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Ep 64: How to build and scale legal teams?
2 Playsin 5 minutes
As top legal leaders across a variety of industries, our podcast guests are no strangers to building teams from scratch and scaling them to adapt to the needs of a rapidly expanding business.
Listen as we share some of our favorite words of advice from past episodes about hiring and growing elite legal teams from some of the most seasoned general counsels and executives working today.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-64
Topics:
You’re starting a leadership role at a new company. What’s your first move?: 0:06
You’re about to go public. How do you build an expert international legal team from scratch?: 2:51
How do you prepare your legal team to be the next generation of GCs and legal leaders?: 8:06
How do you prepare your domestic legal team for an international expansion?: 10:41
How do you bring in the right talent to build out your legal team?: 15:41
How do you identify whether a candidate has the skills they need to succeed on your legal team?: 18:17
How do you keep your team motivated to stay on during moments of crisis, like the Covid-19 pandemic?: 23:24
Connect with us:
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading contract lifecycle management platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues.
Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
are um We've talked about sort of three different companies, three different approaches. Would you be willing to compare and contrast those sort of experiences? maybe like Summarize for for the listeners. you know like Something that worked really well at Hilton worked well because Hilton was an environment like this. Something that really worked well at Twilio was an environment like this. and then at least in still somewhat early days at Atlassian. But yeah um it it could even just be the sort of way that you approach other stakeholders in the business and the way that you go about getting buy-in for your work. Yeah, um that it's such a great question. And I think there's a lot of different ways I can answer it. But I think what's speaking to me at the moment on how to answer that is um knowledge of the business has just is king yeah or queen.
00:00:52
Speaker
um it And I feel that had I been able to master more, like a company like Hilton, it's 95 years old when I walked in the door. it We had 12 different blank brands at the time, different hotel brands, and you know we had hundreds of attorneys. And so to have the luxury of time onboarding there to really dig into how the company, the you know the intricacies of how they How they made money. I just did not have the luxury to do that at that time. Yeah, I think each subsequent role since then I that it has been more and more and more of a focus and then it Atlassian was one of the first companies I with where they were like, please don't do any work for the next 60 days. Please learn a business ne Please just you know leaders coming in you've got to take that time to really understand it um and so I think
00:01:42
Speaker
ah So the the answer to your question is they were they were different in that respect. Each company was different. I feel like Uber at the time was the height of just Uber-ness and what was going on in the world at the time, right? And they were all you know scaling and and and every month, every week, there was something new ah happening there. didn't have luxury to be able to do that. So again, coming into an environment where it's like, we're already behind. We have 300 lawyers. We have the largest out outside counsel budget I've ever seen in my life. yeah There just wasn't the time to be strategic in some of those ways. And I feel like now call it macroeconomic, call it maturity, whatever you want. you know Now taking that time and the value that's placed in that is coming in as a new leader um is exactly where i where I want to be.
00:02:30
Speaker
If I could take myself now and bring myself back to Hilton, and yeah King changer, they would have been even luckier to have you, uh, cause they would have been, you know, fully resourcing you to your, your full potential. that's what do over but You don't get the second chance, but you can learn. pay for um let's Let's talk a little bit about the sort of like operational aspects or or principles that helped get you to the IPO and helped get you to the Take Private. One of the big pieces was you were able to build out a team of about 20 folks. How did you approach prioritizing and and hiring those folks and and really set them up for success within the wider ANAPLAN organization? Yeah. So, yeah, I mentioned in the beginning, I was, since I was the only person
00:03:20
Speaker
I was doing a lot, so I would say the first hires were really geared around keeping me sane. I'll be honest. It was the very interesting set ah or a very easy set of criteria for, i I don't need to do this anymore and I desperately need someone to do it, so let's hire that person. right And so actually, one of the first hires since we were a broad international based business, even as a 150 to 200 person company, we had offices in 12 or 14 places. Wow. Having an EMEA understanding and Asia pack understanding, and being able to do close to real time business there ie was important. So one of the first hires
00:04:08
Speaker
was an attorney who could handle the EMEA business. And we actually hired him in Minnesota first because there was a still bulk was was ah US, s but we had enough EMEA so that we figured the time zone was a little better. And then we hired an EMEA attorney after that. And so that was kind of how we, the first thing was very revenue contract based.
