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Giulio Romanelli, Associate Partner, McKinsey & Company and John Pyall, Head of MGA Cockpit, Munich Re UK

GC: In the legal sector, many people describe the emergence of legal tech start-ups as ‘fintech’s little brother’. Could you tell me about the emergence of fintech, Giulio, and how it has impacted the banking sector?

Giulio Romanelli (GR): Banking has historically been one of the business sectors most resilient to disruption by technology. However, in the last ten years, fintechs have moved quickly, forcing incumbents to rethink their core business models and embrace digital innovations. In the last five years, we’ve seen a significant journey as fintechs have become more and more mature.

Today, banks remain uniquely and systemically important to the economy; they are the major repository for deposits, which customers largely identify with their primary financial relationship; they continue to be the gateways to the world’s largest payment systems; and they still attract the bulk of requests for credit.

Some things have changed, however. Firstly, the financial crisis had a negative impact on trust in the banking system. Secondly, customers are more open to relationships that focus on origination and sales. Thirdly, mobile devices have undercut the advantages of physical distribution. Plus there has been a massive increase in the availability of data alongside a significant decrease in the cost of computing power.

GC: To what extent would you term it a disruption?

GR: We can call this a disruption in the sense that fintechs have a unique opportunity for customer disintermediation, by leveraging advantaged modes of customer acquisition, a step-function reduction in the cost to serve, innovative use of data and advanced analytics, and segment/niche-specific propositions.

GC: When insurtechs started popping up in the insurance space, what was the reaction like in the industry, John?

John Pyall (JP): At the beginning, to a certain degree, insurtechs were looked upon with interest, but as: ‘It’s a bit gimmicky, it’s interesting but it’s not for us.’ And then, over time, they were looked at with more and more interest. From our point of view, we made a clear play in that direction. But I think there still is a little bit of ‘watch and see’ about the insurance market as a whole.

GC: Have insurtechs disrupted the insurance space?

JP: I think people look at disruption as being a negative idea. I think insurtech start-ups have, to a certain degree, enhanced the insurance area because they have actually allowed insurers to touch into areas that we previously may not have been able to. For example, digital partners have allowed us to reach out to new customers that we may not previously have ever gotten close to, simply because of the mediums they use to connect to their services. We have insurtechs that purely use social media to market to their customers and their clients and, to a certain degree, their distribution models are so different from what we were traditionally used to it has meant we have got avenues to customers we would never have considered five years ago.

That may be younger people, it may be people who are more engaged in social media. It may be people who are looking to insure single item contents, which insurers wouldn’t have looked at before. We would have had difficulty insuring people employed in the gig economy, doing three jobs in a day, but these new models enhance our ability to do so.

GC: Has this involved an element of culture change?

JP: When you have companies coming in that are younger, more flexible and they are able to drive through changes very quickly within their own organisations, you look at that and say: ‘We need to show that we have that ability as well. If we want to be in this market we have to be able to deal with that.’ So therefore it does actually allow people to think positively about how can we adapt, to differentiate ourselves within these markets.

GC: Looking again to the banking sector, how have established banking organisations responded to fintech disruption? Has it has a knock-on transformative effect in terms of the way these organisations use technology?

GR: As successful fintechs have rapidly matured from start-ups to mature technology disruptors, banks have started the long journey to transform their core digital capabilities, with several areas of focus. These include: a digital-native customer experience; big data and advanced analytics; moving towards a scalable technology landscape through cloud and automation; adoption of APIs (Application Programmable Interface).

Firstly, banks have been creating an integrated customer experience inspired by digital attackers, versus using a one-size-fits-all distribution. So rather than using the branch as the main point of interaction with customers, all the banks have mobile apps and they are very proud of the features that they use to differentiate themselves.

Innovating the customer experience by integrating with fintechs can provide advantages. For example, take the typical onboarding time for corporate lending. A fintech such as Kabbage proposes to reduce the onboarding time for down from something close to days, to something which is close to minutes.

Secondly, using data-driven insights and analytics holistically across the banks. While focus is generally on ‘customer-facing’ use cases, it’s very interesting to see advanced analytics applied internally to drive operational efficiency. For instance, advanced analytics to improve quality and efficiency of KYC [Know Your Customer] and anti-money-laundering.

Thirdly, banks have been mitigating the potential cost advantage of attacks through radical simplification and refining of technology infrastructure, both on process and existing technologies. For example, leveraging and deploying new technologies such as Cloud enables banks to move towards a more scalable and cheaper technology footprint.

Finally, there are several cases in which banks want to be able to offer not only their own solutions, but to also be able to link to third-party solutions. Some financial players want to offer third-party APIs directly to their own customers. And this is happening right now in terms of payments.

GC: How has technology transformation been received in the banking sector – has it required a lot of culture change?

