Becoming general counsel was actually not anything I ever planned. What led me here was a series of jumping on opportunities and being willing to take a few risks along the way.

After law school, I clerked for a judge, then I was at a law firm for a couple of years, and then I went to the District Attorney’s office. I always wanted to be a trial lawyer, and I really loved the criminal side of law. I thought I would be a prosecutor for the rest of my career.

But then, in 2008, my husband founded a software startup, and the condition of the investment was to relocate to Silicon Valley from Atlanta. We had to move at 30 days’ notice, which meant I had no opportunity to even register to take the California bar, much less study and pass it!

So we moved, and I got a position at Gibson Dunn. They did not have a strong presence in white-collar criminal defence and internal investigations in the Bay Area, and so I was very focused on that as well as a number of general litigation matters. I ended up really loving that experience, especially what I was doing on the white-collar and the internal investigations side. Over time, about half my job became advising clients on the effectiveness of their compliance programs and even helping them establish compliance programs.

One day, I received a call from a recruiter asking if I’d be interested in creating the compliance department at this new solar energy startup that was backed by Elon Musk. I absolutely loved it. l was at Solar City for three or four years and then, when the acquisition by Tesla happened, I was asked to take over and lead and create a formal compliance department for Tesla.

In the spring of 2017, once again a recruiter contacted me, this time about compliance for Credit Karma. I wasn’t quite sure that I wanted to make a move from Tesla but then, out of the blue, Kenneth Lin, Credit Karma’s CEO, asked if I would be interested in making a move to become their chief legal officer. I decided to take yet another leap of faith and do something that I had not done before.

On one side, as anyone coming into a new role will say, there’s an intense learning curve in getting to know the company. How does it operate? What are the specific challenges they face? What are all those different ways people do things? How are things structured that might be different from what you’re used to? And on top of all that, because it was my first time coming in to lead an established legal and compliance team, I had to get to know the team and what people were focused on and how I could best help.

Those are all challenges in any in-house role, but fintech is a highly regulated space, and we are in a hypergrowth period at the company. I was very fortunate to have worked with two companies previously that were both extraordinarily innovative and doing something very disruptive, and which were also going through hypergrowth phases. That was actually fairly familiar and it’s something I find very exciting – I don’t think I would have made a move if there was not that level of innovation and excitement here. I encourage myself and my entire team really to embrace the change, embrace the idea that we’re doing things people have not done before, and recognize that this presents really interesting challenges and once-in-a lifetime opportunities for attorneys and compliance professionals who are figuring out how do we do these things in a legal and compliant way.

The first thing that I have focused on has been really ensuring that we all, as a team, have an innovative mindset. A lot of folks in legal and compliance departments get a bad name as the ‘department of no’, where you’re trying to stop things or shut things down. What I’ve been very much encouraging my team to do when someone comes to you very excited about an idea, instead of having a knee jerk reaction of: ‘Oh we need to put the brakes on’, is to think: ‘How can I be a really great partner? This is an interesting idea, let me look into it, how can we make this happen in a legal and compliant way? What can we do to embrace that change, to walk with our business partners and help manoeuvre around potential landmines or blocks, so that we’re really in it together?’ Rather than setting up an environment where business partners feel that they have to push against legal and compliance or try to avoid us because we’re going to get in the way.

I see a lot of my role as being one of educating, be it our members, our regulators, our external business partners and others, about what it is we’re doing. Most of the consumer protection regulations in existence line up very perfectly with what we’re trying to do, and so that makes it fairly easy from that standpoint – we are trying to help people make sense of something that has traditionally been really complicated and confusing, and give people transparency and clarity in making financial decisions.

As far as looking at the current regulatory regime, oftentimes many of these laws were put into existence decades ago, well before anyone even thought about fintech, and before any of these things were even possible. How do we make sure that we are abiding by the spirit of the law? There’s much that is in a gray area, and that is actually really fun and interesting to think about – how do we set things up to make sure that we’re doing the right thing now and in the future?

Companies need people who understand the business inside and out, and the industry. They need people who understand how many of these complicated regulatory regimes intersect, and who can help navigate where laws are under development, or where there’s not a lot of consistency and clarity. People who can sit back and take a holistic view and help guide their executives and board on the ethical way to go, the safe way to go, and also make sure that we’re providing plenty of opportunities for the company to innovate, be creative and try things that are new.