00:04:30
Speaker
So it was very, I would say reactive. I didn't have a great strategy there. I'll ahll just to be candid. I, in hindsight, I'd probably think about doing things a little bit different in the sense that I think more about, which I did, I think at the next stage of hiring more about multipurpose players, you know, cause then you're getting into the series D and E and F type of a scenario where.
00:04:54
Speaker
You're not really sure exactly what you're going to need, but you need people who are flexible and can react quickly and and are willing to jump in on unknown things. So for me, that was really important at that stage.
00:05:06
Speaker
And then as we got closer to the IPO, I knew that we needed specific skill sets. I knew we needed somebody who was dedicated or knew a lot about privacy, knew a lot about product development, knew a lot about SEC reporting. you know Those types of things became more important. So that's on the skill side. But I also really tried as a manager with a growing team to be conscious of the fact that my experience in the past was I was very fortunate to have great managers along the way.
00:05:36
Speaker
people who are very understanding and forgiving, if I made a mistake, and people who were interested in my growth and my team and the team's growth as a whole. So that stuck with me. I always had, like, for instance, one of my managers at Adobe, every time we would talk about our weekly accomplishments and goals, he always would say, well, what did you get out of it? You know, did you was it something that personally made you happier? What do you want to accomplish? that It will be a personal achievement for you.
00:06:06
Speaker
You know, that was always part of it. And I appreciated that. It wasn't just, here's the corporate objective. What are you doing? A, B and C. It's it's a, tra you know, it's a mutual relationship. It's not a one way thing. And then also at Adobe, I got to credit them.
00:06:22
Speaker
They created the most fun environment. I mean, the group there, we had these amazing offsite, you know, it could just be go out to dinner or it could be we had a couple of off sites where we went up to the Seattle office, you know, as a group for the team I was on. Things like that just created this bond, this culture, this closeness, even though geographically we were spread out a little bit.
00:06:44
Speaker
um It just felt like we were family in a lot of ways It just felt so comfortable to work with that group and I always wanted to recreate that ah To the best I could I don't feel like I was as successful at it as they were yeah um But I think that was another thing was really understanding that I always would prefer hiring for people that make the workplace feel like a better place to be and then let's focus on the skills. like Make it where people want to be part of it, whether that's remote or in person. you know that's It doesn't really matter. You've got to invest in building that kind of cultural tightness. So those are things that I really, I probably thought about that
00:07:32
Speaker
on the later side particularly as we got into the public company side because once you get into the public company side I felt like it was more we also had to focus on redundancy or ability to scale at the right time but not overspend on our hiring or like the hiring became much more tactical about but do you still have to hire in the right fits you know for your journey But it was really like you're more, I felt like we were more constrained because we were a public company and the GNA, you know, spend thresholds to become more important. um
00:08:06
Speaker
but Seth Weissman coaching tree is also, I mean, not in just in your role as an executive coach, but maybe in the various, uh, junior attorneys in-house who you've mentored is probably pretty strong. I think that Belichick or Parcells or Landry, like that's a role model for me.
00:08:24
Speaker
I thought the current number is 12 of my former Solar City and Marketa folks um have been GC or are currently GCs right now. That's incredible. ah And telling that you intentionally think about that that that, that you keep track of that, that that's a model that that you you wanted when you were leading teams, right? And building people up and setting them up for great success all throughout their careers.
00:08:51
Speaker
so So how are you recruiting, right? Like what are you selling? You're selling in ah in essence, you're selling yourself as a leader and you're selling the company. Those are the only things you really have to sell. And so if you want to be selling as a leader with a unique selling proposition, we say this in sales, a USP, it was I'll invest in you, I'll mentor, I'll coach you, I'll grow you. And if you want my job, you can have it when I'm done with it, or I'll get you another one that's better.
00:09:21
Speaker
Right. And that's the deal. and And that deal worked for me for, you know, I was a GC for 19 years. That deal worked because yeah that's investing in people. And why wouldn't it work for everybody? Why can't that street go two ways? That's a very fair bargain. I would take that deal. Me too. Me too. And I got that deal from a number of folks in my career. But but back to the point at at Wilson yeah and and Fong and then bringing Fong over in Solar City's IPO.
