Megan Niedermeyer began her legal career in Big Law. After graduating from the UC Berkeley school of law, she stayed in the Bay Area working first at White & Case before moving to Cooley. She focused most of her work on tech companies and venture capital clients—the bread and butter of Silicon Valley firms—then, in late 2018, she "took a leap of faith" as she describes it and went in-house with the HR and payroll platform firm Gusto. "I was head of Legal and Compliance at Gusto during a really pivotal moment for them," Niedermeyer recalls. When the COVID pandemic hit, and the Payment Protection Program (PPP) was rolled out, payroll compliance became the central focus of the company.  What that meant was that "a lot of big, company-moving initiatives ended up coming out of the Legal and Compliance team, which we grew to over 45 people in my time there." It was a pivotal experience for Niedermeyer, and a steep learning curve.

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Over the last few years, she's built two other legal departments from the ground up at tech firms, and, most recently, joined Apollo.io as the Chief Legal Officer. The company is an all-in-one sales platform with over a million users and investment from Silicon Valley big-wigs like Sequoia and YCombinator.

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The role comes with plenty of challenges, for sure, but Niedermeyer remains undaunted. "Going in-house, you really get to be a three-dimensional lawyer," she explains—a lawyer's lawyer, a business lawyer, and a business leader. But that doesn't mean she can be everywhere at once—nor should she be. Neidermeyer has integrated Lawtrades into every legal department she's worked in, and it "has saved my ass more times than I can mention," she says with a laugh. We sat down with Neidermeyer to understand how Lawtrades can help bridge gaps in a high-growth company, and how Lawtraders should approach hiring opportunities.

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Key takeaways:

• Lawtrades provides a flexible starting place to test your hiring needs
• Legal Departments can rely on Lawtrades' transparency, communication, and the platform's ease-of-use
• Legal professionals on Lawtrades are deeply experienced with in-house and start-up firms

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Parts of this interview have been edited for clarity.

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Can you speak to some of the challenges within your department? Has there been obstacles keeping you from hiring, or growing the department as the company is growing? Has being a fully-remote company turned any candidates off anything?

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For hiring, I think remote is such a benefit. Not only is it what candidates actually want, but it also opens up our talent pool to such a wider base. Talent lives all over the place. It doesn't restrict itself to just the San Francisco Bay area—thank God. So, our legal team today is based almost entirely in the U.S., but our company is very much a global company. So, any of the challenges that global companies who are remote-based—time zone differences, how do we find a time that works for everybody across all the different time zones for like a key cross-functional project—those challenges we always have, and we find ways to get better and better at e-sync communication using zoom videos, doing like pre-readings and readouts after meetings. But, for my team in particular, the challenge is, hey, you're growing really fast as a legal team and we're so spread out because we're remote. How do we get ourselves together in person to confirm our identity, understand who we are, put a flag in the sand in a 'this is our mission, these are the ways we want to show up as a legal team' way. I think that the cultural piece of legal teams is just as important as the substantive subject matter you bring to bear, because nobody is going to want to listen to the right answer from someone they just don't want to listen to. So how do we think about our team as people that are approachable, that are business-centric, that are friendly, that are great emissaries for just being a good colleague generally, that are asking questions and leading with inquiry instead of leading with judgment. We want to be great with written communication, and sharing out our knowledge so we don't keep it to ourselves locked away behind the legal doors.

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How did you first hear of Lawtrades? What made them stand out to you versus other ALSPs?

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I've been lucky to work with Lawtrades since 2019/2020—my early days with Gusto. The things that attracted me to Lawtrades are the same things I think are really important for the culture of the legal teams we create for high-growth companies, which is: approachable, friendly, straightforward, transparent, business-oriented, quick in responses, practical, and how we get things to a Yes. Those are the same traits I want my legal team to have, and that's everything that Lawtrades is. They are practical when they're thinking through both costs and subject matter expertise. They're quick to respond to both give you great lists of talents, but also adjust when maybe your needs change. They're super transparent. The platform is so easy to navigate—you can constantly see where you are with spending, which is super important if you're at a high-growth company where legal's brand new and where you're trying to figure out what budget looks like, and need to be accountable to other leadership team members around what our spend is, and are we allocating our spend in the areas that matter most for the business. And so, all those things mirror what I want our legal team to be. It's a really great fit.

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Before I had moved to Lawtrades, I had worked with other ALSPs, and I found them hard to navigate. You know, four-week email cycles, people who want to have a phone call constantly to just bloviate on the capabilities of their ALSP, but I never got to talk to their actual candidates and understand, "hey at the end of the day, I'm going to be hiring a person to come in and join my team." This person, their cultural alignment, it needs to be just as culturally-aligned as any new hire would make as full-time. With Lawtrades, I love being able to jump right into candidate conversations, and rates, and look at profiles. It's also great because one of the hardest things to do when you're hiring for a legal team in-house, especially at a high-growth company, is to find people who have experienced in-house before. It is a big mountain to climb to help train somebody up from a law firm world to an in-house world. I will take that on, but I can't take on all of those profiles all at the same time. You want people who understand the cadence, how we want to get things done and then perfect them once we've launched them into the world versus waiting until they're perfect until we launch. You want somebody who understands what OKRs are, and corporate priorities, and how to track our progress towards goals. I love that, because Lawtrades exists, they've provided all of these independent workers the ability to pop in to different high-growth in-house environments. I am more likely to find someone who has applicable in-house experience from Lawtrades than I am almost anywhere else, more so than if I hired a full-time position and I looked at the candidate pipeline. More often than not, that pool is stacked full of people with great experience, but not necessarily in-house tech experience.