GR: All of the above have required a significant shift in terms of culture and capabilities of incumbents, which are nowadays focusing more and more to attract digital/tech talent.

Moreover, the pace of innovation in banking is accelerating rapidly, requiring banks to increase their speed to keep up, adopting Agile software development techniques, which imply a radically different way to think about the organisation.

GC: John, in the insurance space, can you tell me a little bit about your role in Munich Re, and how the company is working with insurtechs?

JP: I head the MGA Cockpit, which assists our digital partner unit in onboarding new digital partner business into the Munich Re. A digital partner is a partner – an insurtech start-up normally – which is interested in using digital means like an app, social media, or the internet, in order to secure insurance business. The Cockpit was created 18 months ago through the Munich Re think tank to help the due diligence process of the start-up.

We have a digital partner unit that finds new ideas and new business to be brought in as a product, and we assist them in making that a viable insurance product. Basically somebody comes to our digital partners unit with an idea, and we help them develop that into a formalised product and assist them to bring that into operation.

GC: How do you do that?

JP: We may look at whether they want to write that as a single risk, as a group policy, do they need to write it with an MGA? We look at what’s needed in the wording in order to make it effective. We then see what they need to do: how they are going to handle the claims, do they need to outsource that, we might provide them with someone to manage the claims on their behalf.

GC: Are incumbent insurance organisations under threat from insurtechs or is it going to be a process of greater partnering, do you think?

JP: There’s always going to be one or two insurtechs that may seem to be a potential threat. But I would say that generally the growth will be by partnering – that’s where people are really looking. There are very few that are coming in to disrupt the entire chain; I think most are looking to assist within the distribution chain itself. That helps both the existing business and the new start-up, so there are advantages to both sides if you get it right.

GC: How are banks working with fintech companies? To what extent are partnerships occurring? What are the benefits of partnering? And what are the challenges?

GR: Whereas market and media commentary has emphasised the threat to established business models, the opportunities for incumbents to develop new partnerships aimed at better cost control, capital allocation and customer acquisition are growing.

The vast majority of fintechs focus on retail banking, lending and payments. In many of these areas, start-ups have sought to target the end customer directly, bypassing traditional banks. In some cases, this is further accelerated by regulatory changes such as PSD2 [the second Payment Services Directive, a 2015 EU Directive] in Europe, accelerating the shift towards open banking ecosystems.

However, most recent analyses suggest that the structure of the fintech industry is changing and that a new spirit of cooperation between fintechs and incumbents is developing. For example, ING partnered with the lending start-up Kabbage back in 2015 to deliver instant capital to SMEs. Another example is the fact that blockchain development in recent years has been mainly pushed by consortia, bringing together banks and fintechs.

This offers significant benefit for both parties, as it allows fintechs to rapidly access and offer their services to large pools of customers, while incumbents can rapidly deploy customer-centric digital-native services, and strengthen their own digital capabilities and talent pool. Looking ahead is whether such a ‘coopetition’ model is really sustainable in the long term – ie whether one side of this equation becomes more relevant.

GC: From an insurance incumbent point of view, John, what might be the blockers to partnering with insurtechs?

JP: I think culture does have something to do with it – can you build new technology into your existing systems?

Regulation is also one. We are a very regulated industry, so we have to be careful about how we take steps. It cannot be revolution, it has to be evolution. New technology makes people nervous – they understand their business and they understand how it works. If you then drop outside of that, can you write the business in a different model? How does that work?

Another thought is whether you are actually going to end up competing against yourself. That is a clear worry that people have – am I actually just offering the same thing but getting less value out of it?

GC: In your opinion, Giulio, what are the most exciting technological developments in the banking sector?

GR: Looking forward, the most exciting technology developments are related to the next evolution of current tech must-haves, from advanced analytics and machine learning, to intelligent automation, to blockchain, to internet of things.

GC: And how about the insurance sector?

JP: In terms of new tools, there are home and emergency products, for example alarm systems which allow you to instantly know if you’ve got water leakage or a fire or something like that when you’re away from your home.

A lot of it is around trying to change how product service is given, so we’ve got flight cancellation tools looking at how you can get on a new flight.

There are ways insurers are using data to be more proactive and customer-centric in managing loss better, so if there’s a flood, we can identify which potential customers are affected instead of waiting for them to contact us.

I think the way customers approach insurers is going to change quite dramatically as well. They can manage their whole claim themselves, so they know where the claim is at any stage.

GC: In terms of the technology that’s underpinning these new insurance facilities, what are the trends there?

JP: The technology itself is very AI-dominated. It is very much about how much can we automate so that we can respond quicker to customer needs, and keep them informed.

The balance is between automation and empathy – you don’t want a chat bot to respond to a customer in a very automated way when you’re dealing with something which has an emotional requirement.