00:09:52
Speaker
You know, you just have to focus on what's in front of you. So, you know, there's a, there's a racing, so there's a racing statement about, you know, drive the track in front of you and wherever you drive, wherever your eyes look, the car goes. So do not look at the wall. Do not look at the skid marks and the big blemish on the wall at the track to where you're going. And so with, with the IPO at SolarCity was, okay, let's focus on what we have today.
00:10:22
Speaker
in front of us right now. Let's not let's not focus on on the share price. Let's not focus on a year. Let's not focus on the lockup. Just do the work that's right in front of us. Because what we control as human beings is very minute, but we can control where we put our attention in a given are I want to start with this sort of theme of international expansion is you're thinking about growing your business internationally. One key piece of course, is being able to scale out your own team, having the right people in place. You've got a lot of experience in this with this. How have you done that effectively? I think, especially in this sort of remote environment without wearing yourself out as the GC in the, in the process.
00:11:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's a really good question. um I think I would start by saying it's absolutely an art and not a science um ah for sure. I think also just to go back a step is it's very rarely that it's the general counsel saying we should expand into this market and we should set up an entity there and we should, you know, get people on the ground. It tends to be more that that the business is is driving that for growth. And I find that In all of the roles I've had when we're looking at expansion my first question is always okay I understand that X customer or you know, you know means that we need to have somebody on the ground in this particular country Okay, right
00:11:47
Speaker
What form does that need to take? And so it's always about like trying to understand from the business, what are they trying to achieve by bringing somebody in in this particular country that we don't operate? Because I think that then gives you a bit of a path to what's your recommendation in terms of the um in terms of like the legal framework that should sit around that. Can you actually get ah get a, you know do you need to have? The last resort should be an all-singing, all-dancing local density.
00:12:16
Speaker
um because it comes with a very significant amount of compliance costs. And sometimes it's absolutely the right things to do, but it's definitely worth pushing the businesses to. why they want something rather than them just saying, well, this is, this is, this is what I've decided we're doing. So it's worth just pushing and being clear on like, well, how, what's the best, most cost-effective way of achieving that? In terms of my scaling out of my team, um, uh, at Lime, I scaled out our European operation, legal operation. Um, pretty considerably when I arrived at Lime and I think.
00:12:48
Speaker
Again, it was the sense that some of our most significant markets are in Europe. It's important to have attorneys who can speak the local language, never underestimate how many documents will arrive in the local language.
00:13:02
Speaker
um And also to kind of just understand the cultural sensibilities. I mean, many businesses, most businesses these days they're global, but they're incredibly local as well. And so thinking about how you make that work locally means that often you do need, I think, local insight. I think one of the things is to be very grounded around what you actually need in that particular region because sometimes it might be quite different from what you need in a head office capability. And so, you know, to to be practical, like in a head office role, you may need a product counselor who's got deep experience in product counseling with a lot of technical expertise around kind of like privacy or like product development.
00:13:45
Speaker
it may be that if it's more of an operational role in Europe, you need someone with quite different skills. So my team come from a very broad array of of kind of past experiences. I have, I have regulatory lawyers, I have property lawyers, I have a ah sort of broad range of people who bought different skills that I felt were sometimes needed to that particular region. So maybe one region is very, very advanced in terms of how it engages with cities, maybe one is sort of quite quite early in that in that journey and so you need to be grounded about what you need now and I think also not always hiring somebody super duper experienced sometimes sometimes you actually need someone quite junior and you know you're going to have to to kind of coach them so I think
00:14:29
Speaker
You have to spend a lot of time about thinking what's actually going to get the job done there and what's realistic. So be realistic of where you actually are rather than where you want to get to, because if you hire the wrong person, it may take you longer to get to where you want to go. I think using headhunters can be really valuable. They can definitely but bring a perspective that you might not otherwise seen. I think obviously we use a lot of LinkedIn for our recruiting, a lot of building out a network. Sometimes talking to local council can be helpful if you've managed to find somebody who can sort of appreciate the sort of different dynamics of where you might be HQed and where you're operating. So those are all tips. My most thing is is spend time thinking about what you really need and also make sure you've bought your
00:15:09
Speaker
business, your business along with you in what you're looking for as well. I certainly had, um, I failed, I think to fully appreciate that in one country. And I had a really experienced, very, very good lawyer. And then actually it turned out that a lot of that person's job was going to be handling like genuinely almost administrative matters. And it took a while to like communicate between the business and the lawyer to like work out what their role should be. So yeah, bring your business along and be realistic about what you need. um
00:15:41
Speaker
As the company grows, talk talk to us about building the team. Like how did you bring in the right sort of talent? How did you grow as a manager? I'd imagine that's one of the sort of steepest curves as Lyft sped towards, no pun intended, an IPO that was not in the script. i Sped toward, but always within the speed limit, of course. So you know when I joined, I was relatively junior in my career. My experience was all in the corporate transaction space.
