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Navigating the Legal-Security-Privacy Relationship: Celaena Powder’s Experiences at Seismic
155 Plays1 year ago
Legal, Security, and Privacy are cut from the same cloth — but it’s common to see friction between these teams. How can GCs and in-house leaders bridge this gap to form productive working relationships?
Join us as we dive into the incredible journey of Celaena Powder, VP of Legal at Seismic, as she weighs in on forming unbeatable GC-CISO duos, supporting an enterprise sales motion at a company, nurturing meaningful relationships with Sales AEs to drive business impact, and more.
We also discuss strategies for transforming the perception of Legal, building a high-performing legal team, and fostering a culture of growth and support.
Tune in now to uncover a goldmine of actionable advice and a behind-the-scenes look into how Celaena leads Legal at Seismic.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-6
Topics:
Introduction: 00:00
Finding inspiration for what you want to do in your career: 02:44
Accelerating professional growth when working in small teams: 11:13
Going in-house and becoming VP of Legal at Seismic: 14:08
Transforming the perception of Legal within the org: 18:28
Setting your legal team up for success: 22:30
Navigating enterprise sales as a legal team: 26:22
Leveraging privacy education to drive revenue generation: 32:54
Nurturing productive relationships between Legal and Sales AEs: 35:33
The intersection of the Legal and Security functions: 41:02
Bridging the gap between Legal, Security, and Privacy: 45:00
How the GC’s role will evolve with tech and AI evolution: 54:21
Advice for younger attorneys: 57:30
Connect with us:
Celaena Powder - https://www.linkedin.com/in/celaenapowder/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
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 and Guest Welcome
00:00:07
Speaker
Hi there, listeners. This is Tyler Finn, Head of Community and Growth at Spot Draft, and I am super excited to be welcoming you to another episode of our podcast, The Abstract. Today, we're joined by Selena Powder, who heads up legal at Seismic.
00:00:25
Speaker
Selena has an incredible career from her JD at UCLA through time at Oregon Gunderson to now seismic where she leads not just legal, but also security something we'll be talking about today.
Global Recording Setup
00:00:40
Speaker
Welcome to the podcast, Selena. Thanks for having me excited to be here.
00:00:45
Speaker
Before I ask you to tell us a little bit about Seismic, I do want to note, I think this is pretty cool. I'm joining today from our office in Bangalore, India, where I've been working with our product and engineering team and Selena's calling in from LA.
Growth and Role at Seismic
00:01:01
Speaker
So we're just over 10,000 miles apart, but here together virtually to record this episode.
00:01:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's pretty exciting and shout out to Modern Technology on this because so far this process has been pretty seamless. I agree. Selena, can we start by hearing a little bit about Seismic before we start chatting about your career trajectory? Yeah, Seismic is a staff's company and leader in the sales enablement space, which means we make software that helps sales teams sell better.
00:01:31
Speaker
Whether that's integrating with your CRM or your asset management tools, we bring marketing and sales together. We keep sellers on message and we get content to the right buyers at the right time and really help enable sellers to sell across a virtual environment in today's modern selling cycle.
Career Beginnings and Inspirations
00:01:49
Speaker
Seismic was founded in 2010 in San Diego
00:01:52
Speaker
by our CEO, he's still our CEO along with a few others and has grown to about 1500 people across seven different countries. It's definitely a company to watch. Just since you've been there, I know it's grown quite a bit. I feel like when I first met you, it might have been 700 folks and now it's almost doubled. Yeah, it's been exciting to watch seismic grow. I came in house in 2021. It's been a little over two years now since I've been in the seat.
00:02:22
Speaker
and the company has changed so much since I've been here. And that's actually one of the things I love about being in house is watching that growth. These rapid high growth companies are a challenge for these types of roles, but it's an honor and a privilege to see it from the inside.
00:02:39
Speaker
So before we get to Seismic and hear a number of lessons that you have to share with our audience across how to work with security, how to work with enterprise sellers and sales motions, I want to go back to, to the beginning to sort of your, your early life and what motivated you to go to law school and pursue a career as
Education and Career Choices
00:03:00
Speaker
a lawyer. Yeah. Gosh, going way back, I actually grew up in a small town in Alaska. So I grew up.
00:03:06
Speaker
Outside of Palmer, Palmer's about maybe 5,000 people. And when I was growing up, I grew up sort of in the boonies, in the woods, outside of Palmer, at the base of a mountain range. And so I really grew up living a life of outdoor adventure. I was outside as much as possible, skiing, hiking, cycling. But I was always a big, had big dreams and ambition.
00:03:31
Speaker
And whenever people ask, what do you want to be when you grow up? I reflect on that. And I think that's the wrong question. I think the question should be, who do you want to be when you grow up? Because growing up, I grew up in this town where I had this sense of who I wanted to be. I wanted to be somebody who could command a room, somebody who was well-respected, who was top of her game. But when I looked around and saw the community around me,
00:03:59
Speaker
A lot of those careers looked very different than what I thought would be right for me. A lot of folks work in the oil fields up on the North Slope or construction, educators, healthcare professionals. And I just never saw that woman that I wanted to be in those career paths.
00:04:18
Speaker
And so like most folks and most young children, I look to other sources of inspiration. And one of those areas is of course media and you absorb those, whether it's consciously or subconsciously.
00:04:33
Speaker
We didn't have cable. We didn't have dish. We had a little tiny TV with rabbit ears and we got maybe three or four stations. But over the course of getting those three or four stations, there were a couple of pieces of media that really seeped in. And if I could have, I would have been either a warrior princess or vampire slayer. There weren't a lot of young girls, but those were the two biggest ones. And I still, to this day,
00:04:59
Speaker
There's ever a hellmouth nearby sending me in because I think I could do it, but I ultimately had to take maybe a little bit more of a realistic option. And because there was a lot of great representation of people who looked like me in media at the time, there was kind of only attorneys and now they are necessarily realistic. You know, Shirley Schmick played by Candice Bergen on Boston Legal.
