Claim OwnershipThe Legal Means Business Podcast
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© 2024 Leeway
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A podcast for the in-house legal leaders & functions of tomorrow.
30 Episodes
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Contract lifecycle management, or CLM for short, is a hot topic in the world of in-house legal.
With Leeway being a CLM provider, we know how important it is for legal teams to prove the return on investment of their chosen tool to the relevant stakeholders.
But often, people don’t know where to start.
In this episode, we’re joined by legal tech enthusiastic Marie Widmer and Head of Legal Operations at Nextdoor, Dave Evans, to explore just exactly how you can prove the ROI of your CLM solutions.
The words “fun” and “law” don’t often come in the same sentence.
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But what would it mean if we started weaving fun into the day-to-day of in-house legal?
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Sure, it might sound a bit flippant at first, but more and more studies are proving the value that a fun approach to tasks can have on the quality of the output and the fulfilment and sustainability of individuals and teams.
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Thankfully, in this episode, we’re joined by two advocates for fun law.
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Elizabeth de Stadler calls herself a rehabilitated lawyer and is now Founding Director of new-era legal consulting firm, Novcon.
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Elizabeth’s colleague Liezl Van Zyl is a communication designer and plain language enthusiast, and today they share what exactly is “fun law” as well as how in-house legal professionals can embed fun in their day-to-day.
I think we can all agree that there’s a lot of room for improvement when it comes to in-house legal.
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And if we want to progress your legal team, your business or the industry more generally, we’re going to need to challenge conventional thinking.
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This means we need more in-house legal professionals to have an entrepreneurial spirit, to be activators of ideas and be willing to take calculated risks.
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You’ll know the term entrepreneurship, but what we need in the context of in-house legal, is intrapreneurship. This is when people think and act like entrepreneurs but from within a company.
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One person who’s especially passionate intrapreneurship for in-house legal is Joel Roy. Joel is a Legal Business Partner with pharma company Novartis and, in this episode, Joel shares how in-house legal professionals can adopt an intrapreneurial approach to deliver better outcomes AND build a more fulfilling career.
In this day and age, I think we can all appreciate the value of great leadership.
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And yet, leadership isn’t usually taught in law school.
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In fact, most leaders in the world of legal have stumbled upon the opportunity, and it’s often a big learning curve.
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So why should in-house legal folks care about leadership? And what are the guiding principles to become a great legal leader?
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This is what we’re exploring in this episode with Shaun Sethna.
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Shaun is Deputy GC at real estate marketplace, Altisource.
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For the past 10 years, Shaun has been a senior legal executive for tech companies, and he also ensures that coaching and mentoring are top priorities in his team.
By now, there’s no denying the rise of legal tech in the in-house legal community.
And the most popular category in legal tech is, of course, contract management solutions (or CLM for short).
With Leeway offering a CLM platform, we can’t help but get excited about the huge potential of CLMs for in-house legal teams and their businesses.
However, one challenge we’re often asked about by in-house lawyers and legal professionals, is how to secure buy-in from the various stakeholders across the business.
Thankfully, in this episode, we’re joined by the wonderful legal ops expert and legal tech enthusiastic, Marie Widmer.
Marie has established herself as a forward-thinking and effective legal ops professional during her various in-house roles with the likes of LinkedIn, Pinterest and startup Dapper Labs.
And having implemented numerous platforms, today Marie shares how to secure buy-in for your CLM from stakeholders across the business.
Whether you’re moving to a new city, shifting from private practice to in-house, or it’s your first experience in the world of legal all together, it’s likely that it’ll take some adjusting.
Often, a new environment or new responsibilities can leave you feeling out of your depth. This persistent inability to believe that your success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved thanks to your own efforts, is called imposter syndrome.
It’s something that many if not most people will experience in their lifetime, and learning to manage and respond to this feeling in a healthy way, is critical to ensure that you can continue to thrive.
One person who is no stranger to imposter syndrome is Sara Fukuhara. Sara is now Associate Corporate Counsel at fast-paced startup, Glowforge.
And after opening up about her imposter syndrome on LinkedIn, she experienced an overwhelming response from others who could relate.
In this episode, Sara walks us through her experience and how she’s learning to thrive in spite of her imposter syndrome.
Legal tech has become an integral part of scalable legal functions.
When chosen correctly and integrated thoughtfully, technology can help teams work more efficiently, become more productive and free up time to work on higher-value tasks.
In some shape or form, legal tech has been around for a good while now.
But in this new era of in-house legal, how can we make sense of a crowded market? What can we expect from technology? And how can we choose and make the most of the right tools?
