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Riding Tech Booms and Busts as a Lawyer: Perspectives from David Lancelot
130 Plays1 year ago
Join us for an inspiring conversation with David Lancelot, a seasoned legal leader who has fearlessly embraced the ever-evolving world of technology. While being a tech lawyer is undoubtedly exciting right now, David's journey dates back to a time when it was considered too daring to venture into this domain.
With firsthand experiences of seeing the dot-com boom, surviving the crash, and now witnessing the resurgent growth of the tech industry, David's wisdom is invaluable. We had the pleasure of sitting down with him to uncover his extraordinary path, starting from his role as GC at a high-risk tech start-up to leading a global team spanning the globe at eBay Classifieds.
During our conversation, we dive into David's strategies for scaling legal teams, establishing trust internally and especially with CFOs, driving impactful change within his team and the entire business, and championing the importance of legal ops. But above all, we uncover key insights that legal professionals and leaders need to position themselves and their teams as true co-leaders within the business.
If you're a tech lawyer looking to navigate the thrilling world of technology with confidence, this episode is a must-listen.
Topics:
Introduction – 00:00
Working in tech start-ups from the early days – 1:35
Being the first legal hire at QVC – 4:43
Surviving the tech market crash & navigating lay-offs – 10:16
Playing in global legal markets & building an international team – 14:35
Scaling the legal function like a business team – 21:24
Building trust with CFOs & earning resources for legal – 25:51
Optimizing processes & bringing in legal ops – 28:16
Driving change within your team & the business – 32:19
Using data to communicate & build trust internally – 39:14
The future of legal & legal ops – 43:53
Connect with us:
David Lancelot - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidlancelot/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading CLM platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues. Visit https://www.spotdraft.com/ to learn more.
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Transcript
Introduction from Las Vegas
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome listeners to this episode of the abstract podcast brought to you by spot draft. My name is Tyler Finn. I lead community and growth for spot draft. And we're coming to you live today from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. We're at clocks 2023 global Institute.
David Lance's Career Beginnings
00:00:25
Speaker
I'm very lucky to have my friend David Lance a lot on the podcast today. Thanks for being here, David. Thank you for having me.
00:00:32
Speaker
I want to get started by just giving you a little bit of background on David and his career as an in-house lawyer. He started his career as a GC of a FinTech startup in London. We're going to talk about a few stories from that time together, followed by a stint at Baker McKenzie, then as GC of QVC UK. He also spent a year at Amazon in the UK, and then 10 years at eBay as VP and global head of legal to the eBay's classified business where
00:01:00
Speaker
He had wide remit, advising the executive team on international expansion, compliance, M&A, a few stories about deals there, probably to talk about too, while building and managing a team of 25. In addition to being a business person with legal skills, as he likes to say, David's a lovely person, a very avid cyclist, father, husband, attorney, and
00:01:24
Speaker
as we found out yesterday when he was kind enough to moderate our panel, an excellent public speaker. That's very kind. Why don't we kick off by going back to the beginning. You worked at a tech company in London. Sounds like there were some interesting investors involved. One famous one. Yeah.
00:01:42
Speaker
How did that set you on your path to being a legal leader? Yeah, yeah. So I showed up in London, went to University of Florida for law school.
Becoming GC at Magix
00:01:51
Speaker
And because I have a British background, I have a British passport, I was able to go to London and work. Went to London, did a few sort of, you know, document management gigs at law firms like we all have to. And then ended up getting a role at a company called Magix, which was
00:02:06
Speaker
funded by NatWest Bank and Intertrust, both of which exist still. And with venture capital from Goldman Sachs and an investment from Paul McCartney. I've heard of that capital. Yeah. Yeah. So we had about 40 million pounds in funding from Goldman and one million from Paul.
00:02:37
Speaker
this thing called master game law. So the business didn't really work out, but it was a really interesting, you know, education in becoming the lawyer for a startup, you know, very early in my career. And as I told you, the partner from the big, they call it the magic circle in the UK, the top tier law firms, the partner from the magic circle firm, who was supposed to be the general counsel of this hot new startup in the dot com boom, literally did not show up for work.
00:02:48
Speaker
The business was intended to allow media companies to encrypt content and sell it safely over the new internet.
00:03:07
Speaker
He literally was like, this is too risky. I'm not, I'm not doing it. And so me, who was the legal assistant qualified in Florida, ended up being the general counsel of the company, which I was completely unprepared for, right? Like I really had no idea what I was doing, but it's a trial by fire, right? You got to figure it out. And I think, you know, probably the biggest learning there are two biggest learnings. One, revenue, make money, right? These guys just spent all the money to try and drive growth and they're, they burned it all.
