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Mapping Your Career in Law: Akshay Verma’s Blueprint for Success
160 Plays1 year ago
What do companies and clients really want from lawyers? How can you align your career with your values while pursuing your ambitions? What makes a world-class legal operations team?
In the fourth episode of The Abstract, we sit down with the brilliant Akshay Verma, Head of Legal Operations at Coinbase, as he tackles these burning questions and more. Drawing from his extensive two-decade journey, Akshay Verma shares a wealth of wisdom — from his early days practicing environmental law at law firms to leading in-house legal ops teams for companies at various stages and scales.
You’ll get the chance to peek into Akshay’s Critical Lawyering Skills course at Santa Clara University School of Law, and listen as he dives deep into topics like charting your path after law school, navigating career transitions, and finding meaningful employment. He also offers advice to companies hiring early-career legal professionals on how to stay competitive and attract top talent.
Topics:
Introduction – 00:00
Navigating career transitions in law, pt.1 – 1:11
Going in-house and becoming a business counsel – 4:22
The evolution of the legal ops role – 9:02
Navigating career transitions in law, pt.2 – 10:26
Heading legal operations at Meta & Coinbase – 11:35
Leveraging job interviews to lay down the roadmap – 13:40
Akshay’s background in teaching at law school – 15:57
Critical lawyering skills that law school doesn’t teach – 18:05
Integrating your values into career decisions – 20:33
What companies and clients want from lawyers – 25:42
Attracting top legal talent amid changing priorities – 29:14
How legal and legal ops is changing – 31:31
Connect with us:
Akshay Verma - https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshay-verma-esq/
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 & Background
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome listeners to this episode of the abstract podcast. I am Tyler Finn. I lead community and growth for spot draft. And we're coming to you live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas, where we're at clocks global Institute 2023.
00:00:24
Speaker
I'm lucky to be joined today by Akshay Verma, my friend and the head of legal operations at Coinbase. Thanks for being on the podcast, Akshay. Thanks for having me, man. Excited. We've got a great set of questions here for you and for our audience talking today all about your interesting career from being an attorney.
00:00:44
Speaker
through leading legal ops, first at Meta, now at Coinbase, as well as a bunch of advice that you have for folks who are looking to break into the law, find their passion within the law, maybe pursue a career in something slightly different within the law.
Early Career & Inspiration
00:01:00
Speaker
I wanna get started by asking you when you decided you wanted to pursue a career in the law, and back then, where you thought your career was gonna go.
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah. I, if you would have asked me this question 10 years ago, it would have been a very different answer 20 years ago and even more different answer. But, you know, for me, this goes back to junior high in the Bay area.
00:01:26
Speaker
In eighth grade, we took a science trip to Yosemite, and it was a week-long stay in the valley, and this is a long time ago, 1989, and we had two-day content around environmental issues of the day. So back then, it was CFCs, which were big aerosol component that were destroying the ozone. Deforestation was a big issue. Styrofoam recycling was really starting to become
00:01:51
Speaker
a part of like everyday lexicon for folks. And it was my first real kind of education on those topics and I was hooked right away.
00:02:01
Speaker
And so kind of stuck with it through high school, in college, I did a minor in environmental science. And in my junior year, I took a environmental law class at Cal, then really starting understanding the way that the law, policy, environmentalism came together to form what in the
00:02:23
Speaker
late 90s at this time was a very, very growing field and decided at that time that, you know, I wanted to do something in the environment, which had been brewing for a while. And the way that I was really going to kind of tackle those issues was going to be through the wall. And so that kind of set me on the path to be an environmental lawyer, which I ended up doing out of law school. Obviously I'm not doing that anymore.
00:02:47
Speaker
I think you'd end up in DC or something like that. Was that the idea? This is something about your career. I teach a career path in class in the law
Transition to Tech & Axiom
00:02:56
Speaker
now. I wish I had had the tools that we teach in the class to have engaged in the process back then to really think it through. I didn't. Like most 20 year olds, I didn't really think things through.
