Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Ep 27: Taking Businesses & Legal Teams Global: Sarah Binder, General Counsel, Lime
93 Plays10 months ago
What is a general counsel’s role in international expansion? How do you balance growth with safety and compliance across diverse countries and markets? And how do you scale your legal team to take on challenges that require in-depth knowledge of local cultures, regulations, and business practices?
As general counsel at Lime, Sarah Binder confronts these questions each day, as she and her legal team navigate regulations across 300 municipalities in 35 countries. Sarah, who recently located to San Francisco from the UK, has found that transparency, accessibility, and flexibility are key to working across borders (and time zones). Listen as Sarah offers tips for effectively scaling out your legal team for international expansion.
Introduction: 0:00
Discussing the scope of Sarah’s GC roles at Lime and Pizza Hut UK and Europe: 4:56
Effectively scaling out your team for international expansion: 07:48
Tips for working across time zones without feeling burnout: 12:47
Defining the role of the GC: 18:57
What American execs get wrong when they expand into European markets: 24:57
Guiding your team through a diverse set of regulatory bodies: 30:01
Looking back on your experience with consumer product liability as a general counsel: 32:38
How GCs strike a balance between growth and regulatory compliance: 37:19
Book Recommendation: 40:45
Outro: 44:36
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-27
Annual Compensation Report: https://salary-report.spotdraft.com/
Connect with us:
Sarah Binder -https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajmahapatra/
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.
Recommended
Transcript
Global Regulatory Challenges
00:00:00
Speaker
Each city will regulate our product differently. So it's not each country, it's each city. So you could say that we work with at least 300 regulators worldwide.
Introduction to Spotdraft
00:00:21
Speaker
Before we get started with today's episode, I want to tell you about Spotdraft. If you spend hours every week drafting and reviewing contracts, worrying about being blindsided by renewals, or if you just want to streamline your contracting process, let's talk about an end-to-end AI-powered system that'll save you time.
00:00:41
Speaker
Spotdraft is a contract lifecycle management system that helps in every stage of contracting. From creating and managing templates and workflows, to tracking approvals, e-signing, and reporting via an AI-powered repository, Spotdraft does it all. And because it should work where you work, it integrates with all the tools your team already uses. Spotdraft is the key that unlocks the potential of your legal team. Make your contracting easier today at spotdraft.com.
00:01:14
Speaker
What do you need to know if you're considering expanding your business into Europe? How can you effectively scale a global legal team? Where do regulatory obligations fit into all of this?
Meet Sarah Binder
00:01:25
Speaker
Today, we have Sarah Binder joining us, the General Counsel of Lime, a micromobility scooter company. If you haven't had a chance to ride one, they're pretty fun. Sarah also has global legal experience, including previous stints as GC and Chief Development Officer.
00:01:43
Speaker
for Pizza Hut in Europe and the UK, and before that as a privacy compliance and legal leader at a number of companies, including in the telecommunications space. Sarah, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks, Tyler. It's a pleasure to be here.
00:01:59
Speaker
I'm really excited for this one. We've got a couple of different themes we're going to try to cover off on international expansion, including expansion that's contingent upon working with regulators and you're super well positioned to share your stories because you have a very international global background yourself.
Relocating to San Francisco
00:02:19
Speaker
You're from the UK. You somewhat recently, maybe a year ago moved from England to San Francisco.
00:02:25
Speaker
Before we start chatting about business and the law, how was a big move like that for you and your family? Yeah, it's a good question. It is a big move. I think that you can plan for these things a lot, but ultimately, there's a point where you just have to decide that you're going to take the leap or you're not going to take the leap. I have to admit for us, as a family, we've really enjoyed the new experiences and opportunities of living on the West Coast in the US for sure.
00:02:53
Speaker
I think what's great about the global legal role I do now, and I've seen many of my roles, is that because they have global reach, I kind of get to spend a reasonable amount of time in lots of different places. But yeah, for sure, it's been really fun. But yeah, there's a point where you're just going to have to sort of jump and see what happens.
Tips for International Relocation
00:03:13
Speaker
I like that. Besides being willing to jump, any advice you'd have for folks who are considering taking a job in a new country or making a big international move, even if it's just tips and tricks for enrolling your kid in a new school.
00:03:29
Speaker
Yeah, again, I think a lot of it was jump. Actually, funny enough, a colleague of mine was looking for her next role. And she said to me, I've looked at loads of things, but the only one I'm really excited about is in Thailand. And why is it that, you know, and so I saw the other day she just she just moved to Thailand, which is which is awesome. So I think I think you have to be really honest with, you know,
00:03:51
Speaker
your family and your friends, in terms of what you are doing, you need to have thought about it. I think as a lawyer, you need to just make sure that your qualifications are transferable. How does that work? And I think probably give yourself more time to transition and pack and unpack than I did. I thought I could do it all in a week.