00:03:36
Speaker
And that was the end of that.
Transition to QVC and Building a Legal Team
00:03:38
Speaker
But also I had a really wise ex-consultant who I worked with there. And he said, this is a great place to learn how not to company. And I took that forward forever. You can learn from both sides of the coin. Absolutely. Good business and bad business lessons in both. Yes.
00:03:53
Speaker
Did you know that you wanted to work in tech at that point? Was that a very intentional issue for you? Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's, it seems like a long time ago now, right? Like in 1999, I was taking technology transactions classes at the university of Florida's law school. So I had always wanted to be in that sector and it was super nascent. That was, you know, the e-commerce directive and DMCA and all that kind of stuff.
00:04:17
Speaker
But yeah, that was the field I wanted to be in. And so when I got to London, I looked for those kind of jobs, and because it was the dot-com boom, they're actually worse than them. They were probably very lucky to have you.
00:04:27
Speaker
You went to, I learned a lot. You then went and took on some more responsibility as GC at QBC. Well run business. Tell us a little bit about having to grow into, into that role. Because of the dot com crash, I ended up going back to school and I studied, did an LLM in technology law at the university of London, which was fantastic, super practical, met some great people, including a partner.
00:04:52
Speaker
from Baker McKenzie, who brought me into Baker for a year, and their technology practice pretty much crashed because of the dot-com crash. Sure. You know, all the partners went on sabbatical and all the associates left. Yep. And on the trainees, which I technically was,
00:05:07
Speaker
didn't have anywhere to go except out the door. So I went back out the door and sort of walked the streets, founded a contractor role at a company called QVC, which everybody in the states knows. But like outside of the US, it's not as big a brand, right? Of all any value and convenience, it's a huge television shopping brand.
00:05:26
Speaker
At the time, there was no online e-commerce, especially in the UK. So it was a great opportunity to get into what we call distance retail. Using the interactivity of the television to sell, along with telephone, to sell goods at a distance. And it was by far the biggest TV shopping company in the UK, but it had a lot of reputational issues. It didn't have an in-house lawyer. All of the senior execs had their own lawyers.
00:05:56
Speaker
Outside counsel. Yes. Wow. Literally, the person who lives next door, who happens to be a lawyer, was the lawyer for whoever. It gave me a great opportunity to come in and be tons of low-hanging fruit. Yeah. Lots of opportunity for improvement. I can remember putting a piece of paper on the wall next to the copier that said, do not send contracts out via the fax machine without talking to legal. It's that basic.
00:06:25
Speaker
So doing those sort of things, learning as you go. And they gave me tons of opportunity to do that, right? I started, I did a couple months as a contractor just doing the tech stuff, just buying enterprise back when you had to actually buy servers and buy tape drives. And then they said, well, we need an in-house lawyer and you're a good fit. So then I found a closet, a storage closet that was full of like old computers or something. I emptied it out and made it my office.
00:06:52
Speaker
That's incredible. And I sat there for the next five years, but it was an awesome spot. It was inside the shipping teams kind of area. So I wasn't, you know, whatever with some kind of administrative legal, whatever function, right? I was deep in the business, I think.
00:07:09
Speaker
From that, you know, I get my whole sense of a couple things sense of like embedded with the business, right? You're a business person first with with all of your legal training background way of thinking but I got that there as well as a sense for They had I mean QVC had I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same now, but they had a fantastic
Navigating the Dot-Com Crash
00:07:30
Speaker
culture Really really fantastic culture and I think it had something to do with you know, you got to be humble to work until you shop it Yeah
00:07:37
Speaker
Right? Like you're not going around going, we're the coolest company in the world. We sell stuff to, you know, people on television. So they were super humble and they had leadership training for relatively junior people. And I got some great training on vulnerability. That's one of the things I took with me was like showing your people that
00:07:57
Speaker
you know you make mistakes sure it's okay to make mistakes especially for lawyers right like it's okay to make mistakes it's okay to learn on the job i've got your back that that sort of stuff as well as dealing with something really crazy on air and live tv and six studios all the time stuff right you go out the hallway and there's
00:08:19
Speaker
you know models in and dressing gowns with their hair all up and some guy leading a dog through and then some other people with a bunch of jewelry and it's all sort of crossing paths and it's all happening like that all the time because it's live.
