Being Your Best: Former In-House Leaders Now in Business Roles Share Insights from the Other Side

Welcome to being your best, former in house leaders now in business roles, share insights from the other side. Again, I’m Logan Ide, Atlanta based partner with Latitude and your moderator for this roundtable discussion. We have three outstanding panelists with us today. Good morning, Bintina, Joseph, Julia. Thanks for joining. I’m gonna introduce you all in a minute after we run through a few housekeeping items. So this webinar has been approved for CLE credit in Georgia, Tennessee, Minnesota, Indiana. If you’re in Georgia, Tennessee, or Indiana, we will file directly with those bars and confirm to you via email. In Minnesota, you should submit directly through the OASIS system. And OneNote for those in Indiana, you must complete each of three surveys that are part of the program during the hour in order to receive credit. I guess that’s the snooze you lose CLE rule in Indiana. So today’s webinar has been produced by Latitude and is cosponsored by the corporate council section of the Atlanta Bar Association. If you are not a member of the Atlanta Bar Association and the corporate council section, and I don’t know why you wouldn’t be, but if you’re not, I encourage you to learn about both and consider joining for the networking, educational, service, socializing, and leadership opportunities. Great organization. So us at Latitude, our mission is to provide experienced attorneys and other legal professionals as either flexible talent or permanent hires to our legal department and law firm clients, meeting their needs and in the process providing rewarding career opportunities, work life enhancements, and hopefully both, for our legal professionals. So, this subject is near and dear to our heart. It’s gonna be a roundtable discussion format with time for q and a at the end of each of the two segments, And I’ll encourage you to fire your questions into the chat bar while you’re thinking about them. We’ll see them, may catch some of them on the fly, and then, otherwise, hopefully, most, if not all of them in those designated time periods. Well, that’s it on our administrative items. Let’s jump into the substance of the program. It should be a good one, hopefully entertaining and informative. Today’s program has two topics. First, we’ll talk about purposefully managing one’s career development while being open minded to nontraditional opportunities. And then second, we’re gonna jump into some insights regarding how to be your best as in house counsel. Our panelists today… Sorry. Control’s here. Bear with me. Here we go. So our panelists today have all been there, done that many times over. They’ve all been associates or partners at some of the world’s leading law firms. They’ve made the leap to practicing as in house counsel for dynamic companies. They’ve been in leadership roles for these legal departments. And then, and this is our special sauce in our program today, they’ve all made a further career leap into nonlegal top leadership roles within their organizations. So we have three successful, thoughtful, fearless, non practicing attorneys who are ready to provide nuggets of wisdom and food for thought. Our outstanding panelists today are Bantina Terry, senior vice president of customer strategy and solutions at Georgia Power. And, Tina, thanks for being with us. It’s been great to get to know you. Julia Houston, chief marketing and strategy officer at Equifax. Julia, thank you for being with us, and this is like… We we started our relationship in law a lot of years ago, so this is a fun event here in the later midpoint stages. Joseph Blanco, president of Crawford and Company and another longtime friend. I’ve joked with Joseph and privately that I I would listen to Joseph read a legal treatise and be entertained. So there’s your your golfer today. Our our first segment, here we go. We’re into career development. And borrowing from our title, this segment is intended to tease out some thoughts on how to be your best, how to excel in your current role while being thoughtful and purposeful about what comes next and the tools and techniques that can help you in your journey. Ventina, let’s start with you. So like most attorneys in our audience, you received specialized legal training during your, tenure at Michigan Law School, followed that up with rigorous, you know, on the job law firm training in a specific practice area, in your case, labor and employment. And then you carried that over to your first in house role, and that’s all pretty, you know, traditional in the scheme of things. So how do you go from there to a generalist law department leadership role and then fast forward to what would seem like a complete… Just completely unrelated but very senior role as senior vice president of customer strategy and solutions. If you can connect the dots for us, fill in the blanks, what makes all that work, that would be great. Thanks, Logan. I appreciate that, and thanks for the opportunity to be on this panel with such esteemed people as, Joseph and Julia, as well as to get to talk to other lawyers about how you make some changes in your career as you think about that. So I think there are a couple of important points. I did start as a labor and employment lawyer, and one of my chief customers when I was a labor and employment lawyer was Georgia Power. And so I developed relationships with the Georgia Power business people as well as the Georgia Power lawyers. So they knew me. They understood who I was. They worked with me a lot, and and that was a great relationship. When I left, I actually went to another utility in North Carolina. And then I was at that utility in North Carolina when I got the call from Georgia Power about coming to work as their as their workplace ethics manager. So a couple of things I think contributed to that phone call. One is I kept in contact with people at Georgia Power. There was a partner too who worked with me at Troutman, and he had gone in house at Georgia Power, really as a vice president. And he remembered me. He remembered the great work I did for him at the firm. He remembered the fact that I worked on a a number of things at, Georgia Power, and he knew that current… In my role at the loft… At, at Progress Energy that I was doing ethics and compliance work for them. And so it was really, really easy because we had maintained that relationship for him to think of me when the opportunity arose at Georgia Power for me to be their workplace ethics manager. Since that time, I’ve kind of moved around in Georgia Power, I think, based on a couple of things. One is, I’ve never been just a lawyer, and lawyers are awesome. Great. Right? But I’ve always considered myself a business person and a problem solver. And so no matter what role I was in, I tried to not just limit myself to thinking about the legal issues, but trying to understand the business issues. So I spent a great deal of my career going out in the field. I’ve… When I was in the workplace ethics role, I