00:03:10
Speaker
kind of go with what I thought was best without a ton of information. We didn't have the internet really back then either. So a lot of this was like, I think I want to do this. This sounds good. Let me go do it. Oh crap. I didn't really like this. Let me go do something else. It was really that kind of a calculus rather than a intentional plan where you go out and you try and understand the landscape and then figure out where you want to play in it. So how long did you practice environmental law before you started to pivot into tech?
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah. So I practiced law for seven years, almost seven years. I was at Pillsbury, uh, for two of those years, doing a lot of regulatory work in the environment. And then I jumped over to a smaller firm in San Francisco called for a Lebrono Martel. Did a lot of environmental litigation there, some regulatory work as well. In 2012, uh, we were about to have our first child. So I jumped ship in the summer that year.
00:04:07
Speaker
to leave the law firm life entirely and go over to the business side of the law at Axiom. Really pivotal kind of moment for me in my career, which has now kind of led into this incredible path that I'm really enjoying on the operational side. Tell me a little bit more about Axiom because at the time,
00:04:25
Speaker
Today, fractional legal help, the ability to provide that. There's a lot of opportunities out there for lawyers who want to do something a little bit different or not do this 40, 60-hour work week. But Axiom was really innovating. Tell me a little bit about what the idea was and what drew you to Axiom and made you decide to take that leap. They actually found me. I knew nothing about them in 2012.
00:04:54
Speaker
I was, as I was doing my search in the early part of the year to figure out what was going to be next, I kind of was still in a traditional mindset. Okay. I've been in a law firm like for seven years. In-house is kind of a natural next step, but I explored some government work, a city attorney's office in San Francisco, a few county council office roles.
00:05:18
Speaker
Solar startups were kind of a big deal in 2012. They're still kind of hard with that as much. And so I looked at a bunch of solar startups to go in house there. Nothing was really kind of panning out in the first few months. And then I got a ping from Axiom. So I actually went to Axiom to practice. That was the first conversation that I had with them. They had a few roles lining up for the next couple of years with a couple of different energy companies.
00:05:45
Speaker
And so that was really interesting to me. Hey, no 60, 80,
Role Evolution & Networking
00:05:50
Speaker
100 hour weeks, much more growth, a different direction of growth. I think I started learning this about myself during that kind of process. I really enjoyed being a lawyer. I was a good lawyer, but there was an aspect to lawyering that I was missing.
00:06:09
Speaker
which was around business counsel and outside counsel, you know, it's hit or miss whether they're good business counsel. And I think I, I think I saw the opportunity to really thrive in that atmosphere. So that's what drew me to Axiom in the first place. And I met a guy by the name of David Pierce. He's one of those people that, you know, he kind of meet and we clicked right away as humans. And, and so I learned a lot about his path, which is very similar. Big law lawyer was in house for a while and he was running the business at Axiom.
00:06:39
Speaker
And so we got to talking and I was like, I really enjoy doing things like business development in the offer world. Like what about not practicing with you? And what about something like that at Axiom? And so that started about a three month process and then I had an offer on the table. And so that's what really got me into the world of running legal departments. So I was a consultant at Axiom in 2012. They were this,
00:07:08
Speaker
I mean, they've been around for 12 years, but there were still this like, just breaking on the scene, legal rebel, which really kind of spoke to me as a kind of a value. And so I really loved what they were doing, why they were doing it. They were the antithesis of everything that I hated at the law firm life. And I was like, this is pretty cool. And it's had a great culture, great vibe, everyone's really energized, great talent. Some of them are here actually, people I've known for 12 years now.
00:07:38
Speaker
And so that is kind of the beginning of the journey that got me into what it takes to run the legal departments on the business side. That's awesome. You seem to think of yourself now as more of a business person, as a business person who happens to have a law degree, happens to have some experience practicing law.
00:07:58
Speaker
Was that a mindset shift that you felt like you had to make intentionally? Did it just feel natural? Was it an evolution? Yeah, I think it's one of those things where you've kind of always known, but not really. And I didn't have the chance to really let that part of myself shine in the law firm world because you're cranking away on, you know, drafting memos and researching and going to court, which I enjoyed.