GC: Do you get a lot of pushback from customers on that?

JP: If you have bought through a digital platform, to a certain degree you assume you are going to go through a digital journey and there’s a certain acceptance to that. However, there are times where people want to drop out of that digital journey, and you have to be prepared to respond to those touch points.

The key is to be flexible, to look at where it can actually genuinely assist, but to make sure you put your customer first. Whereas AI can actually help you reduce cost and make that customer journey more effective, what you don’t want to do is lose that empathetic relationship with the client so they become a customer that touches base with you once and looks purely at price.

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Cristina Álvarez Fernández, Head of legal Europe, Cintra

We are exploring how to benefit from tools based on artificial intelligence within our legal department. We still haven’t found the right tool or technology for implementation – but I don’t think we’re far away either. It’s about following a process and making sure – especially the first time – that we do this the right way.

A Fresh Start

This has been a new process for us and we’ve been very deliberate about the steps involved. The first thing we did was to really thoroughly research and find out just what’s in the market. We used a range of sources, from specialist legal magazines, through to talking with our peers – both legal and otherwise.

I have encouraged an internal analysis of the current developments of artificial intelligence in the legal field. We have identified a few tools that could ease the work of the legal department. If we can implement these tools successfully, this will result in economic savings for the company and will help to allocate the resources of the department more efficiently.

At present, we’re currently at the stage where we’re testing tools that we’ve identified that are currently in the market. I think that the first tool we implement will be for contract review. We’ve invested a significant amount into this system already and are hoping that we can have it ready to go by the end of 2018.

First Things First

Contract management and review was a logical first step for us, particularly around NDAs. People always find the same dangers in that kind of contract, so it’s routine work. It can be done by a very junior lawyer – once you explain to that lawyer what the issues are, normally it’s something that can be done really quickly. The line of thinking we took was to take this one step further and try to give it to technology. This is the starting point from which we can hopefully expand.

I don’t think this will replace entirely, at least so far, a person in our team. We’re certainly not planning to get rid of someone just because we believe that work will be done by a machine – not at all. I think this is going to help us to better allocate the resources that we have. We’re not a large department, so where I really see the benefit is being able to focus on things that really need our minds and judgement – which is where technology is probably the least useful at the moment.

Inside Out

I do think that, in time, technology will help us reduce our external legal spend. If we can develop systems within our department that can take on some of this load – particularly where there are significant amounts of data – then we should be able to bring more of this work in-house.

I think that, in time, we will see the relationship between in-house departments and external firms change as a result of technology – mostly where fees are concerned. I suspect that the fees of law firms can be reduced, or at least controlled, depending on the market and matters at hand. But I don’t think the interplay will shift, where we’ll suddenly be dealing with machines rather than a person. At least I can’t anticipate that now – but who knows, maybe in the future, that will be the way!

I have genuinely been surprised and impressed at how the legal sector is dealing with innovations. It’s amazing how the law firms have seen the importance of new technology and they are really getting involved in these matters. Certainly, the sector is always very traditional and conservative, so when we first undertook the research process of finding out what was in the market, it came as a pleasant surprise to see that law firms are leading innovation in the legal sector and how many are doing things like working with start-ups in developing new technology.

I do think that the main driver motivating law firms is profitability. The way in which firms assess and charge their fees, it was getting to a point where it was going to be very difficult to sustain. Clients in particular are trying to change the way that they invoice, looking at alternate fee arrangements or, in some cases, bringing more work in-house. As a result, I think they have been forced to find ways to reduce cost and maintain their profitability. But at the same time, they will have no doubt seen other industries disrupted by technology and seen that this is the way forward.

A Group Effort

Ferrovial’s IT department has been an asset – they’re a really big part of the Ferrovial Group and have been essential throughout this process. They are genuinely curious about the technologies available and their potential impact on both our department and the wider group. They seemed enthused that we were taking an interest in this and were actively helping us along in this process.

One factor which may be more unique to Ferrovial, is that our IT department work with a lot of innovative start-ups. The group is actively working with, even financing some start-up businesses, and the IT department have been looking at some of these to see whether there are tools that could be adapted to legal, or developed specifically for us and our needs.

This isn’t something that’s unique to legal, it’s been happening in other departments already. In general, our company and group are very interested in innovation and new technology. It’s crucial for a business like Cintra and will become even more important in the future. We work closely with roads, in particular toll roads – so innovations like driverless cars have the potential to be transformational for the business. But as with any shift, there are a host of legal issues that will go along with that. So, it’s about bringing all of those factors together and becoming more innovative, thinking more innovatively, collaborating and using technology.

