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Becoming a True Business Partner as an In-House Lawyer
124 Plays1 year ago
“Legal just doesn’t understand our priorities.”
Legal is often viewed as a cost center and a blocker in fulfilling business needs, instead of a thought partner that can help push the business forward. This perception is a challenge most in-house counsel have to overcome when they join a company.
How can you transform legal’s brand, get a seat at the table, and own it so you and your team can become business co-leaders?
Join us for this bonus episode as we explore what it takes to become a true business partner as an in-house counsel, with insights from GCs and legal leaders at some of the biggest companies today.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-10
Introduction – 00:00
Megan Niedermeyer and Brenda Perez on becoming true business partners: 01:04
Doug Luftman on building trust and getting a seat at the table: 04:54
Adam Glick on customer-centricity and relationship building: 06:56
Celaena Powder on nurturing productive relationships between Legal and Sales AEs: 11:40
Celaena Powder on transforming the perception of Legal within the org: 14:55
Lydia Cheuk on building a brand for your team and for yourself: 20:14
David Lancelot on using data to build trust and credibility: 25:55
Akshay Verma on what companies and clients really want from lawyers: 31:31
David Lancelot on transforming legal operations to build scalable and strategic legal functions: 34:14
Connect with us:
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
Featured guests:
Megan Niedermeyer - https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganniedermeyer/
Brenda Yun Perez - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendayperez/
Doug Luftman - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougluftman
Adam Glick - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adglick/
Akshay Verma - https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshay-verma-esq/
David Lancelot - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidlancelot/
Celaena Powder - https://www.linkedin.com/in/celaenapowder/
Lydia Cheuk - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiacheuk/
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
Exploring Legal Career Growth
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to The Abstract, a podcast where we interview some of the biggest voices in legal to uncover how they've grown in their careers, handled difficult challenges, and become leaders within the industry.
Changing Perceptions of Legal Teams
00:00:19
Speaker
A key theme we've explored throughout the podcast is the importance of moving away from a traditional perception of legal as a blocker and a cost center, and instead positioning legal as a true partner to the business.
00:00:31
Speaker
A big component of this is building collaborative and productive relationships with different stakeholders and different business teams. And that's the theme we're going to explore in today's episode. We're going to take a look back at some of the advice and experiences industry leaders have shared on our podcast, starting with our very first episode with Megan Neidermeyer and Brenda Perez from Apollo.io.
00:00:56
Speaker
Here's Megan on why hearing legal folks refer to their business partners as their clients is a big pet peeve of hers. Yeah, anyone that's worked with me for a while knows that one of my pet peeves, I don't have it done, but one of my pet peeves in operating a legal department is hearing team members refer a lot to like the business this, the business that, let's ask the business, our client and this team needs us to do, yes, they are our clients.
Legal as Business Partners
00:01:23
Speaker
Yes, we are out of business, but the legal team is equally part of the business as well. And so when I hear people refer to the business decision versus the legal decision, I think there is a mindset shift that I usually like to see on my teams, but more importantly, I think that's where the industry for in-house counsel is trending. We've got clients, there are business decisions that are a little bit different than legal decisions, but the same way we think in kind of that old school mentality, there's the reverse, right?
00:01:51
Speaker
A bunch of our business partners are also, we're their clients, right? Legal teams should be pushing businesses forward, not just receiving tasks to be done. And so if a legal team doesn't equally view themselves as part of the business, making business decisions, asking the marketing team to do something and the finance team, if we can tweak that and the product team, if we can figure out a different roadmap,
00:02:16
Speaker
then that symbiotic relationship is lost and I question really the value of legal over the long term of the company unless I can propel it differently than it's operating today.
00:02:26
Speaker
Yeah, Brenda, how about your sort of mindset? Because LegalOps, of course, right, sits to serve partially the process within the legal team, but really to serve sales, go to market, like other functions. Yeah, I think I really see it as partners as well. Apologies in advance if I accidentally say client every once in a while.