rode with linemen. I went out with a troubleman. Those are the people that come out to make sure your lights get back on. I sat at the counter and took cash. I sat at the phone and listened to the customer service reps as they were talking to our customers. And so I spent a lot of time across the company to deepen my understanding of what we did. So I think all of those opportunities led to them thinking of me as someone who could be a lawyer, but also more than that. My first legal role here was as the general counsel of our nuclear company. And I have to tell you that that role actually came because I spoke up. So I was in the office of our CEO at the time who later became the CEO of Southern Company. He was the CEO of Georgia Power. He was talking about lawyers and general counsels, and he was saying, I don’t know that we have enough. We might have to go external for general counsel roles. And I said, well, what about me? And he looked at me. He said, well, now that you’ve gone to the business side, do you… Would you really be a general counsel? And I was like, look. Every lawyer wants to be a general counsel. It’s like what we dream about. It’s the cream to our crop. Right? And so, when he had an opportunity to to move me over into a legal role as the general counsel of our nuclear company, he did that in large part because I I framed the way that he thought about me. Since then, I haven’t been in any fully legal roles. They’ve been quasi legal roles, so I’ve had a lot of governmental, regulatory, environmental. And those weren’t areas I practiced in, but they were areas that I, again, spent a lot of time with the people in the business, tried to understand it. And then when I had the opportunity to lead it, understood that I had some limitations because I hadn’t actually practiced in those areas, and that’s okay. So I think I’m on the customer side of the business. This is my second time on the customer side of… Third time. Third time on the customer side of the business, again, because I thought, like, someone who is a business person. I have a passion for our customers, and that’s been really evident. And I’ve also made sure that I made my desire to do other things not just clear by my talking, but clear by my behaviors and getting engaged. So I think all of that wraps up to it. I do tell people, don’t look at where people sit today and go, how did you get there? Look at the path they took. And if you look at my path, they actually all connect very well. Bantina, that… That’s great. I wanna ask you in follow-up. When you talked about, you know, being out with the linemen and the troubleshooters, was that a a program within the company, or was that something that, you know, you had to, you know, raise your hand and say, I’d like to do this. Can I do this? Well… So, Julia knows me well, so she knows I do this. I I I don’t ask for permission very often. I often ask for forgiveness. So I just called. I I asked leaders. I said, if I wanna get to know your organization, who would you suggest I spend time with? And sometimes I think they said it thinking I wouldn’t actually do it. Say we’re like, you should ride with a trouble man on a Friday night and see what it’s like in Atlanta. And I was like, okay. I called the trouble supervisor. I said, I’d like to ride with a trouble man on a Friday night. And I’m in the truck with this guy. We’re running around Atlanta at eight or 09:00 at night getting the lights back on. The guy loved it because no one ever rides with him on a Friday night. And I I got some kudos from the leaders because they… I think they thought she’s never gonna do that, but I just… I did it, and I was genuinely interested in it. Right. Well, that’s great. So, you know, being being curious, taking initiative, these are things we hear, yeah, hear about in career development talks that carry over here. We’re gonna go sideways for a second. We have three surveys or polls that we’re doing during the course of the hour. We’re gonna hit the first one now, and I think just by me saying that that it’s gonna magically happen. There it goes. So, again, if if you’re looking for Indiana bar credit, make sure you get an answer in here. We’d love to hear from everyone. This is this is just a what is your current role question. Yeah. It would provide some information on, you know, who’s in the audience, and our speakers can tailor a little bit to that. We’ll give it a few more seconds, and then we’ll roll on. But I I will say, because I had a chance to peek at the registration, that we have weighted towards legal departments a bit, and we had… I think there were at least 30 different legal departments represented within the the registrants. A a great selection, especially the Atlanta based large and small employers. Okay. Well, I think we’ll wrap that one there. Thanks for responding to that one. We’ve also got a great number of our law firm colleagues and some government or nonprofit and then a few folks who that aren’t sure what they are doing. There we go. Let’s move on. We’re gonna share the results so everyone can see it. There they are. Law firm 27, legal department forty seven, government or nonprofit 10, and nonlegal or not sure 17. Thank you. Okay. So next, Julia, it’s your turn. So you had been a leader of three legal departments, if I’m characterizing it fairly, when… And you were at Equifax when they experienced a massive, very well publicized data breach a little while back, and the company was embarking on some, you know, pretty serious crisis management and remediation. You were asked to move into a newly created nonlegal role to assist in digging out of the crisis. Presumably, you could have said no. Thank you, or you could have, you know, exited out the side door and gone on to another role rather than… I’ll say, I’ll call it disrupting a fairly linear, very successful career. How did you process this opportunity? How did you think about it? You know, it’s kind of a curveball in terms of your career, your personal happiness, the risk. What what led you to say yes? And even before that, why do you think they asked you? I mean, obviously, you’re a successful problem solver. But… Yeah. And then finally, kind of how did you find yourself prepared or in some ways not prepared for that role and and what you’ve done since then? All you. That’s a lot of questions. Isn’t it? So I think I’ll start with the one that’s easiest to answer in a way because you said, you know, why did you say yes? And I think, you know, if anyone on this call read the news in 2017, you’ll recall that, you know, it was really one of the biggest corporate news stories of the year in a terrible way. And, you know, I said yes because I didn’t… I just couldn’t say no. You know, it was… I… We we all at the company just sort of dug in and did… You know, it was really a remarkable time to be here where people just did what was asked of them because we were all committed to, you know, doing the right thing for consumers and our customers and the other employees in the company to sort of get through this crisis