How do you scale legal support for your growing business?
That's the question we posed to Milana McCullagh, Vice President and Head of Legal at Reddit, and Iris Chen, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Airbnb, at a recent panel.
MAJOR POINTS:
- Take the time to listen and study your organization when at a new role
- Spend time face-to-face with your time and get to know them
- Define roles and responsibilities, but make sure information isn't siloed
- A legal project manager can help keep your department efficient
- Weekly team reports are a valuable way to connect the dots for yourself and company leadership
- Strong team culture is vital to scaling and achieving goals
Here is a deeper breakdown of the panel and its highlights:
Experience
Even large, public companies face challenges to growth
Chen joined Google in 2007 with a team of six people. By the time she left over 14 years later, she'd grown the team to 150 people across "different geos and across many of those different product areas." When she moved to Airbnb at the height of the pandemic, she became head of legal for the Product and Marketing teams. She started with 22 people and has scaled to over 50 four years later. "The company has changed quite a bit too. It's now moved to a twice-a-year product launch cycle," Chen added. "How Airbnb now operates is very different than it was when I started. So, how to adapt the team and scale support for that has been a challenge for me."
For McCullagh, the challenges at Reddit were different than hypergrowth challenges. As she explained, it was "really how to ensure public company readiness and scale legal support in a much more carefully operated company" for when Reddit went public in April 2024.
How to face the challenge
Do your homework on how your company operates and how your teams interact.
"It's really important to spend time actively listening, reflecting, and planning," explained Chen. "And this applies to any situation you find yourself in where you've got a new challenge or a different challenge, not just like a new role, like the the ones that Melina and I found ourselves in. You know, for example, I think at Airbnb, I spent the first month or two of my time there on back to back of zoom calls, just meeting people, asking questions, just figuring out, you know, what their roles were and doing my own sort of 360 assessment of the situation, so that I could really understand what I needed to do with my team in order to meet the meet the needs of the business."
Another important point, Chen pointed out, is understanding the operation systems of your organization. "I needed to spend a lot of time getting to know the work, understanding where the, friction points were, understanding the people involved. And it's not a change that happened overnight. I needed to do that homework first before making a case for bringing those those teams together. So I think that's a good example where, you know, that initial work of understanding the operating system can pay off eventually. And, you know, also just understanding, you know, the organization so that you can navigate it, especially for those of you who are leading or managing teams."
Observation and studying the company is important, even though McCullagh joked, "it's really hard to do since many of us are action oriented and A-type and want to jump in right away." Make introductions and meet the people in your company, she adds. "Sometimes your well-laid plans to reflect and spend the first 30 days, or 60 days, meeting folks goes astray, and you need to roll with that."
Next steps
So you've joined a company to build and lead a team. Now what?
The first step in team building is assessing talent and figuring out who to delegate what workstreams to, says McCallagh. "You cannot do it all yourself," she continued. "You just can't. And so you need to have folks, that are really strong, under you. And my goal always is to either hire or develop talent, ensure that folks are better and smarter than me."
Step 2: look at your team holistically, and make sure the right people are in the right roles for their skill sets. "My focus also always and or planning is not to organize around individuals. But, you know, instead really focus on, on, you know, what the company's needs are. And I know that's always harder, but I think it gets to a better outcome."
Yes, remote hiring is much more challenging. One helpful tip is to have candidates for more senior roles do a presentation, says McCallagh. "This is basically where candidates needed to do a 30 minute presentation on a topic in front of a panel. And that just gives you so much insight into, you know, when you can't do live interviews and gives insight into presentation skills." But once you've hired a person, "spend as much time in person, with them, I think that is just key."
When Chen started at Airbnb, the company was still reeling from the impact of COVID on their business. Moreover, she had a limited team—just five people. To help tackle the work in front of her with the resources she had, her priority was to get to know the work and get to know the people. "I spent a lot of time identifying projects to work with individuals on the team directly with not just, you know, working with my direct reports all the time and, and learning about things from them, but really kind of rolling up my sleeves and doing the work alongside, team members on some key initiatives that I knew were, were impactful for the company."
Chen was also dealing with attrition on her team. "One of the things that I think became very clear to me in that experience was just the importance of hiring general athletes. If you don't need specialized knowledge, like let's say you're you're running a payments or fintech [company] of course, you need people who come in with that knowledge to function well from the beginning. But I would say I get a lot more mileage by hiring really good general athletes, especially when you're in a space like tech…where things are constantly changing, initiatives come up, initiatives get sunseted, and you need people who are flexible and adaptable and can do well in whatever position you put them in."