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Gloria Sánchez Soriano, Head of Transformation – Legal Department, Santander

When our group general counsel, Óscar García Maceiras, joined two years ago, he came with the idea of renovating and transforming the legal department. But Santander as a business is also in a huge process of transformation. Maceiras had a concern that we in our legal department in the market – and I think in many other legal departments – were working the same way that we were 100 years ago. We have legal databases, word processing, some digital resources – but we weren’t doing anything special. So the transformational project he envisioned was not only to implement a range of technologies, but also to foster a savvier legal department, with fewer pain points and better cooperation, coordination and efficiency.

The head of transformation role was created only one year ago. There was a need in our legal department to transform the way we work and to start implementing legal technologies, but also to improve things, not only with technology, but with more measures to improve processes and to take a look at how we work with people in the team – which types of lawyers we need now and which type of profiles we will be needing in the future.

Leading the charge

I’m not running a department with many people that I’m taking care of – what I do involves different people from across the department in each project. Day-to-day, I meet these people for different projects, I also meet providers, I do my own analysis of processes – for example, right now I am analysing a specific department within legal, so I am analysing what they do, how they work, what things they will need to start doing, and which others they need to stop doing.

I also need to go to conferences and seminars, because you need to be in the market talking to many people. Recently, I visited London to see what UK law firms are doing in terms of technology and innovation, as the UK is often regarded as best in class in terms of innovation from law firms.

I’m mostly talking to law firms: to people similar to me, such as innovation directors who have this type of role in firms. But I’m also talking to people in-house who, in addition to their own duties, are in charge of innovation. But the problem in many cases is that these people don’t have a real budget for implementation, or even worse, they don’t have the support from the general counsel or the wider business. In some cases their GC says ‘OK, we need to innovate, but you need to do your own work as well, we don’t have the budget and you need to do it at your desk, somehow’. If you don’t have support, it’s very difficult to do anything.

A work in progress

At the moment, for us, implementation of technology is a process. We are implementing a document management system, which is traditional in law firms but not so much in corporate in-house departments. We also have a contract management system.

We are starting to use some tools to give legal advice, for example chat bots, which our internal clients can use before going to the legal department for repetitive questions or areas where there are clear prescribed procedures, like GDPR. To complement these, we are implementing automated workflows to simplify processes and avoid huge amounts of emails – or as many as possible.

One area where I’d say Santander is really at the cutting edge, is using data extraction and analysis tools.

One area where I’d say Santander is really at the cutting edge, is using data extraction and data analysis tools for specific projects. In particular, we are using this for cases where otherwise we’d need to have a large number of contracts reviewed.

Transforming culture

The reality is that the transformation process is about much more than technology. In my opinion, it’s more about how to deal with culture change and how to deal with people, because in many cases, people are afraid to change, either consciously or unconsciously – and sometimes it’s very, very unconscious.

As lawyers, I think that we sometimes are used to working in a traditional way, to be very secure. This cultural mindset is difficult to change. But I see it as though you are conquering different areas. First of all, you have some people who are more tech savvy and who are more happy to change, so these ones are easier. But then you also have some reluctant people, so you need to try to get buy-in for new ways of working – and more broadly, for change. To do that, you need to do learning activities, you need to involve people in the project, you need to involve people in the development. Also, critical people will tell you things that you were not thinking at the beginning and the little things help you in confronting these challenges – so stakeholder engagement, early and often, is critical.

I think the future relates to being more efficient and leaving out some tasks that will be automated. Today, in most in-house legal departments and law firms, an important amount of the work that is done could be automated.

Moving forward means going back

If you want to automate contracts, you can do it in different ways. You can do that externally, or you can do it internally – but, for that, you need to train people. Training in automation is not coding – it’s a language – but it’s quite similar to coding, so you need to find people who are good at it, people who enjoy doing it, and who have the time, and then you need to organise a team. We subcontract the automation, but we will be having a small team of lawyers and paralegals who are able to create or update templates.

Some of our legal departments in other countries use data visualisation tools – so you need your lawyers to be trained in using these tools, because they are very useful for handling and understanding massive amounts of data. You don’t need your lawyers to be data scientists, but you need them to know how to use the tools and take advantage of them. However, many people who have been working for a long time are reluctant to use these tools – so then it becomes about demonstrating the difference the tools make and getting buy-in.

I think that Santander is doing great things in relation to innovation – we have projects focused on everything from blockchain to machine learning – so as lawyers, we need to understand these technologies, but also provide legal advice for the new questions and challenges that will arise as a business. In that way, we will be considering all of this for the training we need to give to our lawyers and the people we will be hiring in the future, so that we are able to provide legal advice to innovative projects. If you don’t understand blockchain, for instance, it will be very difficult for you to provide advice on it.