00:05:24
Speaker
was this powerful woman who could walk into a room and shut down a group of braggadocious, loud men, or they would listen when she spoke, she was highly respected. And so I think lawyer became kind of the default because I saw a little bit of who I wanted to be in that career trajectory.
00:05:44
Speaker
And I'm somebody who once I pick something, I'm kind of going to stick with it. And so I didn't leave her.
Law School Challenges and Networking
00:05:51
Speaker
I decided to go to the other side of the country, her undergrad at NYU and graduated early because college was expensive. And while I was working multiple jobs, that fourth year seemed pretty daunting. I sprinted straight to law school.
00:06:06
Speaker
and ended up on the West Coast because all the lawyers in New York seemed a little bit sad. And I thought, well, I'm pretty sad on this law thing, but maybe the West Coast with the sunshine and so-called will bring out a different breed of attorneys. So I traveled out West and I was somebody who maybe had already always been good at stuff, but not great. So I always had to work really hard for that A.
00:06:36
Speaker
And it wasn't until law school that I found what really clicked for me. And that was the startups and venture capital world. So I could see that woman in all of these different types of practice areas, but it wasn't until I actually built a business plan and pitched in a startup competition that I thought this is for me. And so.
00:06:59
Speaker
During law school, I took courses on it. I truly did build the foundation of a business and I fell in love. It was challenging, but in a different way. It wasn't that I was struggling to understand the foundation or that I had to study all the time, but it was bringing new and different unique challenges to me on a daily basis. And I fell in love. I knew that was the right thing for me. It just clicked. And so I decided to
00:07:25
Speaker
I practiced in this area and it's been the correct path for me ever since. And I'm really happy I was able to get those experiences at UCLA. What was the business challenge? Not in the script, but I'm curious about what the product idea was. Yeah. So this is, this one's interesting. It was actually super PAC insurance. So yes. So not necessarily tech. Politicians.
00:07:51
Speaker
That was exactly what it was. And it was based on this concept of deterrence. And so when Elizabeth Warren first ran for Senate in Massachusetts, she and Scott Crown took a pledge that basically, it was called the People's Pledge. It was something to the effect of if a third party player, like a super PAC comes in and attacks the opponent or runs big ads in favor of the candidate, that candidate had to donate money to the opponent's charity of choice.
00:08:21
Speaker
And it chills the influence of super PACs coming in of third party money in politics. And this was all the brainchild of my friend Nick Warshaw. He's an attorney at Loeb and Loeb in their political consulting practice now, but this was his brainchild. And so he had this theory that we could really make a difference on.
00:08:40
Speaker
third party money in politics. And we ran regression analytics. We put a ton of time and effort into this. And still to this day, I think we could do it. I think it could work, but our paths have veered in different directions and we've, we still talk about it all the time, but it was a lot of fun. And so really, I was trying to figure out how to run a business. So Nick was the brains of the actual super PAC insurance, what this all meant. And I was behind the scenes trying to figure out, wait, how do you, how do you hire people?
00:09:10
Speaker
How much does an office cost? What kind of talent do you need? Nick and I actually share an alma mater. I did not know that you knew him. We both went to Claremont McKenna and we do some Alumni Association work together and he does a lot of very cool work for
00:09:30
Speaker
former governor Gray Davis. So shout out, Nick. You've got good friends, I guess. I'm talking about you more than me. What a small world. Yeah. Great guy. For anybody who's looking for political consulting advice, call Nick.
Career Development at Orick and Gundersen
00:09:45
Speaker
Well, thanks, thanks so much for sharing your early background. I mean, something that I really want to highlight there is that people are so much more than their resume, right? I mean, you look at sort of NYU, followed by UCLA, followed by what we're just about to talk about in a second, which is your time at work and then Gunderson, right. And it seems like almost like a sort of preordained path, right? A very sort of cookie cutter path. And there's way more behind the scenes that's going on there. So.
00:10:12
Speaker
Thank you so much for setting the stage for us and sharing that. Let's talk a little bit about what your experience was like as you started at work and then, you know, sort of quickly transitioned to Gundersen and how you found yourself back in that tech environment again. Yeah. So I, during law school, I knew.
00:10:32
Speaker
startups, venture capital, this was the right world for me. And when I landed at Orick, I ended up in their real estate practice because that's where they had a need when I started. And while it's a great real estate practice, it just wasn't right for me. I knew what I was supposed to be doing. And it wasn't real estate. I now I'm a homeowner, but at the time I couldn't have done it once. So
00:10:56
Speaker
Nobody should have been taking real estate advice from me. Fortunately, there were a lot of other attorneys involved. I mean, I was this little grunt associate. So, but I knew I was not doing the right thing for me. And so I left Oregon pretty quickly and jumped to Gunderson. Gunderson LA at the time when I joined was in this little house. It was actually Ray Bradbury's house at one point off of Abbot Kinney. And for anybody who's not in high, Abbot Kinney is
00:11:24
Speaker
at least then was this very cool startup area in Venice. Snapchat had taken over a lot of Venice, but it was where you wanted to be. There was like truly no venue. Could you imagine your first big law, like real, you know, after Orick big law job was Abbott Kenny. That's pretty cool. So I
00:11:47
Speaker
Not only was the office location great, but it was really small. We were a tiny, tiny office off of a big law firm. And when I joined, there were really two associates. We had partners, but those partners were primarily in other offices. And so for a while, it was three associates in a one room building doing deals. And so
00:12:12
Speaker
The benefit of that was that every call that came in, because we didn't have actual offices, it was just essentially a really big conference room. Every call that came in, every deal that came in, every client challenge, so a lot of client management that came in, I got to be part of whether I was explicitly doing work on it, or it's really just listening. The learning by osmosis was fantastic. And I think
00:12:38
Speaker
That really accelerated my career. Being able to listen to intelligent, savvy people navigate challenges day after day enabled me the next time I saw something to be able to hit the ground running. And that was just this wonderful experience. Sometimes I went straight through from undergrad to law school. I skipped a grade in undergrad.