00:04:11
Speaker
It turned out to be quite full on. But I think, you know, do you have a plan and kind of be open to it? I think we kind of came with pretty with a pretty open mind about it. And so we've kind of slightly let things, you know, things kind of dictate where we wanted to go. But certainly for us, things like deciding where we were going to live rather than doing like three months in service to accommodation was something that we felt
00:04:35
Speaker
was important to us. So I think just it doesn't really matter what your plan is, but do I think sit down and make sure you've had a plan and do make sure you kind of talk to your team and your manager about it as well as your family. And I think you know that you're never going to have planned everything, but yeah, have a plan for sure.
Navigating Emerging Regulations
00:04:55
Speaker
We're going to chat quite a bit about your stories from your time at Pizza Hut and now at Lime. Maybe just to give our listeners context, you could talk a little bit about the scope of your role at both of these companies.
00:05:10
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think my roles for both of these these roles and prior roles have always sort of sat at the kind of nexus of kind of new emerging regulation in the broad kind of tech type industry.
00:05:28
Speaker
which may not sort of sound immediately apparent, but if I think about what I was doing when I was at British Telecom for a number of years was I shepherded British Telecom's consumer cell phone division through the implementation of GDPR. And that was very much a case of you had
00:05:45
Speaker
some incredible innovations within British Telecom around big data. This is like back in 2015, 2016. There was a lot of organizations about big data, about how you engage with customers, about sort of cohorts, about, you know, sort of that kind of deep analysis. Thinking about how you did that with GDPR, did, you know, how did the principles apply to that sort of like innovation in the big data space?
00:06:09
Speaker
So again, that was kind of, I think the good example of this kind of intersection of tech and sort of new legislation alongside sort of the rapidly evolving nature of our businesses from a technological perspective. When I was at Young Brands, that kind of showed up more in terms of we had a very strong digital agenda, really trying to transition our business digitally, which turned out to be incredibly important when the pandemic arrived.
00:06:37
Speaker
sort of being able to continue to operate remotely and for people to be able to obviously order food online. And so again, there was a big digital transformation piece that sat alongside the bricks and mortar of a store. How do you do the digital transformation alongside a bricks and mortar?
00:06:54
Speaker
type of environment. And then Lime is different in that it's a new industry, but it's a new industry that takes existing, you know, takes two wheels, right? It's bikes and it scooters. And so it's, you know, it's, it's another form of transport on our roads, but it does require different regulation, different legislation. And so understanding the intersection
00:07:17
Speaker
of that with existing rules around, you know, whether it's traffic, whether it's parking, whether it's how people are able to access our app. Those are all kind of, I think, similar examples of kind of new industries, new legislation with, you know, sort of how you do that alongside the law is really, is kind of where I've sort of ended up focusing my time on as a general counsel.
Scaling a Global Legal Team
00:07:44
Speaker
And we'll definitely come back to that regulatory piece a little bit later. I want to start with this sort of theme of international expansion. As you're thinking about growing your business internationally, one key piece, of course, is being able to scale out your own team, having the right people in place. You've got a lot of experience with this. How have you done that effectively, I think, especially in this sort of remote environment?
00:08:10
Speaker
without wearing yourself out as the GC in the process? Yeah, it's a really good question. I think I would start by saying it's absolutely an art and not a science for sure. I think also just to go back a step is it's very rarely that it's the general counsel saying we should expand into this market and we should set up an entity there and we should, you know, get people on the ground. It tends to be more that the business is driving that for growth. And I find that
00:08:38
Speaker
in all of the roles I've had when we're looking at expansion, my first question is always, okay, I understand that X customer means that we need to have somebody on the ground in this particular country. Okay, right. What form does that need to take? And so it's always about like trying to understand from the business, what are they trying to achieve by bringing somebody in in this particular country that we don't operate? Because I think that then gives you a bit of a path to
00:09:08
Speaker
what's the sort of rec, what's your recommendation in terms of the, in terms of like the legal framework that should sit around that? Can you actually get a get a, you know, do you need to have the last resort should be an all singing, all dancing, local density, because it comes with a very significant amount of compliance costs. And sometimes it's absolutely the right things to do, but it's definitely worth pushing the businesses to
00:09:32
Speaker
why they want something rather than them just saying, well, this is, this is, this is what I've decided we're doing. So it's worth just pushing and being clear on like, well, how, what's the best, most cost-effective way of achieving that? In terms of my scaling out of my team at Lime, I scaled out our European operation, legal operation, and pretty considerably when I arrived at Lime. And I think, again, it was the sense that some of our most significant markets are in Europe. It's important to have attorneys who
00:10:02
Speaker
can speak the local language, never underestimate how many documents will arrive in the local language. And also to kind of just understand the cultural sensibilities. I mean, many businesses, most businesses these days, they're global, but they're incredibly local as well. And so thinking about how you make that work locally means that often you do need, I think, local insight. I think one of the things is to be very,
00:10:27
Speaker
grounded around what you actually need in that particular region because sometimes it might be quite different from what you need in a head office capability. And so, you know,
00:10:39
Speaker
To be practical, like in a head office role, you may need a product counselor who's got deep experience in product counseling with a lot of technical expertise around kind of like privacy or like product development. It may be that if it's more of an operational role in Europe, you need someone with quite different skills. So my team come from a very broad array of, of kind of past experiences. I have, I have regulatory lawyers, I have property lawyers, I have a sort of broad range of people.