and, you know, which was pretty existential at the beginning, get through it in the best way that we could. And, you know, I had always given people career advice, which said when a door opens, you know, if you really are serious about it, you gotta walk through it and be willing to walk through it. And so, I guess, in a way, I had to take my own career advice and, you know, be willing to take a risk and do something new. And and I I remember saying to myself, well, I know I’m gonna learn something personally, and I’m gonna learn something professionally. And I have no idea what either one of those things is right now, but I just have confidence that down the road, that’s gonna be… Become clear to me. And and I think it it… I learned way more than one thing personally and professionally by going by going through it. You know? So I think why I said yes was I didn’t… It was… There… It just… It felt like the right thing to do. And, you know, in terms of assessing that risk, it really was the… A a disruption to what I had all… What was a very linear career path and was, you know, very black and white in terms of this is what a lawyer in an in house legal department does, and this is your job description. And they came to me with this job that… They… There wasn’t even a job description. It was just sort of we’ll figure it out together, but we know we need somebody to help with this. And so that was really a stretch for me in terms of just my mindset around what I do when I go to work every day. But it it was also one of those times where I thought it was it was… I looked at it, and I thought, you know what? I think you’re… You know, no matter what happens, you just… I just had to have confidence in myself that I would land on my feet, and I would figure it out. And that’s not necessarily sort of… I… I’m… I… Through my career, you know, they talk about that impostor syndrome and can I really do this? And am I really able… Is it… Does… You know, am I really gonna be successful, or did I just luck out one time? And so I think this time, I finally said, you know what? There’s not… I don’t really feel like I have a choice, and I’m just gonna have confidence that no matter what happens, I’m gonna land on my feet. And so that was a… That was one learning for me. But, you know, you asked about, you know, kinda why did… Why do I think that they asked me? And I… A lot of the stuff that Bintina… And we’ve shared our stories with each other before, but a lot of the things that she said really resonated, and they’re the same reasons why I think that they asked me to do it. I think understanding the business as an in house lawyer is just, you know, really invaluable, making sure that you go sit down with people and understand how they make money and why they do the things that they do and what are the risks that they face in their job. Not just the legal risk, but, you know, how do they make decisions about prioritizing, you know, revenue opportunities, or how do they deal with their customers when they have a problem. So really having a deep understanding of the business, not just the the things that are content… Considered to be, you know, legal issues. And, you know, there was something that I would always tell my legal teams, which is I don’t see a difference in legal issues and business issues. Every every issue is a business issue. So I think that by approaching things with that mindset, it sort of let people see that I could think in a way that was not necessarily what what people would ascribe to be a a traditional sort of legal way of thinking. I think also, you know, being willing to make decisions on less than complete information. You know, get as much information as you can and apply what you already know and then be willing to move. Because, otherwise, you get paralyzed in that. What’s the one more thing I can know that would make this decision better? Sometimes you just have to say, I know everything I can, and I gotta go. And so that was, I think, something that people had also seen me be willing to do. And then I guess the last thing is peep… One of our business unit leaders about halfway through the crisis, he looked to me and he said, sometimes I just wonder if you have a pulse. And I laughed about that because… You know? But I had always said through my career, you know, there’s no problem that I feel like I can’t solve, like, that we we can’t solve together. You know? Now granted, I would always say, please don’t do anything illegal or immoral. But, like, if we muck up a contract or if we make a mistake or if we… We’ll figure out a path through. And so, you know, getting panicked about it doesn’t really do any good. And so I think that was another another piece. And then, you know, for me, once I once I saw the application of the skills that I had built my career, you know, spent my career building outside of the traditional legal role, it sort of opened up the aperture for me to realize, like, to put myself out there to take on other things. So I think that’s how it sorta led to to a continued path outside of a legal department. It was a… You asked a lot of questions, so it was a long answer. Yeah. No. And that was great. I think you you hit on the questions and answered them well. And I was I was thinking as you were saying that that you make a great Top Gun Air Force pilot just Yeah. You know, calm, focused, and taking taking things as they come. Thank you. Joseph. Okay. So Joseph’s lead in here. When we… I’ve known Joseph a long time, but when we were prepping this, he shared that… I may get this not quite right, but he shared that he knew by third grade that he wanted to be an attorney, but he wasn’t quite sure if he wanted to be a litigator or a corporate attorney. So I think that by itself makes you something of a a special case in in the context of this discussion. But there was more. You served in the navy, and then at another point, you were training to be a Catholic priest. So, you know, Joseph’s not afraid to explore, you know, different different ideas, different paths, and and to get focused. But what I wanted to ask you was if you could share with us… I think there was a point in your legal career where you’d been very successful. You were a partner at the world’s largest law firm and, you know, and found that that there was something missing from your professional satisfaction that was important to you. And so I I think it would be interesting to share kind of, you know, how that thought maybe crept in and how you processed it in the… You know, while, you know, managing a very busy role and eventually acted on it. Well, thanks, Logan, and thanks for having me, be part of this panel because I think it’s an interesting topic and certainly esteemed panelists to be with here this morning. I think if if you wanna feel sorry for a group of people, the litigators at Crawford are a good group to feel sorry for because I’ve fashioned myself as both a philosopher, civil procedure, constitutional law expert. And so you can see the look on their face when I asked them for