Silicon Valley WISE: 5 Key Tips From Peer Mentors

By coming together to exchange advice and ideas, both in-house and law firm attorneys can benefit from each other’s experiences and mentorship.

Women In-House Supporting Equality (WISE) is an alliance of women attorneys in both law firms and public and private companies, focused on improving equality in the legal profession. The recently formed Silicon Valley WISE chapter’s first meeting focused on sharing practice tips between law firm and in-house attorneys — an exchange that happens far too infrequently. This exciting circle of peer mentorship yielded a wealth of useful advice, but I’m sharing five standout tips.

Move from being “the do-er” to being an advisor

Karna Nisewaner, Vice President & Associate General Counsel of Cadence Design Systems, Inc., runs Cadence’s IP, Litigation, and Employment practices. She also co-founded WISE’s Silicon Valley chapter. Her advice for both in-house and law firm attorneys is to make the key transition to an advisory role. “In order to move to the next level in your career, you need to move from being the do-er that everyone goes to in order to get work done, to being an advisor,” she shared. “This is a hard transition, because it is easy to do tasks that are assigned to you, and you will still need to do them, but where you can really add value is in advising. This involves understanding your clients business, what obstacles they are facing, and what their goals are.” Being an advisor involves more than just doing assigned tasks — you need to anticipate and analyze the client’s needs. “By focusing on listening and asking questions, you can help the client better reframe what they need, so that you are doing the right things for them, not just what they ask for,” continued Nisewaner. “When you start doing this, the clients come to appreciate you more and come to you more, which is great all around.”

Don’t believe everything you read

Mariana Antcheva is the VP Legal of Sage Intacct, a cloud ERP company, where she manages all legal affairs and supports the growth of the business. Her career advice is especially relevant and timely: “Don’t believe everything you read about GDPR!” She elaborated, “A Google search for GDPR yields 6.8 million results of articles, blog posts, white papers and news about this substantial change in the data privacy legal landscape. Unfortunately, not all of these materials provide an accurate description of the GDPR and its impact.” Antcheva advised attorneys to ditch the blogs and head for the professionals. “If you need a reliable analysis of the GDPR and how it can affect your business, seek the advice of an experienced data privacy professional or refer to materials published by reputable sources such as regulatory agencies in the EU tasked with enforcement of privacy laws,” she said.

Change your font at the end of drafting

Anne M. Voigts, a partner at King & Spalding LLP’s Appellate, Constitutional, and Administrative Law Practice, shared a practical drafting trick that any attorney can use. “I spend a lot of time writing. When you’re reviewing a document over and over again, it’s easy to get so used to reading it that you miss mistakes. Your eyes just skip over them,” she explained. “One useful trick I learned was to change the font to something you don’t normally use when you’re close to the end of the drafting process.” This unconventional trick actually has effective results! “You’ll catch things that you won’t otherwise — everything from outright errors to awkward phrasing,” said Voigts. “Also, if it’s a long document, reading it from back to front can help you catch the errors that creep in towards the end when your eyes are tired and you are paying less attention,” she added. “Finally, if the structure of the document isn’t working — if you feel like it just doesn’t flow — think about reading the first and last sentence of every paragraph or bulletpoint. That can help you identify where the problem lies — and how to fix it.”

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Be proactive about cross-collaboration

Deanna Kwong, IP Litigation Counsel at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, had key advice for being a more effective attorney: “Be proactive about cross-collaboration within your company’s legal department or at your firm. Involve litigators in contract negotiations, for example, before the deal is signed or issues arise.” Kwong explained, “As a litigator, I often am not involved in contract negotiations with customers or suppliers, and am only brought into a matter after a problem or issue arises. Recently, I had business unit and IP lawyers affirmatively reach out to discuss contract provisions they were negotiating.” Due to this proactive cross-collaboration, Kwong was able to add value as a litigator before the deal was even complete. “I was able to offer a perspective and experience that they did not have, and it helped us to better fine tune our negotiation strategy and to push for the provisions and edits most beneficial for the company from a litigation perspective,” she concluded.

Partner with clients to have greater impact

Barbara Walkowski, most recently CLO and SVP Strategic Operations at Snowflake Computing, was also previously VP of Legal Affairs at Siebel, Interim GC at C3 Energy (now C3IoT), and COO at Get Satisfaction. With her wealth of experience, Walkowski recommended that both in-house and law firm attorneys should partner with clients to have greater impact. “I see the fundamental role of in-house counsel as helping the business get things done,” she said. “Being responsive to your clients is important, but you can have even more impact by partnering with them to drive the results that make the company successful. This is especially true in a fast-growing business.” Walkowski also drew on her experience to share useful examples. “The negotiation of legal terms with customers is a critical final step in the sales process,” she explained. “At Snowflake, legal works closely with sales leadership to manage the status of all deals in progress and share ideas about how to move them forward even before they come to legal for negotiation. And at Siebel, the legal team was a critical participant in the sales forecast process.”

Although many tend to see the in-house and law firm worlds as completely separate, the WISE Silicon Valley chapter shows that these practices aren’t as different as some may think. By coming together to exchange advice and ideas, both in-house and law firm attorneys can benefit from each other’s experiences and mentorship. And bridging the supposed gap between in-house and law firm practice is especially important in solving important issues of career equality for women attorneys. As the WISE Silicon Valley chapter grows, its members will surely serve as an excellent example of collaboration and empowerment.

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Olga V. Mack is an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor at Berkeley Law, and entrepreneur. Olga founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to serve on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. Olga also co-founded SunLaw to prepare women in-house attorneys become general counsel and legal leaders and WISE to help women law firm partners become rainmakers. She embraces the current disruption to the legal profession. Olga loves this change and is dedicated to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and inclusive than before. You can email Olga at olga@olgamack.com or follow her on Twitter @olgavmack.