00:16:16
Speaker
And and you know I was joining a company that obviously was like heavily immersed in a sort of like a legal and regulatory tricky area from day one. And so even before I accepted the job, I was very clear to to let the co-founders know that I'd be requiring budget for outside counsel to compliment my own skill set because I knew that I didn't know at all.
00:16:42
Speaker
And that was the sort of same philosophy I had as I went to build out the legal team. I really looked for people with skills that were different from my own. So, you know, some of the first people I hired both had litigation backgrounds. You know, another early hire was had an employment background.
00:17:01
Speaker
at the time insurance well still today insurance is very big for us but at the time it was within my purview and so I you know hired someone with insurance insurance expertise and it was only like five or six hires down the road that I ultimately hired you know another corporate person to effectively sort of duplicate myself such that I could be in more of a leadership role versus a practitioner role. And you know I looked for people who were diverse, and I looked for people who were better than me at their jobs. And I did that you know knowing full well that like some people might be threatened by bringing in a cohort of folks who were
00:17:43
Speaker
you know really, really good experts in their fields. But for me, like this was the ticket to success. And and I was very right to bet in that way because all of these people that I'm talking about very quickly gained the trust of the co-founders and other management because they were so good at what they did.
00:18:03
Speaker
And many of them, um some of them are still at left today, by the way, and ah you know a decade later, and and others of them that have since gone on, stayed a long time and have gone on to really amazing things. um How do you look for some of those raw skills while recognizing that maybe junior people who you hire also have slightly inflated ego sometimes or lack certain hard skill sets that they're gonna need to learn? Talk to me a little bit about that.
00:18:33
Speaker
Yeah, and the answer to that is yes, conclusively I do. If you come interview for a job with me, I will not ask you a single question about what your experience is. If you come to me with 30 years of experience in my sector or not a single second of experience, I'm going to ask you the same questions. Because the answer is that my own experience has told me that it just isn't that relevant.
00:18:58
Speaker
I don't care what you've done. I don't care what school you've gone to. I don't care like where you've worked. What I care about is like, does the job I have or the opportunity I have, does it vibe with what you're looking for? Does it fit into where your next step is? Because ultimately the thing I care about the most is are you going to lean And I don't mean lean in like in a Sheryl Sandberg, like let's write a book about it type. way yeah like Are you going to be like excited to try and figure this thing out? Because the experience I had when I like more or less bluffed my way into that first job at turn was like, I was like, man, I need a paycheck. I have a three week old baby and no job.
00:19:41
Speaker
And once I got in there, I was like, okay, i can I see it. Like I can start to see the parameters of the thing and see the outlines of the puzzle. And then I started getting really into figuring it out. And I was successful in that role, mostly because like, I was into it. Like I wanted to work product. I wanted to learn the business. I wanted to figure out the mechanics. I was like going to dig into like the deal negotiations with the business people. I was going to spend the time with them. I built, made great friends there that are Still, you know my great friends 12 years later like and that was because I was totally in into it And the lesson I came away with that is that the subject matter is the easiest thing to teach Yeah teach is like
00:20:24
Speaker
you're wanting to do this. Because you could be the smartest guy on the planet or gal on the planet. You could be the most credentialed, most experienced human being there ever was. If you don't want to do it, if it is not something that is energizing to you, that that like fits into where you are in your life, you're not going to be successful. I have no interest in having to put my boot in somebody's backside to get them to work, right? Yeah. Good you are.