00:13:03
Speaker
sprinted straight into this career. And I really think that learning environment at Gunderson was accelerant on my rocket ship. It was just a great environment. And so as a first year, I was doing the work that third or fourth years were doing by my second year of brackets, I was facing off against partners at other firms. And I attribute much of that to the environment that I
00:13:30
Speaker
I feel bad for those partners who are having to face off against a young Selena with something to prove.
00:13:38
Speaker
Nobody should ever underestimate ambition with a chip on the shoulder because gosh, I was the head first of the fire time and time again and I was loving it. And I'm really grateful that Gunderson bet on me and took a chance with somebody coming in because I was building my book of business real early and they said,
Transition to Seismic as General Counsel
00:13:59
Speaker
go for it. Let us know what you need and we'll get out of here.
00:14:01
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about what made you want to make the jump to in-house and Seismic was both sort of your first in-house role, your first real like VP legal GC, you know, running the show for legal role. And it's also, you know, where you've managed to carve out a place for yourself and stay for a number of years. Tell us about sort of what made you make that jump. Yeah. So I loved my clients.
00:14:28
Speaker
I probably had, I don't know, 70 to 80 companies that I worked with on a regular basis, a lot of which I was their go to. I also represent several VC funds. And my favorite time of year or season, I would always call it board meeting season, because I would go to these companies, board meetings, and they usually happen roughly around the same time. And it's exhausting. You're jumping all over town, calling in, showing up in all these different companies, areas and spaces.
00:14:58
Speaker
But I got to see the business in a different light. A lot of times as outside counsel, you're asked to do very specific work or to tackle very specific matters. But when I was in the boardroom, I got to see the business from a different angle. And some of those board meetings, you just sit in the back and you stay quiet and you take minutes. But some of them, I would have really good relationships with the company and I had good relationships with the directors and I was able to engage.
00:15:25
Speaker
I was able to ask questions about, well, what is that feedback that you're hearing from customers on this launch? How are you measuring success? What does the marketing look like for something like this? You're the first ones who are doing it. What are some of those challenges you're facing? And I was never certainly never asking those to challenge the executive team, but because I was genuinely interested. And so over time, as I was getting to know and really getting to love my clients,
00:15:53
Speaker
and supporting these founders in their journeys. I was looking at my own career and I was thinking about what partnership would be like and what that would mean. And I eventually decided I wanted to be an operator. I wanted to roll up my sleeves. I wanted to help them more directly with those challenges. Certainly I played a big role in quite a few companies' lives at the time, but I wanted to do more outside of the realm of outside counsel that I was playing in.
00:16:23
Speaker
I started to talk to a number of different companies, some of which were clients, some of which were not, about what going in-house could look like. And around that same time, I got a call from Seismic's then CFO, who said, hey, we need a GC. And I had been telling Seismic this for years. They were ready for GC, probably in 2016, 2017.
00:16:48
Speaker
They really needed somebody to come in. And the finance team was doing a lot of the lawyering work. A lot of it was outsourced. They were outside counsel heavy, but maybe not in the ways that a GC would allocate outside counsel resources. And I kept telling them, you need a GC. And I would send them candidates of people who were incredible, these seasoned public company GCs.
00:17:15
Speaker
time and time again, and they would always, always, always say, Oh, okay. Thank you. Thank you. You know, this is interesting. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Maybe some other time. And then I got that call from the CFO that said, Hey, we finally decided we do need a GC. The problem is there's only one person we want and it's you. And I said, well,
00:17:38
Speaker
That's convenient because I've actually been reevaluating what I want and I do think I want to go in-house.
Transforming Legal Department's Reputation
00:17:45
Speaker
So let's talk about what this could look like. And so we had quite a few conversations about what the role would be, what my responsibilities would be, what that opportunity really looks like for somebody still relatively early in their career, jumping from outside counsel to in-house and
00:18:04
Speaker
Eventually, we switched the name on my W2 and I was working remotely for them and from as when I was outside counsel because they were in San Diego, I was in LA and so I basically just logged into a different computer one day and the rest was history.
00:18:20
Speaker
You wanted to be an operator and it sounds like, from what we've talked about before, you got that opportunity pretty early on. You entered the business and there was a sort of reset that was needed around the perception of legal internally.
00:18:37
Speaker
Walk us through what those early days looked like and how you went about trying to really transform how legal was perceived by chief revenue officer, head of products, and all those other sort of operational teams.
00:18:55
Speaker
Yeah, this was a tough one. Legal did not have a correct reason when I joined. And we were very light on Legal. We had, before I joined, there was a commercial counsel. He left before I showed up, so we didn't really overlap. Seismic is a SaaS company, but we sell to enterprise, global, and financial services customers for the most part. Now, anyone now can become a Seismic customer. We really do have
00:19:23
Speaker
products and services that fit companies at every stage of life. But our bread and butter was really in the enterprise. And so yes, we grasp a really what we sell our contracts and the commercial team, which was the only team in, in terms of legal at seismic was soon severely under resourced and didn't have the right tools and skills to be serving seismic at that sizing stage of life.
00:19:53
Speaker
And of course Seismic had a lot more opportunities for legal like any other company at their Seismic skill would. I joined after the series F 700 to 800 employees in multiple countries. And so there was a lot of opportunity for legal to really step in and add value, but overcoming that initial, frankly legal sucks hurdle was a challenge.
Team Building and Talent Development
00:20:18
Speaker
And I, I think a lot of.
00:20:21
Speaker
What I did was organic, showing people there was somebody smart who could help by coming to meetings and saying, Hey, that sounds like a challenge. How are you navigating that? Can you help me understand your perspective on this? Asking a lot of questions and raising the hand to help out over time made a big difference. I think when people realize that there's somebody smart and willing to help.
00:20:46
Speaker
They, they, they like you and they want to bring you in. And so we had always had this negative perception. And by the way, those two contracts admins, when I started are still at seismic in different roles, somewhat related, but different roles because it wasn't that we didn't have good people.
