Transcript
Speaker: I try to carve out intentional time and it really like almost feels like electric because the to-do list is so long. yeah and Really try to go and experiment and build.
Speaker: And that's actually really, really fun. Like, you know, I'd much rather spend some time on a Friday afternoon trying to figure out, okay, well, how can I find the right way to get information from these three different projects and synthesize it so I'm focusing on the right thing coming Monday morning versus trying to like navigate and pull together all those inputs myself.
Speaker: So I think I just like actively spending time and investments in learning right now is super important.
Speaker: Hi everyone, this is Akshay Verma again, your host of the Beacon Voices podcast. Really excited today to have a conversation with one of my former colleagues from Facebook. Yes, I still have a hard time calling it Meta, Rebecca Punick, who is now the general counsel at an amazing company called FAIR. Rebecca, thanks for joining us today.
Speaker: Well, thanks so much for having me, Akshay. How's your Friday going? It's going great, yeah. um I know the sunshine's back. Hopefully we're done with the rain and it's coming through nice and clear back from your window and my window as well. So great day to have a conversation around all things legal, legal operations, legal technology, and excited to have you share some of your insights about your journey with us. And I'd love to start at the very beginning of the journey around your your desire to go to law school, around your desire to be a lawyer, What was it about those early days? And you can go as far back in your early days as you think are appropriate to share with us about really thinking about, yes, this is this is the career that I want to pursue as a lawyer.
Speaker: Yeah, you know, it's such an interesting question for me, because I i think some part of me was always really interested in the legal profession, like even way back when I was really little, I liked like, detective novels, and just ah persuasive writing. But i was also incredible incredibly like painfully quiet kid, never commented in class, you know, only had like a very small number of close friendships. And so I really thought that there was no way I would ever become a lawyer. I was like secretly interested in it and I completely wrote it off as a possibility because in my mind, lawyers were these really performative personalities. i you know, I had an image in my mind of like,
Speaker: the classic trial lawyer, generally male, like big imposing presence, uh, sort of ah aggressive bearing. And that just really couldn't have been further away from who I was. um so when I went to college, i I think I was like interested it, but had written it off. Uh, and then very early, I think it was just like my, my freshman year getting to new, no, my new doormates. Um, you know, one of the people i was talking to was ah another petite female, kinda nerdy like me. um And we were just talking about what we wanted to do. And she's like, yeah I'm gonna become a lawyer. And she was completely confident that this was that was right for her. yeah
Speaker: And it was such a small thing, but it kind of like blew open my like stereotype of what this profession was for. And, um you know, like really that one conversation was like the trigger to me thinking, you know I actually, I think I'm going explore this law thing. um And so that's what I did. you know, I think the latent interest was there, but just having that one conversation.
Speaker: person who kind of was outside this classic mold was enough for me to think that I could actually do. All right. So, so here you are, you're this, and I'll call Kecker a big law because it really is. Even though it's a boutique and it's a smaller firm, they really, they really operate in a big firm standard from a, from a, from quality perspective, a brand perspective. Many big law associates that I worked with transitioned. I also went to a smaller firm. I went to Ferrella, Bronte Martel, again, would be considered a litigation boutique with the same kind of brand. Kecker was one of those. So you're coming from a big law world of practicing as outside counsel and you get into your first in-house role.
Speaker: What was that transition like? Tell us some of the challenges. Tell us what you really enjoyed. Yeah, I mean, it was a wild transition, especially because Instacart was still like so early in its journey. i went from this quite nice office in the Gaslamp District in San Francisco, or I had like a lovely office.
Speaker: And it was at the time, Instacart was basically in this like big warehouse with a lot of IKEA furniture, and it was sort of just yeah know it had a very It felt very young and like everything was just being built. yeah ah The legal function was really, like I said, at its inception. There was no infrastructure. And so it was a huge transition, but I really loved it in a way. i think it was, I feel so lucky that that was my first job because it taught me immediately to just solve problems. I mean, there was like nobody else to go to you know, just on like very like, what does product counseling look like? Well, I don't know. I will figure this out. Fortunately, Mikhail, the first shec had come from Google that had like literally created product counseling as a discipline. So I had to look resources to draw on and do that.
Speaker: it very quickly developed this like reflex in me to like, you know, I will just do my best to figure out the answer here. And if it's not perfect, it's going to be a lot better than the kind of winging it, you know, like the lack of any infrastructure that had existed before that outside of it.