00:02:48
Speaker
I mean, I definitely see other teams as partners, right? I know that attorneys are providing like legal advice and sometimes strategic advice, but we're really working together. We're on the same team. I think sometimes it's maybe the culture of the company if they
00:03:06
Speaker
show if there is that collaboration between teams that they're working together and not just for the other
Integrating Legal within Business Teams
00:03:13
Speaker
team. I think I really like to see it in legal teams where companies where legal teams are like brought into the other teams early in on the relationship, whether it's like
00:03:25
Speaker
you know, inviting the legal team member to their recurring weekly meetings or to like a strategy meeting or even to an off-site every once in a while with Renai's suit. And then the legal team member really gets to know the other team, right? They really get to understand their strategy. They're embedded with that team. And so when they are brought in, it's not just like, you know, calling your lawyer or calling your attorney to help out with this advice, say,
00:03:49
Speaker
they can really jump in and chime in when and
Role of Legal Ops
00:03:51
Speaker
where needed. And I think that collaboration makes it feel like partners and not like your clients. Yeah, Brenda had like the magic words right there with partnership and partners. And that's where I view legal ops is like this glue between the legal department and all of the other departments out there with the right legal ops person and the right mindset and the right like partnership oriented focus. Legal ops is such a critical stickiness to really understand
00:04:16
Speaker
How does legal match to the processes that the rest of the departments have adopted? And then how do we help those departments iterate a little bit based on some of our
In-house Legal Counsel's Presence
00:04:27
Speaker
roadmap items? And so it's very symbiotic and that partnership all depends on the stickiness of a great legal ops hire.
00:04:35
Speaker
What Megan mentioned is a trend we've been noticing throughout the podcast. In our second episode, Doug Luffman, who is now Chief Operating Officer and Chief Legal Officer at Scale With, discussed why establishing your presence within the business and earning a seat at the table is so important for in-house legal counsel.
00:04:54
Speaker
I think the first is recognizing that not everyone has interacted with a lawyer in the past, or if they have interacted with a lawyer, they may not have had the most positive experience with lawyers in the past. And because of that, I think one of the first things you really need to appreciate in engaging with people, whether it is senior executives, whether it's peers, or even whether it's even more junior individuals,
00:05:16
Speaker
you know, largely outside of legal, is making it clear as to what you bring to the table. Because I think in the end, having a lawyer on staff, you know, presume the first question is, why do we have a lawyer? And in fact, the biggest compliment I think that someone on my team got at one point was, why do I have a lawyer at this meeting, right? And what that did is, it opened up the opportunity for them to say, well, look, I'm a product attorney,
00:05:39
Speaker
I'm here because in order to give you product legal advice i need to understand you know the product the technology your roadmap the ecosystem and then you're on and on and so it provided that opportunity to really then explain the role and explain how you're curious about what's going on.
00:05:55
Speaker
and most importantly that you care about what your client or your business partner is doing rather than being this ivory tower because ultimately if you are removed from basically the business and you're sitting in your office or at your home and you really only engage just to answer a question what happens is you get into this ivory tower where suddenly become appear to be the tower of no.
00:06:16
Speaker
where you only stop deals from happening, or that you just don't understand the context around what the advice is that you're giving, and people go, ah, you know, so-and-so just doesn't get it, right?
Customer-Centric Legal Strategies
00:06:27
Speaker
And you want people to think of you not as a lawyer, but really as their business partner that just happens to have legal expertise that can then look at things through a legal lens. A critical aspect of supporting your business teams is partnering with them as they work through sticky challenges with customers.
00:06:44
Speaker
Adam Glick, the VP of Legal Affairs at Front, stressed the importance of customer centricity and how he thinks through issues from the customer's perspective in our third episode. Step back and zoom out. Most of the companies that you're going to want to work for in your career will have a very customer-centric focus. They'll have some form of explicit value, which states that, quote, we are customer-centric or the customers are North Star, something along those lines. That's true.