00:08:20
Speaker
But you didn't really have that opportunity to go out there and really build business, right? The ML 100, wherever the law firm life is, there aren't a ton of new clients for associates to go and pick up.
00:08:33
Speaker
I was a natural networker. I enjoyed doing it. Uh, so I built this network, which I was able to leverage much more completely in my maximum life than I ever was as a lawyer. So I kind of got the best of both worlds, but I haven't built hours. I mean, the first month that I was at Axiom, I remember having this distinct like, wait, I'm not doing time entry. Like something feels weird. And so, and so, but then you get over that pretty quick and I started to get a paycheck. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:09:02
Speaker
So then you started to move into a legal ops role, to be in an axiom for a while. Where was legal ops as a profession at that point? Yeah. So early in my axiom 10 years, so an axiom was predominantly serving technology clients. It was 70% of my client base. I did other sectors as well, but it was predominant here. No, you're not here, but in the Bay Area. So I got to work with, you know, 40, 50 GCs.
00:09:30
Speaker
mainly big companies, but a lot of mid cap companies, smaller companies. And in the first, I'd say three-ish years of my axiom tenure, my client contacts were GCs, their deputies. In the second half of my axiom tenure, my main points of contact and clients were evolving into heads of legal ops.
00:09:55
Speaker
So already just in my, you know, almost seven year timeframe at Axiom, you had seen this shift into a specific role, generally with a specified remit function within the legal department, usually with a team supporting it. Relatively, you know, all over the place with respect to what the legal office meant, what was included, who did what.
00:10:23
Speaker
but there was a dedicated person to that. And I actually, I remember talking to a
Work at Facebook & Move to Coinbase
00:10:30
Speaker
client of mine who was a head of legal ops somewhere in like 2017 or so, asked her a lot of questions. She was a former practicing lawyer, very similar kind of path, hadn't done the consulting bit. She was really enjoying being on the operational side. And then just kind of fortuitously, like in 2018, I've been at Axiom for a long time and I think I tend to get bored.
00:10:53
Speaker
You kind of tend to kind of tap out in one place. I think that's just a natural human thing. Like, you know, I understand that in my parents' generation, like, you know, they, they worked for 30 years at the same place. I just, that was never going to be me. And so I started getting a little bit of an itch in the spring of 2018.
00:11:12
Speaker
Cambridge and Facebook was on my clients Cambridge kind of broke on the scene Cambridge Analytica and I got really deeply entrenched with the legal ops team at Facebook and then they asked me to join later in that year So that was kind of not just the evolution of the role and kind of a prominence that the role was coming to but my own kind of This is kind of the next thing for me. So cool. Yeah
00:11:36
Speaker
Just to round out your career, you spent, for the audience, you spent a little while at Facebook, then moved to Coinbase. Was that about following a person? Tell me a little bit about your time in legal ops so far at those two places. Yeah. Facebook was a massive department, even when I got there. It was about 800 people when I got there in 2018. By the time I left, it was 2,000 people. That's huge. That's a huge department. I never even worked for a company.
00:12:07
Speaker
So that you just learn a lot in that scale and you're working in that scale. You learn a lot. I have a lot of resources that, that meta that I think really helped me with that. And her fantastic manager, Alan Lowe, like David Pierce was my manager and I actually credit him for a lot of how I learned to meet, to manage and same thing with Alan. And so.
00:12:35
Speaker
For me, I think I'm also starting to think about, do I want to be at a huge place? Remain there, do some cool innovation.
00:12:46
Speaker
Or do I want to try and implement the things that we've done here somewhat on the ground floor and see if the building blocks for this can be truly operational as the department scales? So I came to Coinbase, predominantly for that reason. I also knew nothing about crypto, which was really interesting to me. I'm a year in and just falling in love with the industry and kind of mission.
00:13:13
Speaker
So a lot of that played into kind of the decision-making process. There were people involved. A lot of former meta folks had joined Coinbase, so there was familiarity there. They're chief legal officer. I've known for a long time, Paul Graywall. So that's their draw as well. But yeah, for me, the opportunity to do cool things and innovate is really what this role and this function has been about. And that really was
Teaching & Career Planning
00:13:38
Speaker
what drew me there.