Speaker: outside counsel. So that was that was really ah a very valuable skill to develop early. And then the other thing that I feel fortunate that I had in that role was that when the company is that small, you get a lot of very direct exposure with the company's leadership. So the CEO, the CFO, once they had that role, you And that immediate feedback in terms of what is important to this person, like how is my advice landing? um
Speaker: How are they reacting to this immediately oriented me towards finding the right way to help the business and get the business there like path forward. Whereas I think if I had started out at someplace that was bigger, you just get far, thinking you know things that go up to the CEO, there's gonna be like a much smaller percentage of them because things have kind of like settled more. And then oftentimes when things do go up to that level, it's gonna go through, you know the attorney who worked on it initially is probably not necessarily gonna be the one presenting that information. so I think those parts of of that role, I was very lucky to get that kind of very quickly. Yeah. I mean, one aspect of of that is your thoughts, your advice, your work product going up to the executives. The other is you're much closer for their vision of the company and what really matters. And I think that is a game changer for many lawyers who try to make the transition
Speaker: from being outside counsel at firms to going in-house. um And many are are not successful. And and I think there there's plenty been written and said about why that might be over-indexing on risk and not really understanding and being able to see the business outcomes and then and then adjusting your risk profile to to achieve those business outcomes. There's that famous line. and We don't say no.
Speaker: We say yes, but, or yes, and, as as in-house counsel to to advise executives and and our business partners. um Did you ever feel in that transition from Kecker to Instacart that you're like, gosh, this is a higher hill to climb to achieve that than maybe I had originally envisioned?
Speaker: It was... I don't know if it was harder. It was just different. Like you, I think when ah you're at a firm, you're aiming for perfect or as close to perfect as you can. And you spend a ton of time polishing yeah grief, that argument to get it just as good as possible until it's, you know, shiny. And especially the firm where I was at, at the bar was very, very high.
Speaker: Um, And at a startup or especially early in this journey, there's just imperfection everywhere. yeah the goal is like, how can we do this thing? How can we do it as well as possible? And how can I help the company make smart decisions? And um so that definitely required ah reorientation, but But it was also, and and you know, like a willingness to engage in big problems and small. So it was sometimes it was like, how do we navigate this very complex litigation in an area where there isn't a lot of existing case law because what we're doing is new.
Speaker: But sometimes it was like, how do we charge bottle deposits in a way that's accurate? Yeah. um So it wast it was just like a very different set of problems. um and you know, the complexity really just like spanned the gamut. And the key skill was a willingness to just roll up your sleeves and like try to solve the problem, whatever it was. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. I assume you get you get plenty of cover from the executives who are trying to build a business. And honestly, it's it's a time at this time that it was really kind of the the beginnings of the gig economy in so many ways. So a lot of uncertainty on the regulatory side. Much of that is now settled either by practice or by law. And and so it's a very different world that we operate in. Now doing this all over again with AI, and we'll get to that in just a minute. But it's got to be exciting to to build a business um from that legal perspective. What was it like to start to think about growing the legal department and building infrastructure? Is that something that you and Nikhil grappled with during your time there?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. i mean, that is one of the real benefits of joining a company early is, you know, at the beginning, i had a wide coverage area and that was just me. And then as you're there, you kind of think about, okay well, now the company is scaling really rapidly. How do we how do we grow? And one of the reasons I had really enjoyed going from litigation in-house was I had this opportunity to think about a legal problem from a 360 degree lens. So like when it's litigation, you're only thinking about the problem once it yeahp blows up into litigation. yeah But when you're in-house, you get to think about, okay, well, how do we want to
Speaker: adjust this risk while we're building our products, when we're negotiating our agreements. Eventually, when I was at Instacart, i also built out the initial policy team there. So like, how do we want to engage with policymakers? And so you really get to think about it from this 360 lens and so as the business is building you kind of understand what parts of that are coming under pressure first yeah so um you know it was interesting like at instacart because it was a psychic economy space employment counseling was like an early area we invested in because it was both important from like an internal how do we support the company but also how do we build our products and how yeah policy. yeah ah
Speaker: And that could be totally different at a different company, right? Where you might have to lean into some other strengths earlier. Yeah. um Anything around kind of technology efficiency, was that on your radar back then as lawyers? Like, how did you think about those things at Instacart?