00:20:51
Speaker
I want this to be the best possible place for you to work. And so like, I tell my team all the time, like, there's no hostages on my team. and a better job someplace else I want you to go to a recruiter for a hiring. And he's like, don't worry, I won't poach your people. I was like, poach them.
00:21:07
Speaker
one them like There's a better job out there. I want them to go do it. Because I want you here because this is the right place for you. i want to Because you're like the value transfer works. I'm learning the right things. I'm getting the role that I want. I'm getting the affirmation from being great at my job. All these sorts of things that ladder into to me, the environment that I'm most successful in. Yeah. Do you have a favorite interview question to tease that out?
00:21:34
Speaker
So I ask a series of scripted interview questions. I don't want to get too deep into them because I do ask them to people. i want to like get like But generally what I'm trying to test for when I am interviewing people, the things I want to see is I want to see an aptitude for mastery, meaning like I want to see you want to be great at things.
00:21:56
Speaker
I don't care what it is really. I don't care if it's collecting fountain pens. I don't care if it's like playing soccer. I don't care if it's legal stuff. Like I want to see you think of yourself as somebody who masters stuff. I want somebody who wants to be autonomous. Somebody who wants to own the work. Somebody who's going to think of the projects I give them as like, I'm the quarterback. This thing is mine. Yeah. I'm going to rise and fall.
00:22:23
Speaker
with this and like I will be mad at you if you come and try and work on this project because this thing is mine. Yeah. yeah Because I want to see that level of desire for sort of autonomy. And I want to see people who are jazzed by significance. I want to see somebody who is like, hey, the thing that matters to me is mattering. It's not about like the paycheck. Look, paychecks are important. You've got to make enough money to like take money worries off the table. But sure.
00:22:53
Speaker
want you to be in a position where if I told you, hey, you can come to job A, and I will pay you twice as much money, and you will be a cog in this machine, and it'll be like interesting work, video and or I can give you job B, and you'll make 40% less money. But it's going to be on you, like this thing's gonna rise and fall on you. If you are like unequivocally, yeah, give me job B, like, yeah, the money will come, like I'll make that comp later, but like, I want to be in it and hu and we got something um
00:23:25
Speaker
I wanna ask you off you know through that transition, how have you kept your team motivated, right? I mean, keeping keeping a whole team, and not just for four years, but also four years from 2019 to present through the pandemic, through a time when a lot of employees were looking for new opportunities or jumping ship sort of in light of a pretty hot job market. Like how have you kept folks really motivated and and um wanting to stay to to work with you and continue to build a way?
00:23:54
Speaker
like That's a good question. I think about it a lot. I think there's a few things for me. I provide my team with a lot of autonomy because I think that's what people want. Right. So, I mean, I can also do that because they're amazing. Right. Like they do great work. They're very committed to the company.
00:24:13
Speaker
They're very good professionals. And I also don't have people on my team who it's their first job out of college, like that kind of thing. So I think providing autonomies, if you can, is invaluable to employees. They also, for the most part, get to work completely remotely, which is not true. That's not true of all the other teams in a way. But to me, that's a retention lever. And also something that I always try to offer is, um, the opportunity to learn and to do new kinds of work. So I always say, even when interviewing and recruiting from my team, I always say we decide on the, you know, what the role is working on. Um, it's based on two things. One is the needs of the business, but two is what are you interested in doing? Right? So it's both of those things. So if someone on my team says, you know, I'm going to work more on the brand side.
00:25:11
Speaker
I'm super open to that conversation, right? Okay, what does that look like? What kinds of things do you want to work on? Let's keep an eye on that. Because like me, I think they want to learn and that makes their experience more rich. And it's something that they could take with them to their next job. Sure. They want that, right? So those are kind of the things I focus on.
00:25:36
Speaker
And also, I think like we're lucky we have a team that we all like really get along and we like each other and we like working together. So I think that really helps. Sure. um The abstract is now on YouTube Shorts. We interview general counsels, head of legal ops, COOs, and even a few CEOs on our podcast. Hit subscribe to hear from the brightest minds in legal and business.