00:13:40
Speaker
You told me a good story about how your interview for Coinbase actually set the roadmap for what ultimately became your first six months or nine months there. Can you tell us about the question that they put to you and how that helped you?
00:13:58
Speaker
get your feet down beneath you and start running as soon as you joined. It's a labor intensive process for the employer to engage in this type of a process for interviewing. I think it's so critical, particularly in senior roles. So I had my kind of normal interviews with the full slate, both within legal and outside legal, which I think is incredibly important as well for this role.
00:14:23
Speaker
But it culminated in a 20-minute presentation that I did for a small panel at Coinbase. And the main kind of question that was posed to me that I walked the team through was, what differentiates a world-class legal operations team from your kind of run-of-the-mill legal operations team? I wonder where we got the title of the panel that we did yesterday at the clock.
00:14:52
Speaker
I think we're at a place now in the profession where we can actually say that, like we can say, here's what differentiates. I don't know that you could have said that five years ago. So that's in and of itself, I think is a great thing to be able to do, but it forced me to really kind of sit with that question for a couple of days, think about it, like what's worked well here? What could I improve? Think about my experience at Meta, and then be able to take that to one base. And so as I was putting the slides together,
00:15:22
Speaker
It really just ended up transitioning nicely when I got the job in my first 30 days to put a roadmap in front of leadership fairly easily.
00:15:33
Speaker
And so I just thought it was great. I'm a big believer in planning and forethought before you just kind of jump in, particularly in operations, like we just buy technology sometime and I'm just like, let's just go do this. Like, Hey, let's just pause for a minute. Why are we doing this? What's the plan? Where do things go south? How do we mitigate? Like, I think all of those things are important for you. Taking a more strategic, longer view, basically. Absolutely. With this background on you,
00:16:00
Speaker
One of the things that I wanted to talk to you quite a bit about today is the course that you've been teaching for five, six years now at your alma mater, Santa Clara Law School. It's focused on how you find a career that's fulfilling, rewarding in the law.
00:16:17
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about how you got into teaching and designed the course. Yeah, so I didn't design the course, but I do teach it. But I did design a course, which was my first entry into teaching in law school. That was about five, six years ago. And it was a very similar kind of story. It was a course in practical application of environmental law. So I've been at Axiom about five years. I got in touch with
00:16:45
Speaker
a professor at Santa Clara, we had coffee, he was asking me, like, you know, what should we be thinking about giving students that they're not getting in law school? And I was like, I didn't know how to do anything like that. Like, I didn't know how to do anything about our research, but like, it wasn't particularly helpful. So what if we built a course that was all experiential for three Ls? Maybe two Ls, but definitely three Ls who were interested in environmental law. And I was like, I could build it. I could pick five or six things that I did as an environmental lawyer.
00:17:15
Speaker
put them into a module, have a guest speaker that's the first part of the module, and then a practical exercise that's the second part of the module. So we built that course together, pitched it to the university, to the law school. They agreed, and I taught them that course just for one semester. And it was awesome. I just loved the experience. I had about 16 or 17 students in my first class who were really engaged in conversation, had phenomenal guest speakers.
00:17:45
Speaker
We did oral advocacy, we did petition writing, we did real estate environmental due diligence, like really cool stuff that like you just don't learn in law school, but you need to know as a practitioner. And so I really got that bug of teaching. I've been a coach since I was in high schools. I really enjoy engaging in teaching. And then maybe a semester later, the law school decided to implement a course as a mandatory course for second semester one else.
00:18:14
Speaker
And it's called critical lawyering skills.
00:18:17
Speaker
It's encapsulated. It's all the things that law school doesn't teach you. That's cool. It's mandatory. It's mandatory for one else, which I credit the law school and Professor Dorepina for really pushing that. Our students need to know this. And there's a lot of data-backed kind of information as to why this is important. Our profession is historically, even now, horrible with things like mental illness, stress, substance abuse.