00:08:32
Speaker
It's like show business. It's totally show business, but it's, it was the largest live TV, like production facility in London. So basically in the UK. And it was just, it was a fascinating place to work. And I literally made a list, like start here, work your way through of what need to be done. And as I take those things off, I mean, the biggest one was compliance. It was literally like, how do we get to be in my, you know,
00:08:57
Speaker
mind or friend or whatever, a gold standard in the industry. The big unlock there was finding a great person at the regulator who was also a business person with legal skills and bringing him on board to our company and having him be the sort of channel back to the regulator to train our people, to train the presenters, to build the policies.
00:09:22
Speaker
And that really, like, 180 the whole thing, right? We went from a bunch of compliance issues with the regulator where they can pull your TV license. Basically, that's it. You're done. Two, not, like, two year time frame. That really is awesome. Yeah, business was incredibly successful. I mean, it was an incredibly successful business model. So that was super fun.
00:09:45
Speaker
Before we get to eBay, I want to ask you a follow up there. I didn't know that you went through that in the dot com crash and having to find a job. I think there's a lot of folks right now, especially in tech who are going through layoffs. How did you manage that? And there also wasn't social media back then and job lists on LinkedIn. But how did you manage that sort of for yourself emotionally resetting, getting back out and counting the payment to find your next gig? Sounds like you had a lot of hustle.
00:10:14
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, totally. And it was a tough time. I mean, it was a really tough time because, you know, especially when you're relatively young, you know, it's probably in my late twenties, early thirties, and you think you're, you know, you found something, it's going great. And then all of a sudden it's like, let's go into a room where we talk about your severance.
00:10:34
Speaker
Yeah, you know, you've thought you've really tried something and there goes the whole team. And I have to say, like the law firm doesn't tell you about it in advance, right? So surprise, surprise. I had not expected to get any severance. We were still on the contract with the Nattus bank employees. So we got what I felt like at the time was a huge amount of money, 20,000 pounds, took that 20,000 pounds. And I thought like I could go to Thailand.
00:11:03
Speaker
Or buy a new bike. Well, at that time, bikes, you couldn't spend 20,000. Now you can totally spend 20,000 pounds on a new bike. But we can talk about that. But I really thought, what am I going to do next? There are no jobs. It was way worse in that space. Because there were just way too many companies, it wasn't that they weren't profitable, it was that
00:11:28
Speaker
They literally couldn't succeed like technologically they were like years ahead of our time in what could actually be done Sure had to figure out that we couldn't do it and so did everyone else there was no broadband, you know, etc There are tons of issues
00:11:43
Speaker
So I had to say, what am I going to do with this 20,000 pounds? And I basically just doubled down. I went and I did a master's. I did a master's in law at the University of London. They had a really great program, as I said. It was very practical. Technology and Communications Law, a place called the Center for Commercial Law Studies at the University of London. And this guy, Ian Walden, he was managing that program. He still does manage that program.
00:12:06
Speaker
And he was moving from one firm to Baker McKenzie. And I guess he thought, you know, this guy's got some potential. And I used that to pivot into Baker. All right. And Baker was the premier tech firm at the time in the UK. As to be said, there weren't many. But Baker McKenzie, it's a huge international firm. So I got the opportunity to work there and sort of ride out the absolute worst part of the crash through that two year period.
00:12:34
Speaker
And I could have gone and tied on it, right? I've heard, who knows what would have happened. I probably would have just, you know, done something similar, but just like pivoted that way. Went to Baker. And as I said, they didn't have, they didn't have anything for trainees or associates in 2003 or whatever that was, 2004. So, I mean, I literally still remember to this day, walking out the doors, you know, Baker McKenzie onto the street in London and in hope is called Hoburn Circus. That's the name of the street. And I totally remember coming out and being like,
00:13:04
Speaker
Okay. What are we going to do now, dude? Like I hadn't been, you know, I hadn't been networking. I was an associate like a first year at a law firm on a path and then it was different again. Like for the third time in three years, I just went back to my, my net, basically the people that I knew who were job agency types, legal
00:13:26
Speaker
small group in the UK at that time, contacted them and said, hey, I'm back. You know, I'm available for work. And one of them eventually contacted me. It took a few months, but contacted me and said, we've got a contract gig, you know, just a couple of months at QVC. It's like, well,
00:13:43
Speaker
Awesome. It's about someone. Well, it was it was very on point for me because it was basically the CTO hiring for this technology legal work, which is just transactional, we're buying stuff. Before we get to the sort of like meet up the conversation, some of your philosophy around legal and legal ops and high performing teams, tell us a bit about your 10 years at eBay and the transactions and your time there.