00:07:12
Speaker
Part of their mission and value prop, right, is the customer, the customer, the customer. We build great products for customers. That kind of mantra. And frankly, this is the type of company that you really want to work for because it has a chance for great success because it really understands the importance of focusing on the customer. The customer is the lifeblood of the company. As I mentioned, I started out as a commercial attorney and was really focused on negotiating contracts with the sales team and my BD teams to help drive revenue for the companies I was working at.
00:07:41
Speaker
And I'd really learned quickly that even during challenging or even sometimes even contentious negotiations with customers and their legal departments, you must remember that customer is the lifeblood of your company, right? That customer relationship needs to be built.
00:07:59
Speaker
and managed over time because without customers and revenue, there is no company for you to provide legal services for. So you really need to make sure you understand that and the importance of onboarding customers into the company.
00:08:13
Speaker
building those interactions with those customers, absolutely critical. Customers remember their interactions with their suppliers. They even remember their interactions with the legal department of their suppliers. And through those respectful interactions, you can help build long lasting relationships. I remember being at either probably at Splunk, maybe it was Nutanix, and just having conversations with lawyers at these companies that we were selling to.
00:08:38
Speaker
And there were some difficult conversations pertaining to the contract terms. Well, sure, we were when we would have some sort of quote unquote sidebar conversations between lawyers. And we were just trying to develop relationships and talk about how our business needed to be a little more flexible at times. But building those relationships with lawyers just helps smooth out some of the edges. And I was able to leverage those relationships for
00:09:04
Speaker
subsequent negotiations with those customers and just build alignment with them, which I think was really helpful moving forward. And then you need to consider what your internal clients are thinking about as well, the people that you're representing in your company. They'll have so much respect for your work and your partnership if you're aligned with their desire to help their customers, especially salespeople. They need to get those customers
00:09:28
Speaker
in order to get compensated for the work that they're doing. And a legal team really builds longstanding and productive relationships with its sales team by helping them facilitate those successful legal negotiations on a consistent basis.
Negotiation and Relationship Building
00:09:40
Speaker
But I think that's really important. Don't forget about building relationships around customer success with your own internal clients as well.
00:09:48
Speaker
And then I guess lastly, another thing to consider is always consider the type of customer that you're negotiating with or that you're communicating with. Because not all customers are the same, right? Some are longer. Some are going to come from more highly regulated spaces. And larger customers are traditionally going to be more risk averse. They're not going to be as flexible. They might want to use.
00:10:10
Speaker
their contract paper. So you need to consider how to apply different levels of risk tolerance to those discussions. You actually might need to acquiesce on some provisions that are important to you in an effort to get the negotiation completed.
00:10:26
Speaker
Obviously, you need to clear that with your management team, especially if you're a junior attorney, but an experienced manager will really understand how you need to flex at times. And then once you get those larger enterprise customers on your platform, all that hard work, I remember I went through some negotiations that took 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 12 months.
00:10:46
Speaker
back in the day. And even once you get those customers onto your platform or into your ecosystem, even if the terms aren't as optimal as you desire, they're going to continue to buy from you. Assuming you're providing them with good quality product and service offerings, they're going to continue to buy for you. They're going to be bellwether customers for you. So it's worth all that energy and effort you put in order to get that customer as part of your company into your company.
00:11:14
Speaker
Adam touched upon an important responsibility of the GC or in-house legal leader, which is championing the business in front of customers and building relationships with internal stakeholders around customer success. In our sixth episode, Selena Powder, the VP of Legal at Seismic, had more insights to offer about building relationships with AEs, especially when you're working with a longer run enterprise sales motion. It is perspective.
00:11:43
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 AE 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 have that perspective, understand that that's where that urgency is coming from is that you're actually up a last mile.
00:12:13
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,
Changing Perceptions at Seismic
00:12:31
Speaker
understand leverage.
00:12:33
Speaker
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 will not be true. If a customer goes through a nine month RFP, they don't want it to go another nine month RFP because that liability cap is slightly different than what they did on the last one.