00:21:02
Speaker
It was that the history around legal just wasn't there and the resources just weren't there. And so over time I ended up getting more budget. I ended up being able to prove the value a little bit more. We built out the function and the pendulum has swung completely. I do a biannual, how are we doing survey to get anonymous feedback from stakeholders across the business. And when I first joined it was.
00:21:28
Speaker
Legal sucks, legal's so slow, why do we have to sell anything legal? Wow, we love legal. In fact, the pendulum has swung so far that people come to us all the time to the point where I have to start to say, wait a minute, do we know we're correct? Because I always have it. And I still have it today that when somebody asks for help, when somebody raises their hand and says, can you help me, we help them. Always. And now everyone comes to us for help.
00:21:54
Speaker
A shout out for our first episode. We talked quite a bit with Megan Neidermeyer and Brenda Perez at Apollo about how to think about the limits, but also the potential limitlessness of what legal might take on. And there's some good tips in that episode for folks who are thinking about when should I take on a new project as a small legal team and when do I need to find a different stakeholder to ultimately run with it.
00:22:18
Speaker
I want to ask you a follow up on how you've sort of transformed the perception of legal and rebuilt that trust. You know, a challenging piece for a lot of the GCs that I talked to is that they are not infinitely scalable. And they're also probably not the one who are in
00:22:34
Speaker
most of the day to day meetings with stakeholders all across the business. And so it's not just the GC that needs to be trusted. It's not just the GC that needs to have great relationships with sales leadership or product leadership or engineering leadership. It's also, you know, the rest of the legal team and function. Can you tell us a little bit about how you've tried to set up the rest of your team for success and done some coaching, even tips you have for folks who are in your shoes?
00:23:04
Speaker
Yeah, and you're absolutely right. We are not fonts of infinite time and energy. When I joined, a lot of it was frankly brute force. I needed to prove to the business that something worthwhile, but that was a tough year and it was a lot of time and energy trying to tackle a lot of different things by just saying yes a lot. But you are absolutely right.
00:23:31
Speaker
Everyone can believe in me and can love me, but I am not in all rooms. I now have a team of eight on the legal side and another eight on the security side. And so that trust needs to extend from me down. And I think a lot of that comes from coaching. I take bets on people who are talented, who show a lot of potential.
00:23:54
Speaker
And I invest in them. And so for me, coaching is a daily thing. It is, it's not necessarily a quarterly, let's sit down and have a two hour coaching conversation. It's the being available to ask questions. Hey, how do I navigate this? Or, Hey, do you mind if I send you a draft of this response so you can give me feedback to
00:24:16
Speaker
Being on a call, things getting a little hot, and me shooting a Slack message, or seeing the emails get a little spicy and saying, hey, take a lap. You need to pull down, take a lap. Lawyers can run and pull back. And we get maybe defensive when people challenge our advice and our opinions. And so a lot of my coaching revolves around, look, ask them for their perspective. Ask what they are thinking about. Engage with them. Educate. Really explain the why and why you have this lens.
00:24:46
Speaker
Just because somebody is questioning if that's the right thing to do, it doesn't mean that they are questioning you personally. It's that they have a different perspective and they're weighing the pros and cons in a way that's different than you. And by the way, their weight that they apply might be correct. We might have a lens that isn't necessarily always going to be the correct lens for every problem. That doesn't mean it's not a valuable lens. It doesn't mean we can't add a different perspective.
00:25:14
Speaker
But this is a collaborative process. Coming to decisions on big ticket items requires a lot of back and forth. And so I work really closely with my team on all sorts of things. And I think the success behind that comes from a place of openness and a place of opportunity.
Legal's Role in Enterprise Sales
00:25:34
Speaker
I talk to my team all the time and I tell them one of the greatest gifts we can give in our department is the opportunity to fail.
00:25:42
Speaker
And I truly believe that I think the opportunity to fail, to give somebody a shot at something, allow them to make a mistake and go try it again is incredible. And I think that's how a lot of people work. That's how I've learned. That's how a lot of folks on my team have seen success. And so that's always where I start. You can come to me with any question. I am happy to review work. I'm happy to serve as a sounding board and you don't have to get it right on the first one.
00:26:12
Speaker
Let's talk a little bit more about Seismic's business. And I'm really excited for this part of our conversation because I think so many, not just lawyers, but people say, I want to understand the enterprise sales motion. I don't really get how I can work well within that sort of environment. As Seismic's drone, as you've said, right, you know, you've sold it.
00:26:35
Speaker
banks, financial institutions, a whole host of other very large enterprises. And the sales motion there does look quite different. You're working oftentimes, you're selling oftentimes, not just to one buyer, you've got a procurement team involved, maybe IT. In your mind, what does legal need to do to support a strong or effective enterprise sales motion?
00:27:00
Speaker
Yeah, so zoom out a little bit. We'll talk about SMBs, so small and medium businesses versus enterprise or global or complex regulated entities. I'll group those together. Seismic started out in enterprise and
00:27:18
Speaker
A lot of companies start in SMB and then move up market. Seismic started up market. It's probably stemming from a decision our CEO made when we were founded. We have incredible logos as a result in a really strong customer base that those two avenues look very different. And Seismic acquired a company called Lessonly in 2021 and that was very SMB-heavy. And so I got to see this opportunity of what enterprise versus SMB looks like.
00:27:47
Speaker
we service customers of all shapes and sizes now. And so it does look different. And when you're selling to SMB, the one person that you're definitely to might be the decision maker, or maybe there's two or three people.
00:28:02
Speaker
It's quick. You convince them you do one or two demos. You go into the selling cycle. Maybe the CFO needs to approve. The contracting is really easy. It's high volume. It's fast paced. The deal doesn't take too long and you high five at the end. The price is very different though.
00:28:20
Speaker
A lot of enterprises, as you noted, run an RFP. Those RFPs can be lengthy. The RFP itself can be the equivalent of 10 SMB deals. And so you're doing this lengthy RFP. You then transition into perhaps more of that nitty gritty demo environment. Your teams might be demoing to.
