speaker
and this lack of visibility and not being on the same page with our business teams. And that was a huge validation that yes, you're making the right decision, Kathy. And you know, Tyler, I also knew at the same time, there's just so much more I had to learn to be a successful CEO. But the fortunate thing is that working all these years as an in-house lawyer gave me great preparation for it.
00:10:46
Speaker
As many of our listeners will know and identify with, you know, we've done work right as in-house counsel with sales, customer success, finance, marketing, basically all of the business teams. And that preparation gives you so much of a headstart and advantage because as CEO of an early stage company, you wear all of those hats. But luckily you've already walked, you know, a little bit of the distance, right? Doing the work. So that's why I'm a really firm believer that business minded lawyers
00:11:15
Speaker
can actually make fantastic entrepreneurs. Cathy's background as a lawyer doesn't just help her work cross-functionally. More specifically, it's allowed her to offer a unique perspective in the product design process, as she's someone who's lived the experience of her clients. I think when it comes to enterprise tooling, a really challenging thing for product designers is to be able to see the world through the user's eyes, right? If they've actually never done work in the user's role before,
00:11:45
Speaker
So what they need to do is to conduct a lot of user interviews and try to incorporate the feedback. But there's always an element of it that's secondhand. I think for a lot of us who've used legacy
00:11:58
Speaker
clunky software, not designed by lawyers. We know how that feels, right?
Managing interim roles effectively
00:12:04
Speaker
So the neat thing that we've really been able to do at Streamline is to leverage my experience from both doing work on the front lines, as well as leading a team and really baking that perspective into the functionality. And you can't always conduct a fully fledged user interview every time you build a new feature.
00:12:22
Speaker
But my CTO can come over to me and be like, hey, Kathy, what do you think about this new thing we're about to build? So it makes things a lot easier.
00:12:31
Speaker
So far, we've heard from experts who took on new roles outside of the legal field. But some transitions aren't about stepping away from your title as GC. They're about keeping your responsibilities and piling on a little bit more. That's why we invited Vanessa Gage, General Counsel at the health care platform Cedar, to share advice from her time as an interim executive at multiple companies, including a recent stint as interim CFO.
00:12:59
Speaker
For Vanessa, it's all about making sure your company empowers you to accomplish the tasks you need to get done.
00:13:06
Speaker
Yeah. And that's funny because if I had to do it again, I would probably have talked to more people and gotten some sage advice. And so I kind of muddled through it a little bit. I think I was excited. I was happy with what I called the interim title. And over what I found is as kind of the days turned into weeks and turned into kind of months of holding that, I came to a great realization that
00:13:30
Speaker
It may not surprise some people here, but it was new for me. And that was interim roles, I think, are one of the hardest things that you can take on. You have all of the accountability and responsibility that comes with the full title. But with that interim piece, you don't come with the full empowerment to do that role well. And at some point, there's a tension between those two things.
00:13:53
Speaker
Um, and I was hitting it and it's, it comes down to the things like hiring and capacity and planning. And you're essentially in what becomes the longest job interview of your life, but you're not given the kind of the vote of confidence in the tools that someone who just came in knew would have. And, um, kind of going back to me, I don't like to ask for things, but I realized kind of into that process that I needed to ask for things to be able to do my job well.
00:14:22
Speaker
Um, and you know, whether you're going to hold that job kind of truly on a temporary basis, or you're going to hold it in kind of a, you really want to hold it for in a full time capacity. I think being given the tools.
00:14:34
Speaker
that allow you to do the job entirely are really important. I was thinking back to it. It's sort of, you know, for those who spend a lot of time in law firms, it's sort of the same thing of, Oh, we won't make someone a partner until they can prove the king of business. Well, one of the things you need to get business is the title. So it becomes kind of this self-fulfilling prophecy that you just, you can't leap over. And since I was kind of running into the same thing and I finally just asked for it and I said, Hey, I need this to do my job.
00:15:00
Speaker
And then we're saying, oh, that's kind of a no brainer. Here you go. We'll just take that interim piece off. And all of a sudden my job became much easier, you know, and through that, what I'd say is yes, the company may still run a full process. I think that's important depending on the dynamics of the company and its growth stage. So you expect that, but you're going to be empowered to do the job as it needs to be done and have the right tools for it. And during that process, I think it's a great, it is a golden ticket. It's an opportunity to look at,
00:15:27
Speaker
Well, do I like this job? Do I like this job at this company? Would I like this job if the circumstances were different?
00:15:36
Speaker
Now that could be yes, definitely to one or more of those questions, or it can be, well, no, this is not really my cup of tea. Those are both okay. And I don't think we talk about that enough of one of the things with interim roles is they really are a chance to try out a job and see what you think. They're also a chance to build the skills in a way where you are empowered with the tools you need to build those skills well, versus kind of like hitting a ceiling where you can't get through it.