Adaptability and creativity will be very important. Being eager to learn is also important. You sometimes find lawyers who think that with what they already know, they don’t need anything more. For me though, that’s the complete opposite of my expectations of the ability they need to have. They need to be learning all the time. But that doesn’t just go for lawyers, that goes for all professions.

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In conversation: Supriya Gogia, Legal Counsel, Asics

GC: Tell me about your role and how you came to be at Asics.

Supriya Gogia (SG): Asics opened its Southeast Asia regional headquarters in 2012 here in Singapore. I joined Asics in 2016. Prior to this, I was working for a retail e-commerce company which was a first mover in the region. After a good run with online retail, I was looking to get some hands-on experience in offline retail as well. That’s how Asics happened. Asics has been in the region for six years. It has expanded exponentially during this period. Asics started off fairly early in Europe, and America, and other regions in the world, purely because these regions were seen to be more health conscious and sports-centric back then. This consciousness came to SE Asia in the last 15 to 20 years or so, and now the fitness industry in Asia Pacific is worth a whopping $16.8 billion – the highest value ever. There hasn’t been a better time to be here.

GC: It must be quite interesting for you – as you said you started in the online retail business and then moved offline – what was that transition like?

SG: E-commerce in Southeast Asia has been very hot for the last five years, as it is elsewhere in the world. The only impediment in Southeast Asia is that regulations and laws catch up slowly with technology. Technology is moving much faster than legislation, and this game of playing catch-up sometimes ends up impacting the industry adversely. In-house counsel need ratification for creative business models that companies are trying to implement; when we go to external counsel, they do not necessarily have black and white advice because the industry is nascent, it’s very niche, and there are very few companies which are acting as disruptors and pushing boundaries. At the same time, jurisdictions are in the midst of formalising relevant legislation, which makes it imperative that we work closely with external counsel as well as government authorities. Regulations in different countries in Southeast Asia keep evolving and it’s important for us to understand if any upcoming legislation is going to have an impact, either positive or negative, on existing business plans.

For me, the move from e-commerce has been very interesting indeed. Offline retail is more traditional, organised and risk averse as compared to e-commerce, even regulations concerning offline retail are better set out. There is a lot to learn as counsel because most consumer retail brands take pride in store concepts and their existence, which means both offline and online sales channels are important for consumers. As such, being in a spot which is ever-changing and still very new is quite challenging, but it’s equally interesting if you want to be an industry expert. My experience has been very fulfilling and I think these skills become advantageous along the way. All companies want to be online – most of them are there already – so it is a very interesting prospect for my personal growth and contribution to the retail industry. Omni-channel experience is something that is likely to become more of a necessity than choice.

GC: Do you have any sense of why e-commerce has exploded the way it has, in Asia specifically?

SG: Yes. I feel the reason for that is: one, Asia has a relatively younger population, compared to other parts of the world. And secondly, I feel that when you talk about the fourth revolution, it is different from the first three because the first three began in different parts of the world – the first one started in Britain, the second in North America and so on, but I feel the fourth industrial revolution – and this is completely a personal opinion – it started all over the globe, all at once. For instance, even if Apple is designing a phone in California, there is a manufacturer assembling it in China. It is a very collaborative revolution, where countries are coming together to give the end product to the consumer. This is what makes Asia very relevant in this revolution because it is not left behind, it is in fact playing a very significant role. This e-commerce explosion is also partly due to cheaper labour costs and strengthening of the manufacturing industry in this region. Because labour is cheaper in Asia, we have a growing service industry which is well equipped to support e-commerce operations and a massive manufacturing set-up. These are industries which give a strong foundation to e-commerce.

GC: Asics is looking to increase presence in other markets in Southeast Asia soon – how do these markets differ from those where Asics is already well-established?

SG: Asia is unique in that sense. Not all Asian countries offer seamless market entry for foreign companies, some economies are closed and protected. When a Japanese company like ours wants to establish a foothold – it’s not free entry. For some countries you either need to partner with a local venture or you need to invest additional capital to be able to engage in industry-specific activities. That said, these markets have immense potential for expansion, with a growing middle class and a surge in awareness surrounding fitness and sporting goods. We work very closely with external counsels in these countries since language can be a barrier at times. The majority of government documents in Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand are in local languages which require local expertise to decipher.

GC: As a large, recognisable brand, intellectual property must be of particular concern. Could you talk a little about that?

SG: Yes. Intellectual property is the most valuable asset for any global company – for consumer goods it’s the most important piece of brand management. As I mentioned before, the bulk of manufacturing for consumer goods is done in Asia, and this comes with a downside for brand protection. There could be instances where one factory might be manufacturing goods for different brands, and no matter how well you articulate the liability clauses, how meticulous your contracts are, there is bound to be leakage. Leakage is when original products are leaked through the factories into open markets. Brands also face issues of counterfeit products, which originate from factories which create copies of authentic products. When you operate in a region that manufactures, you have to be extra cautious of these infringements, which are potential high risks for the brand.