00:11:09
Speaker
who bought different skills that I felt were sometimes needed to that particular region. So maybe one region is very, very advanced in terms of how it engages with cities. Maybe one is sort of quite early in that journey. And so you need to be really grounded about what you need now. And I think also not always hiring somebody super duper experienced. Sometimes you actually need someone quite junior and you know you're going to have to kind of coach them. So I think
00:11:36
Speaker
You have to spend a lot of time about thinking what's actually going to get the job done there and what's realistic.
Regional Hiring Strategies
00:11:41
Speaker
So be realistic of where you actually are rather than where you want to get to, because if you hire the wrong person, it may take you longer to get to where you get to where you want to go. I think using headhunters can be really valuable. They can definitely bring a perspective that you might not otherwise seen. I think obviously we use a lot of LinkedIn for our recruiting, a lot of building out a network. Sometimes talking to local council can be helpful if you've managed to find
00:12:05
Speaker
Somebody who can sort of appreciate the sort of different dynamics of where you might be HQed and where you're operating. So those are all tips. My most thing is, is spend time thinking about what you really need and also make sure you've bought your business, your business along with you in what you're looking for as well. I certainly had.
00:12:24
Speaker
I failed, I think, to fully appreciate that in one country. And I had a really experienced, very, very good lawyer. And then actually, it turned out that a lot of that person's job was going to be handling like genuinely almost administrative matters. And it took a while to like communicate between the business and the lawyer to work out what their role should be. So yeah, bring your business along and be realistic about what you need.
00:12:47
Speaker
Do you have any, this is just a follow up here. Do you have any sort of like tips or tricks for how you're working across that many time zones or that many different markets? You don't get worn out or you have the right level of sort of information flow between you and folks on your team who you may not have the luxury of being able to hop into a Zoom call with every single day of the year.
00:13:12
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, like being, being remote has, has many advantages and certainly I think everyone does a much better job of being connected globally than prior to the pandemic because it's become so much more established. I think it depends, it'll depend on like where I'm working with. Sometimes I will often sort of break my day into two chunks. So I'll start really early, but then I'll have a break like halfway through the day for a couple of hours where I won't do anything or I'll try and chill out like.
00:13:40
Speaker
go for a run or do something, and then I'll pick it up in the evening, late afternoon evening to pick up a different time zone as well. I think that the most important thing that I have felt as a leader that you need to do when you're managing a sort of globally remote team is people need to feel that they can get in touch with you. And so I do feel like having a very flat hierarchy, a low key structure, making it clear on whether it's through all hands or any communication you send out that your Slack is always available. You can always Slack me.
00:14:10
Speaker
You always have time with me. You just have to ask the time with me and I will always set up. I think those things have helped to mitigate the fact that you can't be everywhere at the same time. So I think people are feeling that they really can come to you and ask you about anything is really important. I have things like drop in hours. So there's a block of time, you know, each week where people difficult time zones where people can just put a slot and they don't have to like prep or in advance and stuff. And I do try to make sure that I.
00:14:38
Speaker
talk to a large proportion of my team, um, each, each quarter as well. So I can sort of check in on, not in a, not in like business update type way, but just checking on, on how they're doing. We also try and do off-sites as well, get groups of people, um, which again, kind of, I really find that those face to face interactions, they carry
00:15:01
Speaker
They carry for so long, like the benefit of doing them carries for so long after the event. It's really, really impacting. And so making sure that people make time to build those relationships. So we do a lot of things that we encourage people to engage in lots and lots of different ways online so that we're all kind of talking to each other. I think it is easier to fall into silos in a remote environment. And so you have to create frameworks that allows that not to be the case.
00:15:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's, I work remote. I love the remote environment and the flexibility it provides, but I really like the idea of bringing teams together in person on some sort of quarterly or biannual basis. I just noticed that both for myself and others, people treat their work in a much less transactional way once they've been face to face or been talking to people. And they also
00:15:53
Speaker
I think they're more likely to give other folks on their teams or in other business units the benefit of the doubt when things are going wrong if they have a stronger personal relationship. There's a lot more trust there. I think it's totally true. I think it's amazing to me.