In this Part 2 of a two-part series with legal ops expert Marie Widmer and Senior Legal & Business Operations Manager at Uber, Jonathan Johnson-Swagel, we continue to explore the key legal ops trends that were talked about at the CLOC Conference in Las Vegas.
And of course, a huge trend was technology.
The value of diverse teams has been a hot topic over the last few years - with greater diversity offering faster and more innovative approaches to business, as well as a fairer environment for everyone to thrive.
To date, the legal industry has been lagging when it comes to Diversity, Equality and Inclusion.
Yet, the unique position of in-house legal teams presents a great opportunity to influence positive change.
This topic was very much front and centre at this year's CLOC conference in Las Vegas.
Thankfully, legal ops expert Marie Widmer and Senior Legal & Business Operations Manager at Uber, Jonathan Johnson-Swagel, are open to sharing their insights from the event.
In this first episode of a two-part series summarising the key learnings from CLOC, we’ll explore how Legal can influence diversity as well as support business initiatives to better measure and take responsibility for their diversity commitments.
When should legal get involved?
Traditionally, checking with legal was the last step in business projects.
But we're now seeing legal teams becoming more and more integrated into the business.
And when legal is embedded in the day-to-day running of a business, you can better manage risk and spot opportunities.
So how can Legal get involved at an earlier stage of the project?
This is exactly what we’re exploring in this episode with Adam Gibb.
Following nearly a decade in private practice, Adam is now Legal Counsel at software company, Ideagen. When he moved in-house, Adam realised the importance of having awareness and input from the outset of projects.
And today, Adam shares his tips on how to get legal involved at an earlier stage of the project.
Contracts have been long, confusing and dare I say, boring documents for too long now.
This makes it difficult to identify and retain key information, or build strong, trusted business relationships.
Verity White is the Founder and Chief Contract Enthusiast at Checklist Legal.
She is a commercial lawyer turned legal innovation expert, with a passion for redesigning legal documents, contracts and processes to be easy to read, easy to use and, my favourite, jargon-free.
When designed well, contracts present huge value for businesses. And thankfully, in this episode, Verity shares with us exactly how to go about redesigning your contracts.
What does a typical legal career look like?
News flash. There is no strict career path anymore.
There are now so many options for those with a legal background.
Traditionally, legal professionals would start their careers in private practice. But now we’re seeing more and more in-house lawyers, legal ops consultants, legal recruiters, legal tech founders, legal content creators, and more.
One person who’s a believer in following what feels right is the Head of Legal for APAC at eBay, Stephen Man.
Stephen has experience working both in private practice and in-house at the likes of Uber and Yahoo, as well as over 16 years in leadership roles.
Throughout his career, Stephen has been challenged to choose which career path is right for him. And there’s a lot that goes into these decisions.
In this episode, Stephen shares how he’s made decisions throughout his career, as well as how you can carve your own legal career path.
General Counsel isn’t the role it was 10 years ago.
In fact, GCs now have the potential to add huge value to a business.
And yet, they still tend to be an underutilized executive.
So how can GCs take a step up?
What skills are becoming increasingly important for in-house lawyers and GCs?
This is what we’re exploring in this episode of Legal Means Business with Megan Lutes.
Megan is the General Counsel AND the Chief HR Officer at fast-paced startup, Glowforge.
Having worked both in law firms and in-house, and now taking on broaden, not traditionally legal responsibilities, Megan is well placed to help us explore the skill stack you need to fulfil your potential as a modern GC.
Contracts are broken.
They’re too long, they kill deals, and they take up a whole load of time for the legal team, the business and counterparties.
The result? The process is either super slow, the deal doesn’t get closed or the relationship becomes damaged.
Working in the contract tech space, it obviously kills me to see this happening all too often.
Contracts present real business value and they can open the doors to new opportunities.
That’s why I, along with many others in the industry, was super excited to hear about the launch of a new legal community platform.
Following on from the success of oneNDA, a community-led, standardised NDA inititaive, Electra Japonas and her team decided to launch a platform where lawyers can come along to collaborate on creating common standards, share knowledge and access templates, for free.
Enter Claustack.
Let’s face it.
Legal traditionally isn’t the business's favourite team.
But thanks to developments in legal operations, legal tech and, of course, mindsets, legal teams are increasingly delivering significant business value.
That said, it can be an uphill battle if the business isn’t open to receiving this new era of legal support.
So how can in-house lawyers build the legal brand internally?
I’m excited to be exploring this in this episode with Andy Dale.