Role at eBay Classifieds
00:14:10
Speaker
Yeah, after I left QVC,
00:14:12
Speaker
My wife and I, we decided we're gonna have kids, we're gonna travel first, go back to the U.S. after that. I had this amazing opportunity to work on the Obama campaign for a little bit. We were in Florida, we were voter protection lawyers and did a lot of canvassing on the campaign, and of course, you know, in 2008, we won, so that's always good. It was a very, you know, exciting time.
00:14:36
Speaker
and then we did a bunch of travel all over the world and then came back and I did a short stint back in the UK again and did some time at Amazon which was super super interesting and insightful to almost a year at Amazon and then came back to the US and I really thought like I've been away so long
00:14:54
Speaker
i need to do a refresher almost like i did not trust that i could practice law in the u.s which is kind of now that i look back and it's just incredible how like we lack confidence early in our careers right yeah we just think like
00:15:09
Speaker
people are going to see that I don't know U.S. law or something. So I actually went back to school, did another event. Again? Yeah, I went to Santa Clara University and only basically made it through one semester on campus. You know, that was fun and interesting. They had some good courses there, good professors, and obviously very tech-heavy place in the valley. Before Axiom contacted me to say who I've worked for in the UK at Amazon.
00:15:36
Speaker
actually contacted me and said we've got this gig at eBay. And they need somebody to support a very international part of the eBay. It's called the eBay Classified Group, which was a collection of classifieds businesses. So basically Craigslist, but if Craigslist was run by competent people who cared about their customers and tried to make room money, right? A business basically. A real business. Yeah, a real business. But in each of these countries,
00:16:05
Speaker
the leading sort of internet platform in all of these countries. And if you're Canadian, you would know Kijiji. If you're Australian, you would know Gumtree. If you're a German, you would know a bit Kleinezeigen. Now Kleinezeigen, that's two days ago that they rebranded. But like in each of those countries, these are places where like millions and millions and millions of people do pretty much everything that you do on the internet that's not transaction.
00:16:28
Speaker
Right, so everything that used to happen in the back of the newspaper happens on classifieds. And somewhere like Canada, the number one place to buy and sell a used car is on Kijiji. Same with a mobile phone, the same with buying or renting a house, all of these things. So it was a really strong business and super high growth rate.
00:16:47
Speaker
and a really interesting portfolio of like some extremely nascent money losing businesses in places like Mexico or South Africa or Argentina and then some quite strong mature businesses in places like Germany or the UK or Denmark or Australia or Canada.
00:17:03
Speaker
And then some really speculative stuff that never even got off the ground, along with a whole raft of like M&A, just constant M&A. Like, do we want to buy a vertical in like the boat's vertical, right? To plug into our auto's business kind of thing. Or do we want to buy a property horizontal or vertical?
00:17:24
Speaker
in some country somewhere in the world. So it was a really interesting business and almost entirely outside the United States. So ironically, right, I go and I study US law because I'm worried about that and I end up in a job that's almost entirely outside the US, right? And I got an incredible education in like, you know, privacy law in South Africa, employment law in Singapore, et cetera, right? German, you know, dealing with German regulators can be quite cheap.
00:17:53
Speaker
Etc. So it was it was super interesting business and they didn't really have legal support certainly in market, right? They have very limited legal support in market and it gave me the opportunity to I mean Like it wasn't as if the eBay Corp business was gonna give this business Which was relatively small about 200 million in revenue. I think it was when I joined wasn't gonna give that business 20 lawyers and we're thinking the many lawyers
00:18:23
Speaker
I was a contract lawyer who was being paid for by the business, right? So I had to, first of all, prove my value enough that they would hire me full-time, right? Which I did. Then I had to prove my value enough that they would let me build something more than just me, which they clearly needed, right? Because this business was growing dramatically. I mean, some of us... You're growing in revenue with no lawyers, that's...
00:18:49
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, well, it was the same. It's always amazes me that the companies, you know, because they're just not advised by their law firms that it's better to have somebody in-house who really understands the business and embedded with the leadership team, because it's not in the best interests of the law firm, right? So I prove my value at one level.
00:19:08
Speaker
And then I had to prove it again to basically the leadership team and the leader of a part of the business. And at that time it was the emerging markets part of the business. And had some very challenging times there.