00:28:41
Speaker
All of the stakeholders in the business who are actually going to buy and use it, as you look to IT, maybe securities in there, privacy might be in there, event, the flows. You've got different stakeholders. Maybe one group is the owner, but another group is going to use it. So suddenly you're also doing demos for that team. It is pretty lengthy. And then by the time you get vendor of choice, you're then heading into a contract. And a lot of these contracts, these big enterprise businesses,
00:29:09
Speaker
are going to tell you to use their paper, depending on their sophistication, what SAS is. So then you have this piece of a contract, which can take a very long time.
00:29:19
Speaker
You then get into the final signature process, which signatures at enterprises are significant. There might be 10 plus approvers, all who have to check a box on their end saying, yes, I've done it. And God forbid you've got one person out on vacation or somebody who just welcomed a child into the world. Everything's grown off and.
00:29:40
Speaker
It truly is. You've got to run this gauntlet of approvers. And even now with this new economic environment that we're all trying to operate in, it's just gotten more challenging. The CFOs are really running the show. And so that process is getting longer. There's more scrutiny. There's more eyes on the buying process. So that's the overview of how I look at enterprise versus SMB. Now,
00:30:08
Speaker
What's it like to actually be the lawyer or the legal team working with your sales org in the enterprise process? I think there are a couple of practice tips here. You talked to Adam Glick about being a customer-centric GC. And I think that's great. And that will absolutely right. That needs to be the entire legal team.
00:30:29
Speaker
Because when you are so customer-centric, you will inherently work with that customer. You are not coming in from a lens of us versus them. And this is going to be a fight. It's that collaboration. It's that partnership. And I think some of the ways to really foster that, while also balancing that value protection, that role that we have to play, is asking questions, trying to understand that customer's pinpoint. Why are they buying this thing?
00:30:58
Speaker
What problem are we solving for them? What value are we bringing to the table? And what makes us uniquely positioned to do that for them? And then understand, are they in a regulated space? Get to know their regulators. Get to know those challenges they face. And as you're going into that,
00:31:17
Speaker
think about, okay, if I'm the customer, why do I care about this? Maybe the customer has a misunderstanding or the customer's legal team has a misunderstanding of what your product or services do. Is there a way that you can help educate them so that maybe they have a different perspective coming out of a call? And so a lot of that is customer centricity. I also
00:31:37
Speaker
harp on this all the time with my team. Every touch point matters. We are not sales reps. We are not comped like sales reps, but guess what? If we are not showing up to a call prepared, if we can't talk about our products and services, if we can't champion seismic in the way that we need to, it might not instill trust and confidence in our customer. So we need to show up prepared. And I actually think we're going to talk a little bit about security, I think, but this actually is probably more important for security.
00:32:07
Speaker
With legal work, you go through a beast of a negotiation. You might talk to each other again when you add more seats or you want to do some project or five years from now, all of the world has changed and you have a completely different set of terms you need to talk about. But with security, you are doing regular security assessments. They might be annual.
00:32:26
Speaker
or depending on how important your product is to the institution, bi-annual, orderly sometimes. And so forming those security relationships is actually really important. So every touch point matters, particularly in the selling cycle, particularly with security.
00:32:42
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. As you know, you know, I used to work on privacy issues. And I actually found that the part of my job that I liked the most was that sort of customer education. And they understood oftentimes, especially when they were sort of more sophisticated enterprises or buyers, they understood how they were going to leverage the product, they might have understood
00:33:01
Speaker
Some of the benefits or drawbacks of using our product offerings relative to either the competition or alternatives in the data space. But they looked to folks like me and others on our legal team to educate them
00:33:18
Speaker
on how the regulatory environment applied to our products and what we were right. They wanted to not just understand what we were doing to get ahead of it. They also wanted to understand, okay, but how does it actually even apply because I'm not an expert on that. And we'll get into this around security, too. But I think that that sort of customer education piece and viewing yourself as as an educator, just as a salesperson, as an educator is is truly important for
00:33:46
Speaker
for ultimately helping your BD rep or account executive close that deal. Absolutely. And it's funny that you bring up that privacy, customer advocacy or customer education perspective, because I couldn't agree more. In fact, one of my first hires when I joined seismic was privacy.
00:34:05
Speaker
It was a dedicated privacy, non-attorney operator out of EY. Very talented because when I thought about how am I going to allocate my small amount of resources, I can't be everywhere at once and Seismic really needs a lot. I thought about, okay, well, I'm going to focus on really revenue generation. But I think it's part of that. It's because our customers more often than not,
00:34:32
Speaker
are global, whether or not they're classified as global or they think of themselves as global, companies now in a remote first environment are all over the world. And that can be challenges with privacy in the US or challenges with privacy abroad. And so being able to talk to our customers about how we view things, how the platform might help them with privacy compliance because we have some capabilities
00:34:58
Speaker
or talking to them about the types of personal information we use. We're, you know, cookie controls, consent flow throughs, vendor vetting, all of these different components are something that really matters to this customer base. And so I invested in privacy pretty early from when I joined because trust and confidence with customers is so important. And if we can't speak to privacy, we're going to lose them.
00:35:22
Speaker
One more follow-up here that I want to get your view on before we turn to security is outside of having good relationships with account executives or salespeople, are there really sort of like practical tips that you might have if you're a commercial attorney or just someone on the legal team working with an AE to make sure that relationship is as smooth and productive as possible? Yeah, for sure. I think the first one is perspective.
00:35:52
Speaker
These are long deal cycle. These can be anywhere from six months to 24 months. And that is six to 24 months of this AA dating this customer. And they are eager to walk down the aisle. So know that when you're coming in, you're actually coming in at the tail end of a relationship this person has been building for potentially years. So from that perspective, understand that that's where that urgency is coming from is that you're actually at the last mile.
