A Yahoo! search success

After joining Yahoo! in 2006 I handled mostly pan- regional matters in product compliance and advertising in addition to ad hoc projects like acquisitions and strategic partnerships that landed on my desk. All of this required a lot of coordination between our US and local legal teams and remains a large part of my job today. We are a team of 34 lawyers and total full time staff of 42 spread across Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan supporting Yahoo!’s global initiatives and Asia Pacific businesses. We also work closely with our global legal team on a wide range of matters to provide the best advice possible to our business clients.
Coming from a corporate commercial background, I engage in general counselling in the broadest sense. On any given day I, or any one of our country general counsels may be looking at commercial contract issues, privacy matters, reviewing legislation, advising on litigation or negotiating a strategic partnership. This certainly alleviates the boredom that may come with being pigeon-holed into a certain area of law or particular kind of transaction which can happen at law firms or in-house teams in different industries.

Unlike my time in private practice which was spent on a number of high priority projects and clients, my current role is characterised by a high volume of transitory matters (in addition to the high priority projects.) The volume of matters necessitates speed and practicality in providing advice so that decisions can be made quickly to allow the business to move forward.

AMC: What does a typical day for you look like?
SM: I will be up before 6 am and checking my Blackberry for anything critical that may have come in through the night, but I try not to log on with my laptop or else it is difficult to move from the office in my home. I will spend some time with my kids before getting them off to school and then head into the office myself.

Since I work closely with my colleagues at headquarters in California I’ll typically be in the office shortly after 7 am to catch them in their mid to late afternoon. After a call or two I will take up the never-ending battle against my in-box. As our Asia Pacific offices start to come online I will turn my attention to my team and Asia Pacific business clients, getting on the phone to discuss the issues of the day. Lunches are normally in my office but I have been known to sneak out to the gym or get out for a while to stretch my legs.

It has been our practice to maximise the amount of work done in-house and this is not purely a cost consideration. Our business is very fluid and quite often it is faster to do the work ourselves rather than instructing counsel, getting them the relevant information and waiting for advice. This results in increased workloads for our attorneys and means that no one is above getting their hands dirty on things like drafting and negotiating agreements, working on a due diligence or preparing risk memos for the business, myself included.

Spread throughout the day I will have calls and meetings with members of my team, internal business clients and the Asia Pacific management and discussions will range from a litigation in Singapore, regulatory actions in India, an acquisition project in Australia or looking at strategic partnerships in Korea to more administrative matters like approving expense reports or planning our next legal conference.

I will normally be out of the office fairly early for Hong Kong standards so that I am home to spend some time with my kids before they go to bed. We’ve got pretty strict rules about not checking e-mails during dinner and no computers on the dining table. After dinner I will normally log in again just to try and get emails down to a manageable level and may also have calls, although I try to minimise ones that start too late. However, given the global nature of our business this sometimes can’t be avoided. After some mindless television or reading to clear my mind of the day’s thoughts I will get to bed to ready myself for another day!

AMC: What qualities and skill-sets are you looking for when recruiting for your team?
SM: For our legal team we need to find people with both excellent technical legal skills and the ability to communicate clearly with both our internal business clients and the rest of our legal team. Technical capabilities are table stakes; it is presumed that each member of our team will have a high level of expertise and skills enabling them to deliver high quality work product and I’ve found in the recruiting process that there are many in the legal profession who possess these levels of technical proficiency. However, not all these candidates are suited to working in-house. When recruiting for our team the real challenge is finding dynamic people who can also communicate and interact effectively with co-workers and internal business clients. It is these soft skills that I find more difficult to hire for.

Each person on our team has a role to play and one of my top priorities since taking up the general counsel post nearly a year ago is to push people, perhaps a little bit outside of their comfort zones, on communication skills and interaction with other members of our global legal team and business clients. This has given our lawyers more opportunities to develop their soft skills and increase the exposure and recognition they receive which has many follow-on positive effects.