00:12:52
Speaker
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. 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?
00:13:20
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.
00:13:47
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.
00:14:14
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.
Building Trust and Value in Legal Teams
00:14:42
Speaker
Historically, there has been a perception of legal as always being in favor of mitigating as much risk as possible. On the podcast, Selena also went into how she transformed how legal was viewed at Seismic. The commercial team, which was the only team in terms of legal at Seismic, was severely under-resourced and didn't have the right tools and skills to be serving Seismic at that sizing stage of life.
00:15:11
Speaker
And of course Seismic had a lot more opportunities for legal like any other company at their size and 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 value, but overcoming that initial, frankly legal sucks hurdle was a challenge. And I, I think a lot of.
00:15:39
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 a hand to help out over time made a big difference. I think when people realize that there's somebody smart and willing to help.
00:16:04
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.
00:16:20
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.
00:16:46
Speaker
Legal sucks, legal's so slow, why do we have to sell anything legal? So now 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, did we go for 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 I would. And now everyone comes to us for help.
00:17:11
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
00:17:27
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?
00:17:57
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, that was a tough year and it was a lot. I'm in energy trying to tackle a lot of different things by just saying yes a lot. But you are absolutely right.
00:18:24
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.
00:18:45
Speaker
who show a lot of potential 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?
Accessibility and Transparency in Legal
00:19:02
Speaker
Or, Hey, do you mind if I send you a draft of this response so you can give me feedback to
00:19:08
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 a call 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.
00:19:39
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. Lydia Chuuk, who is the GC at Away and was our most recent guest, reflected on how she has instilled the value of being business first within her own legal team.
00:20:03
Speaker
She also discussed how she made legal more accessible and transparent, which went a long way towards marketing and branding the legal team in front of the rest of the organization. Obviously within our team, we're a total safe space, but I think I've made my expectations extremely clear as to how we should show up to the rest of the organization. And it's not a problem because it's
00:20:27
Speaker
what they want as well, I think, which is we will always be helpful. We are always business first. We will be your thought partner. We will help you come up with a creative solution. And I think being business first is number one, really important, but number two, I think sometimes other teams find that refreshing because experience with maybe legal teams at other jobs they've had where they haven't felt that.
00:20:57
Speaker
And legal at away is actually really highly valued, right? Like you've, you've built a great reputation within the business for those folks who may be stepping into a role as GC taking over a position where, you know, maybe things are a little bit more tenuous with the other functions. Do you have advice for people who might be in, in that sort of position?
Cross-Functional Legal Initiatives
00:21:18
Speaker
Look, I'm so grateful that away values are legal team and I know not everyone enjoys that. So.
00:21:37
Speaker
And I get it because I have this impulse as well. We're somehow trained to think that the work's just going to speak for itself. And sometimes it can. And so the excellent work is the baseline, of course. But you have to remember all of the other teams, they're doing it. They are marketing themselves to the organization. Absolutely. So it's that kind of visibility that
00:21:44
Speaker
I don't have any magic bullets here.
00:22:00
Speaker
one should try to have for their own team. And that could be like really easy things in the early days I did office hours. It was an hour a week. It was a drop in policy. I met so many team members that way. And then that's kind of where I would get like, what's really going on.
00:22:19
Speaker
because you can have like a chit chat, right? And you would learn a lot about the context of why decisions are being made. And I think it also made the legal team feel very accessible, right? There's really no downside to doing the office hours. So you do an hour every week. You could put it on the Slack. Hey, drop into this. You can do it virtually. You can just write, just log onto a Hangout. If no one shows up, you're just working at your desk anyway.
00:22:46
Speaker
If 20 people go up, then that's great too, right? So that's something I always recommend, especially if you're just really trying to establish your team into the company. Trainings, I know everyone says you should do trainings, but you actually should do trainings. I believe that, like, at away, I work with a lot of really smart people and they want to learn the same way I want to learn.
