Guest Chapter 20
Name: Stacy Carter
Current Position: Chief Legal Officer and SVP of Business Affairs at Techstars
Former Post-Law School Positions: General Counsel and Head of People at Sphero; Associate General Counsel of Rally Software; Associate at Cooley LLP
Legal Practice Area: General Counsel.
Started as a business attorney doing mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and startup work.Law School and Year: University of Colorado, 2007
Time between undergrad and law school: 3 years (accountant)
Two books I recommend:
Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni – Simply the best book on leadership team dynamics. I read it annually.
Wild by Cheryl Strayed – A book about a woman's journey on the Pacific Crest Trail, and a good reminder that sometimes we all need to take a break and get away.
Short background on why I went to law school
I was a tax accountant at KPMG in Virginia before I went to law school. I had thought about going to law school for many years, but after becoming serious with a guy who was getting his PhD at University of Colorado (CU), I decided it was time to apply for law school in Colorado. The relationship didn't last, but law school and a new career path did. I assumed I would be a tax attorney, given my tax and accounting background, and after the first summer of law school, I actually went back to KPMG for a summer doing M&A Tax work. The summer after my second year, however, I decided to try a law firm experience. I went to work for Cooley LLP and quickly became seduced by the joys of working with start-ups. Cooley offered me a full-time position after graduation, which exposed me to the wide world of entrepreneurs.
What frustrates me most about people I hire newly out of law school
I currently lead the Legal team at Techstars. Techstars is a global accelerator and investor that makes 600+ investments a year in start-up companies that are incorporated in more than 20 countries around the world.
We support the business with a fairly large legal team, or as I like to think of it, a small in-house law firm. My legal team of 16 is constantly growing so I get to work with new lawyers all the time. New lawyers are exciting to work with and tend to be very enthusiastic about working at Techstars, especially since they get to spend much of their day talking to our entrepreneurs around the world, helping them secure investment, and learning about the latest technology and products in our portfolio. Of course, there are frustrations working with new lawyers as well.One of the biggest issues I see is misunderstanding or misalignment on the end goal. The end goal for a lawyer is a specific outcome that your client (either at a law firm or in-house) wants. The idea is probably not to offer the most detailed legal advice covering every risk and scenario or to make sure your email/memo/contract is grammar-perfect. If your goal is to get an investment or transaction or contract done, think about what you are doing and how it relates to the goal. Too often, I see junior attorneys spend too much time researching and running down issues that really are not related to the goal that the business or client is trying to accomplish. I always encourage young lawyers to ask their manager or business partner if they do not know the end goal.
A second issue I see is written products that are sloppy and not ready for senior review because the attorney has rushed to meet a deadline. A part of every professional job is your organization and time management skills. If you have a deadline, you should understand approximately how long it will take you to complete the project, including gathering information from others and managing your own proofreading. It frustrates me when an attorney misses a deadline because they could not get the information they needed for completing the project and waited too long to ask. I recommend one to two proofreads of an email or written project, but not more; perfection is the enemy of getting things done!
How have you used (or not) the core concepts of lawyering as this book proposes: Empathy, Listening First, Asking Questions, and Giving Advice?
Being a lawyer means that we are fundamentally in a client service profession.
This is true whether you have law firm clients that pay you money, or if you are an in-house lawyer. As an in-house lawyer, I know my legal team is generally a “cost center” to the business, meaning that we are an expense to the business without a balancing revenue (at Techstars we are also part of the product delivery team given the number of investments we facilitate, but most in-house legal teams are fundamentally cost centers). The business must be our client in order to justify the expense of having an in-house Legal team. I believe a key part of providing good client service is empathy and asking questions. What is the business or the client's end goal? Why is that goal important to them? What is the Legal team's role in helping to achieve that goal? This does not mean the client is always right, but it does mean that you must deeply understand the client's point of view if you are to explain yours successfully (if you read the Getting to Yes negotiations book that Jason recommends, you will see this concept explained detail really nicely).For the Techstars Legal team, one of our most important jobs is to work with our managing directors to help make accelerator investments in the 10 to 12 companies that the managing directors have selected to enter into their Techstars accelerator program. The managing director's goal in choosing these 10 to 12 companies is to select companies with the greatest opportunity for growth, future venture capital (VC) investment, and eventual liquidation through acquisition or IPO. Sometimes, in the legal due diligence process, a Techstars attorney will see an issue that would go against our rules for investment. While it is tempting to just let the managing director know that we cannot invest because of XYZ specific rule, the better way is to explain the decision is that this company is likely to be uninvestable by future VCs because of the particular issue (which is the genesis of why we have most of our rules). By showing empathy to the end goal of the managing director (investing in a company that will be able to grow and take lots of future investment), we can make sure we are aligned with them when explaining why the Legal team is taking a particular action.