00:16:10
Speaker
how different an in-person experience is. And I think the biggest thing I would say is that you just don't know where a conversation is going to go when in person. There's always, it leads to something that you didn't expect. Whereas to your point, I think one, you know, when you were talking remotely, they do tend to focus on the issue at hand and there is less kind of sort of the medium somehow, I think allows for slightly less kind of meandering. And I think it's often in the meandering you can find
00:16:36
Speaker
a new solution to a new challenge i think as lawyers often find a new challenge that you haven't really been aware of it just gives you more there's just a greater landscape i think when you are in
The Importance of In-Person Interactions
00:16:49
Speaker
person i think.
00:16:51
Speaker
making sure that you create the time for that, but then also you make it as productive as possible. For me, I'm really, when I'm planning an offsite or a team get together, I'm pretty ruthless for every item proposal on the agenda is could this be done on Zoom? What are we going to get from this that we wouldn't get on Zoom to make sure that the quality of conversations and the topics that you're discussing are really things that A, are going to have lasting impact, but there's something that you just wouldn't get from a Zoom discussion.
00:17:21
Speaker
And so that's kind of, I hold quite a high standard. The other thing is, is you can have fun on Zoom, but it's not super easy to have fun on Zoom. So I also do think that actually it's really important when you spend time with your teams in person that you have fun. And so we do spend a lot of time building in
00:17:41
Speaker
opportunities for different teams and groups of people to interact with each other. So we'll do a lot of like, you know, crazy activities. We've done axe throwing, we've done finding this like four story kind of like ropes course. Oh yeah. Pretty terrifying.
00:17:58
Speaker
We've done lots of different things like that where people end up in different groups. They spend time with different people who they don't already know. We do lots of kind of things to build those relationships because I think team building has always been something that's been important, right? But I think in a remote context, it's even more important than it was. And actually, that's probably my most primary objective when I bring people together face to face is for them to
00:18:18
Speaker
deepen and strengthen their personal relationships and knowledge of each other because that to your point is what gets you through the challenges that you may have to deal with sort of business challenges day to day.
Spotdraft's Compensation Report
00:18:30
Speaker
Quick announcement before I let you get back to the episode. Spotdraft just released our annual compensation report for in-house legal professionals. If you're wondering how your compensation compares to your peers across industries, years of experience, and more, make sure to check it out. Find it at salary-report.spotdraft.com or head to the link in the description. Now, let's get back to the episode. Going back to something that you said earlier,
00:19:00
Speaker
You mentioned that you don't think it's very often that the GC is the one who's saying, hey, we need to expand into this market, this new market internationally or otherwise. As you think about sort of global expansion, what do you think the right role of the GC is in that process relative to fellow members of the executive team? How should you be working with your fellow executives?
00:19:26
Speaker
It's a really good question. I mean, I think, obviously, a GC is a business leader. And obviously, they may well have ideas that involve, you know, developing a new market. I think on the whole, though, the general counsel's perspective of developing a new market tends to avoid establishing additional entities, given the additional complex tax requirements, governance that goes with it. I think my
00:19:52
Speaker
role where I've done this and I've done this in many different companies is really around efficiency, effectiveness, and kind of how quickly can you get it done? Because obviously everybody always wants it done tomorrow. Yeah.
00:20:07
Speaker
Well, I think a lot of the time it's saying, right, OK, well, what are we trying to do? OK, I understand that. What's the best way to do it? What are the risks? What are the things we're not thinking about? Could this come back to bite us? Like a lot of the time it's like client X may have said that we need to have a presence here. OK, we should do that. That's the right thing to do. Are there other things that a year from in a year from now, when I've done this, what are the things I'm going to have wish I'd known and I wish I'd thought about? And so trying to make sure that you are setting up if you are setting up an entity or you're going to be operating in a different country is
00:20:37
Speaker
Let's think through various scenarios of sort of good medium to bad of where we are from year a year from now. So in a year from now, we're profitable in this jurisdiction. Okay, that's amazing. Fantastic. Hang on. If we thought about tax, what's our tax liability going to be here for making a profit? Where are these profits going to be declared? Medium would be we're hitting our business plan. Okay, right. Well, that means we're going to have 25 people here. Are there rules that kick in when you have a certain amount of employees in a certain country? Does that change?
00:21:03
Speaker
What's bad is it went really badly and actually we are going to wind up this entity. Okay, right. Did we take out loans? Have we got to pay back loans? Are we in default? Have we got to wind up the entity? How do we have to go about winding up the entity? If people have never wound up an entity in a foreign jurisdiction, it is a very costly, very expensive process. I have a couple that I think have been
00:21:27
Speaker
We've been whining for more than 12 months. And so what I try to do is be like, a year from now on those three things, if these things happened, what would I wish I'd known now to prepare for? So I think, as always, general counsel's jobs is to, is to, you know, prepare for the best and plan for the, plan for the worst. That's your job. So.