00:36:22
Speaker
If you can get involved early, get involved early. Start to understand that. Customers start to understand those challenges. Maybe that's in product solutioning. So for example, I work with our financial services customers a lot to provide that compliance and regulatory lens and have those conversations. But get involved. Understand leverage. A lot of times we think about, well, this is a really big game. There's no way that I have any leverage against them, but that
00:36:50
Speaker
be true. If a customer goes through a nine month RFP, they don't want to do another nine month RFP because that liability cap is slightly different than what they did on the last one. So understand the leverage. What are you bringing to the table? How much do they like you? What did they go through to get to this point? And then really work with your AE. Link arms.
00:37:13
Speaker
work with them. If you were on a messy deal with a lot of different points, leverage them, work with them, say, hey, these are some of the challenges we're facing. Can you back channel to procurement or to your champion to figure out where they've given room in the past for this?
00:37:30
Speaker
I think that's something that is often underutilized is that back channeling. You don't need nine legal conversations. You can actually get a lot done without lawyers on the call. And the lawyers on both sides will also be very appreciative because we don't have a lot of time and energy to be talking about the same things over and over again. And so navigating the behind the scenes relationships is highly effective.
00:37:56
Speaker
I also really like something that my team has adopted, which is before these big calls, do the internal strategy call, get aligned. Can I give something on the legal side to get better commercial terms? If you tack another year on that contract, I might be more flexible on a liability cap because I see that you have more skin in the game, that you're going to stick with us, the risk profile changes a little bit. And I think you earn a lot of credibility with your AEs when you're thinking about it.
00:38:24
Speaker
from these different perspectives and really winning them some points. They might even be comped in ways that you can help them while also maintaining a reasonable risk profile and getting the deal done. I think that relationship is really critical and I have some folks on my team who have fantastic relationships with AEs that they work with over and over again. Frankly, I'm proud to see Grow and facilitate great customer experience.
00:38:51
Speaker
I hope any sales leaders who are listening to this are taking notes as well, because all of this can be flipped around the other way too. I feel like you should go talk to Pavilion, not just TechGC, right?
Leading Security and Legal Integration
00:39:02
Speaker
Like, you know, we're community focused on revenue leaders. One of the relationships that I cherish the most is that it's my relationship with my CRO, that chief revenue officer. And I think that's because
00:39:14
Speaker
He is a mature business leader. He understands the value of legal. On day one that he showed up, I didn't have to convince him that legal deserved to be involved. One of the benefits of him and our relationship is he recognizes that my wins often happen in the dark. And a lot of what I do with sales and marketing for the work of my own team, of making sure they're heard and they're seen,
00:39:37
Speaker
But he's a big champion for us and that he recognizes a lot of these deals don't get done without us. Whether that's in sort of the pre-sales phase of talking to privacy, talking to security, talking to compliance, or it's actually during the deal cycle. I think that understanding of value creation versus value protection
00:39:56
Speaker
And the different hats and roles that we have to play has really helped our two departments form that bond. When he joined, we looked at the relationships between the different groups through the lens of our employee engagement surveys. So the surveys that seismic employees take twice a year to give the company feedback. And we decided, okay, we're going to work together on these different topics.
00:40:18
Speaker
And I think that relationship has really trickled down throughout the entire organization and legal is a valuable player. Legal is a partner, not just an order taker. And this is how we can work together and help each other out. And so big shout out to our CRO. And I think to the extent that folks can form those relationships with your other major stakeholders, I really encourage that education and that partnership mentality when working with business leaders.
00:40:48
Speaker
Absolutely. Let's turn to security because I think it's really interesting that you hold sort of both a leadership role around legal and privacy, but also security and you're, you know, CISO, head of security ends up, right? Like working very closely with you and reporting into the legal function. Tell us how that came about and, and what you think of that, that arrangement.
00:41:14
Speaker
Yeah, so when I first joined Cyberpunk, I didn't have any security experience to be clear. I was a corporate lawyer. I was doing crazy M&A deals. I was doing billions of dollars in transactions, but I didn't know anything about security.
00:41:28
Speaker
And I want to say during my first maybe four to six weeks, we had a security incident and it was fine. Everything was fine. We actually, it wasn't this big blow up. No data was linked, you know, no data. Notice, notice Selena said incident, not breach. Right. Okay.
00:41:47
Speaker
When I first showed up, this was so early. And of course I'm a stage in our incident response plan. I think most GCs are companies. There's a role we play in these matters. And so I showed up and I had no idea. And I took a month off between outside counsel and in-house to really study, to be an in-house attorney.
00:42:11
Speaker
And this did not come up on my second. I'm on a call with our head of security, our CFO, and probably 30 engineers. And they are talking about all these different things. And I am just sitting here taking copious notes
00:42:29
Speaker
because I don't know any of the words they're saying, not even, I don't understand the words, but I truly don't understand the words. And so I got off that call, I quickly hopped onto Google because if you're in house, you're a Google lawyer. So I'm hopping onto Google, I'm searching.
00:42:45
Speaker
his acronym. I swear to you, I'm Googling what to do in the event of XYZ. Materials trying to figure out if they were training for a webinar I could take on what to do. And of course, it was under control. My director of security had it handled, but I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing in this environment other than
00:43:09
Speaker
cool calm problem solver and so that's how I acted on the calls and then immediately get off and panic and google and again everything was fine i found our incident response plan in our files i reviewed it i luckily have a incredible security engineering team but that first experience was really eye-opening on the role of legal
00:43:31
Speaker
And after that, anytime we triggered our incident response plan or anything that fell even close to that sort of sub-zero related events, I was very involved. And over time, I worked really closely with the security team, whether it was solving customer issues, risk analysis and risk management or incident responses.
00:43:52
Speaker
and security reported into my prior CFO. When he left as security needed a home, we talked about the different areas it could go, but ultimately fell under me. And so when I first took over security, my role was not technical security professional. I was not going to tell them which knobs to turn on our Azure instance or different ways to configure your web action firewall. What I was going to do is be a really good people leader and hype person.