I would say the other side of it is seeing your entire legal and compliance department as a business unit in itself, and thinking about how you can make sure that you’re building the right team, that you have ways of evaluating what the team is doing and how much value you are providing to your business partners. How you function with legal operations is another big area, and having that business sense and applying it to the entire legal and compliance function is critically important.

I think if I could go back and tell myself anything as I took on this role, it would be to trust myself even more and realize that everyone, especially in the tech space, is learning a lot as they go. There’s not a hard and fast playbook, and there’s not going to be a lot of tried and true lessons that they can plug and play. It’s important to not be afraid to ask what may seem like stupid questions. Really get in and be willing to roll up your sleeves and – especially if you’re working in the tech space – dig in and understand the technology. Don’t assume that anyone has already looked into something and don’t necessarily take something at face value. There may be a way of doing something that people have not thought of yet, or a different approach in how you design your products that could completely get rid of any potential legal risk. Just really focus on that creativity. That would be my advice – just be comfortable with the fact that no one has one this before and so it’s fine if you don’t necessarily know all the answers off the bat.

My path here was intentional, although the irony is I really was not a huge sports fan growing up. I really fell in love with it in college, and pretty immediately started working in sport. In a lot of ways, I’ve grown up in the business, so part of what I fell in love with was the business of sport as well as the game of football. I worked in sports media and communications before going to law school, and I entered Stanford with the goal of returning to sports.

My 1L summer, I asked the Raiders, for whom I had been a PR intern in college, if I could come back as a law clerk, which they were very gracious in allowing me to do. I went to law firm Akin Gump for my second summer, because I knew that partner Dan Nash did a lot of work for the National Football League (NFL). I worked at Latham & Watkins after I graduated, and then at the NFL League office in New York. The 49ers’ EVP of football operations, Paraag Marathe, got to know me from my work at the League, and he asked me if I would interview for a position they had just created here – which was director of legal affairs. There were a lot of people, including my own family, who said: ‘Oh that’s so nice to hear you’re going to interview – you’re never going to get that job!’

The team’s executive vice president, Patty Inglis, had created the position with a plan in place to groom me to eventually become the general counsel. The role grew as I created our external affairs department. Shortly thereafter, we added a risk management department. Last year, we aligned a number of departments to create our community impact team, which is a conglomerate of the 49ers Foundation, community relations, 49ers Prep (which runs free youth football camps and flag football leagues), our STEAM education program (where we invite in 60,000 kids a year to get them excited about science, technology, engineering, arts and math through football), external affairs, fan engagement, and the 49ers Museum.

My role as general counsel felt like a natural evolution. It was really the beginning of my time at the 49ers where the learning curve was the sharpest. There was so much I was doing on the business side that was unfamiliar to me. My first few months, I didn’t know if I would make it every day. I was here 10 hours a day – but I was growing.

Inglis and I were building the infrastructure of the legal department with things like a contract management system, while working to get Levi’s® Stadium built – so that was a really intense couple of years.

I received a lot of very good advice along the way to becoming general counsel from Inglis and other general counsel, such as to learn the business underlying each contract and therefore draft or negotiate a better agreement, and how to hone those contract-drafting skills.

Like many GCs, the struggle is in trying to step back and think strategically for the future, while not completely suffocating in the fires you need to put out every day. A lot of it is risk management, especially now in the current business environment – looking at the risk profile of various business decisions and determining what’s best for the organization both from a brand and revenue standpoint. As general counsel, we have a particular lens for seeing potential downsides and evaluating their likelihood and severity.

As a general counsel, more of your role becomes about leading other people than about being a really expert attorney in a traditional, technical sense. It becomes more about soft skills and your ability to manage and lead attorneys and non-attorneys alike. My advice to people who want to become general counsel would be to develop the ability to teach and lead others, and to communicate with and influence peer departments in the business. We don’t do a good enough job in training lawyers in those skills.

My proudest moment was during a challenging and difficult time in the business, and somebody who was in a position of power asked me: ‘What would you do if you were me?’ I think that’s ultimately the goal – it’s our role as the counselor, the consigliere, to develop that trust.

Another proud moment would be the opening of the Levi’s® Stadium. We put so much blood, sweat and tears into that, and it was a group effort of literally thousands of people – from architects, to financiers, to construction workers, to lawyers, to salespeople. You have this incredible communal feeling of hard work that pays off in a physical thing that you can actually see.