GC: Is there anything that you see coming on the horizon that might affect the industry?

SG: I do think the concept of augmented reality is quite intriguing, as well as the trend of pop-up stores – which is quite common in Asia – where you can try a pair of footwear, get the “touch and feel” of the product and use a tablet or iPad available at the pop-up to order that product. The product could be delivered to your address the very same day. You don’t need to stock up inventory, the space required is minimal, which ensures you don’t pay exorbitant high street rentals and human resources involved are far less. I do foresee this as being a popular way to shop for countries where internet penetration is high.

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In conversation: Crystal Lalime, head of APAC global markets legal, Credit Suisse

GC: Technology in finance is a hot topic – especially here in Hong Kong. What are your perspectives on this and what is Credit Suisse doing in this area?

Crystal Lalime (CL): Technology is changing finance, it is changing banking and, in the process, creating new pathways for Legal to play a role.

Recently, we partnered with a fintech company called Canopy Pte Ltd. What their technology allows is for clients to consolidate their accounts on the automated account aggregation platform, so an individual can manage their whole portfolio from a single platform, which is quite a powerful tool for our clients. We identified a company that we thought provided a very good solution for our clients and took an investment in the company to provide that service to our clients.

This is a major trend in the industry and we are very much a part of it.

GC: Can you describe the partnership approach that Credit Suisse takes to working with start-ups?

CL: With start-ups, you see a lot of interesting technology, but a lot of the times it becomes about who they partner with, where their distribution chain is, what their path to market is and whether there is a really strong use case. As lawyers, we can’t necessarily keep up with the technology development, but we certainly have ideas about how they can be partnered with or integrated into Credit Suisse.

Our approach so far has centred on just that – partnering. A lot of AI technology partners may be attracted to partnering on certain projects with us because of the large data dumps we can provide to train their algorithms, but oftentimes finding a use case that makes sense on the legal technology side for CS and the technology provider can be time-consuming.

GC: When working with start-ups, what role is Legal asked to play?

CL: As we look at these opportunities with start-ups, that also presents new challenges for Legal. Oftentimes, start-ups aren’t as well governed as we’d expect – particularly with the high standards we’re accustomed to operating within. Legal plays a prominent role in advising on the due diligence and sometime restructure of start-ups, which isn’t unexpected – these are M&A deals after all – but the issues which arise can be more varied.

When you’re running a start-up, budget is a huge consideration, but when you’re working with financial institutions – areas like compliance are ones where there isn’t room for error. Sometimes you’ll see that there are certainly the right intentions in mind, but a start-up might employ a junior compliance officer to help them get on the right track – but as you scale up and you’re running a big platform – the compliance may be extremely onerous.

Once a partner is identified, there’s a whole host of further issues for Legal to consider. What are the processes in place for handling data, moving data and protecting data? If we’re co-developing products, who is going to own the IP? What about if there’s interest from other financial institution’s to licence the technology – how do we handle that? It takes a lot of creativity and diligence, as well as constant training and upskilling for the legal teams who may have previously been advising on selling products and are now involved in offering software services. There is a lot of crossover and innovation requiring product and IP legal expertise. We’re not just providing advice on legal issues – advising on strategy.

GC: Being asked to work on projects like this is outside of the typical scope we often hear from GCs – particularly in finance. Have you had to adjust your approach in terms of hiring or training your staff as a result?

CL: That is a real challenge that we face. It comes back to the core values of our GC department, which are legal advisory, legal service provider and strategic adviser. To continue to provide these in a changing environment, it means that we have to be constantly upskilling – and that goes both for myself and for my team.

It also means that I’m more frequently taking stock of what skillsets we have on our team and what we might need to stay ahead – one day it could be looking for a programmer or a computer science person, the next we could be looking at these start-up-style deals, where perhaps we need people specialised in IP or outsourcing – it’s really about constantly staying on top of what we have and what we need.

I think as a broader trend, this is true for a lot of legal departments. The nature of legal work, as much as it stays the same, the applications change and how we go about completing that work is changing too. At the moment, many of the lawyers on my team are working with technologists (e.g. programmers and other platform specialists) – that’s a direct result of a lot of our legal documentation being automated. On the team, you have to have lawyers willing to do what may be perceived as non-traditional legal work and explain to non-lawyers our trade. That goes both ways too – on the other side, we need to have programmers and technologists who are willing to work with lawyers. It’s a paradigm shift and the overlap between technology and legal is growing constantly – and that’s not something I see changing any time soon.

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In conversation: Randi Ikhlas Sardoni, Head of Legal and Corporate Secretary, Panin Dai-ichi Life

GC: Can you tell me a little bit about your background, how you came to be working in-house, in the financial services industry and at Panin Dai-ichi Life in particular?

