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Tyler Finn
Hi there, this is Tyler Finn, the host of the Abstract Podcast, and I'm coming to you today with a special bonus episode all about scale. We've talked to a variety of legal leaders over the past few months, general counsels, head of legal operations, other folks in legal about how they've scaled their teams and helped their organizations navigate hyper growth. I hope you enjoy this episode. Let's get started.

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First up, we have April Lindauer, general counsel of Carta about how she scaled her team through COVID.

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Tyler Finn   

When you joined Carta was about 200 employees. Today, the business is somewhere around 2000 or so. So you've you've literally helped them 10x I suppose, over the time that you've been there, take us a little bit on that, that journey from 200 to 2000 and maybe some of the some of the highlights,

April Lindauer

Yeah, I think some of the highlights were I joined shortly after their Series C fundraising. So I joined at a time when we were really looking to launch what we called our public markets product. So that product was an employee stock option plan for public companies. So we had just formed a broker dealer at that time, and so that was really why I joined Carta. I also joined at a time where, you know, their core business. They are an SEC registered transfer agent, so it was also to help bolster that compliance program as well, and then also just to help manage and scale all of their legal services. So I joke around and say my job, when I started, was everything, and it over time, and as we went through various rounds of fundraising, we started hiring for more and more specialists.

Tyler Finn   

Got it in,

April Lindauer

Whether it was in compliance or in legal, uh huh. So, but I was real. I really joined the company as a generalist at that point in time. So I did everything from commercial contracting to employment to IP, you name it, I was managing that along with a small team of lawyers for about two years.

Tyler Finn   

And how big is the whole legal team today? It's like 50 or so.

April Lindauer

Well, I manage today legal compliance and risk on a global level. So we have close to 50 employees globally, of those employees, I believe now that 17 of those employees are lawyers.

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Tyler Finn

Next up, we have Adam Becker, head of legal operations at Cockroach Labs. I sat down with Adam at CLOC in Las Vegas earlier this year for a conversation around how legal ops can help legal departments scale.

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How do you think about I don't know if these two things are at odd with each other, at odds with each other, either, but sort of building process that scales and can scale quickly, but also being able 500 people. But cockroaches is a very innovative company, so I'd imagine things have to remain very flexible, right? How do you think about balancing those two things? I

Adam Becker

think it's the same problem with technology. Now is a question of an answer to Yeah, I went in there building to scale, right? Because we, the legal team is now more than doubled in size since I've been there. So that's a scalable thing. Everything the company does is, you know, scaling. How do we make it happen? And but again, now we've hit this technological innovation where maybe there's better ways than there were a year ago, or, my case, a season ago. And I think it's a balance between the two. And quite frankly, it's the same thing I see as something like this. You know, the technology providers in our world are also having this conversation, right? Are we native? AI, we're putting it in. Are we integrated? Are we buying something like it's the same thing. We have this amazing product that we built, and now we have this new technology, which we have to build into it. So we're all balancing it in a way. And I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer, but we're embracing both. I mean, I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to say this cockroach Labs has become very AI focused, and we made it a corporate goal to be an AI company, yeah. So we play with AI a lot. We have an exploratory program in legal. We are using more than I ever thought. You know, I'm very excited here to learn them actually, how to perfect my GPTs, because right now, my GPT is overly helpful. Too much person in there. But we're building it. We're doing it, and it's it's cool, and I don't know where everything's gonna go, but it's a balance. We still need stuff to work, but we are very open to what's next.

Tyler Finn  

I also sat down at Clock in Las Vegas with David Cowen, founder and CEO of the Cowan Group for a conversation around how helping scale your team can also help you scale your career. 

I think this builds on a point that you made earlier, which is, I've observed that it's not just that you have to scale legal alongside the business as it scales, but people increasingly see legal as a very important component of a scaling business, or helping the business scale. And I think a lot of folks would chalk some of that up, at least to the rise of legal ops. Do you agree with that? How do you think legal ops helps businesses scale? Not just legal teams.

