About

Lisa Mather moved into in-house legal work a decade ago and has not looked back, taking on senior roles with Colgate-Palmolive around the world – notably in Sydney, Prague, New York and Hong Kong – before being made vice president and chief international counsel of PayPal in 2017. The cultural and geographical variety she has enjoyed in her roles throughout this time is regarded by her as among the most positive aspects of her career: ‘By far, one of the best things for me personally in having had the opportunity to work in-house internationally, is the wonderful teams of lawyers I have worked with and gotten to know over time all around the world’. She explains her current role allows her to continue feeding this passion, as well as to flex her legal muscles in a demanding role: ‘As vice president and chief international counsel for PayPal, I currently work with an extremely talented and dedicated legal team of over 60 staff, who are based across over 15 different countries all around the world. Working in one of the world’s leading fintech companies, we work in a dynamic industry sector and the business we support touches over 200 jurisdictions. We encounter a very broad range of legal, regulatory and business affairs issues’. Gearing up her team for even greater achievements in the future, Mather explains that she is building even more efficient internal processes. ‘General counsels today are highly accountable for how they manage their legal functions, especially when it comes to measuring factors such as the value they add, ease of doing business, effective talent management and cost management’, she says. ‘For example, we are in the process of introducing 10 core KPIs that we will be using consistently across our function to more accurately measure our effectiveness and drive our continuous improvement, and we have some significant global contract management projects under way, which we have initiated in the second half of 2018’.