Speaker: holy So actually, my very first legal hire at Instacart was a legal ops role. Nice. There you go. I love it. It was like the very first thing I wanted to invest in because, again, a luxury of being somewhere early is you have a chance to build it right from the inception. And so my thought was, let's bring in legal ops early and try to build the right foundation so you're not trying to go back later and do a whole bunch of cleanup.
Speaker: Yeah, I'd love to understand this. You came from a law firm where legal ops back then really wasn't a thing at all. It wasn't really on anyone's radar, but it's your first in-house role. How did this get on your radar? get What what um cemented in your mind the importance the importance of doing this?
Speaker: Yeah, I... think it was really, i mean, you're right that law firms are we're definitely not the first to think about like investment in like legal ops. Yeah. that they I will say there were some parts of keeping track of my time and increments of like 0.375 hours, right? That really made me think carefully about how am I spending my time? Yeah.
Speaker: And that part, um you know, i'm like so glad to have left billable hours in the rearview mirror. Yes. I think that that instinct has probably been valuable to me in terms of just If you're running against, I've always hated running against an inefficient process. It's like running into a headwind. um And so if we can have really good process so that everybody is so able to kind of like lean into the skills that they are being hired to do ah that has always seemed like you would want to like structure things around that. That's been always at the forefront for me in terms of like, when I'm trying to build a team. And so I think that was really like legal offs. It's like, well,
Speaker: every piece of work we're going to do as a team, if we're taking a 20% tax because the lawyers are trying to figure out in an ad hoc way, how do we do knowledge management? How do we do entity management? How do we, you know, organize a due diligence process, all of those things that's going make our team worse overall. And so that like that first hire really kind of helped the entire team.
Speaker: I think, you know, if it formed the foundation of a team that always was able to run really efficiently and effectively. That's a fantastic, okay. I have to ask, do you remember the first or second or one of the few early initiatives that the person implemented at Instacart?
Speaker: Oh my gosh. I, so this hire really was, um, he was so critical, uh, to the team. I, you know, I remember, uh, How do we like, just like, I remember looked at how we organized our entities and just our business licenses and the different cities where we were operating. Because Instacart is an interesting business, right? They actually have operations on the ground yeah because groceries are going to be delivered. So relative to other tech pers parties, has a little bit more of an operational on the ground component to it.
Speaker: And just like, first of all, identifying that as an issue and then going through and cleaning all of that up. Knowledge management, it was like another big one of just, I went from Instacart to meta and the challenge of finding the right piece of information, you know, Oh, I remember that. It's incredibly, incredibly challenging. And so if you have somebody kind of right from the beginning and thinking, yeah like, how do we how do we build the right infrastructure for this? Yeah. Very cool. Let's talk a little bit about the transition to to Meta. What pulled you there? What was interesting? And obviously, much different scale that you're stepping into now going from Instacart to a very, very large legal department, which I won't scare anyone with the numbers, but massive legal department that would dwarf some Amlaw 100 firms in size, which is just crazy.
Speaker: But that's that's the nature of the business. And that's the nature of the need. What was that experience like in kind of making that transition? yeah So um I was really, really proud of the team that we had built at Instacart and really enjoyed the time there. i think I had always had just like a little bit of a nagging question inside of me because that was my first in-house role. Like, well, we built this thing and it seems to be working pretty well, but I have nothing to compare it to. um
Speaker: And so I really had the sense that i wanted to see, I wasn't sure I would stay in a big tech company forever, but I really wanted to see how big tech companies had like organized the legal work especially given like the complexity and impact of the legal issues that they were dealing with how do they organize that work at scale how does that work yeah and think just also the the complexity of the actual issues that were being navigated also interesting to me having dealt with one the So that's what brought me there. Yeah. And then how did you kind of start to learn and navigate an in-house world that was already, know, far more extensive in scale and complexity? Like what were some of the early learning lessons for you?
Speaker: So I think one of them was that complexity does not scale linearly with the size of the organization. Yes. That is like exponential. Absolutely. And so that was really, really eye-opening for me.
Speaker: that I think, you know, you have some of like the best program managers and like tons of intentionality around how those systems are run. And it's still really challenging because the scale of it. So that was definitely one one learning.