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Tyler Finn  

David Cowen

It's a really good question. It's a really good question. Um, you know, I think, like, in some like, in so many different ways. So we're going to get into a maturity, you know, we're going to get into a maturity frame. So a, it depends on the maturity of the GC. B depends the maturity of the individual that they've hired to run legal ops. C, it depends on, you know, the authority and the resources that they're going to give this individual. I mean, it gets really complex, right, so, but it does, like legal apps moves the needle. So it doesn't matter where you start, so long as you start kind of thing, you know, like, if you're Jen McCarron, or you're Mary O'Connell or your or your Lucy Basilia, like, if you want those people, like, you're moving the needle, right? Like there, but they've got maturity and, like, if you had a decade of experiential knowledge, yeah, if you've got eight years of experience, or six years or, I mean, it's kind of like baseball, right? So, like, if you've played high school, college, aaa, and you've had a lot of that bats, or you've like, you're ready for the pros, you know? And then you're not ready for the pros because you're working in the pros, yeah, and then you become Aaron judge, right? You know, I say, but not everybody becomes Aaron judge. So, you know, there's an impact of legal ops, but I do find, I think maybe the answer that's most helpful here about the role of legal Ops is legal Ops is becoming, by by authentic nature, a more interdependent part of the Business of law and the business. So we are beginning to see intersections of information governance, data security, the various business units. We need a lot of smart people around the table to understand the potential that AI Gen AI the agentic workforce of the future holds for us. There's no one department that's going to own this, you know, and so I think, again, because legal has so much to gain from this, there'll be a lot of sharing and a lot of learning. So legal ops, legal gloves, part of legal I almost don't think, I think that all of that is coming together at an accelerated rate, and I don't even know what the agentic world is all about yet. Just beginning to think about that myself, it's like you're going to be an Agent Manager, right? Who's going to be an agent? What does that even mean? You know, I mean, that's where we're all going to be together a year from now. It's not going to be this over building of technology on the floor. I think it's going to be more process around what are you doing? Do you have agents? What are you doing with your agents? I mean, I'm just listening to Reid Hoffman, yeah. And I'm like, I'm having a hard time keeping up. And if you haven't read super agency by Reid Hoffman, I'm like, I highly recommend super agency, because he talks about how the human in the loop is the key, and what and who are we going to be in that leadership role of managing these agents. So I don't think we're going to be displaced if we learn how to work with this.

Tyler Finn   

The last of the conversations that I had in Las Vegas at CLOC was with Tommie Tavares-Ferreira, Chief Strategy Officer at Law Trades and former head of legal operations at Cedar and Peloton. Tommy and I had a conversation around why success in scaling legal operations means bringing your cross-functional stakeholders along with you.

It's not just that legal is required to allow the company to scale. These days, folks look at legal and say that's actually a very important partner in helping us scale. And I think legal Ops is a big part of that. You've done that before, right? I mean, a company like Rakuten here in the US peloton, which obviously experienced huge growth, and you were there for the IPO, you know cedar as well. Talk to us a little bit about how you've helped not just legal orgs, but like organizations scale through your legal ops work.

Tommie Tavares-Ferreira

If I was at peloton for the IPO, I'd have many more millions of dollars in, but I came right after. So why did I get caught on that minutia? Sorry, the actual question

Tyler Finn   

No no the question was really like, how have you being at these organizations where there's been not just a scaling legal team or not just a scaling legal department, but also it's really rapidly scaling business. Yeah. How have you helped the legal team and the wider organization scale?

Tommie Tavares-Ferreira

Oh, that's a great question. So the beautiful part and position of legal operations, one of the opportunities that we have is when a company is growing like cedar is a great example, like series D. This is, this is a growth company, not like, hyper, hyper, gross, unmanageable, yes, certainly on a real growth trajectory, like projection, we can come in and look at what the business is trying to achieve. And if you know, I would hope that a legal operations person is doing this, if they're looking around the landscape of like, what the business is trying to achieve, they can figure out where they fit into that. And really, like, if you're, if you're a good legal leader, and certainly, you know, Vanessa cedar was like, you're going, what are the company's objectives? Where does, you know, the legal objectives ladder up to that, and then legal operations going and how do I help us all achieve that? Right? So what does the company want to achieve? What does the legal department want to do in support of what the company wants to achieve? And then legal operation goes, and I'll make you all achieve it, right? So if the company is like, hyper growth and trying to drive revenue, and it's like closing deals faster, then guess what get? Guess who's working on CLM stuff like, yes, who's working with sales op to make sure that you're closing deals like, you know, if, if you're trying to save costs, and maybe you're working with procurement to go, what, what are we spending money on it where, you know, where we wrap our arms around that like, so I think the real opportunities in supporting that, Right, like, big scale, is that legal operations generalists really have the the know how to know what levers to pull to support growth, and even if it's happening rapidly, any like I think that they know where to put themselves in to help to achieve those goals.

