In-House
In-House
Podcast Description
The best in-house legal teams aren’t just legal. They help their organizations solve complex issues, make the right decisions, and even grow their businesses. That’s right, legal isn’t just a cost center.
In-House is a podcast featuring top leaders in the legal industry.
Tune in as Jessica Nguyen, award-winning Deputy General Counsel of AI Innovation and Trust at Docusign and former Chief Legal Officer of Lexion, interviews leading in-house counsel and legal experts. Our guests navigate the ever-shifting landscape of the latest issues, current events, and regulations - while balancing the needs of their organizations.
Whether you’re new or highly experienced, In-House is here to help you enhance your career.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast focuses on themes such as legal strategy, organizational growth, compliance challenges, and industry trends. Episodes may cover topics like AI in legal practices, navigating regulatory changes, and case studies of successful in-house legal teams that foster business growth and development.
The best in-house legal teams aren’t just legal. They help their organizations solve complex issues, make the right decisions, and even grow their businesses. That’s right, legal isn’t just a cost center.
In-House is a podcast featuring top leaders in the legal industry.
Tune in as Jessica Nguyen, award-winning Deputy General Counsel of AI Innovation and Trust at Docusign and former Chief Legal Officer of Lexion, interviews leading in-house counsel and legal experts. Our guests navigate the ever-shifting landscape of the latest issues, current events, and regulations – while balancing the needs of their organizations.
Whether you’re new or highly experienced, In-House is here to help you enhance your career.
Our hosts and Erin Abrams, Chief Legal Officer at Via, discuss the role of in-house counsel in business decision-making. Erin emphasizes collaboration, early involvement, and building a culture of trust and safety within legal teams.
Via builds innovative software to enable our customers — cities, transit agencies, transport operators, school districts, universities, and corporations — to transform their legacy transportation systems into advanced digital networks.
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Key Quotes:
“ In addition to having a framework for how decisions are made, I think it’s really important to have a framework around the life cycle of what you’re trying to accomplish. And I think of it very much in sort of a product lens, but what I’ve seen be really successful at organizations, especially as they’re starting to scale, is really going to the teams and saying things like, “legal can’t come at the end.””
“With our joint ownership model, I think part of that means not running away from the consequences of your decision and saying, okay, we mitigated this risk to a place that the business and the legal team felt comfortable.”
“There’s not necessarily tons of in-house positions for litigators, but what you can do is become a professional risk mitigator. You can kind of shift and say, okay, I’m really good at pattern recognition. I know what has led to litigation in nine out of 10 cases. So now that I’m looking at this much earlier in the pipeline, I’m looking at it and a contract that seems vague. You know, there’s an area of sort of like a gray area. You know, it feels a little bit squishy to me. I’ve seen litigation result in similar circumstances. Okay, well, this is like a risk I can mitigate.”
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Time stamps:
00:48 – Meet our co-host Ken
04:01 – Meet our guest Erin
09:25 – What effective partnership looks like
14:18 – Evaluating business risks
21:41 – Making challenging decisions
28:35 – Using compliance as a competitive advantage
31:35 – How to hire well
42:53 – Keep or redline?
45:30 – Where to find Erin
45:52 – Final takeaways
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Links:
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