The difficult moments, when there’s turnover or change, where human livelihoods and families are involved – those are the most challenging moments in football. It can also be tough when public perception does not match the reality inside an organization. Thankfully I enjoy what I do, so it doesn’t diminish my love of the game, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t hard days. When you’re having a tough season, it is hard on everyone, although obviously hardest on the players and coaches.

We do a lot of work at the intersection of football and science. One of the things that I didn’t foresee before I came to work here was how many software agreements we would enter into – there are a lot of really interesting companies that we partner with.

Even though the world is moving very fast in terms of technology, I don’t think the skills that we as in-house counsel have to exercise have changed that much. It’s about your skills at client service, at understanding the big picture, and then being able to communicate to others, particularly non-lawyers, what that big picture is and how the pieces fit together. And then, of course, having really excellent contract and drafting skills, strong negotiation skills, and being a good issue spotter.

Legal departments are often viewed as cost centres, but that’s unfair, because the deal doesn’t close without a lawyer doing the contract. We limit losses – both in business deals and in litigation. As general counsel, we struggle on that side of innovation – how do we demonstrate our value in a world that’s very based on metrics? That’s why a lot of us use things like contract management systems, to show how many contracts we’re turning out, and how quickly we’re turning them out.

When I think about real innovation, a lot of that is just the everyday problem-solving that lawyers do. That’s where I think lawyers are actually more creative than often people give them credit for.

Looking forward at the role of general counsel, I expect that, given the brand reputation issues that companies are running into, there will be a greater emphasis on the role of the GC as that internal watchdog. I’m always wary of the word ‘compliance’ because I think it has this connotation that you’re a paper pusher, whereas I think what really is required of the role is excellent judgement and ethics. People are going to be looking for a GC who has a strong moral compass and an ability to read situations and pick up on things – to not just make sure that you’re following things by the book, but that there is not something that is actually ripping at the fabric of the organization, even if you have checked all the technical boxes.

It will be interesting to see how much more independence the GC role ends up having. The extent that it’s subordinate to some other executive roles may limit its ability to be the check in the balance of powers – so it will be interesting to see that evolve.

After I finished law school, I got very interested in cities and urban policy and I started working for the City of New Haven. There was a large, environmentally contaminated, abandoned site in my neighborhood and I got interested in trying to develop it. I worked on the site for about three years – first while I was working for the City of New Haven and then when I was a fellow at NYU School of Law, at the Furman Center, which is an urban policy think-tank. But really, I knew that this real estate project was the kind of entrepreneurial project I wanted to do.

I had known the founders of Genius through friends, and then after a couple of years, they were basically like, ‘Hey! We’ve got a million problems, want to come work here?’ It was a much smaller company at that point, about 15 people. We were also just beginning the process of liaising with the music publishers who administer the rights for songwriters – and who are our core strategic partners. That was not anything I had experience with at the time, but the founders and I knew each other well, we trusted each other and we liked working with each other, and they wanted me to give it a shot.

But of course, at the time, I knew very little about the music industry, or what really running a company looked like, and so there was a ton to learn. I joined right as the NMPA [National Music Publishers’ Association] was (rightfully) cracking down on copyright violations with lyrics. We were in the process of formalizing our licensing relationships and introducing ourselves to critical partners like music publishers and songwriters, so it was important to get out there and really let everyone know that we were trying do the right thing, that we wanted to be collaborators, that we wanted to be creative together and make what we do good for everybody in the equation.

The experience I had doing the development project in New Haven was some of the most valuable experience I had coming in to Genius. There were a ton of legal dimensions – environmental clean-ups, deals with the state, zoning negotiations, etc – but I always had to have the bigger picture in mind as well, which gave me a sense of what it meant to make a whole project work.

I learnt the importance of real relationships and talking and meeting – getting to know your counterparties. It just can’t be underestimated how important that is and how valuable and satisfying it is to realise that you’re dealing with interesting, talented people on the other end and that you can hopefully work together to do cool stuff.

My first title was actually general counsel, but my role immediately went beyond the job description because a company of 15 people doesn’t traditionally have a general counsel. So at the beginning, I was also running finance, HR and facilities operations. Over the years, and as the company has grown, I’ve helped establish key roles at the company, like managing our sales organization. I no longer oversee these departments – we’ve got much more talented folks managing HR, finance, facilities, and sales now! Now I focus on our core general strategic relationships – with our board, investors, music industry publishers and labels, and streaming services like Spotify. It had become all-consuming, so recently we hired a terrific director of business and legal affairs, reporting to me – and so legal is back in my orbit.