the briefs and the the best cases on both sides. But I ended up being a a corporate lawyer. But what really, I think, helped me and the best piece of advice I got early on in my career came from my then fiance, now wife. And I’m not just saying that because I think she’s on the the CLE. But what it was was I was actually having a tough time in about my third or fourth year practicing law. And it was kinda crazy because I actually had not one, but three great mentors at the law firm, but was just not happy, doing, what I was doing, and it just felt like, it was exhausting me to go into work every day. And so the first advice she gave me was actually fairly typical, which was, you know, write out the pros and cons. So I wrote out the pros and cons, and the pros had this massively long list. And the cons were billable hours and not having control of my schedule. But that’s not how I felt. And so when I told her that’s not how I felt, she then encouraged me to actually go get help figuring out what it is I was feeling and to be able to articulate that. And so I actually went and saw a, you know, career psychologist, corporate coach, whatever you wanna say. Went through kind of a battery of tests to kinda figure out, okay. What do I like, and what do I not like, and what are those things that I might be better at? And it’s funny. Once I was able to articulate those, I was able to better see in situations where they might be a good fit or analyze the things I wasn’t liking that were much easier for me, and I was able to articulate that. And that was, like I said, early in my career. And then what that allowed me to do is then see opportunities as they presented themselves to be a little bit more diagnostic around whether that might be a good fit for me or not. And I always thought that I might wanna go in house, but I thought I was five years away from going in house when I got the opportunity to go in house. But even while I was at the firm, it allowed me to do some things to help with the corporate department, to agree to take over, managing, the Atlanta office. And I found that there was just a part of that, that I really liked and that resonated with me. And then carrying it through to interim general counsel with a… You know, and then permanent general counsel with a, you know, standard kind of list of of duties. And then we had a leadership change early on where one of our operational leaders needed to give up control of our overseas operations, our back office, if you will, in The Philippines because we needed her to do something else. And at the same time, our head of strategy in m and a was leaving the company, and so there was gonna be a shift. I was an m and a lawyer, so I was like, okay. Give me strategy in m and a to expand my role to go with Nexon. The CEO said, no. I really think you should take over the operations in Manila, which at the time were almost, I think, about 550 and are now 1,200 folks. And I was like, that seems crazy. Like, you should give me the thing I know how to do and I’m good at. But what he was telegraphing to me and would end up being extremely helpful was, okay. This is what you need to help round out, what you’re doing for you to be more useful, to the company and to develop, what you’re doing. And because, Lisa’s suggestion earlier on, I saw in that, okay, that actually could be quite interesting. It’s a change. It’s dealing with people, and it’s leading people through change, which is what I like to do. So That… That’s great. And and that was… I I think when we talked, that last thing you mentioned, you… At some point, you had… You knew you enjoyed being a… In a leadership role or being a leader and that you were able to gravitate into those roles at the law firm and then with the legal department now in your… Now you kinda got all you could want more in your role as president. There are more direct reports and more responsibilities than you could have imagined in third grade. Well, thanks, Joseph. We’re we’re gonna go into a quick q and a piece right here. I’m I’m gonna tease out. Alright. So here’s… We’re gonna do this question, then we’re gonna do our second poll because in that poll is buried a q and a piece. So this this question asks, do you have children? How are you managing work demands versus those at home? Do you have any regrets as to how you’ve allocated your time to work and the rest of your life? So a question that, you know, all of us confront at different times and in different ways through our careers. Anybody wanna tackle that one? Okay. We’ll move on. Great. So so I guess I’ll go first. I… We have three children, they are two 16 year olds and a 15 year old. So it all kind of hit at once. Right? So we had three in diapers. It actually came to time in my career, which in a lot of ways, I think saved my career because by personality, my dad had told me early on, look. There’s kind of three ways to be successful. You can be born successful. You can be really, really smart, or you can work really hard. He said, unfortunately, for you, you’ve only got one option. And so I’ve always been a hard worker. And so I just would work and work. And and when you have three children in diapers from 06:00 to 08:00 in the evening, you can’t do anything except for take care of them. Right? It is it is all encompassing. And I think for me, it allowed me to finally understand that, okay. I can shift my day a little bit. I can enforce some parameters around my my day. And I think in the absence of that, I probably would have burned out, in the law. And so in a in a very strange way, it kind of helped me, understand that I could insist on a little work life balance. Because my wife is on this call, I think I do need to give the caveat. I am still not perfect at it, and it is, it is a work in process for sure. Great. So I would only… So I don’t have kids. My husband and I made a decision before we even got married that we didn’t, that that kids weren’t really for us. And, I think it’s really important that, of course, everybody gets to make that choice. I’m very, very close to my family, and he’s very close to his family. And I’ve made some decisions in my career based on that because it was the most important thing for me. My father developed ALS in 2016. I was in Pensacola, Florida with southern… Another Southern Company subsidiary at the time. Maybe it was 2017. And… No. It was ’16. And I told the company, I’m leaving. I’m either… You’re either moving me closer to be in Atlanta. That’s the closest I could get with Southern Company at the time, or I’m gonna go somewhere else. It’s not because I’m unhappy. It’s because I have to be closer to my dad in these last years of his life. And I said, and I don’t know or care what it’s gonna do to my career. That’s just not where my focus is. And so I I think that it turned out okay as I tell everybody. It turned out okay. It turned out pretty doggone good. But, as I tell everybody, you’ve got to figure out what it is you can live with. And you’re right in your questions about regrets. And I was not going to