Tyler Finn   

And to put the fine point on it, is what you've just described, that sort of framework, also a framework for prioritization, yeah, in a in an environment in which there's probably a lot of different priorities, or opinions or

Tommie Tavares-Ferreira

The bottom line is, like, if everything's a priority, nothing's a priority, right? Like, so a lot of my time is spent as a legal, apps, professional, sort of throwing everything on the whiteboard and then going, what's the matrix here? Like, what is the musket done? What is the nice to have? What's the wish list? Like, what are we not getting to this year? Because, like, everything comes in fast and furious, and it's why I probably, like, you know, speak so highly of like, doing some sort of antique system. Like, it's really, actually very important, because it's important to see how much are you getting in sort of one pocket that just is maybe not important. And how do you, like, how do you actually systematize the things that are coming in that need some sort of, like, bounce back needs some sort of like, here's the answer to your question. Now with generative AI that's going to do a lot of that, like, first pass, maybe answer the question, because a lot of that doesn't need a legal mind or a legal operations mind. And we do legal ops leaders are really going to find these opportunities of like, where do we strategize, where we do spend our time, or where we don't spend our time, where our lawyers spend their time, where they don't spend their time, their time, but really, like, we can't all be everything all the time, but lawyers feel like they need to, sometimes they want to, and sometimes they actually have to be. So being able to figure out, like, where we can put them, where they don't, maybe need to answer a question, where that can be, like a self-serve thing, where technology fits in and like actually helps us to get that done, all of that stuff. Those are really fun problems and challenges, but if you don't prioritize, you will spin out really fast, because there's a lot to do.

Tyler Finn   

Finally, I recently sat down with Jordan Hatcher, co-founder, COO, and CLO at The Grid, and former first lawyer at StaffBase, about how he helped the StaffBase organization grow and scale from 80 employees to more than 800 and set them up for a successful IPO.

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I don't want us to pass over your time at staff based because that's really I think it's really interesting, and I think you probably have a lot of lessons to share. Where was the company at when you probably a great place to start?

Jordan Hatcher

Yeah. So I interviewed in end of June or July, and then started at the beginning of September. And even between that time frame, I think they'd added 30 people. So I was the 80th employee. They didn't have an office here in Amsterdam, and I was lucky enough that when they offered me the job, and I said, Look, I want to stay that. We came up with a solution to stay here in Amsterdam, and it ended up working out. We had, I think, at one point, 40 people or so in the office here in Amsterdam. Oh, wow. And that's a whole story in itself, like basically starting the office here is the only exec at the time. And yeah, they were just getting started. They it was the typical Wild West that most of your, most of the listeners, will understand, and that, you know, AES could effectively make up their own contracts. They, you know, there wasn't any of the structures in place. I mean, you don't expect it, though, I didn't go in expecting to have a lot of that as the first legal hire in. And also, you know, when you're at the very early stage of a company, which I also see even more now, the focus is keeping the company alive, right? And it's closing sales getting some momentum. You're not running a compliance organization. You're not trying to take every box right. You're, of course, you're trying to do the right thing. But you know, the structures that you have in place, you know, a 10 million AR business are different than the ones that you have at 50 or 100 or about to go public. And in the same way, you know when you're in that sort of one to 10 range, when you start, when usually they hire their first lawyer, unless they're regulated, it is just chaos in some ways, right?

Tyler Finn   

Lessons that you drew from your time there, or maybe getting them a little bit away from chaos, as they basically 10x in size over the course of your tenure.

Jordan Hatcher

Yeah. So while I was there, they went from, as you mentioned, from 80 people to 800 people. I think one of the first things that I did in the first two weeks, it was right, we're opening up a new office in London, do all the incorporation and sort it all out. One thing is, at the very beginning, if you're joining one of these smaller outfits, is the first lawyer. It's a moving train, and you kind of have to run up and speed alongside of it and join it right in the sense that you can't just jump in and expect so I didn't want to disrupt the quarter. I kept on with their negotiation processes. They had a contract at the time that wasn't easy to negotiate in the US, but we kept at it, because it's the one that they had. And then we looked, listened, really, heard from the team about where the pain points were, and then tried to create something that was more global to go on forward, right at the very beginning, you have to really get stuck in. So, you know, when we opened the first rented the first office. I found that office here in Amsterdam. I ordered the Ikea furniture. I helped build the Ikea furniture. You know, you kind of have to really dive in and into anything, almost, because, again, it is a fast moving train, right? But at the same time, you can't lose focus of what the core of your job is, right? It's very easy to get distracted by a lot of other things, and you have to focus a lot later with growing the team, especially during the COVID crisis and the size that we got to, and then my own story with my son, who has special needs, I really didn't take care of myself, and I see that after having taken the sabbatical and everything else like I focused a lot on work. It was an escape for me, but it was also really demanding, and I should have had better tools to either take care of myself or to kind of handle the work in the right way so that reducing my own personal Stress.

Tyler Finn   

Thanks so much for listening to this bonus episode with stories from legal leaders about how they scaled their teams and helped their businesses scale. Hope you enjoyed this one and hope to see you next time!

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