Define roles, delegate tasks
You can't do it all on your own.
As Chen notes, with a lean team you have to be efficient. That means defining roles right away. "My team members know exactly what they're responsible for and how they're supporting the business, and then they can take care of helping those clients navigate the rest of the legal department."
"If you are a company like ours where we're really focused on international growth, how my team works with the international teams is going to be increasingly more important." You want a team of people who are communicative, collaborative, and open to new ideas.
In addition to role clarity, Chen recommends centralizing knowledge rather than "having five different lawyers on one thing."
Build slack into your teams, so when you have fluctuations in volume you can find ways to spread the load around to multiple people. "With some training," Chen continued, "everybody can do it so that it's not all landing on one person's plate, especially when you know volume is going to pick up."
Project management
Yes, legal can have project managers too.
According to McCullagh, at a certain point, it no longer makes sense to rely on outside counsel. "You need someone day-to-day to manage your legal work," and provide strategic legal guidance. "Someone who understands your company really, really deeply and can provide that end-to-end legal guidance."
And you can be building processes and systems in the background as you're focused on other day-to-day problems. For example, Chen described her team "very much like a hub in this kind of hub-and-spoke model of how we support a lot of the different business initiatives."
She developed a Point Of Contact Directory, "where we literally mapped out everything that we work on, and who's the primary product counsel, commercial counsel or other lawyer on it, who's a back up."
Building the directory might not be a priority, but once it's running, it can help people get information very quickly, identify who to turn to for a specific project or need.
McCullagh's experience at Reddit taking the company to IPO taught her that "getting the litigation program management in place to support a ramp up was key."
Snippets
They will change your (work) life.
"Information sharing needs to be supported by structure, otherwise it will very quickly fall apart the larger the organization gets," Chen explained. Especially in the age of remote work, there's no easy way to bring everyone together to share information. A solution that both Chen and McCullagh adopted from the days at Google is the Weekly Report (or "snippet"). "This is basically individual team members will report, and they just write these little snippets about what they're working on. It goes into a report that I edit and curate, and it goes to my entire [legal department]."
"I will tell you that that has been my biggest value add from day one, is that report," Chen said. "In terms of the feedback I've gotten from clients about reading that report, they read it religiously."
The snippets also allow you to quickly see what stage of a project each member of your team is in and jump in where you're needed.
"I know there's some snippets haters out there," added McCullagh. "But I would say it is the easiest thing you can implement when you are starting a new role at your company."
And to keep things uniform, Chen and McCullagh recommend circulating a guide to your team of the length and amount of detail their weekly write-ups should be.
Culture creation
A shared vision is key.
Instilling a team culture of growth and openness is vital to achieving those goals. To do that, McCullagh recommends articulating expectations to ensure your team's service is aligned, "and then secondly, articulating the mission. This is particularly important in a quickly growing company where you have teams that that bump into each other."
As an example, McCullagh explain how, during her first year at Reddit, "we had a very formal list of OKRs. And then the feedback was this wasn't quite as helpful. So now we have just a very short statement of here are the things we're trying to focus on aligned with company goals, and here are our major project. Also articulating the Why: why is this important for us to be working on."
Face time
The value of in-person interaction hasn't gone away.
For Chen, "building those connections, whenever you have the opportunity to be together in person, is so crucial."
Try to find time to schedule offsite events, in-person meetings, or whatever face-to-face connection you can foster among your team. Inevitably, that connection will leader to smoother communication between your team, and healthier collaboration.
Another tool to consider is a bootcamp curriculum for "certain subjects and topics that I knew time and again the lawyers on my team need to be familiar with in order to be effective counsel. So, privacy 101, or consumer protection law—things that I know to be very, very relevant for a large population of my team. I designate two people on the team to be the owners of that [issue], and we rotate folks who own the curriculum and are responsible for it."
Final thoughts
"Snippets: go implement it at your company," McCullagh stressed, before adding, "Is your org structure working given where you are as a company? Do you have the right staffing for now and six months from now? Just be ready to adapt to changing needs."
"Everybody has a lot of moving pieces that they're dealing with," concluded Chen. "You're constantly multitasking, but if you don't take the time to zoom out and listen, observe, and reflect when you are dealing with a new challenge, you won't end up with a good outcome."
Finally, be sure to invest in initiatives that empower your team to operate smartly, efficiently, and and consistent with the expectations and standards that you've set for them.