00:19:24
Speaker
doing business in Mexico, South Africa, Argentina, maybe going into different parts of Asia, pulling out of some parts of Asia. Like all of that is a very challenging environment. So super fun, like really interesting and fun. And I was able to go from there to, you know, basically starting to build a team, starting to bring people in. And of course, initially it was, well, you're spending X hundred thousand dollars in Canada.
00:19:53
Speaker
How about we cut that in half and I bring someone in and then actually more like cut it by, you know, this guy's super hard worker in Canada, Ben, and it probably cut the external council fees by at least 80%. Then you can reinvest.
00:20:11
Speaker
That and start, you know start the ball rolling. It's a virtuous cycle. Absolutely virtuous cycle where you you take the the low-hanging fruit the savings from that and then with a vision and a plan Reinvest that into continuing to scale the function and over time, you know we put lawyers on the ground in a number of countries, of course and
00:20:34
Speaker
There's 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. Everything's qualitative. 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. And everything will get taken care of, probably with a very high sort of risk aversion
00:21:02
Speaker
To everything probably a lot of people who 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 is is just reacting
00:21:15
Speaker
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 we're going to scale this function like a business unit, the legal function like a business unit.
Scaling Legal Functions at eBay
00:21:27
Speaker
And the way we did that at eBay Classifieds was to say we're going to build a centralized commercial contract function associated with the eBay legal ops function and use that to
00:21:39
Speaker
Take in like we had a massive contract volume right we had something like four thousand deals a month wow on just on like sales force 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.
00:21:58
Speaker
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 that reviews all of this stuff and deals with it. And however, we're going to deal with it for Denmark, Germany, Australia, Canada.
00:22:15
Speaker
South Africa, Mexico. No, totally. Exactly. Argentina. Tons of places where they want to deal in their local language, local law, 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.
00:22:34
Speaker
but it really seemed like an impossibility. But I have to say, with the help of some super strong people who built that function on my team, we were able to, over time, over a sort of three, four year period, pull together a system for dealing with all that volume.
00:22:50
Speaker
and doing it in a super effective and scalable way you know the goal of that wasn't do things fast and cheap sure the goal of that was how do we accelerate the business well at the same time giving our lawyers the headspace to become you know first just like very very valuable to free up their time to do valuable work
00:23:12
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 and
00:23:35
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 rice You went 0 to 25. Yeah, it's pretty impressive. Well, I've never been a fan especially after the last couple years of like
00:24:05
Speaker
people numbers equals growth or is a positive thing, right? I mean, I'm sure you've had the same where companies would come to you and be like, we've got 50 people now and we're going to go to a hundred by the end of the year. And you're like, that actually might be concerning. That's actually a bad thing, right? Because what I want to hear about is revenue because back to 2001, right? Like it's great that you've got a lot of people in at the company mentions in London where I did my first gig, they let me choose the desks.
00:24:31
Speaker
And they were sweet desks, right? Some of them were in class, they looked really cool. And some of you were on chairs too. Oh yeah, that was very expensive. And we weren't making any money, right? We were just blowing money all over the place. And we didn't even know what to do.
00:24:45
Speaker
It's got to be sustainable. So I like to think of it as like we were really managing the businesses resources in the most effective way, right? As business leaders, we're business co-leaders who happen to have a legal skillset and are managing a function like a business unit. And so I would build trust with the CFO, which we talked a lot about at the conference, building trust with the CFO through, you know, quantitative
00:25:11
Speaker
metrics, like really understanding what's moving the needle for the business and in a lot of cases contracts, right? Like getting deals done, getting them done effectively, not wasting time on stuff like NDAs, et cetera, MSAs that are repeatable. But you don't need lawyers to look at if you put the right processes in place and then you have their backs in case anything goes wrong, which it generally doesn't. Doing that such that you can then say, okay,
00:25:40
Speaker
Hey CFO, you know we really manage our resources properly, whether that's time, people, money, technology, whatever, risk. We manage our resources well. So what we'd like to do going forward strategically, here's the vision. We're going to build out this function. I need some people in Berlin now.
00:26:01
Speaker
to help with that, right? Because we've gotten to a stage where all of the English language stuff that we could push, and that's including like basically saying to Danish customers, we're going to do business in English, right? We know you guys speak English better than we do. So don't force us to do Danish language conferences. It's totally not necessary. And it will speed up all our processes, right? So then super efficient process. But then you get to the point where there's some countries where you just have to do local language, right? Like you're not going to be able to convince Germans
00:26:31
Speaker
or Japanese, or Chinese, to operate in English just because you knew. So then you need resources on the ground, lawyers on the ground, who can operate in German. And that was a huge unlock for us because we had so much volume in Germany, our two biggest businesses were in Germany, that took us from
00:26:52
Speaker
40-50% to 60-80% of the total volume was totally centralized, going into this contract funnel, getting dealt with the right resources, and being efficiently implemented and managed.