00:44:21
Speaker
And so that was the role I took was I'm not a technical security person, but I'm a pretty good operator. So let me help you. Let me advocate for you. And like I said before, my job is sales and marketing and it's selling and marketing the great work of the team. And I took that on for the security team and I think, and I hope it's made a positive impact on their experiences.
00:44:45
Speaker
I want to ask a follow-up, which is, you know, I've talked to a lot of GCs and even experienced this myself, which is until sometimes you get to that great CSO hire or a director of IT or security who is good or at least proficient in kind of like executive communications, the relationship between legal and security or the GC and the head of security or privacy and security can actually be something that's quite fraught.
00:45:15
Speaker
Unfortunately, right? How have you, sounds like you have a great CISO, but how have you sort of built a great relationship with security, learned how to speak their language, really managed to integrate them into the legal team and done it well? Yeah, it's a good question. And I think
00:45:35
Speaker
I hear those stories of the people who will give me a call and say, I'm really struggling with my CISO or this person just on a rampage about risk in the business. CISOs tend to be a little bit of chicken little, the sky is falling. That's just the nature of the beast. That's good. I think we want somebody who is very concerned about risk and about risk mitigation. But I always am disappointed to hear that because
00:46:05
Speaker
In a lot of ways, legal and security and privacy are cut from the same cloth. Yes, we're value creation, but we're a lot about value protection and we're a lot about stewardship. So my department's slogan is stewards of seismic. And we take that really seriously. We're here to shepherd this business to that next milestone, that next mountaintop. And I think.
00:46:28
Speaker
It's unfortunate when those teams aren't working well together. I know when privacy was first kind of invented, I guess, or when GDPR came on listening. There was a huge tension between privacy and security and you really had your CISOs who said, okay, this is under my remit as a protector of this business, as the steward, of course we need to care about privacy. And then you had CISOs who said,
00:46:52
Speaker
I've got a full-time job. Forget this. I'm not going to touch privacy. I just need to make sure hackers don't get into our systems.
00:47:00
Speaker
You are absolutely right. There has been this tension and I don't think there should be because I actually think if you peel back the, you take away the Latin terms that lawyers use and you take away a lot of that sees those years. We have a lot in common. We have this foundation of risk and that ability to talk about risk, that ability to real risk and think about risk mitigation, valuing risk is something that we share and we can really connect on. I think for folks who are struggling with that,
00:47:30
Speaker
This is going to be my advice for really any executive or any department struggles is take off the boxing gloves, be human and have a conversation and say, look, something's not clicking for me. I need to understand your goals or I need to understand the why and how you do certain things. And this is very personality driven. But for me, I'll say, hey, to be successful,
00:47:58
Speaker
And I believe this, to be successful, I need to understand where you came from. I need to understand where you're going. I need to understand the trade-offs that you've made, what keeps you up at night, what gets you excited. And if I can understand all of those things, my advice is going to be a lot better. And I believe that when it comes to working with challenging departments or challenging personalities, sitting down
00:48:21
Speaker
and say, I want to really get to know you. I want to get to know how you've set up the department. And I think that goes a long way. And we talk about vulnerability in a lot of different avenues. That's a very popular topic these days. I think there is something vulnerable about saying, let's just sit down. Our messages, our Slack messages aren't landing. I feel like we're not clicking well. Can we have a conversation? Let's like sit back and see what's going on here. So I think that's one.
00:48:50
Speaker
The other one is if you really want to get to know security and you want to lean in on security and kind of become a little bit more security proficient, if you don't have that relationship where you can just ask your team, what do I do here? What's that mean? ELI finalist for me, which by the way, that's what I do all the time. I'm talking to engineers, but I'm talking to security. We're not talking to basically anybody who knows something that I don't, which is a lot of people that size me. I'll say back up.
00:49:19
Speaker
Explain it like I'm five. I'm 15. Explain it like I'm 15. Maybe five is a little too young or a teenager's brain. But that's how I think about things is, okay, let's take a step back and give me the dummies explanation on this so I can help you or so I can think about this. Maybe there's a different perspective I can add. But so if you don't have that
00:49:45
Speaker
great person that you can go ask questions of. There are a lot of opportunities to really learn and to engage on the subject. I think sometimes it's an incident response and you just need to learn. But staying up to date on news, Hacker News, Krebs on Security are some of the popular blogs.
00:50:08
Speaker
Stay up to date on the news. We use the phrase, boil the ocean, right? You're not going to boil the ocean on this. You are not going to become a security professional overnight, but start to pick off bite-sized chunks and learn about it. I think there's a lot there. There are podcasts that you can listen to, whether it's natural security or really security in the micro. You could go check out certifications and audit standards if you're really nerdy and you want to dig in.
00:50:33
Speaker
If you're more advanced, I think Mandy has a free threat feed. That's definitely on the more advanced end of the spectrum because you're going to get a lot and you're going to get a lot of words that you don't know. But there are some opportunities here to really lean in on the education that I think can help make that collaboration easier, particularly if you have potentially a recalcitrant as CSO.
00:50:57
Speaker
And I just want to make something clear because I phrased that question in a little bit of a bombastic way. I think it is really important for GCs and CSOs to have a good relationship because oftentimes that GC is the one who's reporting up to the board ultimately right on what's happening around security and is expected to be proficient enough or to make those sorts of assurances to the board. I also think it's really important that good people are willing to take on
00:51:23
Speaker
what is an increasingly difficult role in being a CISO or being a chief privacy officer. And at least this is my personal view, I don't think it's helpful to see those sorts of folks like get prosecuted around incidents. And I think we actually really need good people who are willing to try to tackle those issues head on and hands on, as opposed to having a board and a GC blame a CISO or sort of vice versa, right? I think this relationship is really, really increasingly important.
Future of Legal with AI and Advice to Young Lawyers
00:51:53
Speaker
Absolutely. I think that's right. And this can be a thankless job in some ways. Now, I'm extremely grateful. I don't feel that way. But a lot of times, like I said before, your wins happen in the dark. You're successful. Don't go wrong.