regret not spending my dad’s last years with him. I was very close to my father. And so I always ask people that you… Make the right… Or tell people, make the right decision for you because you’re the one that’s gotta wake up every single day with that decision. No one else does. And so… And and there… And it’s hard. And after you make the decision, you’ve gotta live with the consequences. So if I hadn’t had any other moves at Southern Company, I would have had to live with that particular consequence, and I was at least mentally prepared to do so at that time. Great, Ventina. Thanks. That’s that’s another interesting twist. Right? I mean, we we all have different different things that we actively or passively choose to make important in our lives or or not make them important, and, you know, the consequences are the consequences whether you, you know, decide or don’t decide. Alright. Schedule wise, I need to pop up the second question right now. This one is a mentor question. Have you had a strong mentor figure in your legal career? And we’ve got multiple answers there. Yeah. Definitely yes to some degree. Definitely no, but I would like to or, you know, forget about it. Don’t need a mentor. You know, I’m self self sufficient, and I’ve got all the answers. Still waiting. I’m watching the results, waiting for somebody to choose that one. Notetakers yet. We’ll give it a couple more seconds. Indiana folks, wake up if you’re if you’re nodding off. And there we go. So in the poll, and here are your results. So I, you know, I think this is interesting. It’s really broke out very evenly between, you know, those three answers. Zero takers on, yeah, I would never want a mentor. So, I mean, I would I would love to hear some quick takes on this one. Yeah. I know I’ve had different mentors in my career who’ve been very helpful in different ways. And, you know, I reflect on that and say, you know, gosh. I… There was no end to the… I I would have taken all of the support, mentorship perspective, you know, pull up, push out the door, whatever I could get. So who who wants to opine on that one? And I and I think in particular, the not really, but hoping to, you know, how how can you be proactive? Because some of us… I’ve got so many stories from lawyers of, yeah, that first year when I was a attorney at big law firm and, you know, senior partner grabbed me and said, get in the car. We’re going to Macon for a hearing. And, you know, on the way down there, it’s and by the way, you’re conducting the hearing. Right? So, anyway, Julia, you’re about to Yeah. No. I will say I I think that is a… You know, people talk a lot about the difference in mentors and sponsors, and I think even more than a mentor… More… I’ve had lots of people who I would consider, you know, mentors on my kitchen cabinet, people who have been influential and important in my career. But I think even more importantly, I’ve had the opportunity to have some really strong sponsors. And by that, I mean, you know, people who believed in me and were willing to go to bat for me and who were willing to stick their neck out and say, she can do this, and we should give her a chance. And I think, you know, it’s one thing to… For somebody to, you know, give you advice and tell you what they think and, you know, explain their career. But what more important is the person who will vouch for you, you know, and and really stick their neck out for you as a supporter. And so… And that, you know, you have to earn that. Right? You don’t just show up in somebody’s office and say, hi. I’d like for you to be my sponsor. And so I think a lot about how do you put yourself in that position in order to get those kinds of relationships. And, you know, it really means, you know, sort of digging in and and and you have to put yourself out there so that that person sees… So that people can see what you can accomplish. And then, you know, you have to cultivate relationships. You have to earn trust. I mean, it takes a lot of work and investment in relationships and, you know, often showing loyalty to someone that they then will, you know, reciprocate to you. And and, you know, I think that mentor relationships can’t really be forced in my mind. Like, the truly good mentoring and sponsorship relationships are ones that happen naturally, but you also have to put yourself out there and seek them out. You know, I always say to people… I mean, thankfully, I feel at a different place in my career where I can now mentor and sponsor people, and I take that as my calling. I mean, I have no… No one ever shows up or asks for a meeting for me, and I can say this. Like, I’m not exaggerating it, that I won’t take the time to meet with them because I see that as such a critical way to, you know, give back and invest in people’s careers. And so when they show up, though, they need to know what they want out of the meeting or out of the relationship. You know? And I often say, okay. Well, how are you gonna get there? I’m happy to help you. I’m happy to give you advice. But, you know, it’s a two way street in that mentoring and sponsorship relationship. Wow. That’s a great jump in. Look. But I I mean, I got lucky. Right? I clerked for a fabulous judge, and then I had three great mentors, at the law firm. And my situation is particularly unique in that they were people who I worked for. So it wasn’t, which then, in a lot of ways, that’s the best situation because I think they can also provide that psychological safety or whatever you wanna put on where I… It was okay for me to fail on the periphery. Right? So it was okay for me to, as you mentioned, take the deposition, although mercifully, I never had to do that. But the… To really, you know, take a step out there and to make some mistakes and to realize that I could have done some things better and to grow because, like, they had my back in every turn, and that’s helpful. But I think that if you can’t get that, I’d try to get into a situation where you can have that. But in the absence of that, having a mentor that’s not outside of your direct line or that you’re not working for, is incredibly important. And I would not… Especially now, I I would not limit that necessarily to just lawyers or just people within your firm or your company. There are lots of great people who can give you insights because a lot of this is just about human dynamics and having someone who can look at your situation from outside and not be as as smart in the day to day. Gotcha. Excellent. Excellent add on. Alright. Well, that’s… We could bottle up that mentor sponsorship answer and share that with a lot of folks to their benefit. I’m sure Bantina could add to it. We gotta we gotta move to keep on schedule. So we’re gonna go into our second segment, which is being your best as in house counsel. The three of you have had the, I think, relatively rare experience of being leaders in corporate legal departments and being now consumers or users of those legal services. So I’m hoping you can share some perspective that our audience will find both, you know, both