Speaker: um You know, another was just, I do think I learned a lot So as you say, like Meta's legal team is bigger than a lot of law firms, big law firms. yeah And that gives them the ability to really recruit and hire for just like world class roles in a ton of different domains.
Speaker: So that was super interesting for me as a lawyer to get to see like, okay, well, this is like, what does world class comply EU data privacy lawyers, competition privacy, um you know, most, a lot of in-house teams, you know, even if you have a dozen people, that's kind of a little bit on the bigger side. When you have, you know, a size of that team, there was just an opportunity to learn from so many different lawyers. And then also, i think I learned just as much from my clients on the mostly product managers. But that also, that like really changed the way that I do do my work. Yeah. um Let's dive into that segment of topics because I think it's really, i think it's critical for for our audience to hear about what makes for a really true trusted partner for the business as a lawyer. And you can kind of compare and contrast your two experiences. And I to talk about Farron a little bit, but your two experiences earlier on in your career between Instacart and Meta and, and kind of the demands from the business. What are some of the tricks the trade for you to kind of build that trusted advisor relationship with the business?
Speaker: Yeah, so i in the teams that I have been on, we've always been able to map, or we and like, this is true also in my current role, we really try to map the legal team to the business. So, and to have a real client service mentality. So i think like the first thing is to really get to know sort of who your key clients are in the business and like, what are their goals? What are their roadmaps?
Speaker: what are the major challenges? And then that gives you an opportunity, I think for for the legal side to become i'm a deep, deep expert in, you know, there's always gonna be at firms, you become like a world-class privacy lawyer. My goal as an in-house lawyer is to become the world-class lawyer in like the legal issues that my client is trying to navigate.
Speaker: And that intersection between the product or the business unit that you're trying to support and that legal landscape is kind of the critical opportunity. And so i think that's that's one thing. And then also just learning how to operate in a way that can really expedite velocity analysis. So, like said, I was at Meta, that meant learning how to operate like a product manager, learning how to like, what are our goals? What is the timeline? Thinking much more in terms of like metrics and how to we even organize and document our work So I think that I've kind of like over time tried to pick up even in the way that I operate and practice to begin to look more like the clients I support. were there Was there anything specific in your philosophy and how you built out your teams, how your teams engaged with the business? Was there anything unique there that you have now started to incorporate as kind of an operating model wherever you might go?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, i think there's a whole bunch of that like project management as a discipline. so you know, a canonical documentation, but we have like a source of truth. yeah um How we communicate, are we being really crisp in our, i think one of the things, you know, like how we communicate risk can be incredibly mushy So when I was, I met him, we spent a lot of time thinking about how do we like really clearly communicate risk in a way that's like coherent across the organization. And that's something that I've definitely brought yeah probably with me to future roles. I mean, especially in worlds where the risk is so unclear and undefined.
Speaker: i remember grappling with those issues across the product org there as well as trying to dr out develop a risk matrix in a world where like, we actually don't know a lot here. And so we really have to be thoughtful about what it is that we even put into the matrix. Very complex. How do you communicate uncertainty? And that uncertainty can either be like, we just don't, the product is still in development, the legal landscape itself is changing. This is an area where there just isn't a lot of guidance. So both like the magnitude of of risk and also uncertainty. And also started and um now you have a fantastic team with legal operations built into it. And I think that that was something that you already had in place before you got there. Is that right? Yeah.
Speaker: And so so how are you partnering with the legal operations team? Like, what are some of the priorities you talk about? What are some of the goals that you want to achieve for the business and enabling the legal department? Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker: Yeah, so I think with legal ops, you know we really think about people, process, and tooling. um And so one of the things that we've been working on at FAIR is like adding, just trying to create a little bit of structure across the team. And then for each of our major practice areas, looking at what are our key areas where we're getting high volume, where are the opportunities to streamline and create efficiencies, create better process. um so that has been one part of it and then of course right now layering over that is just how do we really build like an ai first legal team and where are the biggest opportunities to really increase our team's efficiency and weave that into how we do our work and i love the opportunity of being able to do that as like a smaller team because that can we can like lay the foundation and then grow up on top of that
Speaker: yeah Well, you literally cannot have a conversation 2026 and probably it's going to be true of the foreseeable future without talking about that two letter word. So let's let's let's dive right into it. I mean, how do you currently in your role, but also as a lawyer and at a e-commerce company, like what are some of the things that you're thinking about when you think about AI, both across the company, because I'm sure legal is a little bit of a gatekeeper for what kind of gets deployed across the company from an AI perspective, but also in terms of the impact and the business value that AI can add both to the legal department and to the business. like how are you thinking about those things right now?