Future of Legal Operations
00:27:06
Speaker
We're here at Clock. We've been talking about LegalOps for the past couple of days. You have a philosophy or a view that every high performing legal team needs an engine room.
00:27:17
Speaker
Absolutely. Can you tell us about what the engine room is? Sure. Who the engine room is maybe? Yeah. What it does for legal and for the rest of the business. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think as I said, like the way we look at the legal function has changed relatively dramatically over the 20 years that I've been practicing, right? We've gone from an in-house law firm that is very much, and even I was doing this back in the day,
00:27:42
Speaker
where you're basically managing an external counsel. You don't think of yourself as a business person who tries to like deeply understand the strategy of the business and deal with issues internally and sort of say, okay, well, we're spending X millions of dollars on external counsel. That balance is not right. You know, we could do it way better in house. And over the past 20 years, that's flipped on its head. And I think
00:28:07
Speaker
you know, in what I call a modern effective in-house legal function, you really try your best to use those resources as effectively as possible. And the way, you know, aside from managing your finances in a sort of modern way and not just using it all on really expensive external counsel, you build process and you optimize processes and technologies and like a business unit would. You wouldn't go to your marketing team
00:28:35
Speaker
marketing leader and or your strategy leader and they would you know the only thing they want is more people right that's that's ridiculous of course they wouldn't just want more people they want systems and processes maybe some consultancy optimization and a really important part as you know of marketing is operations right and it's exactly the same for me
00:28:55
Speaker
The engine room of the legal function is legal operations. And it really adds an enormous amount of value to have something that can deal with so many parts of what we do as in-house lawyers in a way that is scalable. It's not, oh, well, we need another lawyer to do more marketing review, right? Don't do that. Like build a process, build a workflow.
00:29:20
Speaker
Have a contract management system that's more and more intelligent over time. Somebody else takes care of, right? That's integrated into all of your business processes. Turn over the relationship from the lawyer who has to manage the relationship every single day. Of course you want them to have a strong relationship with their business people, but turn over the option for the legal intake to a system and an operations team.
00:29:48
Speaker
that is, in most cases, vastly better at doing that kind of work, right, than lawyers. It's different. Yeah. Different work. It's totally different work, and it's not something lawyers are generally trained to do. Unfortunately, I think that needs to change, and I'm working on that too, as you know. I'm doing some law school stuff to try and work on that, but for the moment, you know, most lawyers aren't operational experts. They're not project managers. They don't have that kind of training, and if you bring people in that can do that,
00:30:16
Speaker
and build a function to do that, it's an enormous benefit. And I think the key benefit, and as I said before, it's not about just saving money and doing things faster, it's about giving your in-house legal team the opportunity to have some headspace so they can think about vision, mission, strategy, context, product, and become really great business co-leaders. And then all of that together, both the ops and the strategic guidance can accelerate a business in a way that
00:30:46
Speaker
the old school way of doing things is throwing lawyers at the problem so they react to everything that comes in. They burn themselves out. The business doesn't like them because they slow things down. Totally different game, right? We want to be the business people with legal skills. That sounds like a lot of change. How do you bring business stakeholders who should really like this along with you? And also importantly, how do you bring
00:31:11
Speaker
legal leaders, other lawyers on your team, along with you too, because it's going to mean change for them as well. Absolutely. Yeah. And of course we talked a lot about this yesterday at the conference, but I think that there's totally two sides to the coin to that change. Both sides involve trust. I think that the common thread there is building trust with other people right in the business and whether that's the lawyers or the, or the business people. I had the,
00:31:39
Speaker
You know, the real honor and, you know, I guess luck to have some really strong business leaders in the big class too and in QVC. I mean, they gave me the opportunity to build something which was relatively innovative, an approach to lawyering that was relatively innovative. And so I built trust with, you know, quantitative factual reporting.
00:32:03
Speaker
To finance strategy and to see as well as just working my butt off. Yeah, right. We're proving your value, getting your seat at the table, owning your seat at the table. Doing that requires an enormous amount of effort and that's easy for lawyers to do, right? That's all we do. We actually need to ramp that down.