It’s important to me that I’m not the only person reviewing deals that I’ve been instrumental in creating, because that means that I’m too close to them. I definitely want other eyes on them and it’s always been that way; it’s always a collaborative process. But I think it’s definitely possible to wear many hats responsibly. I don’t think it’s wise to have a lawyer in an ivory tower who is in some world of abstraction, weighing in. We’re all realists to the point where we know that there isn’t just an answer that exists in an abstract space for questions of risk – you need more information and you need to trust your team to be able to handle that kind of complexity, and not fear that if your lawyer is too involved in the business side of things that they’ll somehow be compromised. I think it’s really the contrary – they will be better informed and will be able to make better decisions.

We have a company value here, which is to be skeptical of experts – and really don’t devalue your own ability to figure stuff out, and think there’s a monopoly on special knowledge. The way we operate here is really not attaching any mystery to the law or to contracts – when somebody wants to get a contract signed at Genius, they read it and they negotiate it and a lawyer doesn’t touch it until the point person at Genius feels that they understand it and feels good about it. The person who is trying to make a deal knows the most about what’s important to them and the company as a whole, and there’s no reason they can’t understand what they’re agreeing to, what they’re trying to get out of it and what the scope should be. I think it’s important that folks who have specialized training ultimately backstop this stuff but, at least in my world, there’s a trend towards the broadening of engagement with things that people typically think of as the work of lawyers.

In my mind, the most important thing has always been to really be connected to the company’s mission. When you’re trying to build your company and your business and establish what you’re going to be in the world, I think it’s really important that everybody – especially the folks who are empowered to say no to things and who are trying to manage risk – really understand what the company is trying to do and value that, and are not just taking the standard nervous lawyer approach.

At Genius, we’re always trying to innovate in the products we’re creating – we’re creating new formats. Annotating lyrics was new and, more recently, we have our Song Stories product, which tells you a story about a song as you’re listening to it. The experience is inspired by the Instagram or Snapchat story experience, but is built around a song. We’re super-excited about bringing the Genius experience to streaming services and all the places people listen to music. Trying to figure out the partners and the right structure of a deal, and making it scalable, takes some amount of thinking and creativity from all sides. Our legal team is constantly forced to be creative and think about products that have never been done before.

In the digital space, so much of the innovation that’s going on is around collaboration and the creative use of content that might be coming from lots of different sources. That inevitably means figuring out how to work together with other creative people and other creative companies, and that is going to require legal organizations that are built for that, and are part of that beyond simply being lawyers reviewing contracts – it’s going to take creativity.

For a lawyer that wants to be a creative and productive presence in an in-house role, I think the more aspects of the business you can expose yourself to – for us, that means technology, music, video production – the more useful you’re going to be. For folks who are interested in emerging companies, the more entrepreneurial activities you can engage in, the more you really get a sense of what it means to try to build something from scratch, which is an invaluable experience for a lawyer.

I worked for nine years with Ashurst (formerly Blake Dawson, and Blake Dawson Waldron before that when I joined in 2004) in Sydney, Australia. I spent the first year thinking I wanted to be an IP/IT lawyer, and I was actually contemplating leaving the law to study engineering. But I had a wonderful mentor who said to me, ‘The law is a big place, Aimie. There is a space for you here, you’re just not in the right pond.’ She helped me navigate moving within the firm – notwithstanding that was outside the usual process – and I spent some time in the banking and finance team. As soon as I got there, I was in my pond and I loved what I did. I spent the next eight or so years as a transactional banking and finance lawyer.

I went on secondment a couple of times – at RBS, Perpetual Trustees and Qantas – and each time I decided in-house wasn’t for me. I liked the purity of what I was doing, I liked the breadth of the work, and I worked for lots of partners. But then I got involved in a transaction in which Canadian ATM owner DirectCash Payments Inc was acquiring Customers Ltd, a publicly-listed company in Australia. The CEO at DirectCash was a very interesting character – I thought he was quite different in the way that he came at problems from quite obtuse angles. I spent 12 months working for him in private practice following the transaction, and then he asked me to work for him. I thought I could learn a lot from working directly with him, and that’s how I came to end up working in-house.