interesting, useful, actionable. I’m gonna acknowledge there were a couple other questions that came in late. We’ll try to get to those in our next q and a session if we can. If not, we’ll try to get you some thoughts afterwards. So for this one, Julia, let’s get the ball rolling with you. You and I discussed some thoughts that developed. At least you shared a specific anecdote where a member of your, I think, current team had gone to legal with the question, maybe didn’t get the answer they were hoping for or expecting, shared that with you, and then, you know, there’s kind of a conversation and, you know, action item that came out of that. If you can share that. Sure. So I could go on and on about this one, but I’m gonna make it fast because I think this is, like, one of the most important learnings I’ve had from being outside of the legal team. And and I I give advice on both sides of this. And and so this scenario was somebody had gone, asked a lawyer, said… They said no. Legal says… And then they came back to me, and they said, legal said no. And I said, well, what did you ask? Because it… One of the hardest parts about being outside of the legal team is I still know the answers, but I I have to send people to the legal team to ask them the answers. And so… Because you don’t ever stop being a lawyer. So I’d said, I knew what I thought the answer should be. And I said, well, what did you ask them? And they’d asked this really, you know, quite… You know, specific question without giving the context and, you know, the… It was a much more nuanced question than they’d actually answered. And then on the other side, legal team had said, answer that specific question without asking for the context. And so, you know, so I said, you know what? Let’s go back. And we went and met with that person again, and the three of us talked through it. And I said, now think about this and think about this. And at the end, we got to the right answer without, you know, any problem. But I I took that back, and I actually… You know, I still have so much affinity for my teammates in the legal department. I mean, they’re, like, my best partners and friends. But what I say to them is I… You know, since this is a legal focus call, I say, you know, realize the power that you want to have as a lawyer. You know? You want people to do what you say when they come to legal and you say no. You want them to say, okay. Legal said no, and I’m not gonna push. Because when they say no, they mean no, and, you know, we gotta do the right thing. But always have the attitude of trying to get to yes and only say no when it is really absolutely a no. And so always ask those contextual questions. And that… You know? And my teammate, bring them in. Make them your partner. Don’t just go, you know, like a robot with one question and ask and get the answer back, and then you just take it and walk away. So it’s really about that bring people to the table, bring the legal team in as your partner, and legal team value that relationship so that you can, you know, get to yes much more easily. And so that just is, like, one of the things that is such a learning for me is, you know, the… How the legal team is perceived that they don’t even know necessarily sometimes. So Yeah. Well, absolutely. And I think that that some of the information, thoughts you shared there at the end, Joseph, maybe you can tag on to that about that question of, you know, trust building, relationship building, even going back to what we talked about earlier of, you know, for career development of understanding the the business you had. I I think this maybe didn’t completely fit our model. You can hit it on both sides. I think when you’re GC, you did a little bit of that from your side. No. Look. I mean, I I think in a lot of ways, the role of in house legal departments is translating legal advice into something that’s practical and and into the business, whether you’re having… Well, you know, the advice is coming internally or from outside law firms. But I always thought of it somewhat as kind of a… The business leaders you’re dealing with are, like, first year law students. Right? And… But they know a little bit about, the law. They’re really smart, but they don’t really know what to do, with all of that. It’s kinda like, you know, joke of trying to order a pizza in a first year study group. It’s impossible. Right? Because there’s on the one hand this, on the other hand that. But I think that in the translation, you really have to understand the business side of it. And you can only do that by doing what Latina did and and going on those ride alongs and asking a lot of questions. One of the things, because we had a little bit of a disconnect in some areas when I first got to the company. One of the things we did early on was we took our, our off-site, legal department, get get together. And instead of going, you know, to a place locally or whatever, we went down to one of our operational units. We spent the first day talking about internal legal, department stuff. And the second day, we spent sitting behind, adjusters and sitting behind people doing medical bill review and really learning, the business down there. Now none of us could actually do any of what, our colleagues were doing down there, but it was both important for us to see what was going on. And it sent a really important signal to the organization, which is we’re willing to learn. We’re willing to to come down here and and spend our time learning what it is you do because I think it’s that translation. Right? Because what we do as lawyers is really complicated, and and trying to translate that into something that’s actionable is hard stuff. Sure. Sure. Interesting. We’re moving a little bit fast now, but that’s that’s good because we’re gonna leave time for the q and a, and we’ll circle back on some of these things. So, Ben, Tina, why don’t you bring us home on on this topic as far as the initial presentation part and, you know, share some of, you know, your observations from… You’ve actually been, you know, kinda forth and back and back and forth a couple times, so you… You’ve even got more perspective. I mean, I I think that Julia and Joseph really summed it up when they talk about knowing and understanding the business and your customer and making sure that you are speaking with the right voice. The worst thing that you can do is tell a person in the business no with no explanation, with no full understanding of what they’re actually trying to do. And I think that it’s interesting. We’ve been in a lot of conversations lately, and we’ve disinvited the lawyer that we were dealing with, which is nothing that you want to have happen because he translates risk into no. Right? So the reality is I’m a officer of this company. My job is to evaluate the risk. As a lawyer, you’re to help advise me of that risk, but you don’t tell me that I can’t take the risk. Right? That’s not… Unless it’s illegal, you can’t say you can’t take that risk. And so I think that the most important… The most valuable lawyers that we