Randi Ikhlas Sardoni (RIS): I was born into a legal background family – my grandfather, father, uncles, aunts, cousins, brother, you name it. We hand over books from generation to generation. But that is in the private sector – surprisingly there has been no one working in-house – so I had to take the first step in the family. I only spent a couple of months in private practice, and then I took my career to work as in-house counsel at one of the biggest state-owned banks in Indonesia.

I found out that the insurance sector in Indonesia was growing and offering a lot of opportunities and challenges, and also that there was a scarcity of local talent. With the economy growing and many insurance companies entering the Indonesian market and competing for the same talent, there is a shortage in the market. Now I am at an insurance company, and have fallen in love with the sector.

GC: What are the main challenges of the Indonesian insurance market?

RIS: Indonesia is an emerging market and has high potential for the insurance sector. The main challenge currently is the market penetration. Insurance penetration in Indonesia is still around 2.9% compared to GDP. Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia have much higher penetration.

GC: Why is it so low?

RIS: I think one of the problems is financial literacy, particularly insurance literacy. There is scepticism about the insurance industry in Indonesia. The Indonesian financial authority, the OJK, has addressed this issue and it has required insurance companies to have a campaign for financial literacy, to increase market penetration.

GC: Can you talk a little bit about the regulatory environment in Indonesia?

RIS: The legal team will transform – we are no longer a braking system in the car, but we will become a navigation system. We are shifting our role from the defending player into the playmaker. We have to be able to provide strong legal advice and also excellent risk advice to the board and this ability will help the board to be the one sitting in the driving seat to direct the company. The legal team has to have strategies for providing sound legal input with strong business acumen, in anticipating changing regulations.

In ensuring the fair and supportive regulatory reform, government relations activities must also be addressed. General counsel must act as the advocate of the company by utilising the industry association bargain with the regulator.

GC: Are there any other main business challenges that the company is grappling with at the moment?

RIS: There is an untapped market in Indonesia. To become one of the top five or top three insurers in the Indonesian insurance business, we as a company have to produce a value proposition for prospective customers, cover for all the various social and economic channels, and develop the ability to penetrate the untapped market and create the system of brokerage. Indonesia has such a huge population, with only 2.9% market penetration. Currently many of the population are in a household of mainly generation X and Y. So that will be the focus of the company, and we are helping the company to be able to achieve those goals.

GC: What does your workload look like day to day? What occupies the majority of your time?

RIS: As the general counsel of the company, I am of course the subject legal matter expert. Currently, legal issues are still dominating the daily workload. However, standardisation of legal work and IT have helped users to have faster and more immediate attention from the legal department. So aside from the helping with the legal issues, we are currently in the process of designing a platform for stakeholders to have their wholesale legal needs met in one IT application, in one single window.

We are asking our stakeholders what is their expectation of the legal department, and then, in a couple of years, we will have that kind of application.

GC: What has been the highlight of your in-house career so far?

RIS: Probably experiencing a fast-track career compared to my peers in the market and the industry. Despite being part of the millennial generation, the board has entrusted me to serve them with the company secretary function and also with the counsel of the company. I think I certainly understand that this responsibility has to be managed properly, and also as currently we are in the spirit of the Asian Games, I am co-opting the energy of Asia tagline to the legal team – that youth spirit. My team are the problem-solvers, and we operate as a start-up legal team within the company.

GC: What does your legal team look like?

RIS: We currently have a lean, but highly effective legal department. Currently we have three lawyers – one who is responsible for corporate legal and secretarial, another responsible for government relations, and another for litigation respectively.

GC: What has been the most challenging moment of your legal career so far?

RIS: We are currently helping the company to embrace a new era, and we are also repositioning our place from legal advisory to business advisers. We are now really trying to create initiatives that translate that vision of legal and business advisers. We are trying to really listen to the business units and respond to them. We are now even thinking about having an internship programme into the business units, so that the legal team have experience in the business unit. After that, they will go back into the legal team with the proper knowledge – not only sitting at the desk doing the legal job, but really knowing what the business person is doing and experiencing for a certain period of time.

GC: What have been the major challenges or activities for you and your legal team over the past year?

RIS: One is always about digitalisation. Everyone is doing this, and we are now also expecting to be able to adapt and support the company in the digitalisation process. Technology has been a topic of conversation within the industry. We are in the age of the digital disruption, financial technology disruption, and now people are looking at insurance technology (instech). So that will also be something that we have to be able to adapt to, and also help the company to compete with that.

In terms of regulation, insurers have to be ready to spin off their Sharia units, as required by the 2014 insurance law. We have to submit the blueprint for the spinoffs by 2020, and they have to have spun off by 2024, so this is becoming a hot topic of conversation everywhere in the industry. We have to be able to ensure that the process of spin off is running smoothly and successfully.