00:32:24
Speaker
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, going to your business leaders and saying, here's the metrics, here's the numbers, here's the financial outlook here, here's how it aligns with our strategy, our business strategy, really understanding that strategy and where we want to go. I think another
00:32:50
Speaker
Another thing is like to build trust with business people, just enthusiasm. Yeah. Like just straight up enthusiasm about the product, right? Whatever you're doing, this is really cool. This is really interesting. Yes. I've read the report on the competitive situation. Yeah. How can I know more? You know, can I come to the meeting? Great. Come to the meeting.
00:33:11
Speaker
Of course you can't do that many times because you don't have time, right? Because you're spending way too much time doing boring, repeatable, soul destroying work, right? And so it's true. Part of the vision and the journey is how do we get rid of that so we can do more of this, right? Partnering with the business and really enjoying the wins and the losses, right? Learning from the losses and enjoying the wins. And then building trust on them. So then the other side of the coin is
00:33:38
Speaker
Okay, you've built enough trust with the business so that they will let you, you know, either spend more, for Microsoft, it's usually just invest in a different way, right? So you're talking about like, do we want to hire
00:33:53
Speaker
X more lawyers or spend X more on external counsel or do we want to bring in a legal operations leader? Someone who's relatively senior, you always want to hire people smart. Somebody who knows better than you about the problem you're trying to tackle. So bringing in that ops leader, reinvesting in that and then going to your team and saying like the way I always set it up is this isn't about, and there's always fear,
00:34:19
Speaker
Fear, change, there's always fear. I mean, I have fear from change too. I've been through plenty of change and there's always that visceral, you know, fight or flight thing. I go into your team and saying, this is not, as I said, twice already. This isn't about just being faster and cheaper, right? This is about making your life better. Yes. You are, and I mean, lawyers in general, I think, are, I mean,
00:34:42
Speaker
Not a gym, they are. Incredibly smart, hardworking people who are also really creative. They're almost like artists. A strong sense of themselves, too. Yes, yes. Strong values. Strong values, strong ethical compass, et cetera. That's why we become lawyers, right? We have something in our background that says, you do this. They're super driven. They want to succeed. And you come to them and say, well, I'm going to take 40% of what you do.
00:35:09
Speaker
Do it this way that's way faster and more effective and the automatic reaction that I always see almost always is you're taking my job, right? You're taking my fear. Yeah, which you know if you've built trust there's less of that but if you don't know of the people that you're dealing with I think and they can be that automatic reaction and that is not the case
00:35:29
Speaker
Clearly, I don't want to lose great people because we're making things more effective and efficient. I want those people to become the great, creative, innovative in-house lawyers that they can be and business leaders. And I think the simplest piece of advice you could give to anybody in business or otherwise is just trying to create that headspace. Take a step back.
00:35:56
Speaker
open your mind a little bit to the possibility of doing things in a more modern and effective way. And I think if you also, I mean, very practically test case, that's what we did with this contract management stuff is focus on a place where you can win. And I think for us, it was the UK or Australia at the time, English language, they were all about it, very innovative environment. So
00:36:22
Speaker
We did it there, it worked great, and then they become your evangelist. Then they're like, oh, because it works great, I have way less of that garbage. Everyone should be doing this. Everybody should trust the boldness. And then it just sort of goes from there. And we actually talked about this, I think yesterday on the panel, like the idea of reaching a tipping point.
00:36:41
Speaker
where you get to a certain amount of the work is off your lawyer's place. They're having a good time partnering their business, spending more time in meetings and off-sites and understanding the strategy and becoming really strategic leaders.
00:36:56
Speaker
There's a time when that happens somewhere and somebody says, Oh, I get it. It's working. It's working. And for us, it was sort of like 40% of the volume is now off their plates, not 90%. Yes. Like.
00:37:12
Speaker
That takes a long, long time. A lot of work. But 40% is off the plate-ish. And then we literally had people come to us and say, I've got some extra budget. I want to give it to you. That's amazing. Not a lot. I was shocked. Which really, you know, it's one of those moments where you're like, oh, this is a good idea, right? This will actually work. I am not a crazy person.
00:37:37
Speaker
I am in a vein. I am out there. We're doing something that really helps people and changes their lives and accelerates the businesses at the same time. So, you know, from then on, no brainer.
00:37:48
Speaker
I want to double click on one thing you said. You talked about bringing metrics when you go to a CFO or you go to sales ops or you go to other sales leaders or marketing stores. Tell me a little bit more about how you use data to communicate internally and to build trust internally. Absolutely.
