Navigating in-house careers in law

Scaling the legal function

Michael Haynes: So let's start with you, Fiona. I think you've got a really exciting scaling journey, taking your legal function from just you to a team of seven. How was that? How do you approach that process from the start? What things did you do in that process that you feel contributed most to your success?

Fiona Konetzky: I'd say I didn't approach the process at all. It just happened at some point. When I joined Adverity in 2019, the company had closed the series B and they decided, isn't there a person that actually handled all these contracts? And it was me. So my role, I started as a contract specialist. Then pretty soon after I started, they realized having a legal person in-house is really useful because there's much more I can do than just reviewing contracts. This is how my position developed. Thankfully, Adverity is quite successful and we got more and more work to do. This made me become a head of when I had my first colleague joining the legal team. Now I have seven colleagues with different qualifications, all of them lawyers.

It was a crazy journey, where I had to do everything from being a sole counsel to becoming a manager for the first time. Also, since two years, I'm part of the VP team, which is great fun for me as well. It's also my task to align on the strategy with other senior leadership members.

Michael Haynes: That's good. It's quite a journey. Hiring your first person and then suddenly realizing you've got to seven, it always feels like time moves at double speed through that as well. Graeme, you've got this kind of unhealthy addiction to scale-ups, which I at least recognize as well, including your time at Trustpilot and Skyscanner. What are the common challenges you faced across those legal teams and what tactics and strategies did you employ to effectively overcome those?

Graeme Barron: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think all the organizations I've been with have been through that scaling journey of trying to do more with less, going from a place of real firefighting to strategic mode and trying to get through that journey. A lot of it is about becoming more efficient on the high volume, slightly lower impact work so you can start to focus on strategic matters. A lot of my journeys have been about scaling contracting, building systems, building processes, and automating processes to allow things to be more of a machine on the contracting side. This then gives you space to think about the more bigger impact or strategic work. That's often been a challenge.

There's a temptation when you get into a scale-up of thinking, my god, there's all this work, we need about 20 lawyers. You're never going to get your CFO to do that. So you need to find ways to enable your organization to self-serve. That's one of the things I've seen throughout all of my journeys: how do we enable the business to self-serve and empower themselves to make their own decisions with the right guidance? A lot of my journey has been about getting less coming into the legal team, which is slightly counterintuitive, but it's okay if they're low-level things or low-hanging fruit that you can get your commercial colleagues to self-serve and not come into legal. You can then start thinking about the bigger impact work. So for me, that's been a common theme throughout all of my roles.

Michael Haynes: Yeah, I certainly recognize that. The challenge of scale is you try to do even less as the task becomes even bigger. Johanna, your career is one of the more unusual ones here. There's a couple of things you mentioned in your introduction that I think would be really interesting to hear more about. One was the transition. You took a break from your legal career and then transitioned back into legal after your time as a flight attendant. The other bit I'm really interested in is moving from a GC role back into a senior legal counsel role and choosing a place to work, a company and a culture over title. Tell me more about both of those; they both sound quite interesting.

Johanna: Yes, thank you. I'll have to go back to the start of why I got into flying in the first place. Iceland, where I'm from, is strategically located between Europe and the US, so we have a lot of airline activities there. At the time I was 21, the collective agreements were really good, and scheduling everything was kind of a dream extra money alongside a university job that you could have that was paying much better than entry-level legal jobs. I could do that part-time, only a couple of flights a month, and then during the summer during my bachelor. Then when I got into my bachelor, I also got some legal opportunities. I was working as a legal intern for a really hot startup in Reykjavik. There was basically one general counsel, and I was kind of her right hand, so I got to dip my fingers into a lot of different things and got some strong experience.

When I took a break from flying, I also did an internship at a law firm as well, a really good one. We don't have any first-tier law firms in Iceland, but it was a top second-tier firm. When I was graduating my masters, the startup I worked for had 75 million users. That company was bought out by Gloomobile and closed operations in Iceland. So I had to think fast and took a full-time job as a flight attendant with the airline I had previous experience from. I don't regret it because it paid well, had nice traveling layovers and everything. But of course, I knew that I had a ticking clock on me because the longer you're out of law full-time, the harder it is to claw your way back in.

So I was looking at opportunities in Copenhagen, where I wanted to live with my partner. The opportunity that I stumbled upon was for FMC Agricultural Solutions, which is an industry I had never thought about going into. But when you're a new lawyer, you don't really choose the industry; the industry might choose you. I got really lucky with my team there; it was a legal team of 90 with 23 attorneys. They taught me everything, and I grew up there more than in a law firm. They actually sponsored me to take my bar exam in Iceland as well. My LinkedIn doesn't really make sense because a lot of things were sometimes happening at the same time. After being there for nearly five years, I decided during COVID that I wanted something more human, a smaller, younger team, somewhere where I could go centrally in Copenhagen every day.

So I took a job as a general counsel and could really sell myself in that position. I had been dipping my toe into all the different compliance fields and contracting. Then I got to be part of the leadership team. I saw that Podimo was looking for someone, the ad said to lead the team. I thought, well, this might be perfect. After the interview process, they decided to hire someone else as a general counsel who had more than 10 years my senior. I was already sold on the company and wanted to work there so badly. It has the right culture, the right speed, and is on a journey I want to be a part of. I'll trust that I'll be able to scale my career with that company. So far, it's been living up to my expectations.

Transitioning to leadership

Michael Haynes: It's a great example of how important it is to have some motivating factor, whether it's development, people you want to work with, or a product you believe in. Let's talk a little bit about the transition to leadership as well. That's something all three of you have done. It's a step change, going from lawyering to managing to leading. I'm really interested to hear about that transition. How does that role change? How do you go from being a lawyer to being a more strategic advisor, helping with business subjects? Fiona, is that something you've seen in your transition to VP Legal?

Fiona: Yes, of course. Most likely, law school doesn't teach you that, right? It was something I experienced the first time at Adverity, and it was quite challenging. I enjoyed it from the first time because I could choose my first hire myself. Adverity gave me all the trust to find a perfect match with the rest of my team. The biggest aha moment was realizing that, as an organized person with an eye for details, I had to enable my team without micromanaging. As a first-time leader, I made some mistakes, but I ended up with great relationships with my hires. Focusing on enabling and training your team members is key to having headspace for strategic work. It was overwhelming at the beginning, but I found that focusing on each team member's strengths and weaknesses was helpful. If you find the perfect role for your team members, that's the best thing about being a manager.

Michael Haynes: Completely agree. Graham, was that a similar experience for you? The other part of leadership is transitioning from being a lawyer to a manager to a business leader. How did you find that? What skills did you need to develop quickly going into that?

Graeme Barron: It's such an interesting transition. As a lawyer, you have the temptation to get into the weeds because you genuinely love the work. It's hard to lift yourself up from that work to focus on creating an environment where your team can thrive. That's a new skill set for many lawyers. You need to focus on the strategy, ensure clear alignment within the team, and give your team space to achieve their goals. You also need to become an industry and business expert to align with the business strategy and advance growth. It's much more of an all-around business skill set rather than just core lawyer skills.

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