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, I think our team actually like interacts with AI in at least like three big ways. So, you know we're at a company like, i think, Most tech companies right now is thinking about how to build AI into its products. yes So on the product counseling side, we definitely are thinking about and advising the business on that end. We also are we work with the company on AI governance. So for within our company, the way that we work, how do we both provide the right level of enablement while making sure we have the right safeguards in place? So that's the second way. And then three, as a department, how are we using it?
Speaker: And how are we weaving that in and making sure we're building into the way that we operate? So there's at least those sort like every part of our team really touches AI in some way, both as like obviously all the lawyers and the non-lawyers on our team are using in their day-to-day work, but we're also kind of thinking through these like big, big levers as well.
Speaker: There's been a narrative in in the AI world. We're what? We're about three years since ChatGPT kind of first broke onto the public scene. ah ai across legal is everywhere these days.
Speaker: work at a legal AI company. How about that? and And so there has been this narrative around and you see it everywhere. Oh, AI is taking this job and that job and lawyers will be gone, this and that. um How is your team? Do you discuss those issues? What are some of your kind of individual perspectives? Is there anything that you talk about with the team that would be helpful for some of the other lawyers who listen to this podcast, particularly those GCs who are managing teams? Anything there that you think is interesting for us to talk through?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, there is definitely like ah in the atmosphere, i feel like the dominant strain is this like fear and disruption ne that you're sort of alluding to there. yeah But I kind of wish we heard as much about the opportunity, like the things that small teams can do now that just were completely not possible. yeah um you know So I was listening to some webinar and they were talking about the possibility of using AI to look at your code base and ah you know, scan for new inventions, right? Like the idea to have a IP program deeply woven into the way that the company is doing it so that you find inventions at a rate that you might not find otherwise like that.
Speaker: That is like performance at a level that you wouldn't typically even have access to as a smaller legal team. And so I do think there's like, people are talking a lot about how do we do the same level of work with fewer people. And I actually think we should be thinking a lot more about how can we do things that we never would have thought were possible. Yeah. with the same number of people. And like, that's the part that I find really exciting. And there's just so much there.
Speaker: And I feel like it gets a little bit less of air time. But legal operations has had this holy grail of how do I get the legal department to stay in that top right quadrant of high value, high, oh gosh, now I'm forgetting what the top right, high value, high risk work. That's what it was. How do I get everyone to stay there? Because that's a really interesting things that we should be doing. That's really what enables the business to move forward and to navigate risk appropriately.
Speaker: And so now you have arguably the most powerful tool or set of tools that we've ever had in the history of the legal profession to allow us to do that. And yet most of the narrative continues to stay around. Well, I saved 80 percent of the time in redlining my contracts.
Speaker: OK, but what are you doing with that time? How are you spending it? um Thoughts on that for you as as you have now you know in your in your third in-house role? Yeah, I mean, I think I have never felt so confident about the necessity and value of having really high judgment people enroll, right? Like actually I think AI makes that skill more important than ever. And so think as long as people like really double down on, because you know AI can give you something that's convincing and right, or it can give you something that's convincing and wrong. And you need the ability to be able to discern between those things and also to be able to like design the system that's going to give the company value out of AI instead of a whole bunch of like a high volume of swap, which is actually just going to slow things down.
Speaker: And so i think if people, a have, you know, we're like definitely investing and bringing in people who have like expertise and judgment and a vision for like, what does this area look like if we can navigate it as strategically as possible.
Speaker: If you have that skillset or those people in seat, and then you put AI behind them, then you're just getting a ton of dividends. yeah So I do, i agree with you. Like, I don't think we, think if you had envisioned the role as just being able to like manually push things through a process, then yes, I think AI can feel very straight threatening because it can do that faster and faster. than probably a human being could. yeah But if the skill set is the ability to do really high judgment work and think about how is this done as good as possible to help move you know our company strategy forward,
Speaker: that skill set is actually more valuable now. Absolutely right. Because we need someone designing and overseeing kind outputs of these systems. And that judgment probably gets even more repetitions in this new world because you're able to have the time and the space to be able to deploy it and really grapple with things from a strategic perspective. One of my peers in the industry who writes quite a bit on these topics, he said something and has been consistently saying something which really has really rung true with me, and I'd love your thoughts on it.