00:21:47
Speaker
It can look at very many different things. I think if you're growing in multiple different jurisdictions, thinking very hard about your corporate structure, if you're going to have a central European HQ function, thinking about things like data privacy as well, then those things all need to kind of be thought about in advance. That said, I get asked this question a lot by general counsels, I think because I've done it in so many different jobs.
00:22:14
Speaker
It's not very hard, and so I don't think any general counsel or any lawyer should be remotely concerned about, we're opening in this market, I've got to set up an entity, I've got to make sure that we're registered for tax, I've got to work with accounting, we've got to get employment contracts in place. You tend to be starting small, unless you're going out and you're immediately hiring 100 employees.
00:22:36
Speaker
I just find that what I do when we're starting small is you just have check-in points where you're like, okay, when we get to 10 employees, we're going to move to doing these types of things and we're going to perhaps look at our agreement and maybe we're going to now have local counsel involved because we've got this many people. So I think you just have to create your own milestones, which will be different in every single company. Just create your own milestones where you keep checking in. For me, a really important one
00:23:02
Speaker
line was once the entity started being profitable, I knew that I needed a year before they were profitable to plan for what we would need once they were profitable from sort of a tax structure and perspective. And so knowing that timetable meant I was able to do that. I think one watch out is that unless you want, is that also, I think what a business often doesn't think about is the costs of operating a foreign entity.
00:23:27
Speaker
Um, it will really depend on your foreign entity, but you should be assuming costs of at least $50,000 a year, if not, and it can definitely go up to sort of more than 200,000. Um, particularly you will have to appoint local directors. If you're a new company, particularly if you're in an unproven or unknown sector, you know, the costs of employing an external director may be quite high, really high. And that is quite a lot of additional work. You've obviously got to indemnify them.
00:23:56
Speaker
So there's a lot to think about. And so what we do for every new country that we go into is we will give a breakdown to our operations team. It will be like, this is how much we think it will cost to offer to set up this entry and entity and to operate day to day. So that in the business plan, you have built in these costs. And a lot of the time you then say, well, does this cost, does this business plan still make sense if we've got to spend this? And I think that goes back to the challenge of
00:24:21
Speaker
What's the right approach here from a cost benefit perspective? Is it, is it worth doing this? And so often you do, but I just, I, my focus is always to make sure that the business is going into the, with their eyes wide open on the cost, the time and the people resource, because they are quite significant.
00:24:40
Speaker
You have a lot of experience doing this on both sides of the Atlantic. I think today, maybe our listeners will become more global after this episode, but I think today a lot of the GCs who might be listening or lawyers who might be listening are based in the States. What do you think American executives get wrong or what are common pitfalls that you've seen as they've thought about expanding their businesses into Europe?
00:25:09
Speaker
I think what I would say is having worked on both sides of the Atlantic for six, seven years now, is that I think that the level of understanding that US executives have of operating in different parts of the world, including Europe, continues to grow exponentially, right? Like I think the capability and the expectations are much more realistic than they were perhaps when I
00:25:37
Speaker
was first starting doing this work in like 2017, 2018. So I do think it's really changed. And I think things like GDPR have really kind of translated globally. And so people really do think about those types of issues. And I think once you're thinking about one issue, you then think about the others. I think what can get a few kind of minor things that can get confused, I think not everybody's in the EU, sounds really simple, but. Yeah.
00:26:03
Speaker
that's actually not straightforward. And there are a number of European countries that are partly member of the EU, but not. So again, that needs thinking through when you're thinking about EU regs, they may not mind quite the same way. Also, understanding of EU regulations and directives are not the same thing. And it means that often countries will interpret that legislation slightly differently. So
00:26:25
Speaker
for some technical reasons, what is applicable in Germany is slightly different in Belgium, for example. So I think really understand what it means to be entering the country that you're going into. Don't just assume that the EU is like one solid block that does everything exactly the same way because it absolutely doesn't. I think that another thing that is not fully understood sometimes is
00:26:51
Speaker
Obviously, I think linked to that is just the huge cultural differences between the countries. The amount of times I've heard people say, oh, but it's all EU law. And you're like, no, it's not. Like the French had their laws before they became members of the EU. Every country does. And so understanding that each country really is going to be quite different in its approach and its approach to risk. And so, you know, the risk approach is very different in each country and it's different on depending on what you want to do. And, you know, when I was at Young Brands, I worked across
00:27:21
Speaker
28 countries at Lyme. I think I work across, I think sort of somewhere north of 35 countries. And just to be clear, you know, I'm not going to have a huge amount of detailed knowledge of the legislation in every single country. But while you do develop like a sort of sense of like, oh, we're doing it in this country, right? Okay, well, I'm going to want to look really carefully at like how these kind of contract provisions work.