have, we substitute it with another lawyer, so we didn’t kick out all lawyers. We couldn’t because me and the other two people are business people with law degrees too. The most important thing you can do is be a partner and really try to understand what’s trying to be accomplished. Sometimes that requires, of course, for you to ask additional questions because people come in, like Julia said, with one question. That’s not really what they need, but they’ve formulated what they think the question should be. But really figure out what they’re trying to do and then figure out how you can facilitate that and advise them of the risk along the way. And that’s, I I told one of the lawyers we were talking to because I’m close enough to him. I said, what you end up doing is making me think I’m an idiot because I don’t… I can’t assess and determine the risk that’s best for this company. And you don’t want your customer to feel like you’re saying, you can’t assess that risk. You can’t decide to take that risk. I’m a decide that for you because I know better than you do. Right? When what you really wanna say is, let’s talk about this risk together, and let’s figure out how we make the best decision for the company. So… And that… That’s that’s really the advice that I give most lawyers. That’s the first advice I got when I was a young lawyer at the law firm was, one of the partners told me, any old lawyer can tell you no. I can get look no anywhere. Your job is to help me figure out how I can get to yes. Well said. Well said. Okay. Well, I think that’s that’s a great initial, you know, presentation on those themes. We’re gonna hit the third poll, then we’re gonna swing back around to the, you know, q and a for that segment. So question number three, how often have you changed employers? So this is kind of a question of… Yeah. Just kind of… Or specific to our audience. You know? It it… It’s gonna be skewed by where people are in their career. People change more frequently early in their career, less frequently later, but it’ll give us some general ideas. You know? Certainly, the legal industry, you went back thirty years, would see pretty confident, a lot more answers skewed towards less change. It’s the world we live in today that… Not just in the legal industry, but across professional and other industries. Folks change change roles a lot more than they used to, and there’s good, bad, and challenges to that from a personal and professional perspective. So here’s here’s our answers. Very few people, at least in our audience, are in the job they started their career in. And, you know, the largest you can see… What’s that? 62% are, you know, changing jobs, you know, rather frequently, or may… Maybe let me swing that back. I guess the right way to interpret it is that every one to three years is is kind of the short end. So, yep, I’ve looked at the attendees. We’ve got some folks who are, you know, thirty years into their legal career, and, yeah, I would bet they started out in one place, made a couple changes mid career, and then have been in their position for a while, and the folks who are more junior would be a different bag. So thank you for responding to that. I’m gonna not have discussion on that one specifically unless it comes up if we wanna talk about it in the q and a. So this this is great. We’ve got some time to hit some of these other questions that have come up. Let me see which one we wanna field here. How about that’s a very specific one. But let’s let’s take a crack at it. So here’s here’s the setup. Someone who is in a role as general counsel, you know, for… Call it a small, medium sized company. Company’s going through a sale of itself, you know, probably gonna be, you know, larger company acquiring in that position being eliminated or very much changed, how do you think about… How can you think about, you know, advocating for yourself to potentially move into a a different or new leadership role, whether that’s the, you know, combined company general counsel or something else. So in a very dynamic situation with a lot of change. Thoughts? Well, I went first last time, but I’ll just say quickly. My mantra is always that change creates opportunity. And so I believe that… You know? And and I actually had an experience like that in my own career. Like, three jobs ago, I worked for a company that went through a bankruptcy, and I actually… You know, I don’t know why, but I joined the company when it was in bankruptcy. Ventina knows what I’m talking about. And so I… And after we emerged from bankruptcy, the entire 100% of the leadership team of that company changed. And, actually, they looked around, and they didn’t know our specific business. And some of them… I was a public company lawyer, and some of them had never been… They had worked in a nonpublic, you know, subsidiary of a a company and weren’t necessarily, you know, super deep in public company stuff. And so, like, that was a really valuable skill set to them. And so I just marched myself into the meetings and started, you know, telling them what I knew, and it was great. You know? And so I think, actually, if you embrace that change as a way to position yourself and show your value, like, that can be a… You know, it it changes the dynamics in a way that you can show up differently. So I I see it as a great opportunity. I agree. I I think change favors lawyers. Right? And I think part of what Julia was talking about earlier, which is staying cool under pressure rate, it’s just kind of a natural skill set that you almost have to develop, to be a successful lawyer over time. And in any kind of change environment, people are gonna look for that security and and to be able to those people who can figure out what is most important in that situation. So let… I like this question. How do you get more involved with learning about the company, more involved with the business team when there’s resistance to that from, quote, you know, the the the business side of things? When they they wanna keep you in your box, you know, and they’ll hand questions over the transom and get them back. You know, how how do you how do you get yourself in the conversation behind the curtain? Yeah. I I think part of that is it’s like all relationships. If you’re waiting to talk to your client or your customer for when they need legal advice, then they don’t… It’s much, much harder. And so the great thing about being a lawyer and being in house is that you can ask the business leaders to learn about their business, to attend their staff meetings, to do all that kind of stuff. You can take them to lunch and grow relationships with them and all that kind of stuff so that they become… You become a trusted partner for them. But if if you’re only intruding when you wanna give legal advice, when you see, oh, they’re doing something over there. I need to make sure that it’s alright, then they’re gonna look at you skeptically. So I would say build the relationships, know and understand the business, and they’ll invite you in because you’re already… Well, really, you’re