Speaker: For all of the doomsday ah narrative out there on lawyers or accountants or whoever it might be. His focus is on lawyers. But he's like, for all the doomsday and naysayers out there, but lawyers are going, he's I don't think you understand what lawyers actually do.
Speaker: I don't think you understand. Lawyers are not just doing red lines on contracts. Lawyers are not just doing document review and these tasks that are a part of our roles and maybe a part of our jobs are tasks. And those tasks don't define us. They're not who lawyers are. And so it's really missing the boat to be able to say, hey, this tool or this segment of tools is going to erase this entire career.
Speaker: um is it going to change the nature of the tasks and how they are done? Of course, but that is true of any profession and any technology that gets attached to that profession. Like what are your thoughts on that piece?
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's totally right. I feel like when i most roles I have stepped into, there has always been this bucket of work that was like high volume, low complexity, not a great career path for anyone on the team. And yet it needs to get done. and like, how are we going to do that? yeah And that's always actually been a problem that we've had to work around when designing teams because it's like not necessarily a great stepping stone as a professional to the next stage. And yet, like companies have always had that bucket of work. We certainly had it on the legal side where it's like, you know, maybe those like
Speaker: Low complexity agreements that need to get some kind of review and somebody's got to do it and there's a ton of them. But like, gosh, that's not very interesting work. Yeah. And it's like that if we can remove that or you know, get much, much more efficient with that bucket of work. Yeah.
Speaker: I think that's the part that any lawyer I've worked with would be like very happy to say, okay, we're going to do less of that and we will give you more time to develop the skills to be able to weigh in on this like very strategically important agreement that the company needs to navigate.
Speaker: Absolutely. And look, by nature, maybe it means slightly leaner teams over time, but I'll go back to something that you said, which is, well, why are we not focusing more on the opportunities that we are creating as a result of this technology?
Speaker: there was a ah paradox that I've recently learned about. I think it's called Javon's Paradox. I'm not really sure. It's an economic theory, maybe late at eighteen hundreds Actually, it's got to be in the 1900s because it actually incorporated the Industrial Revolution into it. And it basically says that the advent of any new technology, the thing that it is arguably going to replace ends up creating far more roles in it.
Speaker: um And so I think the the use case that I had read about in this particular paradox was around engineering, because whether you're using Claude or anything else, coding becomes that much easier.
Speaker: The bar to entry, to I could go code something, i have zero software experience, but I could go build a website or an app now pretty quickly. But what that does is it democratizes the ability to do that. And if you democratize something like that, guess what?
Speaker: Everybody's going to want to do it. And so you've actually created your, and and that by its nature will lead to more entrepreneurship, new ideas. My kids are thinking about these things. So it's going to lead to these proliferation of these roles and existing roles that we already know about. And it's going to create all these roles that we haven't even thought about yet. And that to me is always the more exciting opportunity is what is it, what are we going to have that we can't even think about yet? And what are those jobs going to be like? And how many careers and roles are we going to create as a result of of that reality?
Speaker: and I think it's going to be the true same thing in in the legal profession is gonna be true for lawyers. There are probably going to be types of lawyers in the future that we're not thinking about right now. I think that's really kind of cool.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And then i also think like, just even within like a legal in-house legal team, like the things that we can do, our ambitions for what we can handle in-house with a team of our size could look dramatically different.
Speaker: We could like, do a lot, lot more than you know maybe a small legal in-house in-house team could do. Any advice that you would give to ah two groups of people?