DirectCash was acquired by Cardtronics, and I fully expected that at the end of that process I’d be going home to Australia to find a job. But I got a phone call from the CEO of Cardtronics after we had signed the deal, and he said, ‘I’d like you to think about becoming our GC’. I think the most flattering place to be hired is from the opposite side of the table, and that is what happened. Cardtronics is a Nasdaq-listed plc and I’m an Australian-qualified lawyer, so it was something I thought long and hard about. I’ve never been one to shy away from a challenge, so I ultimately thought: why not?

I’m not qualified to advise on US, Canadian or UK law, so I have outside counsel and teams of local lawyers in the UK, the US, Australia and Canada. And to be candid, in the general counsel role, you can never be an expert. Somebody asked me once, ‘Why do you think the title is general counsel?’ And I said, ‘Because I spend my day counseling people generally!’ Really it’s about putting together the experts with the business when and where it’s needed.

When I first went in-house, I went from being an expert in everything related to debt financing and knowing all the market trends, to being asked questions about employment law and occupational health and safety that were completely outside my expertise set – businesses are dynamic, and there are a broad range of issues that cross your desk every day.

I very quickly realized that you have to get comfortable with no longer being an expert, and you’re going to know a little about a lot, instead of a lot about a little. I think to be successful in the GC role, you’ve got to be adaptable and you’ve got be prepared to think about things in ways you might not have contemplated before. You have your external firms to help you, but ultimately the business thinking around the risk has to come from you, so I think that adaptability is the core trait for successful GCs.

But it did take me a little bit of time to get to that place. As a banking and finance lawyer, I would feel like I had let someone down if I couldn’t give them the answer, because I’m supposed to be the expert in that field. But you can never have all the answers when you’re in-house. I carried a bag of insecurity around for the 12 months or so following the move in-house, and it took sitting down with the CEO I was working for and him saying to me, ‘You’ve got to check that bag – you don’t need to carry it around with you. We know you won’t have the answers immediately and the sooner you get comfortable with that, the better you will be.’ And really from that conversation forward, I checked that bag every day at the door, and trusted my judgement. Now I really enjoy getting the practical problems from the business and helping them try and solve those.

One of my proudest professional moments was when we announced the acquisition of CashCard by DirectCash in Australia on what was Friday Canadian time, Saturday Australian time, and DirectCash to Cardtronics before markets opened on the Monday. What seemed like an impossibility had become a reality. It took an enormous amount of effort from a very talented team, and was the culmination of a long sale process on the DirectCash side and acquisition process on the CashCard side. The difficult thing about being in a sale process is that you never know if the sale is going to go through, so you have to run the business and do the right thing for shareholders irrespective of what’s going on with that process, but you’re always mindful of it. That was a really interesting professional experience to have, especially as I had a daughter who was between one and two years old at that time, and I was flying around the world with her and my husband, trying to keep two sensitive transactions confidential.

I’m now in the process of building a team of internal lawyers who want to get their hands dirty on the work and don’t want to push everything externally. It’s very important that we know our business because our externals will only do as a good a job as the instructions that we give them. As an in-house team, if a matter has got business elements attached to it, you are the expert. If you engage with that mindset, the externals can help you produce a document which works. If you give something to an external without that context and without that input, you end up with poor outcomes. You’ve got to have a team of internal lawyers who want to get across the detail and understand the business drivers and business levers so that they can articulate what is it we as a business are trying to achieve in the context of the ask.

I wouldn’t say we have a formal panel of externals – I’ve just started recalibrating. The Cardtronics use of externals was very haphazard; there was no rhyme nor reason to it, so we’re going through a process of rationalizing who our externals are. But it’s not a hard and fast set of rules about who we can and can’t use.

In terms of innovation, my personal view is that you inherently need a person’s brain to run around all the various rabbit holes, and I’m not sure that you can really get to a place where that’s replaced by AI. I don’t think you can replace the lawyer in the dialogue when you’re sat around trying to figure out how the business can structure something which is efficient, compliant and workable from a business perspective.

That said, there are things that make our lives a lot easier. I’m in the process of getting a cloud-based document management system implemented. The expectations of the business are that the legal team produces high-quality documents, we have version control, and without a proper tool it’s very difficult to do that when you’re working in and across teams within the business.