00:18:46
Speaker
And so a big kind of driver for mitigating those circumstances is knowing yourself, your values, what you care about, what's not going to mesh with you, then understanding the landscape that's out there, and then figuring out a way to marry those. Like, where am I going to fit in? What's really going to... I won't call it a passion because I don't think everyone needs to follow their passion as a career. Sure. I would say teaching is a passion of mine, but it's not my career, right?
00:19:18
Speaker
But I get to do it and I get to satisfy a part of myself. And then planning it. So how do you go from what you understand yourself to be, what you understand the market to be, to where you want to play, to getting to that. And so there are some execution steps along the way. Understanding information from networking, understanding the landscape from reading about different kinds of roles, and then putting yourself out there. So we do a lot. It's, again, it's an experiential learning course.
00:19:48
Speaker
and we talk a lot about our feelings that I've never would have done that in law school. Like, why do I care about this? Do I care about this? Why does this matter to me so much? I just got an email this morning from one of my students this last semester. Hey, reminding me that I need to turn grades in, which I haven't done. But also really just thanking me for the semester and the content. And she said, I've actually used a lot of these tactics just in the last week as I get ready for my summer employment.
00:20:17
Speaker
And to me, that's a huge win. You know, it's amazing. Students are able to take this. We just learned it this semester, start applying it immediately and actually seeing some benefit out of it. Our audience is going to be lucky because in the next couple of questions, they're going to get to audit a little bit of your course.
00:20:35
Speaker
One of the modules that you touched on is around the role that values play in shaping your career and what path you decide to go down. Let's, let's talk about that both sort of from your perspective, how the values informed your career and also how do you teach that? Yeah. And of course mine was very unintentional in my own journey. So if I was reflective kind of looking back, I could see a pattern. Yeah. Innovation.
00:21:03
Speaker
Um, being on the cutting edge, taking risks. Like those are values that I think I embody. And so that's what has led me down the path that I've been in the last 11 years. So we do an exercise. I think it's the, I think it's the fourth class where they do a value exercise. There's 50 cards that they cut out and they each have values on them. And they're, you know, they're not.
00:21:33
Speaker
a complete list of all values that human beings embody, but then they have to pick their top three to five. Okay, so they do a scoring mechanism. And then we talk about them in the class. That's their homework. We come back, we talk about them in the class. And then we marry that to like how they're going to find that in the organization that they're looking for, in the roles that they're looking for. And then in particular, we do role planning around particular client situations or employee employer situations where the values are not matching up.
00:22:02
Speaker
And a precursor to that are some of the statistics around, you know, mental health and substance abuse in our profession. And one of the questions I asked the class, like, here's the data on all of this for lawyers.
00:22:18
Speaker
What's the why? Why is this data exists? Everybody has great answers and no right answer. For me, it comes down to an unreasonable expectation versus reality situation.
Networking & Student Priorities
00:22:31
Speaker
Sure. And the way I think you close that gap is by education. What does it really like to work in big law? What does it really like to work in government? Well, you talk to people as much as you can. They'll never truly replace the actual experience, but you'll get a lot more information.
00:22:46
Speaker
So that, combined with the values, really helps you drive towards, where should I be looking? So instead of the carpet bomb approach that we would take, I took for my job applications back in the day, they could have somewhat of a more targeted approach. And they can then filter and vet the conversations that they have with the baseline of, hey, this is what I care about. Are you the same? Is there a match here?
00:23:10
Speaker
And it doesn't have to be a yes and that's only who I'll go with. But if it's a no or it's a maybe, then you have an expectation or you need to build it with yourself about what that experience could be like for you. But the understanding comes first. And that's really where the values conversation comes in. How about skills? Because that's another big focus of the course. And helping folks understand what skills do they want to be pursuing throughout their career? How did those match up with?
00:23:37
Speaker
what they're getting themselves into. Tell us a little bit about that. Yes, one of the concepts we talked about in the class is there are two main goals for law grads upon graduation. Number one, pass the bar. Sure. Right? Whether you want to practice or not, you should pass the bar. Number two, find meaningful employment. And that qualifier is incredibly important because what does meaningful employment mean? It means something different to everybody. But how do you understand what that means for you? So there's a Venn diagram in the literature that we use.