Speaker: Number one, anyone who is thinking about leaving their current role and is exploring the GC or CLO role at ah at a smaller company. And number two, people who are your peers, who are the lead lawyers at companies around how to think about AI and how to discuss it with their teams.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Wow, I feel like I am still learning. So I approach certainly that second question with a lot of humbleness. um I would say for like, let let me answer the first one first. So if you're ah in-house and not in a GC role and you're thinking about trying to make that move, I think the number one thing I would say is that these roles look so, so different depending on the company that you are at. That is like one title, but it's, you know, potentially like a hundred different jobs. And actually you can go one place and then depending on what happens with that company, like the same role can be like very different jobs at very different moments in time. um So i when I talk, and I have had this discussion with, you know,
Speaker: peers and former colleagues and friends, is to really try to understand that difference. And so that like ah becoming general counsel of a seed company or a series A, series B, just like can be very, very different and can like look what you're able to do, what you kind of your day-to-day looks like. and you know the extent that you work with law firms could look very different than it would if you're you know a series C, D, E plus company. yeah um And so to like really understand that. And then it also really matters what the company itself is doing. So if you're in like a company that's navigating a heavily regulated space, that can look very, very different than if you're at a SaaS company. So I think that's just the...
Speaker: the one the number one thing is to kind of like really understand the space and understand what appeals to you. So I think I had that, like having gone from Instacart to Meta and I've been able to look across the lifespan of, you know, different companies at different points in their growth. That was really helped me find a role that I knew was going to be a good fit for what what I was bringing. um And then on the other GCs using ai I think the biggest thing that I have found is like, this is a time and I actually feel like we're in this window and I don't know how long it lasts where
Speaker: you know, there's really room and like encouragement for spending dedicated time on learning. And so like when I find an opportunity for AI to make something that I've been doing more efficient, I just like plowing that time back into learning as much as I can because it's changing so quickly. And so, you know, i I try to carve out intentional time And it really like almost feels like electric because the to-do list is so long. Yeah. Really try to go and experiment and build. And that is that's actually really, really fun. um
Speaker: like i'd you know I'd much rather spend some time on a you know Friday afternoon trying to figure out, OK, well, how can I like you know find the right way to get information from these three different projects and synthesize it so I'm focusing on the right thing come we come Monday new morning?
Speaker: versus trying to like navigate and pull together all those inputs myself. So I think I just like actively spending time and investments in learning right now is super important. You know, I, and I, and I, fully agree with you. I think we're in that phase right now. I had not even considered that that phase may end.
Speaker: I think it's the point where we're just, you need to have the skills. You're right. You're absolutely right. At some point you just need to be able to do it. think that's, that is sage advice for Really, any human being on the planet ah beyond a certain age right now. But I think certainly in our profession, if you're not experimenting and trying new things with AI on a daily basis in both your personal and professional life, like I think you're doing yourself a disservice.
Speaker: um I use it daily. My wife use it that uses it daily. My kids try to use it on their homework daily and that gets them into trouble. But at least, you know, there'll come a time when they're going to have to to know how to use it.
Speaker: That time could be very, very soon, depending on how education changes its stance and actually builds it into the curriculum for for kids as well. um Okay, one last question and then we'll wrap up. This is more of a general question, just given the leadership roles that you've had and have now across your career. What is one leadership skill that for you becomes incredibly important and is at the top of your list as you think about teams and scale and growth and getting the most out of your teams?
Speaker: Yeah. So for scale in particular, the one that I think about a lot is how do I stay really like with my finger on the pulse of the work that's happening? So when you have a small team that comes just like totally naturally, yeah because you are either directly involved in the work or you're like right next to the person doing it. And so you know immediately when something is encountering some challenges or there's bums and you know the substance of the work in and out. On the other hand, when you have like a very, very large team, there can be layers between that. And so like, do you actually know how things are going on the ground? Do you actually know the substance well enough that when things percolate up for a decision that you're able to like make that in an informed way quickly? And so I've had a chance to see both of those. And I think that to the extent that you can like minimize like the layers between you and insight into how things are going,
Speaker: it can make everything that, um, like the troubleshooting process and the refinement so much faster. So, uh, that is something that I think a lot about. How do i maintain enough direct insight into how things are going on the ground and enough personal knowledge of like, what is the actual challenges? What are we trying to solve? What are the underlying legal issues? Um, and, uh,
Speaker: Yeah, like getting that right is very much a work in progress for me too. But I do view that as sort of the the holy grail. If I can i get that right, a lot of good things will follow downstream from it. And you're right. It becomes much more difficult the larger that your organization becomes because the human interactions exponentially increase and and that adds all of the complexity in the world. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Rebecca, thank you so much for joining me today. This is fantastic conversation. that That hour just absolutely flew by. Yeah, actually, thank you so much for having me. This was really fun. All right, take care.