We’re going to standardize as much of our business process as we can, including documentation, so that we can partner with the business to say, ‘Let us build a tool for you, but once we give it to you, we need you to work within its parameters; we’re not going to customize for every deal that we do.’ We need to have a legal team that can spend its time on the more complicated things and the more standardized business-as-usual deals get done on standard, approved paper.

But I’m a paper girl. I like to talk to people and I don’t like email, I prefer conversations over electronic dialogue, so I’m old-fashioned in that sense. I want my people more engaged with the business: talking to the business leaders, being on the calls, understanding what’s coming, being ahead of the ball rather than being reactive. Quite a lot of business incubates, so if we know that it’s incubating, we can be ahead of that curve. But you can only be ahead of that curve if you get out of your office, understand who the key business drivers and dealmakers are and get engaged with them so that you know what’s coming.

I graduated law school during the dotcom boom and quickly determined that I wanted to be part of that excitement. But by the time I got to Silicon Valley, it was 2001 and the bubble was crashing. I landed on my feet in 2005 at DLA Piper, where I spent almost half of my career, culminating in a partnership in the corporate group. While at DLA, my practice focused primarily on representing public companies in SEC reporting and corporate governance matters, and M&A and capital markets transactions.

Early on, I had a sense of wanting to go in-house: I viewed an in-house role as being more than a transactional lawyer; you delved deeper into the business and the position required you to become more practical and solutions-oriented, more of a decision-maker, in my mind. I secured my first in-house position at Caesars Entertainment, which was the perfect transition for me. Caesars’ global legal department was comprised of many lawyers from large law firms and had a general counsel with a strong presence and sense of team and practicality. While at Caesars, I practiced primarily in areas in which I was most comfortable, including SEC reporting, corporate governance, and capital markets (equity and debt) and M&A transactions. I worked closely with the finance and treasury departments, advising them on legal issues relating to Caesars’ more than $20bn of debt, and advised Caesars Interactive Entertainment on various corporate matters and acquisitions. At the same time, I was able to learn how in-house practice differs from that of a law firm.

Next, I was presented with the opportunity to become deputy general counsel at Everi Holdings. Going from a large company to a smaller one presented new learning experiences for me. I became much more intimately involved with the board and senior management and had to deal with a much broader set of legal and business issues. I was also directly responsible for managing more people, including lawyers and non-lawyers. In addition to advising the board and senior management directly on issues with which I was intimately familiar, such as SEC reporting, corporate governance, and debt-related legal issues, I also played a large role in managing litigation and advising the company on issues relating to human resources, intellectual property, and customer and vendor contracts. My role at Everi also allowed me to work with senior management to implement and improve various business processes throughout the company.

In early 2016, just as I was getting married, I received a call from DLA, offering me the opportunity to return to the Washington DC area as a partner in their corporate practice. I accepted the partnership and the chance to return to my home state of Maryland. While my return to DLA presented me with a plethora of challenging and complex legal issues in a short period of time (including representing a private-equity backed company in a $400m raise, immediately followed by a $500m IPO and a $3bn refinancing of the company’s debt), my law firm experience was exactly as I recalled. With my first baby on the way, maintaining the ever-elusive work-life balance was even more difficult. On top of that, I yearned to re-embrace the different challenges provided by an in-house role. The opportunity at Live Ventures allowed my family to return to Las Vegas and was exactly what I was seeking – a general counsel role with a small-but-growing public company.

Live Ventures is a public holding company that operates multiple businesses in different industries, including two retailers (Vintage Stock and ApplianceSmart) and a carpet manufacturer (Marquis Industries). Understanding a company’s business is crucial to any in-house role, and Live has three of them. Our subsidiaries operate independently and often with wide latitude, so the biggest challenge is integrating myself with senior management, both here at corporate and with our operating companies. I need to ensure that the business people know that I’m here to help and advise in any way I can, including navigating the challenges of being part of a growing public company.

For those considering going in-house, I suggest that you round out your legal skillset. At a firm like DLA, you’re focused on mergers and acquisitions or capital markets transactions, for example, and if you have an issue regarding a commercial lease, you reach out to a real estate colleague. At Live, I’ve worked on more commercial real estate leases in the past few months than I had in my entire career. So if you’re at a large law firm, it’s really about trying to find that odd project, embrace it, and try and use it to your advantage to learn something new. I know it’s challenging with the way larger firms are structured, but I think that broader skillsets translate better for in-house positions.