already there. They don’t have to invite you in. I’m laughing, and it’s easy for me to pull off because of being… I can pull off Clueless pretty easily. And so sometimes there’s resistance, and I just kind of act like it’s not really there or or did when I was in the law department. And you just kinda keep pushing forward. But I think in the absence of that or in the face of real resistance, business people listen to business people. Right? And so if you can get someone to sponsor you in with a simple, hey. You know, I was facing a difficult issue, and Joseph really helped me with that. That coming from some peer that they trust is going to go way more than any article I could send them or any… Anything I can personally do to… And and by the way, that’s what business people do all the time. Right? You’re always relying on the advice of your your peers. And so I think that’s a way in if you can’t get any other way. Great. Yeah. And and, mean, I would just tag on to that. Maybe it was said in the middle, but, yeah, how you how you convey yourself. Right? I mean, it’s kind of to that point of, you know, not just injecting yourself when somebody’s doing something that may be, you know, problematic, but, you know, smile in the smile in the hallway or, you know, how’s your weekend going at the water cooler? Yeah. We’re going to that. Alright. I think it’s gonna be our last question, and I and I like this one. I’m gonna ask it this way. And this is asked in the context of, you know, for someone considering taking a big leap, whether it’s a GC or a business role. And, yeah, let’s say we’ve all had failures in our background, large or small. So the the question asks, can you tell us about some of your most memorable failures? I’m gonna ask it a little bit different. But let’s assume we’ve all had failures and without… If you wanna share something specific, great. But I think the more interesting question is, how did you recover? How did you process that? You know, did it set you back where you had to kinda regain trust with people or, you know, change your own view of yourself and talk yourself back up? Yeah. However you wanna come at that. Anybody? So I’ll I’ll go first. So the the first big failure I remember in my career, I’m sure there were plenty other, was when I was a in house counsel at the other utility. And I got an assignment from the head of the legal department. I’m a labor and employment lawyer, and he said that that the, business was completely nonunionized, which is very, very, very rare for a utility even in the South. And he said, I want you to build our union avoidance strategy. Right? So, they hadn’t had a labor attorney before. They specifically hired me because they needed a labor attorney, but I had to do employment too because there wasn’t enough labor work as you can imagine. And so and he said, I want you to… You know, you’re gonna present it to the executives. And so I I go off and I create this strategy, and I show up and I present it. And one of the executives over the power plants raised his hand, and he says, who on my group did you talk to as you were formulating this strategy? Nobody. I had done it all myself in my little office, cooked up all the answers. I knew everything. And every time in my career that I have been unsuccessful, it is when I decided that I knew all the answers, and I was gonna go it alone. And I was gonna figure it out myself, and I was gonna present that child fully formed to folks and show them how incredibly intelligent I am and how great I am. And every single time I’ve done that, I failed. Now, luckily, I’ve learned not to do that. In fact, I I get a little bit of a rap. It’s been Tina’s gonna collaborate with y’all. She’s gonna have everybody in the meeting. She’s gonna ask everybody their opinion, you know, so… Which is good. I’m glad my reputation, has turned. But that… That’s the biggest failure that I had, and it it hurt to sit in that room and have those guys. They were all guys, all older white men. Look at the little black girl lawyer and be like, you know, where’d you come from, essentially? And, I I just tried again. I mean, I wasn’t gonna be deterred. I wasn’t going to walk around… Walk away with my tail between my legs. I simply said, you know what? You’re right. I should get some input, and I’ll come back once I’ve done that. And I left, and I came back, and I presented a strategy that they could then believe in because it wasn’t just me in my office formulating, but I had lots of people in the room while we were talking about it, and and they had buy in. Right? So so that’s what I would say. That was my biggest failure. But I I think the biggest thing to learn is they were okay with me messing up. Right? They didn’t crucify me for it, but they were better about it because I came back with doing it the right way after. I didn’t just kinda slink away. I said… I admitted it, and then I came back and said, well, here’s here’s what I really needed to do the first time. Right. Own it. Fix it. Move on. Thanks, Ventina. That that was thanks. That was a great share all the way around. Unfortunately, we’re hitting up on the top of the hour, so we are going to wrap this up. If you missed it at the outset, CLE credit, Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana, we will submit directly and confirm by email to you. In Minnesota, please self file using OASIS. If you are seeking bar credit in another state, we can give you the proof of attendance that you can use. As far as parting thoughts for our being your best seminar CLE, You know, here’s one. Get out there. Get involved. Put yourself out in a opportunity to network, learn, succeed, fail, grow. I’ll put the plug in for the Atlanta bar in the corporate council section. And if we at Latitude can help you personally or your organization, we’d love to. And I’ll flip it over to the panelists for their fifteen second parting shots, and then we will conclude. So, Ventina, top left of my screen, please, you’re in first. I I I just say if you… If there’s something you want, go for it. Tell people that you wanna do it and and go for it. Don’t think you can’t. So Joseph? I guess I’d say know yourself, so that you can then evaluate and take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves. Great. And, Julia, that leaves you to, bring it home. Those are hard to follow. I think mine is really related, though. It’s like, don’t let fear stand in your way, And don’t be afraid to leave the nest… The comfortable nest of the legal department because it doesn’t mean you can’t ever go back. Like, just go try something new and see what it feels like. There you go. Well, thank you to the three of you. This was fantastic. You’re great panelists. Thanks for sharing your benefit of your experience and taking the time. Thanks to our audience. We had a a great turnout today with, you know, really wide variety of positions and experience. I’ll leave up some of the CLE information here in case anyone missed it and needs it. And thanks so much. That concludes the CLE for today. Bye now.