00:23:10
Speaker
Right. And so I find that those trainings tend to land really, really well. And there's always really good feedback. And of course you just have to tailor them depending on what's needed in your company. Right. So like I have an IP training that I've done.
00:23:25
Speaker
And then the marketing team is like, oh, oh. And it's really interesting to them, right? But it's also a way for us to explain the context under which we work. So when we ask questions or make decisions, they understand where that's coming from, right? Like we're not just asking these questions because we're just doing that. We're doing it because we have to do it. So I think it helps everybody.
00:23:49
Speaker
Another thing you might want to do is just, you know, work on and create policies that no one else is focusing on. So gin up that gen AI policy. Do it. If no one else is doing it, do it. Or your document retention policy. Go do that.
Data-Driven Legal Strategies
00:24:04
Speaker
It might not be fun, right? And so that just kind of brings in cross-functionally a lot of other people into your fold and then you collaborate on something and you're providing value for the company. I would also say,
00:24:17
Speaker
data. So whatever data you have, when I tell my exact team, Oh, my team reviewed 300 contracts this quarter, like that number sounds really impressive. And no one else is thinking about what your team is doing other than you. So I think just people and people love the data. So if you have it, share it. And then I think the last thing it's kind of what we talked about before, which is
00:24:46
Speaker
brand. So this is what I talk about sometimes, and it makes the lawyers nervous a little bit. But what is your team brand? And all that means is, how do you want
00:24:57
Speaker
the rest of your organization to perceive your team, even if it's subconsciously, right? So my team talks about how we're the team of yes, and we're only half joking. That's our brand. We're the team of yes. I'm really proud of the way my team shows up. We're here to enable the business. It's all the things I said before, right? We are business forward. We're the team of yes. We're going to get you there. If you want to do something, even if we
00:25:22
Speaker
are like, it's not great, but let's go through all of the risks and let's decide what makes sense for the business. So the answer will be yes.
00:25:32
Speaker
Speaking of establishing trust with data, David Lancelot, who is most recently the VP and Global Head of Legal at eBay Classifieds, had some excellent points on his episode about how to approach data reporting as a tool that helps you build credibility within the business, especially with the CFO and especially when building the case for budget.
00:25:55
Speaker
I build trust with quantitative factual reporting to finance, strategy, and the CEO, as well as just working my butt off. We're improving your value, getting your seat at the table, owning your seat at the table.
00:26:13
Speaker
doing that requires an enormous amount of effort. That's easy for lawyers to do, right? That's all we do. We actually need to ramp that down and be like, okay, working as hard as you can all the time leads to burnout and it doesn't lead to effective management and acceleration of a business. So doing that, having a vision
00:26:34
Speaker
Going to your business leaders and saying here's the metrics. Here's the numbers, right? Here's the financial outlook here Here's how it aligns with our strategy right a business strategy really understanding that strategy and where we want to go even in house owners Understands that we need to use numbers in a business. Yeah, right But but I mean it said it's actually quite a ridiculous thing to say out loud, right? Like you need to use numbers in a business
00:27:00
Speaker
nobody gives numbers in a business in the legal department, right? It was just sort of like, give me some money and I'll do this qualitative thing that you guys can't understand. We're so smart, you know? I think we've come over time to understand that we are in a business and we need to operate like business people with legal skills. And so early on in eBay, I think I've told you this story before, like adding up numbers, external accounts to spend over previous years on my phone,
00:27:28
Speaker
like because we did not have a system at the time, there wasn't a way to track it, not in a way that was, you know, viable. There was a system in place, but it was one of these, you know, we're sort of four or five generations in now to the technology that we can use in an in-house situation. This is sort of
00:27:52
Speaker
developer. So I just have to go in there and be like, okay, here's all the years in the past. Let me add this up so I can try and project forward and then make a graph out of it. I got to say my biggest partner in that one is a strategy.