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And you've found Lawtrades has a wide enough, and deep enough, talent pool with in-house experience? Enough to be selective with your hires?

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Yes. And I love that I can also see their prior engagements. Oh wow, they've worked at some other companies that I know have been super high-growth, or very fast paced, or super oriented around transparency, or have the same sort of legal structure issues or operational challenges that we do. You kind of know different business structures that have been innovative, and that you follow, and it's been really awesome to be able to see candidates and their prior engagements so you can understand that this person probably gets it. This is going to be a good fit for them.

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‍What are some of the things you think about when creating a legal team?

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Well, I think a lot about this: when you're resourcing a legal team, how do you just create one out of thin air? On the one hand, it'd be really irresponsible to go on day one and say I'm going to hire 10 people because I just want to go from 0 to 10. No one has ever said that. No CEO has ever said that. You really have to prove yourself with impact first before you keep building. You have to understand actual needs, and needs that need to be filled now versus later. So, when I think about building out a team from scratch, I move from, "hey, there's just myself," to, "I need to replicate myself and document out as much as possible so other people can get even 40% of what's in my brain as easily and quickly and as self-servingly as they're able to." But wait, in order to do that, I need to hire some additional expertise to do that. I can hire a contractor who's going to come through Lawtrades. Then I can hire a consultant who's really just going to come in for a very short stint project to help advise, or figure out a path forward. Then I can hire a part-time person. Then I can hire a full-time person. I usually ramp up in that order, exactly.

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I think the first step to even understanding how you're going to build a team, or where you're going to go, is to bring in a contractor—like someone from Lawtrades—where you can both stop the bleeding in areas that are a high-volume part of the business, so you can focus on the high strategy that needs a ton of internal context to be able to do; and also, so you can bring in someone from Lawtrades that is not doing high volume, but is working on specialized areas that you need to move forward because you can't be in all places at once. They help beta test whether or not you want to be able to hire a full-time position within that area. When you work with Lawtrades, they're maxing out at 40 hours a week, so you can see, hey, this is enough evidence that a full-time person is going to be relevant. I'm going to open up a full-time role for this. Lawtrades allows you to test your hypotheses around full-time roles without hiring full-time right away.

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And what sort of roles have you been bringing Lawtraders on for at Apollo?

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I am routinely hiring Lawtraders early on when I start a legal team on the legal operations side. So, bringing in someone for legal ops to help block and tackle the operational challenges of where are our contracts? How do we think about this system integrating with that system? Let's get organized around our documentation. Let's do meetings with the right teams, and at the right cadence. Legal ops is a role I have typically filled first with Lawtraders, and then maybe a full-time hire. I also use Lawtrades in addition to a full-time legal ops hire. There's sometimes just so much volume that it's great to be able to bolster my full-time legal ops person with support from Lawtrades.

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I've also worked with Lawtrades on equity management. So, corporate paralegal work for overflow where you don't quite have enough for a full-time job, but you definitely need someone. In the past, I have gotten spread too thin to be able to spend my time doing those tasks. I've also used Lawtrades on some privacy counsel, on specialized kinds of knowledge, and the area I've worked a lot with Lawtrades is on commercial counsel. That's one way to stop the bleeding and plug the initial gap. Typically, you come into a company and they have a lot of contracts that have to be reviewed—vendor agreements, customer agreements. For sure, as a leader coming in, you want to understand the lay of the land, deep dive on to the template you have with customers, understand what gets negotiated, what doesn't, what vendors you care about, which ones you don't. But as soon as you have a good sense after having rolled up your sleeves and have understood the problem statements, bringing in a contractor with Lawtrades has been my saving grace, because then I can enable them with what are the four corners, and here are the five things I care about in each of the agreements. Now, please go run with it. If you've got questions or escalations outside of this, come to me and we'll work it out.

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There's one particular Lawtrader—I should really give a shout out to David Gundell—he's just amazing. I've worked with him now at 2 or 3 companies, and every single time I start a legal team, he's the first person I bring in because I know I'm going to have to get some extra bandwidth and bring in my posse for all the contracts that are going to be in the backlog.

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What advice would you give other legal departments looking to hire through Lawtrades? What strategies should they be implementing?

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Yeah, you needed them yesterday. There's a constant harp in the in-house legal community about how hard it is to hire more lawyers. "I never get budget," or, "I can't figure out a way to grow my team." I can tell you the easiest way to grow your team—bring in a Lawtrader. Really manage them, empower them, enable them to deliver value, and then take a look at that value they've delivered versus the cost to employ them for that last month, quarter, year. More times than not, you'll see that this makes sense to make a full-time hire. And that is all the justification you need. Hey, this person came, they conquered, we're going to convert them.

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More broadly, would you recommend Lawtrades to other companies and legal departments?

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I personally love it. To other legal leaders who are looking to use Lawtrades: yeah, absolutely. I love the transparency. I love the updates on the bills. The pressures you get, especially as a start-up around billing and maintaining cost controls, especially in this environment, are there with Lawtrades.

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There are a lot of ALSPs out there, and I would really caution people with, however the sales process is, that is going to be indicative of how it is to work with them. So, if it takes you 3 weeks to set up a call, if you don't get really clear transparency on pricing, if you don't understand how they're going to contract and get that person on onboarded—those are all the immediate signs that they're probably not going to be super adaptable once you hire them too.

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I never have to worry about understanding where I am with Lawtrades, which is the polar opposite to most of the big law firms too, where it's a complete black box until I get hit with a $40,000 bill at the end of the month—that is not the surprise you want to end up with.

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Whether a high-growth start-up building its legal team, or an established multinational looking to expand its skill set, Lawtrades provides world-class legal talent via an easy-to-use platform that makes hiring and managing a breeze.

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