The other challenge, particularly for the general counsel role, is learning how to manage people – both up and down the organization chart. It’s not something they teach you in law school or at a law firm, but soft skills play a much larger role in-house than they do as outside counsel. Oftentimes, for me, applying appropriate soft skills presents the most challenging part of the role. You can’t talk to HR the same way you talk to opposing counsel, or the same way you talk to your own outside counsel, or the same way you speak to your CEO and CFO.

Also, ivory-tower-thinking doesn’t have a role in-house. It’s almost as if you’re apologizing to a business person, and saying, ‘Look, I’m sorry we’re talking about this in this manner but unfortunately we are talking about a theoretical legal issue here, and this is something that may come up down the road depending on what direction the company takes.’

Law school teaches you how to analyze issues, research, and write memos, but there’s very little practical training. Law firms provide some of that practical training – teaching you how to draft documents and negotiate, for example. In-house practice is very different from firm practice – you must be practical and find solutions; you are an adviser of risk and counselor to the business team. A lot of outside counsel claim they are practical and business-oriented, but the reality is the business team does not want to be negotiating every word and obscure provision where there is little risk. Finally, you must be able to communicate in a crisp and precise manner, using language the business team understands. Long emails and memos are not going to make you a successful in-house lawyer.

At Live Ventures, we don’t have a panel. Selection of outside counsel is relationship-driven: relationships developed by senior management, the board and myself. I learned a long time ago that you hire the lawyer, not the firm. A firm may have a great reputation, but if the lawyer’s not practical and helpful and is unable to communicate in a concise manner, then the firm’s reputation doesn’t matter. It always amazes me that lawyers think they are building relationships by billing their clients .1, .1, .1 every time they touch a matter. I see those bills and cringe, because that tells me that the outside counsel does not view us as a collaborative partner – we are simply a revenue source. Alternative fee arrangements are something we now look at on every new project – and we expect our legal counsel to do the same.

I believe companies that can continue to bring work in-house will do so (although some companies have taken steps in the opposite direction). I think the larger, elite law firms are appropriate for larger, more complex companies, and bet-the-company transactions regardless of a company’s size. But those of us working in smaller, budget-conscious companies who come from a sophisticated outside counsel practice can leverage our own expertise in-house and our own relationships. Elite firms serve a purpose, but I think there are plenty of lawyers who have previously practiced at those firms, yet bring the same capabilities and quality advice at a much better rate; these are the lawyers we seek out.

I joined Mastercard in 2000 and initially spent seven years in our law department. Then, I spent seven years or so in a series of business roles – I was chief of staff to our chief operating officer doing strategic work, financial planning and sales planning. It was a senior staff role, which is often how lawyers can move effectively from the legal function to the business side. From there, I went to run our North America markets, and for the first time I had a P&L and actual account responsibility, which is a bracing challenge for anybody, but particularly somebody coming from a legal background. Because I was deep in that market and understood some of our challenges, I was asked to take on the role of chief product officer, which tested me in a whole new way.

One of the strengths of Mastercard’s culture is that it seeks to move people around and give them diverse responsibilities, and I really was the beneficiary of that. I joke that I was qualified for exactly none of the jobs I had except for the first one! And in a strange way, all that moving around made me better qualified to be the general counsel.

So, coming back into a legal role did not feel like a significant leap, because I had both wide-ranging previous experience in legal and risk management, as well as having spent seven years with a lot of access to the board of directors and helping to drive the company’s business strategy. In the product organization I had been given the opportunity to manage a relatively large team, and so the opportunity to come back into the law organization and drive a focused transformation agenda was very exciting.

It goes without saying that in the GC role you need to really make sure you put on your risk management hat. That isn’t to say that I didn’t feel accountable for risk management in my business roles, but there’s a special accountability here, and trying to be intentional about flexing that muscle, consulting widely with people and using my business experience to advise on legal risk was a key part of my initial agenda as GC. These were all an important part of coming back in to the law department.

One of the things that I’ve found is that as in-house lawyers, we need to always be selling, meaning that we can’t take for granted that our colleagues understand or appreciate the critical work we do. Business people tend to communicate simply and crisply, whereas lawyers can, at times, go on forever. Just being able to talk to my own legal teams about things like simplicity of communication, managing to metrics and leaning into the company’s strategy has been a pleasure to bring to the department. You need to tell your colleagues it’s a priority: you need to get their buy-in and acknowledgement, so when you are successful it doesn’t look like a random walk, it looks like very important strategic work, which it in fact is. That is so foundational, but it so often doesn’t happen. In-house lawyers need to be selling their services and their value.