00:28:05
Speaker
strategy, go to strategy and be like, I've got this crummy looking, you know, PowerPoint. Yeah. And they work their NBA magic on it. Right. And boom. Bane trained them well. Bane trained exactly. They're at Bane or McKinsey or whatever and they did that two month PowerPoint thing they all knew. And then you got something shiny that you can use for a long time and then just for an update once you put the hard yards in on the initial stuff.
00:28:29
Speaker
Then you can, I mean, I would always do unplanned and planned updates, right? So I had this thing about going around with, you know, whenever I'm in a meeting, got my laptop, having a coffee, whatever, just let me show you a couple of slides. Just let me show you something. Oh, you got slides? I thought you were a lawyer. Yeah. Not a word doc. Yeah. Not a word, no, exactly. Not a PDF, 36 pages for the conclusions at the end, right? And then you have to send it back to the law firm and say, do this over. But like open the laptop.
00:28:58
Speaker
and just show them the update. It's like here's a graph, very easy to understand, legal spend over time. I mean the one that I always love is legal spend over time versus revenue.
00:29:10
Speaker
and showing that you are scaling the function, you know, spend may go up, but it won't go up nearly as fast as revenue, right? That's what you've got to manage for. Spend over time versus revenue, and TL, I totally will spend over time versus revenue, and then eventually versus benchmarks.
00:29:29
Speaker
So that's that's the real company. Yes. Yes, and that is super That is super hard to do in the in-house legal industry for your particular sector, right? For a particular kind of you know, FinTech whatever platform or healthcare whatever like finding that group of companies and then getting the data and
00:29:51
Speaker
on who works there, how much they spend on external counsel, you know, lawyers per billion, et cetera. Like, that's tough to do. But once you put that hard work in, then you can say, here's our total legal spend versus revenue over time versus benchmarks, right? And that's hard to argue with.
Valuable Skills for Lawyers
00:30:12
Speaker
That's the kind of thing that makes your CFO smile. Absolutely. Like, this guy is really trying. Guess it. Well, he may not be
00:30:21
Speaker
as good with this as my head of strategy, but he's doing his best to show that he is managing the resources of this business in the most effective way. So when he comes to me on that quarterly cycle or biannual cycle or whatever it is, with an ask for a number that for most businesses is a rounding error compared to like the marketing team, right? Marketing team needs a couple hundred million dollars and you're like, can I get like a hundred thousand to set up a team in Germany?
00:30:50
Speaker
Yes. Yes, you can. And you may have to wait till the end of the year when they haven't been able to hire every single product developer they wanted to hire. And you might get, you know, that leftover headcount, but you still get it, right? And then you build and you prove and you build.
00:31:06
Speaker
This sentiment of prioritizing relationship building is also reflected in data and surveys conducted to understand the qualities that clients and companies really value and are looking for in their lawyers. Akshay Verma, who leads legal ops at Coinbase and also teaches a course on critical lawyering skills at the Santa Clara University School of Law, highlighted some of this research. The first course section in the class, I put a chart up there.
00:31:36
Speaker
And the precursor conversation to putting the chart up there is about research that has been done over the last 10 years. And they refresh this every couple of years. They go out to 35, 40,000 clients and employers.
00:31:52
Speaker
And they survey them and they ask them, what do you want most out of your lawyers? Who's they in this case? So the employers and clients. They survey. So it looks like Coinbase, for example. If we got that survey, this is what we value most out of our lawyers. Sure. And then they do a top 10 list. So I put the top 10 up there. And it's an eye-opening moment for most students. It was eye-opening for me when I first read this material. I'm actually a little surprised.
00:32:18
Speaker
7 of the 10 have nothing to do with the practice of law. And near the top is relationship building. Interested. Invested in the values of your employer or your client.
00:32:30
Speaker
responsiveness, work ethic, intentionality around those kinds of things. They don't teach any of that in law school. The three that are not in that category are more hardcore, kind of hard skills that they did teach in law school, oral advocacy, communication, research skills, your typical lawyering stuff, but that's only three of the top 10. So that then really launches into a lot of the rest of the stuff that we talk about.