00:52:13
Speaker
Which, by the way, might not be your mistake. It might just be that that's the way the world turns. You can't have your finger in every single pie. You're plugging every holes in the dam. But you need to be able to have that professional courage to stand up and say, this went wrong. This is why it went wrong. Or, hey, this could go wrong. Here's why I feel really strongly about it. And I think that matters a lot. And in terms of communicating with the executive team or the board,
00:52:40
Speaker
you can really split that up. I think at seismic, we play to our strengths. And that's how we've divided the work. And so I am the champion, I advocate, I think that's one of my strengths. I think a lot of lawyers are really good advocates. That's, you know, that's where we came from. And so I use that as much as possible. So I advocate, I'm the champion for this, the great work that this group does.
00:53:07
Speaker
Mysiso, on the other hand, is playing three-dimensional chess. He is incredibly talented at thinking about what's coming around that corner, what's that next thing. And so a lot of times when we are talking about board communication or we are talking about executive communication, I might take the hell on that. And that's not necessarily because he can't do it or that's not, you know, oh, no, I don't have faith in this guy. In fact, quite the opposite. I have a lot of faith. But when you have an incident that's evolving in real time,
00:53:36
Speaker
and you're working on different stakeholder analyses and keeping everyone up to date, it might make sense for him to be running the show in the instant response and me handling a lot of those communications to keep people apprised. And I think that dividing and conquering and teamwork is what makes us successful as opposed to one trying to own or overbear or takeover or rip out of each other's hands the toys that we were playing with before.
00:54:07
Speaker
I wanna start to wrap up with a couple more questions, one looking forward and one looking a bit back. I wouldn't be the first one to ask a question sort of around AI and how the role of the GC may evolve. Here at Spot Draft, of course, we think that that sort of technology can be used to enable the work that lawyers do, right? We use the term co-pilot to describe what we're trying to build here, what we're striving to build here.
00:54:35
Speaker
How do you see the role of the GC changing over the next five years? I think technology will play a much bigger role in the day-to-day operations of a legal department. Yeah, I think that's right. I think legal tends to be later in the adoption of technology, but I think we have
00:54:56
Speaker
sort of this class of GCs at tech companies who are trying to change that. And so at seismic, the legal team were pretty early adopters of a lot of the generative AI free tools now within the guidelines and guard rails that we set. But we were pretty early adopters to start using those for workplace efficiency and for testing out different avenues. So I think
00:55:21
Speaker
To me, AI is the next segment. If you're not using it, you're falling behind. And it's still pretty early, but I think it's going to move rapidly in a direction where it's helping a lot of us. And of course, that doesn't mean it's without Wag Myers. There are plenty, but for me, I'm always looking at AI to make us more efficient. I don't think the GC goes away. There's been a lot of leadership on this around how AI is a tool, but it doesn't replace decision-making. And in fact,
00:55:50
Speaker
I think the FTC has very strongly said AI should not replace decision making, especially in areas of hiring and credit and compensation. But for us, it's really about how can we do our jobs more efficiently. And I think particularly in this economic environment, efficiency is top of mind for everyone. And what gets me excited about AI is I think AI is a little bit agnostic, where
00:56:15
Speaker
You might have had 10, 20 years ago, matter management systems or billing systems, timekeeping in law firms. You might've had evolution there. That was specific towards potentially law firms. I think a lot of the AI tools that are being developed are department agnostic. They are to make you more efficient. They are to give you another tool in your toolkit to do your jobs on a day-to-day basis.
00:56:40
Speaker
In a lot of ways that means that legal can play with the other teams on an even playing field, as opposed to trying to catch up with legal specific tech. Hopefully spot draft is making us something really cool that we can use for CLMs. I think legal research, case law research is going to be a big unlock. There are a couple out there who are already doing it. And then I think, you know, quickie drafting, being able to redline back and
00:57:08
Speaker
And that takes a ton of time and resources and in-house departments are constantly grappling with this. So I think, you know, the drafting co-pilot will be helpful and hopefully we'll get to be able to test that out and play with it as it comes to fruition.
00:57:23
Speaker
One last question for you. What's one piece of advice that you'd give younger attorneys? Maybe you back when you were leaving UCLA Law and had done that business competition and were thinking about what your career might hold. Yeah, I think that lawyers tend to be more conservative.
00:57:44
Speaker
in how they determine their careers. It's very, well, let me go do this for a few years, and then I'll pivot to this, and then maybe I'll do that. And I think you get a lot of interesting career journeys. You get these sort of winding careers that might end up in the same spots. And I think you have probably had an opportunity to interview folks on this podcast who have shared that. And I think there's a lot of value and interest there.
00:58:07
Speaker
For me though, that was the exact opposite. I knew exactly what I wanted. I was going to go chase after it and I was going to sprint there. And one piece of bad advice that I received that would turn me to maybe good advice for everybody else, but one piece of bad advice was to wait.
00:58:26
Speaker
was when I was first joining Auric and I wasn't where I wanted to be, I was told I will give it three years. Nobody laterals this early in their career. And that was a terrible piece of advice. I could not imagine spending three years seriously doing something that was not going to be necessarily that
00:58:46
Speaker
creative to what I was going to be doing long term or what I want to be doing. Why would I go build skills and subject matter expertise in one area when that is absolutely not what I want it to be? And so I think my advice for folks is that if you have a North Star or you have what you want to do and you know what that is,
00:59:07
Speaker
Go chase it. Don't wait. Don't wait for people to give you the green light to go get after it. I think just go do it. It's not everyone who understands exactly what they want. But if you are fortunate enough to know that, I don't think you should wait in line until somebody tells you it's okay.
00:59:24
Speaker
That's a great place to wrap up. Selena, thank you so much for being on the podcast, for being a leader in the community of GCs. You really explained, I think today, why folks like you are on the vanguard and pushing this profession forward. So thank you very much for being here and listeners. Hope you enjoyed this and we'll see you next time on another episode of The Abstract.