We’ve really worked hard on a metrics-based scorecard of things we wanted to achieve – some strategic and some tactical. It is such a natural instinct for business leaders – every business leader manages to a P&L or some sort of balanced scorecard of hard numeric metrics. For lawyers, on the other hand, it is really hard, and a lot resist it. But at the end of the day, if you push hard enough, I think every legal function can find a metrics-based scorecard to measure themselves. That’s really powerful because it speaks the language of business, and it’s a great way of demonstrating value to your board, your CEO and others.

We are shifting a significant portion of our work from lawyers to a shared service function with our finance team. Now, at Mastercard, if you do a non-disclosure agreement with us, it’s done by staff in the shared service function, and that shared service function has all sorts of automation and it tracks – in a very rich way – timelines and response rates and so on. It has allowed us to use knowledge in entirely different ways. We are revamping all of our customer-onboarding systems to make them much more digital- and user-friendly, we’re bringing mobile-based solutions to all compliance requirements, and we’re really trying to show up as a mobile first, digital savvy organization. If Mastercard is going to grow 10, 15%, I want to be able to support that growth, but at the same time grow our expenses only by a very small fraction of that 10, 15%.

In a legal department, it’s very easy to revert to: I’m a service organization and I will do what the business brings me. That’s reactive. We have a critical role in driving company strategy: understanding that strategy, figuring out the components of it, influencing it, and finding ways for legal and policy and other things to not only enable the strategy, but to advance it.

‘I’ll give you an example. We’re increasingly seeing that good privacy policies are a competitive differentiator. In light of GDPR, my legal team has created a groundbreaking venture called Trūata – which is a method of anonymising data so that it can be used appropriately while protecting consumer privacy, consistent with the new regulations. It came about because lawyers went to the business and said, ‘Look, we have to do this but, by the way, we can get a competitive advantage if we do it well. Let’s drive this thing.’ This is an example of how, if you’re just an order-taker, marking up contracts, then you’re not doing all that you can do.

I think that there is growing demand for the GC to be a trusted adviser to boards. The GC must be the keeper and the guardian of the company’s ethics and its culture, including in areas well beyond its traditional remit. Being part of those conversations, always doing the right thing and absolutely insisting on good ethics and compliance are so important. We’ve seen how incredibly destructive some of these divisive cultural issues can be if they’re not managed the right way.

It’s really hard to overestimate how much time and effort goes into board and governance issues. That continues to surprise me, even four years into the role. Getting the narratives right to the board, not just on my own things, but helping the company do that well overall so that we have effective meetings and get to good conversations – boy, it’s time consuming. You’ve got to make sure you’re resourcing for it, because it can take over your role.

In my job, I could do nothing but government outreach and it still would be really hard to cover everything I need to. This aspect of the job is that important and demanding. Given the choppy geopolitical waters, it has never been more important to make sure you’re not just stuck in the office, but you’re out there talking to governments and stakeholders, you’re advocating and being an ambassador for the firm. The reality is that there are only a few people in an organization who can really get top engagement, and demands on GCs are increasingly high as a result.

In terms of the role of the GC going forward, I do think new skills may be needed on the external ambassadorship side. If you can give a good speech in a TED Talks style in front of 200 economists in a leading country and come off as pretty compelling, you’re adding value to your firm. The best skill you can ever get anywhere in life is public speaking. It’s not rocket science; being comfortable in a public role can be learned.

The world is going through enormous change, not just in technology, but also geopolitics. For multinational firms, from a regulatory and public policy standpoint, the future is going to be harder. Norms that have been around since the Second World War are really changing: Alliances are fracturing, we’re seeing trade issues; we’re seeing nationalism on the rise; prevalent data privacy issues. Societies are looking for private companies to take positions on social issues that are enormously complicated. So the job is harder than it’s been because of those things and I think we need new models and approaches to addressing them. Trying to do it alone isn’t likely to be successful. Being a GC, not in a steady state, or even in a growth state with known paradigms, but in a state where all the paradigms are being thrown up is difficult, and we need to do more work on our tools.