00:32:57
Speaker
you'll learn the other three in law school. The other seven, you already have, because those are life skills. But guess what? They're the most important career skills in this profession. And I'm not telling you that. Your clients and employers who are going to be paying you money are telling you that. So maybe we should listen. And so that really then gets into conversations around relationship building. And I firmly believe in the in-house world, it's the bedrock of how anything gets done. When you need people to go back for you,
00:33:28
Speaker
When you want to go back for someone, when you're in the muck and things have gone south, for example, in a CLM implementation, you need to draw upon those relationships. You're like, hey, look, we're going to get through this, but I need you to trust me, or you're being asked that. That's really critical, because that's how you get through it really tough. Anybody can get through the bull market. That's easy. It's the bear market that you really, really want to have those relationships solidified and get you through it.
Scaling Legal Functions
00:33:55
Speaker
To close out this episode, I want to resurface a framework that David Lancelot discussed in our fifth episode. Listen to him speak about scaling the legal function like a business function and enabling legal team members to become business co-leaders.
00:34:14
Speaker
a number of ways to do things in house. But one way is sort of the old fashioned way, which is what I call throwing lawyers at the problem. Like just more and more lawyers react to everything. Um, everything's qualitative. You, you business people, you can't really understand what we do. So just give me a lot of money, right? And then it'll keep going. And then you'll have this massive legal team. Um, and everything will get taken care of.
00:34:38
Speaker
probably with a very high risk aversion to everything, probably a lot of people have to say no to stuff, not because they really think it shouldn't happen, but because they just don't have the time to do it, because all they're doing is just reacting all the time. So what I tried to do and what the team tried to do, and my leader at the time, Karen Schwab, tried to do, is instill a sense of
00:35:03
Speaker
We're going to scale this function like a business unit, the legal function like a business unit. And the way we did that at eBay Classified was to say, we're going to build a centralized commercial contract function associated with the eBay legal ops function and use that to
00:35:23
Speaker
Take in like we had a massive contract volume, right? We had something like 4 000 deals a month. Wow on just on like Salesforce, right and then under that we had hundreds and hundreds of of revenue deals that had to be reviewed From all of these countries all around the world And so that was like I initially thought this we can't do this. It's impossible right? There's no way that we can have a central point
00:35:50
Speaker
that reviews all of this stuff and deals with it and however we're going to deal with it for Denmark, Germany, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Mexico, Argentina, tons of places where they want to deal in their local language, local law.
00:36:09
Speaker
All the customary stuff that you might run into, I have tons of stories about dealing with businesses in Argentina or even law firms in Argentina, but it really seemed like an impossibility. I have to say, with the help of some super strong people who built that function on my team,
00:36:28
Speaker
We were able to, over time, over a sort of three, four year period, pull together a system for dealing with all that volume and doing it in a super effective and scalable way. The goal of that wasn't do things fast and cheap. The goal of that was, how do we accelerate the business while at the same time giving our lawyers the head space?
00:36:50
Speaker
to become, you know, first just like very, very valuable to free up their time to do valuable work.
00:36:58
Speaker
then to become strategic business partners and then to become business co-levers, right? So there was always a goal to get rid of the stuff, the slow value, this repeatable that's not being done as effectively as it needs to be and move up the chain until I have lawyers in each of these different markets who are literally business people with legal skills on the team.
00:37:21
Speaker
Leading leading businesses and I think we were very successful in doing that that's like my proudest moment there was having these like great people shine great people shine and then go on after after the the sale of that business to become you know leaders and Really inspirational people in their own rights
00:37:45
Speaker
That's all we've got for today, folks.
Conclusion: Legal as Strategic Partners
00:37:47
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Abstract. Make sure to subscribe to get notified as soon as we release new episodes. And if you're an in-house lawyer or legal professional who's tuning into our show, I'd love to know, what are your thoughts on transforming legal into strategic business partners? And how are you approaching that within your own organization? Drop a comment below or connect with me on LinkedIn and let's chat. We'll add links in the description. See you next time on The Abstract.