Episode 8: Branding in-house legal with Laura Greenberg of Worksome

Inspiring Legal

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Full episode transcript:

[00:00 - 00:09]: Welcome to Inspiring Legal, the podcast for in-house legal.
[00:10 - 00:16]: Get insights, learn from peers, life lessons from some of the most influential GCs.
[00:16 - 00:19]: If it's related to in-house legal, we cover it.
[00:19 - 00:30]: For more inspiration, go to openli.com slash community.
[00:32 - 00:36]: Welcome to another episode of Inspiring Legal.
[00:36 - 00:40]: My name is Stine and today I'm joined by Laura.
[00:40 - 00:41]: Welcome, Laura.
[00:42 - 00:44]: Hi, welcome. Thanks for having me.
[00:44 - 00:53]: So for the listeners out there, Laura is a big contributor to the openli community,
[00:53 - 00:59]: having written several articles on a topic that is very close to our heart,
[00:59 - 01:03]: about building the in-house legal team's brand.
[01:03 - 01:09]: But before we jump into that and hear more about the importance and why you should be thinking about it,
[01:09 - 01:11]: I think we should meet Laura.
[01:11 - 01:17]: Laura, can you maybe just tell people who you are and maybe a little bit about your background?
[01:18 - 01:22]: Sure. I always have a difficult time knowing where to start.
[01:22 - 01:26]: So usually I try to get some things, you know, right out at the start,
[01:26 - 01:32]: which is that I'm an American who is an expat living in Denmark, in Copenhagen,
[01:32 - 01:35]: to kind of situate myself.
[01:36 - 01:40]: I went to law school in California.
[01:40 - 01:47]: So I'm a California licensed attorney and I've had a varied career throughout different states and countries in Europe.
[01:47 - 01:50]: I've primarily been in-house my whole career.
[01:50 - 01:53]: So that sets me apart a little bit. It makes me a little different.
[01:54 - 01:56]: Today I would say that I work in tech.
[01:57 - 02:02]: But prior to that, I've also worked in sports and worked in media.
[02:02 - 02:10]: And I'm very passionate about pushing our industry, the legal industry, and particularly in-house teams forward
[02:10 - 02:20]: to become more efficient, really to be optimized and be able to work better within our current business environment.
[02:21 - 02:25]: So for those of you, when Laura is talking about those companies she's worked for,
[02:25 - 02:29]: it's big companies like Unity and Red Bull.
[02:29 - 02:36]: So she's being modest. She is a person who knows a lot when it comes to in-house legal.
[02:37 - 02:44]: So Laura, maybe just tell me a little bit about where did your passion come from
[02:44 - 02:48]: when it goes to the kind of in-house legal team brand?
[02:48 - 02:50]: Like, where did you get that?
[02:52 - 02:56]: I think it's probably from really just working with the business
[02:56 - 03:02]: and going in and having the business really just not excited to have a meeting with you,
[03:02 - 03:10]: not excited to take a phone call with you, or maybe even some points being scared to come talk to you.
[03:11 - 03:14]: I mean, we're there to help. We're a service organization.
[03:14 - 03:19]: We serve the business and enable the business to thrive.
[03:19 - 03:21]: So really we should be looked at as partners.
[03:21 - 03:27]: And so, you know, just this barrier that would come up because people, you know,
[03:27 - 03:33]: in some contexts have had negative experiences with legal or they think of television shows.
[03:34 - 03:39]: Right? People have come with all these preconceptions about what a lawyer is or what a lawyer does.
[03:40 - 03:46]: And I've found in most of my jobs, I've had to do education and relationship building
[03:46 - 03:50]: and bridge building and selling what I'm doing.
[03:50 - 03:54]: So then I can be more integrated into the business.
[03:54 - 03:59]: So it's really, I think, probably out of necessity to do my job better.
[03:59 - 04:05]: But then also just on a personal level, you know, you want your colleagues to want to have meetings with you
[04:05 - 04:08]: and not be upset or disappointed.
[04:08 - 04:11]: Like, oh, I got to get on a call with legal.
[04:12 - 04:16]: Yeah, those like, have you talked to legal? Do I have to?
[04:16 - 04:18]: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
[04:18 - 04:22]: Okay, so when you're talking about legal brands and building that,
[04:22 - 04:30]: it's as much about getting maybe away from the perception that legal is a naysayer
[04:30 - 04:33]: or maybe somebody you couldn't talk to.
[04:33 - 04:35]: So is that correctly understood?
[04:35 - 04:39]: Yeah, kind of like, I would say like a dream crusher, right?
[04:39 - 04:43]: Especially working in technology, working with developers.
[04:43 - 04:49]: I think when people are, or even in the creative industries, when you're creating something,
[04:49 - 04:55]: you don't necessarily want to sort of bring your baby to legal to then have it be, you know,
[04:55 - 05:03]: crushed and smashed because, you know, of some regulations or just something that is going on.
[05:03 - 05:07]: So that's also part of why, you know, in brand building, it's about when to work with legal.
[05:07 - 05:13]: So come to legal before so we can work together to build whatever it is you're building.
[05:13 - 05:18]: So then you don't have those negative experiences of, you know, for example,
[05:18 - 05:22]: building a product that's collecting all sorts of personally identifiable information
[05:22 - 05:28]: and not building anything in that product to deal with regulations in the proper way.
[05:28 - 05:34]: So if we then take your, you've written a whole series on this subject.
[05:34 - 05:37]: So again, there is so much for us to cover.
[05:37 - 05:48]: But if you were to kind of like give the intro to how do you see like legal brands,
[05:48 - 05:57]: where are we today and how have we maybe been evolving, hopefully?
[05:57 - 06:02]: I think it probably just depends on one, the company and then the leadership of the legal team.
[06:02 - 06:07]: But I definitely see, especially actually as part of the LinkedIn community
[06:07 - 06:14]: and also different legal communities that are being built, like the OpenLink community,
[06:14 - 06:21]: people are interested in pushing our industry forward and also the perception of legal,
[06:21 - 06:23]: how we're doing things.
[06:23 - 06:30]: You can look at everything from pushing from using plain language to adopting technology
[06:30 - 06:40]: to talking about mental health of lawyers, where we're trying to push forward to humanize ourselves.
[06:40 - 06:48]: And then also, I think, bring ourselves up to speed with other teams that are using technology to optimize.
[06:48 - 06:51]: So I think it's all about accessibility and humanizing.
[06:51 - 06:54]: So I think there's definitely really great progress being made.
[06:54 - 07:00]: But, you know, other kind of, I guess, like the early tech adoption curve, right?
[07:00 - 07:03]: People are in different parts of their journey.
[07:03 - 07:08]: But don't you think maybe that the legal teams are evolving too in this day and age?
[07:08 - 07:15]: Like what we've seen from the community report that we did and that we're launching now,
[07:15 - 07:24]: we can see that a lot of the legal professionals out there have been struggling with building relationships,
[07:24 - 07:31]: getting that buy in and understanding of why legal is so important and when you can use legal.
[07:31 - 07:38]: So do you think there is maybe also a shift in the in-house legal teams in terms of mindsets?
[07:38 - 07:48]: I think so. I think they're recognizing that in order to do your job, you have to sort of have a seat at the table or change the perception of legal.
[07:48 - 07:54]: And also, I think legal teams ar...