00:27:46
Speaker
So I think really appreciating the cultural sensitivities around different countries. The amount of times I often hear, oh, well, you know, employment in Europe is a nightmare. No, it's not. And actually, quite frankly, or it's really different or it's really difficult. Well, no, actually the rule, you know, employment legislate labor legislation between California and Texas is completely different. And so it's not wildly different to if you're doing a
00:28:13
Speaker
U.S. right role, it's not wildly different, I think, to that. So I think just being very aware of cultural differences and sensitivities is, I think, really, really important. And actually, it's very similar to the U.S. in a lot of ways where, you know, you just have very different cultural perspectives depending on where you are. But I think taking the time to listen, understand that. I also was recommended a brilliant book called The Culture Map, cultural map.
00:28:43
Speaker
which is really fabulous because it talks about how different cultures
00:28:49
Speaker
communicate, but not just like talking, but how they build relationships, how they take feedback, how they deliver information. And it really does point to some really interesting tendencies. And the reason it's called the map is the idea is that you sort of draw a map of all the different places that you're working and look about how they engage on these different axes of like performance, feedback, building relationships. And it really helps you navigate kind of where you are.
00:29:17
Speaker
I find that very useful to just sometimes calibrate a bit. Okay, I'm getting on a call with
00:29:23
Speaker
with a regulator in this country, I know that these are going to be, these are some of the things I need to focus on. But I think each country is different. I think, and you see that crop up on approaches to litigation, approaches to regulatory disputes. It can be very, very different approaches to tax disputes. It can be really different depending on what country you're in. And you just really have to really listen and understand that your approach that you have used in
00:29:50
Speaker
the U.S. may not be appropriate in that environment.
00:29:55
Speaker
We'll find that book for the show notes also and provide a link in case anyone wants to pick
Understanding Local Regulations
00:30:01
Speaker
it up. Let's chat a bit more about the role of regulators as you go about expanding internationally. You've got a pretty big team working for you. How do you, working with you, how do you think about your team effectively managing relationships with, I think, such a diverse set of regulatory stakeholders or regulatory bodies?
00:30:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really good question. I think there are some businesses that have a huge amount of regulatory breadth, I think just in terms of what we do. And the reason that Lime sits in that bucket is that each city will regulate our product differently. So it's not each country, it's each city. So you could say that we work with at least 300 regulators worldwide. And so, and sometimes even within a city,
00:30:52
Speaker
you may have different parts of the city regulating your product differently. And so that creates a lot of huge opportunity, but challenge. And so you have to, I think it's about having clear principles and guidance about how you will work with regulators, but making sure that they are locally appropriate and flexible where they need to be. And so
00:31:14
Speaker
I find that any sort of policy documents, and we spend a lot of time working obviously in a big global company on kind of playbooks, on policy documents, you have to make sure that they have the appropriate amount of flexibility in them, because what may make absolute sense to be categoric on a certain point with a regulator in one country won't make sense. But you have to make sure that they build in that flexibility. When you handle a lot of regulators, you need to really make sure you understand
00:31:42
Speaker
your contractual obligations with them, your verbal commitments with them, you need to make sure you've really got your arms around like how that relationship has been managed and what the issues are. I certainly expect all of my attorneys who are on the ground in those markets to know who their regulators are
00:32:00
Speaker
They're up to date on what they're discussing with them, what the challenges are, and there's always some similarity between the issues, but also there's quite a lot of different perspectives as well. I do think, as I say, it's about setting a broad direction on key issues, but making sure that it's flexible where you need to. We do obviously, on top of that, we will have our local regulators, which is our cities. We will then obviously have national regulators.
00:32:26
Speaker
or supranational regulators in the case of EU, whether that's on anything from those types of things would be like, whether it's product, whether it's privacy, those types of issues. As we were preparing for this, one issue area that I think you have
00:32:42
Speaker
pretty extensive experience and is consumer product liability. And I think that's going to be interesting for listeners to hear about because I don't think that's an area where a lot of GCs maybe have, have deep sort of roots or experience. Um, maybe not with, with Lyme, but, uh, in a sort of prior life at a different company, do you have a story that you might be willing to share about what effectively working with a regulator looks like on those types of issues?
00:33:10
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think it sort of goes back to the principle that I said earlier, which is that you need to really understand your regulator and
00:33:20
Speaker
what are the driving motivations for them so you understand the environment that they're operating in and what are going to be the critical things for them because it will be different in each country. I think one of the things that I have learned, so a long time ago in one role, we had to assess whether we were going to need to do a product recall for a product that was causing quite significant issues in customers' homes.