00:24:07
Speaker
It's now four circles, but I really like to think of it in three. So it's your values, your interests, and your skill sets. And in the center is meaningful employment. Are you going to get in the center right after graduation? Chances are low, but you want to know where that is. So that's your plan. Then you have the building blocks in those three circles. You understand your values. If your values and your interests will change over time, and that's OK, but you want to understand that.
00:24:37
Speaker
Your skill sets are fully within your control. You can go out in law school, externships, internships, even some classes now that they're teaching in law school actually teach you how to do things like draft contracts and so forth. So you build up your skill sets that drive you towards that center. So that's where the role of skill sets, whether it's oral advocacy, whether it's networking, whether it's relationship building, whether it's
00:25:02
Speaker
Brief writing, whatever those skill sets are that you need to grow in order to get towards that meaningful employment that is meaningful to you is another area of focus that they can start on right away. Let's talk a little about our relationships which you just mentioned and you've mentioned a few folks so far who have been important sort of mentors to you or guides to you as you've grown over the course of your career. This has actually been a recurring theme on the podcast too as you can imagine.
00:25:29
Speaker
How do you think about the importance of relationships and teaching people how to network and how to find mentors? How have you been able to find mentors throughout your career? Yeah. Another pre, the first class in this, the first course section in the class, I put a chart up there.
00:25:52
Speaker
And the precursor conversation to putting the chart up there is about research that has been done over the last 10 years. And they refresh this every couple of years. They go out to 35, 40,000 clients and employers.
00:26:07
Speaker
And they survey them and they ask them, what do you want most out of your lawyers? Who's they in this case? So the employers and clients. They survey. So it looks like Coinbase, for example. We got that survey. This is what we value most out of our lawyers. And then they do a top 10 list. So I put the top 10 up there. And it's an eye opening moment for most students. It was eye opening for me when I first read this material. I'm actually a little surprised.
00:26:33
Speaker
Seven of the ten have nothing to do with the practice of law. And near the top is relationship building. Interested. Right? Invested in the values of your employer or your client. Responsiveness. Work ethic.
00:26:48
Speaker
intentionality around those kinds of things, right? They don't teach any of that in law school. The three that are not in a category or more hardcore kind of hard skills that you did teach in law school, oral advocacy, communication, research skills, your typical lawyering stuff, but that's only three of the top 10. So that then really launches into a lot of the rest of the stuff that we talk about.
00:27:12
Speaker
you'll learn the other three in law school. The other seven, you already have, because those are life skills. But guess what? They're the most important career skills in this profession. And I'm not telling you that. Your clients and employers who are going to be paying you money are telling you that. So maybe we should listen. And so that really then gets into conversations around relationship building. And I firmly believe in the in-house world, it's the bedrock of how anything gets done.
00:27:40
Speaker
When you need people to go back for you, when you want to go back for someone, when you're in the muck and things have gone south, for example, in a CLM implementation, you need to draw upon those relationships. You're like, hey, look, we're going to get through this, but I need you to trust me, or you're being asked that. That's really critical, because that's how you get through the really tough thing. Anybody can get through the bull market. That's easy. It's the bear market that you really, really want to have those relationships solidified that gets you through it. It's set under the top 10.
00:28:10
Speaker
aren't really about the practice of law. It actually, this is not in my notes, it makes you wonder if more than, credit to the school for having one course and having it mandatory, but it makes you wonder if there should be more education or there should be a thread all throughout law school or education, broadly, right? I agree with you, man. I think back on my own path and I was like, I wish I would have had some of this formalized
00:28:37
Speaker
education in high school, in college, certainly in law school. I think it's tremendously helpful. I spoke on a panel yesterday and I was telling the panelists about this class and one of the GCs was like, I wish I would have taken that class in high school. I was like, I want to take it now. And I use a lot of this material for myself. Sure. It's a constant reevaluation process. Like you have to constantly question, maybe not constantly, but annually at least.
00:29:02
Speaker
Question yourself, am I headed in the right direction? Am I happy? Why? What's driving me?