AMC: What qualities does Yahoo! look for in external counsel? Are there any criteria followed in choosing suitable practitioners?
SM: External counsel will depend on the scale and complexity of the project and expertise required. Our most senior lawyers have invested a lot of time cultivating relationships with law firms so that they understand our business and the issues we face. Quite often local firms will be more in tune with the local regulatory landscape and can provide very focused advice efficiently.

AMC: What do you consider to be some of your biggest challenges?
SM: With many business or functional teams within a corporation legal will need to go through a process of gaining trust and this is not always easy. Quite often the legal department is perceived as a barrier to the business: “The trouble with lawyers is, they always tell me what I can’t do, and don’t help me with what I can do.” We have all heard the complaint that legal takes an overly conservative approach to risk management and they tend to place unfounded importance on theoretical rather than real risk. We may also be perceived as being unapproachable and that working with us contributes to operational inefficiency because we don’t share the sense of urgency that the business does.

This mistrust may result in a toxic working environment where the legal team represents the downside and business management argues for the upside. This friction may lead to business teams avoiding communication with legal and trying to find solutions elsewhere. By doing this the business may be denying themselves the possibility of having an effective solution provider, risk manager and collaborator. Legal becomes marginalised, unaware of potential legal risks and unable to perform its objectives and this leads to the company being exposed to higher legal risk.

I have personally witnessed ‘advice shopping’ where an internal client was unhappy with the advice from one member of our legal team as not being what they wanted to hear and so they approached another member of legal for ‘more favourable” advice on the same issue. This was extremely damaging to relationships with the client.
I do want to say that generally our business clients are great partners who get us involved early but for any large company these issues will exist and are bound to flare up every once in a while. The trick is to gain and maintain trust.

AMC: How do you go about gaining the trust of your clients?
SM: To avoid these kinds of situations we try our best to be client focused, collaborative and look at issues from the internal client’s vantage point rather than strictly through a legal lens. The message we want to send to our clients is that the legal team is here to work in partnership with the business in jointly determining the right amount of business risk to take. In today’s business environment it is crucial to be accessible and communicate clearly and this means being switched on and avoiding legal jargon and theoretical analysis.
My primary aim when providing advice is to get clients something they can take action on immediately, and not something that invites a further round of emails and discussions. No business is without risks and by getting to ‘good enough’ rather than water-tight, all contingencies accounted for agreements we try to move quickly on ‘flow’ work. More time can be spent on unique transactions or high dollar value/low-volume work but we generally use speed to close as a metric for success and this keeps our business teams happy.
By doing all of these things we continually improve our credibility which is rarely an issue of credentials. Not a single business client cares where I went to school or where I practiced law. Credibility in the client’s eyes is based on the capacity to apply knowledge to a specific client situation quickly and in terms they can understand and utilise.

AMC: Have you found the mythical work/life balance?
SM: The pressures of working in-house are different from private practice. In private practice you could have several live transactions, each demanding your full attention. None of your clients will be sensitive to your other projects or the needs of your other clients so the pressures to deliver on tight timeframes can border on (or cross the border of) being unmanageable. In an in-house setting, you are working together with your business units on a set of common goals which leads to deeper engagement and collaboration. I think that this is the most compelling feature of in-house versus private practice since you are there from the beginning and get to see issues through
to closure.

In terms of hard hours there is more flexibility working in-house and I’m certainly not putting in as many ‘billable’ type hours hammering out documents at my desk as when I was in private practice. In this respect there is more balance but there are a lot more operational, administrative and management duties that put a different set of skills to work, and depending on the kind of person you are, you might find these responsibilities even more stressful than strictly advising clients.

Essentially, my work and private life feel more balanced and this is likely a combination of having more flexible office hours, working without the pressures of timesheets and sourcing new instructions and clients, and enjoying the people management side of heading up our great Asia Pacific legal team.