About

The legal department at Storyful consists of two top quality lawyers, namely general counsel Emmet O’Grady and senior legal counsel Angeline O’Connell. The function was established by O’Grady in October 2015, with O’Connell joining the department in September 2016. The last two years have seen a number of factors that have directly led to an increase in workload, not least a trebling of the sales team, a huge growth in revenue, and the advent of GDPR along with increasing auditing requirements. Notwithstanding its size and this exponential growth in volume of work, the legal team has remained constant, with O’Grady and O’Connell providing coverage globally across the leading social media intelligence and news agency’s five offices – Dublin, London, New York, Hong Kong and Sydney. ‘This increase in volume has been met predominantly through innovation and creating efficiencies’, explains O’Grady. Amongst the innovations introduced is “agile methodology”, which O’Grady describes as, ‘a method of project management that we learned from our product team that we applied with significant success to our GDPR operationalisation. From a practical perspective, this involved breaking down our requirements into manageable bite-size tasks that we completed fortnightly, with stand-up reviews at the end of every fortnight to track progress’. The team also implemented “Kanban methodology” to its contracts management processes. This, according to Grady, ‘involves the sales team creating an instruction card in a Kanban tool that is then managed from initial instruction to completion in an efficient and transparent manner. The main benefits have been that new business is now managed according to commercial priorities that are set by the chief revenue officer, rather than the one who shouts the loudest at the legal team. It also means there is total transparency as to where a matter is in the pipeline. This has resulted in a significant drop in “turnaround time” for legal responding on instructions for sales’. Additionally the team has implemented an electronic signature system. O’Grady also highlights that O’Connell has been an outstanding addition to the legal team, and is now effectively the primary point of contact for the sales team on commercial contracts. Through the various efficiencies created, as well as through effective training, relationship-building and site visits, the team is credited for decreasing turnaround times in spite of a rapidly expanding and demanding client base.