Future of Legal Ops & Personal Speculations
00:29:07
Speaker
Because it keeps you engaged. And if you're engaged, your employer's happy, your team's happy, your family's happy. So it's really important to understand those things about yourself. You have a pretty interesting perspective, I think, given where you sit and the students that you're working with on maybe some of the anxieties or fears that folks who are about to graduate from law school are grappling with.
00:29:31
Speaker
A lot of listeners are probably thinking about hiring some of those folks. Can you tell us a little bit about what are millennial, density law school students grappling with today? How are they thinking about breaking into the law or going and getting careers, building careers? Yeah. I have seen an incredible evolution in the priorities of law students and law grads, particularly over the last five years that I've been teaching.
00:30:01
Speaker
And I think even non-law student, early stage professionals are voicing this as well. And surveys and data will reveal as well. People care a lot more now about mental wellness, balance in their lives, whatever that means for them. I don't think it has to be even, even, you know, work life, like what the right balance is for you is important.
00:30:28
Speaker
Those kinds of priorities have taken over things like compensation, choice and autonomy matter a lot more. For all its ills, the pandemic has been a really good thing for professionals in whatever sphere they tend to work in, but particularly the legal profession in terms of the choice that they want, over what they do, how they do it, when they do it.
00:30:52
Speaker
So to all the employers out there, whether you're hiring fresh grads or not, you need to create an employee experience to be competitive. And that has to do with more than just your compensation and your stock option packages and so forth. There's an element of that that is incredibly highly prioritized, particularly by these law students. And you hear it from them as we engage in this material. So you hear about it from their values.
00:31:19
Speaker
Those have changed. I used to hear a lot about success and money, right, values, which I had when I was a law student. And now it's more family and time and autonomy and happiness. I just think that's a great thing for human beings. I want to start to conclude by looking to the future, both for you and also for the future of legal ops and the legal profession.
00:31:43
Speaker
Where do you see your own career headed and where do you see the legal ops function or the legal function headed over the next five, 10 years? There's been so much change in our profession and in departments just in the last couple of years. Who knows? I don't even know. I couldn't even begin to think how much all the different categories of AI are going to change, how
00:32:07
Speaker
legal work is delivered internally and by law firms and by ALSPs over the next couple of years. So I think understanding that is a key role that legal operations will play. A big focus for me that I've shared numerous times this week is how does this function intentionally get closer to the business? We are a business function for all intents and purposes. So I think we've done a great job serving our stakeholders in legal.
00:32:38
Speaker
but that's one step removed from the information that we need to serve them better, so to speak. So I think understanding business roadmaps, priorities, pain points is gonna start becoming for my team anyway, a much higher priority to understand so that we can advise our legal counterparts, our legal stakeholders matters. So I think that's kind of the next evolution in this particular profession, which is just absolutely exploding right now.
00:33:05
Speaker
In your own career? I'm not gonna let you out. Yeah! I'm not sure, to be honest. What I do know is that there's so much opportunity in this space. Whether that means that I remain in an operational role. Do I start working more heavily in legal tech in some way?
00:33:25
Speaker
Is there a COO role somewhere in my future? I'm seasoned enough now to know that I'll know when it comes across.
Conclusion & Wrap Up
00:33:36
Speaker
I'm in a position, you know, both in my role at Coinbase, but also through legal operators and the other companies that I both advise and work with and know about to know that when a role kind of opens up that I will be ready to make the change if I want to.
00:33:54
Speaker
So I don't particularly, my students should not hear this thing. But again, I'm 23 years into my career and I think I'm allowed a little bit of leeway to really like, I think I will know when it comes across. But I have several different options that are available to me and that's kind of an exciting place to be. It's very confidence instilling. You know, I think I really enjoy thinking about what's possible. And so
00:34:21
Speaker
And if you're willing to take a risk, and I've done that particularly well, I think over the last 10, 11 years, if I'm willing to take a risk on myself, then the world can really be my oyster. I can't wait to see what you build. Thanks, man. Yeah. Thank you so much for being here with us. Thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of The Abstract. And hope to hear you all or see you all next time. Thanks, Todd. Thanks so much.