00:16:03
Speaker
But regardless, you kind of need to go into that process and assume, I think that the kind of the box that you filled in the company is not going to be the same when this is all over. I think that was something that took me a little bit of time to get my arms around in the sense that I was being elevated into a different role and I was trying that out. But I probably was never going to be happy back in the box that I was in originally and that's okay.
00:16:30
Speaker
But I think working through that also gave me the ability to do my job better and kind of just come to terms with that. And so what kind of flows from that is what I'd say is you really do need to own it from day one.
00:16:44
Speaker
or week one or at some point early on in this process and just say, Hey, I'm going to do this job. I'm going to dive in. I'm going to learn new things. I'm not going to be perfect. But with that, I am going to be better for it. But if I kind of hold myself back of, Oh, I might want to go return to my, this thing that I had before, you're not going to succeed at it. And you're going to kind of set yourself up for failure.
00:17:07
Speaker
I think also in that process, when I talked about this, this can be a tough subject to talk about because what overlays interim roles is often a lot of things that are just completely outside of your control. You know, there's dynamics at every company that go far beyond whether or not you're good at your job. And that often is particularly at a point where you're managing a situation where you've kind of stepped into an interim role.
00:17:32
Speaker
So I think it comes also with maybe just reading the tea leaves and accepting that that can be how things go.
Understanding business for role expansion
00:17:40
Speaker
But that doesn't, you kind of have to just internalize that and then move past it if you're going to succeed in the role and really learn and enjoy and grow from it.
00:17:50
Speaker
Let's wrap things up with some insightful tips from Janessa Stout, COO at Tally, who leveraged her time building an expertise in financial services regulation at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and PayPal into a wider ranging leadership position at Tally. Yeah. One thing I would really encourage people that are interested in that path is to really understand
00:18:17
Speaker
the business from many different points of view and understand what do these, what does this group care about? You know, what does this group care about? And try to understand the whole machine that fits together of the business, because that gives you such better insight into the way the company works. And this, it's true of lawyers, as we know, if you're, if you're the lawyer that comes in and is like, no, that won't work. That's not very helpful. Right. The goal is to like, try to figure out a path forward. And I, I don't think that only applies to lawyers. I think that's true.
00:18:46
Speaker
in any function is like, okay, what do we, what is tally as a company or whatever your company is? What do we need to do? Like, what are the objectives of the business? And so what can we do in service of that? So I think the first thing is, if you want to
00:19:02
Speaker
expand your scope, you can't just stay in your lane and like, be like, I'm the lawyer. This is what I do. You do the other things you have to be willing to, to branch out in a way that's not too annoying to everybody else. Um, and then I think another thing is.
00:19:19
Speaker
Be willing to own hard, complicated things that nobody else wants to do because they're hard and complicated. It's a lot of work, but are you willing to take on this hard, complicated thing that needs to be solved for the business and you're willing to do it? That actually gives you a lot of scope and understanding and really wisdom about what the business needs.
00:19:48
Speaker
Path you can take but it you have to be willing to like really get in there and do things that maybe other people don't necessarily want to do
00:19:55
Speaker
to maybe sort of close out the thought about how you can grow over time. Do you have a perspective on, and it may be a mix, whether or not those other sorts of opportunities to take on a really hard problem are things that in your career you sought out or are things that maybe were brought to you by a mentor or another executive in the business? Hmm. Most of the things
00:20:25
Speaker
I didn't seek out, but I don't think anyone was bringing them to me like, we think this would be good for your growth, Janessa. It was more like, help. We need help with this. Will you help us? Which is fine. And that's the way life works a lot of times.
00:20:43
Speaker
That's a really good question, Tyler. Um, I don't think, and maybe this speaks to my poor career planning. I don't think there's a lot of things that I have been like, I want to be in charge of compensation. It's more like, okay, this is a thing we need to understand and figure out. And, and so let's do that. And let me, let me be part of that solution. But I, there's actually no reason though, if you were like, if you recognize, you know, I think I actually have.
00:21:12
Speaker
strength and insight in this area. Let me volunteer to say, hey, I can pitch in and help. How could that happen? I think that's a perfectly legitimate way to go forward also.
00:21:22
Speaker
That's all we've got for today. Thanks for listening to this episode of the abstract. Make sure you subscribe on my profile to get notified as soon as we release new episodes. And if you're a current or former in-house lawyer or legal professional who's tuning into our show, I'd really love to know, how are you thinking about growing in your role and taking on more responsibility?
00:21:45
Speaker
Let's start a conversation. Share your stories and expertise using hashtag the abstract and tag us on LinkedIn. We'll add the links in the description. Hope to see you all next time.