4. Pack Your Gear | Key Tools
The premise is that - as the first GC in a high growth tech company - there is benefit to “trying on” the idea of thinking of legal like product. A few opportunities open up with this shift of thinking. For the tips of the waves - thinking of legal like product introduces a new frame with new possibilities.
The job is to design a product (legal services) which must meet the needs of a multi-stakeholder market (company leadership, the board, other teams, clients, outside counsel, investors) with the ability to scale.
A product team tunes product-market fit by sitting with the customers and observing how they interact with the product in real life. In staying curious, they discover friction points, blind spots, future opportunities. This information helps them identify and prioritize work. They also gain relational trust.
The analogy breaks down when you realize: (1) you do not get a big team (like product). (2) You will soon discover legal is not the golden child of the company.
The good news is: (1) as the first GC, there is no “this is the way we’ve always done it.” (2) You get to learn and design and innovate.
One approach:
There are certain areas I want to look like every other high growth tech company. Cloud storage. File organization. Electronic signature gathering. Cap table management. There are also areas I want to think and design. When I design, I want to do so to help other teams as they interact with legal - which in turn helps the company. To know how to design - I need to sit with those teams (my customer) in the same way product does. I ask questions like: “What is your prior experience working with legal (or have you)? What did you like? What did you not like? If we are sitting down a year from now and you are telling me I aced my first year as GC, what are we talking about? What is your top pain point with legal right now?”
With this information, I work to solve the problems of others.
New tools:
Ironclad. Sales wants contract lifecycle management and speed of contracting. Finance wants dashboard visibility. All teams want integration. Legal wants version control, searchable text and something better than how we negotiated deals in 2004. Everyone is curious about the difference AI can make here (it will).
Vanta. Every company wants security, compliance, dashboard visibility, a cross-functional process in place when something breaks (it will).
Share Tools (with Product):
Monday. Leadership wants visibility on how legal organizes and prioritizes, with the chance to provide input.
Miro. The company needs the ability to visualize and agree on workflows. This is especially critical working legal into the product release cycle and mapping potential crisis response scenarios.
Retrium. The company needs a “safe space” for blameless cross-functional retrospectives on key projects.
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