00:33:46
Speaker
Uh-huh. What I have learned, and again, this kind of goes for any kind of crisis that you end up in as a business. The other very obvious example will be a data breach. Is that. Sure.
00:33:58
Speaker
It's very rare that the information is ever black and white. It just, it never is. And it may be that you have one piece of information that people are like, this is black. And then you'll have another piece of information that's completely white, or you may just have a whole bunch of like gray. And I think what you will discover is, is that in those situations, and certainly what I discovered when I had to deal with this potential product recall is you're never going to have a perfect answer and you will have to work with imperfect information.
00:34:26
Speaker
to make the best decisions that you can vis-a-vis communicating with customers, communicating with regulators, communicating with investors and any other stakeholders. A lot of it. And you will often, there will be different perspectives as to the level of engagement that you should be making. But I think my point is, except it's going to be great, because certainly the first one that I dealt with, I spent a lot of time trying to make sure that it was clear before I did anything. And I definitely learned that actually you just have to live with the imperfection.
00:34:55
Speaker
I do feel that at those times, it's really important to think of yourself as a consumer. And, you know, I do to, you know, what is what is the right thing to do? Definitely make sure that you've got your arms around the information flow. Make sure that things are not disappearing outside of
00:35:13
Speaker
business that you're not aware of. I think you remember working on another crisis issue where it turned out there were three different teams working on the same issue and they weren't talking to each other. And so making sure that you've, you've kind of, I think a general counsel plays a really useful role on, on any kind of crisis in terms of just grabbing the information flow, making sure there is structure and coherence to discussions, to, to progress, to actions, like really being
00:35:38
Speaker
very very you know tight on you know each action what's the status of it and making sure that that you continue to progress like through those kind of crisis type issues so i think those are the things i would suggest on this particular issue we were transparent with our regulator we said well we just don't know this is all the information this is the information we have it's not a clear picture we are obviously coming to you because we want to work with you on a solution to this and i think because we were
00:36:07
Speaker
And it genuinely depends on which country you're dealing with. That's not the approach I would take in all countries, for sure. But in this country, we were transparent. We were open. We were a trusted business. And they said, OK, thank you. Asked a few questions. And we came back and they said, let's talk in two weeks. Tell us what you found out and we'll go from there. And so it was very much kind of like a partner led approach. And I think in that case, being proactive and transparent
00:36:32
Speaker
really did us a lot of, you know, I think we ended up in a good position because we took that, we took that approach. But you will have a lot of things to weigh. I think my, my overall guidance is there is not a perfect answer. And I don't think anyone has ever run
00:36:49
Speaker
a sort of crisis situation or a product recall situation perfectly. They're hard. They're complex. They've got a lot of puts and takes. There's a lot of gray information and you're going to kind of just be okay living in the imperfection of it. That's great advice around crisis management broadly and around what the role of the GC should be there.
Balancing Growth and Compliance
00:37:11
Speaker
when you think about the role of the GC, maybe in, in better times, uh, when there isn't a fire, uh, how do you think about setting the right tone around sort of growth and expansion on the one hand, but regulatory compliance and safety maybe on the other. The general counsel's job, I think a lot of the time is to bring clarity to potential business situations where
00:37:41
Speaker
You are transparent about whatever the requirements are. The consequences of failing to meet those requirements and that you're weighing it up against the business need. I mean, you know, one of my favorite coaching things is that a team member will come to you and say,
00:37:56
Speaker
We've got a major issue with this product or with this market or whatever. And your first question is always, OK, talk me through what's the revenue? What does it relate to? You've always got a ground in the world of that's what we do sit in in the world of.
00:38:12
Speaker
of the business. And so I think grounding it in there is really important. I think a lot of times it's about transparency. It's about quantification of risk. You've got to have a number. You can't show up and you've got to talk the business's language. You have to talk the same language as them.
00:38:28
Speaker
So I think it's about transparency. I think it's about talking the language. It's about meeting the pace and the expectations of the team. You know, you may have some teams that are quite happy for you to take a week, considering something carefully and the thing that wants an answer, you know, now. So I think thinking about it's trying to meet them where they are and where they're trying to get to.