Now, the issues relate to how to ensure that when the spinoff company is independent from the holding company or the conventional company, it will be competing with the other Sharia companies in Indonesia, and not with the conventional company.

There will be a lot of discussion about how to also train the financial advisers. Currently, we have financial advisers that hold two licences, a conventional licence and a Sharia licence. But after the regulation takes effect, they have to advise just the conventional or just the Sharia businesses. So these are will be several things that have to be taken care of and discussed properly.

GC: What else have you got coming up on the horizon over the next 12 months or so?

RIS: The next 12-24 months will also be about how to simplify the insurance process, to help society increase financial literacy, so people will be able to understand an insurance product properly. We all know that there is so much complicated language, so we have to able to simplify that language into more commonly understood language for society. I think that will also be the process over the next 24 months.

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In conversation: Dominic Gyngell, general counsel, Speedcast Industries

GC: How did you get to your position at Speedcast?

Dominic Gyngell (DG): I had been at BT for 13 years when I got approached by Speedcast in 2014. It was really interesting because it was telecoms-related but a much smaller company with big ambitions. It had achieved impressive growth, the company had been around in some form since 2001 but it was only when it was listed on the Australia Stock Exchange in 2014 that it landed on its feet and started to grow an aggressive international strategy.

GC: Were you involved in the company’s listing?

DG: I joined in early 2016 post IPO – it was a steep learning curve for me. I am involved in continuing disclosure obligations in Australia and since then we’ve done a number of things including two more equity raisings in Australia and a refinancing programme where we moved our debt from Australia to the US market.

GC: How have you grown the legal team in that time?

DG: The legal team was small at first, there were just three of us when I joined. Since then we’ve expanded, we have 15 lawyers globally. We provide satellite communications to some pretty remote parts of the world, operating in over 100 countries and with offices in 40.

Our largest markets are the US: we do a lot of work for the US government, large energy companies such as ConocoPhillips. We do work in Southeast Asia and Africa, and dealing with regulators and governments in the US is very different from working with businesses in Myanmar and Kazakhstan. It really varies.

GC: How is the legal team structured?

DG: We are organised regionally, we have a team based in the Americas, one covering EMEA and one in Asia.

GC: What does your job look like on a day-to-day basis?

DG: The role is very diverse: this week I’ve been dealing with labour disputes in Brazil, new customer contracts, board meetings in Angola and Sydney, a property deal in Peru, whilst balancing all the day-to-day operations. Every day is different. My job has changed a lot since I joined when we were a $200million company; today we have revenue of 1 billion US dollars. We’ve gone from 300 staff to 1500 in that time. We’ve got a lot more sophisticated. A big part of my job is working on M&A; we’ve done 15 deals since 2012. We acquired our most recent company last week – one of our largest competitors in the US, Globecomm. They operate in 100 countries.

GC: What sectors do you cover?

DG: Speedcast has four main divisions: maritime, which includes providing telecommunications services to cruise ship operators around the world, and commercial maritime, which covers smaller vessels. Energy is our second biggest division – our main customers are offshore oil and gas companies. We are increasingly serving governments, as well as the military, mining companies and NGOs.

GC: What are the biggest challenges on the horizon for you over the next 12 months?

DG: Compliance continues to grow – we are seeing a lot of change with regards to ethical compliance. Anti-corruption, bribery, regulatory compliance, all remain key issues for our type of business. We have just done a large GDPR programme in Europe, and I expect to be dealing with increasing data protection legislation.

From an internal perspective, we are focusing on integrating the 15 new businesses we have acquired. A large part of this is bringing together different teams, and this will be a challenge getting our systems aligned and dealing with cultural issues.

GC: Have you introduced technology within the legal department?

DG: We’ve just launched a programme to digitise all of our customer contracts onto a single database that can be accessed by the whole legal team and operations. For the first time, we can get centralised data on all of our larger customers and our supplier contracts. We deal with dozens of bids and contracts around the world so we have also automated our approval processes, so that they are all on one system.

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Susannah Stroud Wright, Chief Legal Officer, Credit Karma

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.

I don’t think I would have made a move if there was not that level of innovation and excitement here.

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.

It’s important to not be afraid to ask what may seem like stupid questions.

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.

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Hannah Gordon, General Counsel, San Francisco 49ers

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.

The struggle is in trying to step back and think strategically for the future.

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.

When I think about real innovation, a lot of that is just the everyday problem-solving that lawyers do.

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.

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Ben Gross, Chief Strategy Officer, Genius

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 think it’s definitely possible to wear many hats responsibly.

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.

The most important thing has always been to really be connected to the company’s mission.

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.