Shout out to my colleague Sierra Moller, who treats managing directors at Techstars as her valued clients, often by showing them incredible empathy.Most useful class in law school
CU Law School has an amazing clinical law program for its students. Most lawyers I know who went to CU Law and work in the start-up field participated in the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic, which is a phenomenal program giving students the opportunity to work alongside entrepreneurs for school credit (helping them incorporate, issue initial founder stock, file their patents, etc.). In fact, many lawyers who I have hired over the years have gone through the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic and have loved it. Given I took mostly business law classes at CU, I decided to do something a little different my third year and worked in the Juvenile and Family Law Clinic, representing children who have been abused or neglected. While I have not needed to use any of the technical legal knowledge I learned while at the clinic, I cannot overstate the value in what I learned about client service and being partially responsible for a client's health and safety outcomes. The clinic taught me client advocacy, how to work with individuals who have truly been failed by others in their life, and of course, empathy. Even if you know the type of law you want to practice, I would highly recommend taking a couple classes in law school completely out of your comfort zone, particularly with types of clients that are completely different from ones you have experienced.
Biggest mistake I made at my first job
I am going to share two big mistakes that I made at Rally, my first in-house job. For my first year or so at Rally, I was responsible for negotiating most of our SaaS sales contracts with big (often Fortune 500) customers. After signing a contract that included a negotiated source code escrow provision, I was told by our engineering team that we could not meet the terms of the provision. I did not know ahead of time that we could not meet the terms because I had not done a thorough job of asking the right questions.
There was really no excuse—we all worked in one big office together and I often played ping pong with these engineers during an afternoon break. While I had egg on my face in this particular instance, I learned a career-long lesson about making sure the business can actually perform what is agreed to in a contract.Also during my time at Rally, I went on maternity leave after having my third kid. While out on leave, Rally was in the process of an initial public offering (IPO), and my boss convinced me to come back to work before the end of my leave part-time in order to work on a special project related to the IPO. I wanted to get public company experience, and I think I felt guilty for taking the time off, so I worked part-time the last ~six weeks of my leave. I have always regretted not having that extra time at home with my daughter, and I certainly have had more than enough opportunities to work and get public company experience since then.
How I remain happy in my profession
Early on in your career, you will hopefully have the opportunity to experience all sorts of different projects and types of work. At Cooley (first legal job) and Rally (first in-house job), I raised my hand as much as possible to volunteer for various projects. This led to public company work, tons of M&A, SaaS and licensing contract negotiations, employment law, among other things. I realized that I liked M&A, was good at negotiating commercial contracts, and had a passion for employment law. And, I learned that I really do not like real estate (reviewing leases) and litigation. While I cannot always avoid reviewing leases and litigation, as I get more senior and have an experienced team to support me, I am better able to choose what I want to focus my time working on. I encourage all lawyers to spend time early in your career figuring out what you like and what you are good at.
My second piece of advice for happiness in your career really comes from my husband. Whenever I complain multiple times (he listens supportively the first time) about the same coworker or work issue, he asks, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” While you will hopefully have plenty of mentors, friends, and family members supporting you in your career, you are ultimately the one responsible for your happiness at work. If you do not like something, you can choose to try to change it or to accept the issue and have a good attitude. Trying to change a problem can mean fixing a process, setting up working agreements with a coworker, or even finding a new job. Accepting the issue with a good attitude can be equally valid in certain instances, and remembering those words of wisdom have helped me remain happy at work time and time again.