00:38:07
Speaker
I think everybody now, even in-house lawyers, understands that we need to use numbers in a business. It's actually quite a ridiculous thing to say out loud, right? You need to use numbers in a business. But 20 years ago, nobody used numbers in a business in the legal department. It was just sort of like, give me some money and I'll do this qualitative thing that you guys can't understand.
00:38:30
Speaker
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 on external counsel spend over previous years on my phone.
00:38:51
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 viable. There was a system in place, but it was one of these, you know, we're sort of four or five generations in and out to the technology that we can use in an in-house situation. This is sort of second.
00:39:13
Speaker
Yeah, 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 gotta say My biggest partner and that one is a strategy
00:39:26
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 them exactly. They're 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.
00:39:49
Speaker
Then you can, I mean, I would always do unplanned and planned updates. 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
00:40:20
Speaker
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. 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 gotta manage for. Spend over time versus revenue, and TL, I totally will spend over time versus revenue. And then, eventually, versus benchmarks.
00:40:49
Speaker
So that's that's the real company. Yes. Yes, and that is super hard. 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 on who works there, how much they spend on external counsel, you know, lawyers per billion, etc. Like,
00:41:17
Speaker
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. That's the kind of thing that makes your CFO smile. Absolutely. This guy is really trying. Gets it. Well, he may not be as good with this as my head of strategy, but
00:41:44
Speaker
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?
00:42:08
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 and you put. I want to start to wrap up by asking you about the future.
00:42:27
Speaker
where you think legal is headed, where you think legal ops is headed. You didn't say this, but you brought up a sort of provocative idea of potentially GCs in the future reporting into a head of legal ops or a legal ops and operations leader.
00:42:47
Speaker
Tell us where you think the function's headed. Sure, sure. Yeah, well, I think as the legal operations is even more nascent in its development than the in-house legal function. Legal ops didn't exist as a profession 15 years ago. It is now a relatively well-formed sort of
00:43:09
Speaker
group of responsibilities, but it's still in many places not as respected as it should be, right? And it's not as senior as it should be. And it's almost like in-house legal just a little bit earlier in its development where there's no training. There's no like clear, this is what you should be doing as a legal operations leader. There are a few people doing it. There's some great books.
00:43:34
Speaker
that you can get that sort of wrap it up nicely. But I think, you know, as operations develops, as the value of it increases over time, we're talking like both in sophistication and now in intelligence, because of all the artificial intelligence stuff that's happening, that function will just continue to be more and more valuable to a business. And I say that like specifically to the business, not necessarily just
00:43:59
Speaker
to the legal function because operations is much more than legal, right? Operations is the place in legal where you have like a direct physical almost connection into the business, to the sales operations function, to the marketing operations function, et cetera, to the CFO, to finance directly, right? They can see your system, you can see their systems, you can tweak and accelerate the business. So I think that will become more and more important and as Meghan Niedermaier said yesterday,
00:44:28
Speaker
Like legal operations should, for most general counsels, be your first hire, right? You should have some form of operations as early as possible as you can in a modern effect, in a single function. Yeah. And then the quote about.
00:44:43
Speaker
ops leaders managing the general counsel. I heard that from the CEO of the legal tech business in the last week. And I can't say I agree completely with the quote, you know, having been a general counsel or whatever. But I really like the idea of sort of just like changing the mind. Like nobody never said that to me.
00:45:02
Speaker
I love that, it's disruptive. And I think the legal tech space and the innovation around legal operations is the most disruptive and innovative part of the in-house legal sort of sector at the moment. So I just love the fact that people would say to my face, right? You imagine in the old days coming to a general council meeting like, well, you should report to the ops person. But now we see plenty of
00:45:29
Speaker
lawyers reporting to COOs of businesses, right? Sometimes it's the CFO, but often... Becoming COOs of businesses or CFOs or even CEOs of businesses. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And like the move from a business person with legal skills to the COO of a business isn't that big of a leap, right? It's all about project management. It's all about effectiveness, efficiency, managing.
00:45:52
Speaker
process policies and technology really well. I think there's definitely something to the fact that it's not so much that the general counsel reports to the ops leader, but the person who does the job of leading legal function, leadership is the key skill. And that's business leadership. And business leadership is a lot of operations. You can have a great idea, but if the ops falls down, the business will not succeed. So yeah, ops is the future.
00:46:21
Speaker
That's a great place to act. Thank you so much for joining us today, David. We really appreciate you sharing your insight with all of our listeners. And thanks to all those who are listening. We'll see you next time on the abstract. Thanks for having me. Cheers.