Andy is the General Counsel & Chief Privacy Officer at AI-powered B2B gifting platform, Alyce.
And he is also the co-host of the Data Protection Breakfast Club, presented by TechGC.
With well over a decade of in-house experience, Andy is well-versed in what it takes to position your legal department in a way that enables you to deliver the best outcomes.
And you’d be surprised how much easier it is to make an impact when the business views Legal as a business partner.
The obvious difference between working in-house and working in private practice is that in-house legal teams work INSIDE the company.
And when you work INSIDE a company, you have to work well with other teams if you expect to know what’s going on and to best serve the needs of the business.
But for a department that’s worked in silo for decades, and for highly talented professionals whose education generally focuses on technical skills, it’s not always easy for in-house lawyers to collaborate effectively with other teams.
So, how can legal teams ace cross-functional collaboration?
This is exactly what we’re exploring today with the wonderful Sarah Irwin.
Sarah is the Head of Legal at the no-code automation company, Tines. Sarah is also the founder of Irish Tech General Counsel - a network for legal professionals in the Irish tech community.
In this episode, Sarah shares how the role of in-house legal has changed over recent years, as well as how in-house lawyers can embed cross-functional collaboration to improve the performance of their legal department and better enjoy their day-to-day roles.
There’s no denying that legal departments have been seen as the “department of no” for too long now.
But while in-house lawyers are eager to add business value, it can be tricky to know where to begin.
Thankfully, today we’re joined by Arnaud Gouachon, the Chief Legal Officer from Contentsquare - a company described by Gartner as one of the 4 Most Innovative Technologies in eCommerce.
Arnaud describes himself as a full-stack developer, with experience in public companies and hypergrowth startups and scale-ups.
He is incredibly focused on being a problem-solving partner to the business.
And during this episode, Arnaud shared how to turn legal and compliance challenges into business opportunities and revenue accelerators.
To achieve great things as a legal team, you need to align your actions with the wider business objectives.
So how should you set goals within the legal function?
How do you identify your priorities, and define the steps needed to achieve your legal ambitions?
One goal-setting technique that’s proven effective is called OKRs.
And this is exactly what we’ll be talking about today with Frances Coyle.
Frances is a fintech lawyer with a decade of experience working for merchant acquirers, lenders and banks like Adgen, Klarna and Monzo.
Having recently set up her own consultancy, Turtle Law, Frances now works with a mixture of early-stage startups, scaleups and banks.
Frances has much experience in benefiting from OKRs in a legal context and in this episode, she shares an introduction to the goal-setting technique as well as some common examples that can be applied to in-house legal teams.
These days, especially in the tech space, legal functions have to scale fast.
But often, their headcount doesn’t grow at the rate of the business.
So how can you keep pace, deliver sound legal outcomes and create real business value?
One way for a legal team to focus on higher-value work is to embed and use “distributed ownership”.
I know, I know, letting go of control over conventional legal matters might seem a little scary,
But in this episode of Legal Means Business, I’m confident that you’ll be convinced.
We’re joined by Marion Bergeret, the General Counsel at digital health insurance company, Alan.
Marion has studied and worked all over the world and has gained significant experience as a tech lawyers
Marion is a Tech product lawyer and has studied and worked across numerous continents. She has hands-on experience in start-up operations, HR, fundraising, and M&A.
And today she’ll share how she and the team at Alan have scaled their legal function by focusing on the distributed ownership of legal.
It’s a good one. So listen in and let me know what you think.
Blockchain has been around for well over a decade.
And yet many in-house professionals still know very little about it.
Gartner forecasts that blockchain will generate annual business value of more than $3 trillion by 2030.
And it suggests that 10-20% of global economic infrastructure will be running on blockchain-based systems by that same year*.
With this in mind, it's becoming increasingly important for in-house lawyers, especially those in the tech space, to have an understanding of this often confusing technology and its implications.
Thankfully, in today’s episode, we’re joined by Dr Louis Sanchez De Lozada.
Louis has more than 20 years’ experience as a financial and corporate legal counsel in banks and asset management companies
and he is now Director Legal Counsel at asset management firm, Unigestion.
With a passion for LegalTech, Louis has invested a lot of time and energy into understanding the blockchain and its implications on the world of in-house legal.
The tech industry moves fast.
So setting up your legal function in a way that enables scale is absolutely critical.
This means designing legal processes that are both fast AND effective.
This is exactly what Luke O’Leary is on a mission to achieve.
Luke is the Legal Expert at European fintech unicorn Qonto.
And he believes that a key aspect of legal function scalability... is in designing processes for quality, speed and autonomy.
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