00:38:45
Speaker
But I think the most important thing is being clear and on the risks and quantifying them and knowing when something is a very serious issue as opposed to not doing. The other thing I've also found is that proactive education is really hard because no one has time to do proactive education and not everybody wants to listen to the lawyers talk about
00:39:10
Speaker
policies and focuses all the time. But I find that being proactive about, you know, spending some time and you get into a business and thinking about where are my most material risks and being proactive about educating your business about risks. Because I actually find that on the whole businesses, they really want to know where their risks are and their vulnerabilities are, and they want to be able to
00:39:28
Speaker
be educated about them. So I think educating your, your, your business teams around those issues as much as you can and trying to do it before you have an issue is really, really valuable. And then you can continue to develop the coaching and the level of expertise over time. And so that actually what you really want is that your business is trained well enough that they will be able to spot issues themselves. They may not know what to do with them, but that's fine. But they know when to come to you. And I think if you can land that message
00:39:58
Speaker
with the business. So I think proactive education, and again, I think this comes back to being an accessible person. I think sometimes as lawyers, we feel like we're very accessible, but you fail to appreciate that actually sometimes people are like, oh, but it's going to the lawyer, you know, it's the attorney. And I think being clear that, you know, your job is simply to
00:40:19
Speaker
protect the company, allow the company to achieve its goals. Making that point and being accessible, transparent, open, friendly is really, really important to kind of actually, and it really helps actually protect, I think, against you not having visibility into what's going on. So I think just continuous education is really important.
00:40:39
Speaker
That's fantastic advice. I've got just a couple more questions for you as we start to wrap up. You gave us one book in the culture map, so our listeners are gonna get a bonus book from you today. I'm a big reader and I always like to ask guests, or I often like to ask guests, something that they've read recently, whether it's a business book or something for fun, that they would recommend to others.
Book Recommendation: 'Too Big to Fail'
00:41:04
Speaker
Do you have a recommendation for us?
00:41:06
Speaker
I do. It's not new, I'm afraid. It's an oldie, but a goodie. But I would say that once a year, at least, I will read Too Big to Fail by Andrew Salkin, which is about the financial crisis. It doesn't read like a nonfiction. It reads like fiction. It's incredibly pacey. But I think I've always been fascinated by understanding better
00:41:34
Speaker
in the corporate world, how decisions are made in crises, what went wrong, what went right. And I think it's such a compelling book of how you navigate a really existential crisis, but also on how important it is to be a human, if in doubt, you know, be a human.
00:41:53
Speaker
But I also think and how important it is to ask questions that there is no such thing as a stupid question and I think when you look at the financial crisis. You look at some of you know there was some in the book it's very clear that just not enough questions were asked a lot of the time and so I always think that like, it's a reassuring.
00:42:10
Speaker
I think it's a good sort of way, it's a good book on sort of how you navigate a crisis, but I always come away with a sort of sense of like, trying to be human is incredibly important, and also asking questions, and there is no such thing as a stupid question. It's helpful. And it's like, it's a really good, it's really good book. So yeah, I read that. I read that one a lot. So if you haven't read it, it's, it's amazing. It's very, I have not, but it's really, we'll read it quite quickly.
00:42:34
Speaker
I think I've seen, I think there's an HBO show maybe that was based on it that I've seen. I mean, I'm fascinated by The Great Recession and read like Tim Geithner's memoir and a few other books, but I've not read that one. And so you pick something right up my alley, Sarah.
00:42:50
Speaker
Well, what's a relief? One one last question for you before we let you go that I like to ask of almost all of our guests. You know, if you could look back on your your days when you were just getting started as a lawyer, but something that you wish you'd known then that you you know now that there are there are many things. But I think I would probably say
00:43:18
Speaker
Worry less about titles and worry less about career progression. Worry more about the type of work you are doing, the type of people you are working with and what you are learning. I think when you're when I was more junior, I was it was more important of like, you know, meet the next career around what's next. And I think also just the sort of hierarchical structure of a lot of business, but particularly law firms kind of drives you towards that. And I think what I've learned over time is that actually
00:43:47
Speaker
It's the quality of the experience that you are getting that matters way more than, you know, the salary or the title or whatever. And so, you know, I think I'm never, it never fails me of how many surprises me more of sort of how many people you meet who, you know, everyone's career path looks pretty different and there is no, there is actually no linear career path. And if there is, then there isn't, there really isn't one. And so I think just trying to be,
00:44:17
Speaker
cognizant of what you're learning and the experiences that you're getting is more important than the title or the next rung on the ladder. That is really meant to be the idea of there not being one linear path. I think one of the big messages of a lot of these interviews and of the podcast series. So thank you so much for joining us today and for such a dynamic interview and yeah, really, really appreciate your time.
00:44:45
Speaker
Oh, Tyler, it was an absolute pleasure. It's been so fun to connect. So thank you so much. I really, really enjoyed it. Thanks for tuning in today. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd recommend that you give my interview in season one with David Lancelot, Chief Legal Officer of LawView, a listen. We talk about practicing abroad and how to effectively scale your legal team.
00:45:08
Speaker
You can also subscribe so you can get notified as soon as we post a new episode. And if you liked this one, I'd really love to hear your thoughts, so leave a rating or a comment. If you'd like to reach out to me or Sarah, our LinkedIn profiles are in the description. See you next week.