#11 - Being a Legal Ops Pioneer with Reese Arrowsmith of the Campbell Soup Company

What does it take to run a high performing business strategy? Finesse and a lot of advice from people who've been there, done that before. I'm Mario Carroll. Join me on my Pearls on Gloves off podcast to hear from the leaders building some of the most innovative companies today. We'll take a high value, no holds barred approach to find out what works. See you there.

Hello everyone. Welcome to Pearls on On Gloves Off. I am your host Mary o' Carroll and today I'm chatting with one of the originals, an OG from the Legal Ops world. Reece Arrowsmith Reese is the VP and head of Operations for Legal compliance and Government affairs for Campbell Soup Company. There he works with the General Counsel to develop and lead a best in class legal department operations function with a primary focus on aligning the department's day to day operations with the business strategy. Legal operations there oversees running the daily operations of the department including strategic planning, finance, information technology, law firm and vendor management, client service and human resources. Prior to this position, Greece was the VP and head of Legal Ops for Lincoln Financial Group where he oversaw running the daily operations of the department including strategic planning, finance, it, law firm and vendor management, all those kinds of things. Prior to that he was a legal consultant for a management consulting firm and a legal tech vendor. Rhys served as the inaugural chair of the ACC Legal Operations Group and remains there on the executive team for that legal operations group at acc. And finally, Rhys is also the treasurer of the board of the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger. So many things. Welcome Reece. It's great to have you.

It's so nice to talk to you, Mary. I always enjoy our conversations. I'm so happy to be here today.

Absolutely. Well, there's a ton to dig into which I'm excited to hear about the scope of your role because I know it's beyond just legal and also includes the adjacent parts of the company which I think is probably becoming more common. And to me that's exciting affirmation of the value that the role really offers. Expanded scope is always a hat tip to success, but let's go way back because I think it's always interesting to know how people fall into this role of Legal Ops and what background or experience makes them successful. So take me back. Let's start with college. What did you study? What were your hopes and dreams at that time in your life?

Oh, this is very different. I'm not sure we've ever had this conversation, but I actually have a degree in environmental biology and my passion to this day is endangered species and endangered ecosystems. I graduated from college, thought I was going to be saving the rainforest than just generally endangered ecosystems. I got a job at an environmental consulting firm, realized I loved it in theory but not in practice and wanted to do something software related. Little bit of a long story short, I ended up getting a job at Metra Tech doing team connect implementations. And that was my first foray into legal process improvement, matter management, technology initiatives, that kind of stuff.

How many years ago was that? Because that was probably really early days of the E billing and matter management world.

Oh yeah, late 90s. I'm forgetting the year 98, 99. So to think about a company, it still amazes me actually that here was a company delivering a web based global enterprise matter and E billing. Actually it didn't have E billing at the time, it was just matter management. But to companies like GM who adopted this thing, and Tyco and Home Depot and Walmart and Merrill lynch and Ameriprise, you name it, we were there very quickly. It caught on fast.

And these were for legal departments, right? It's matter management. The same way we talk about it today.

It's exactly the same as what we talk about today. It was four legal departments.

So interesting. And those are big name companies that were investing in legal tech before legal tech was a thing, really. So that you really did fall into legal ops and legal tech fell into it.

It was before companies were investing in it and it was way before the legal ops position existed. I mean, at the time we would be selling into companies. And the question as an implementation consultant at time, you know, this is a small software company starting in the late 90s, so exactly what you can think of when you think of that is exactly what we were living. And one of the sales guys would come forward and say, hey, I've got this opportunity at Home Depot or wherever the company was. And we'd say, well, who are you selling to? Because it was so often an IT person, there wasn't a head of legal ops that was procuring the software. It was a couple of people in legal or a senior attorney had an idea and went to it. And it was hard. It was really hard.

It was hard, but at the same time so impressed with the types of companies that you were able to penetrate. That's really cool. So you did that for a few years and then more consulting.

I did. So I did it for a number of years and I'm going to come back to this probably later on. But different companies had different reasons for implementing the software. Tyco went through what Tyco went Through in the early 2000s and their CEO and I think CFO accounting scandal. And they looked at all departments within the company and they needed matter management and E billing system. And they were doing things like pushing the envelope. I mean, for the early 2000s, to think about a company putting a defensible process in place to track reserves on matters in a matter management system and require the department to have that as the system of record was really quite forward thinking. But it gave me early in my career the knowledge on best practice, not just in the vendor management, budgeting, matter management side of the house, but also the reserves reserving. Is it probable, estimable, reasonably possible, all of that very early in my career. The flip side is then you have. I was working with Home Depot and Home Depot wanted to implement a matter management system. If you think about where Home Depot was in the world, it was new. They were inviting people into warehouses and there was a lot of risk tied to that at the time. And they wanted to better manage the risk and understand what kind of claims were happening to prevent them. And they hired us to create this very forward thinking matter management system that was web based in, I think it was 2003, where they were collaborating with outside counsel in the tool. So they gave outside counsel access to the software and they were at the same time jointly updating matter notes and they could actually send notes through this web based software. You know, at the time I thought, this is going to be the thing that sells this to every company. This is so cool. Which it didn't really catch on for a whole host of reasons, but collaboration.

Caught on like 25 years later.

Yeah, exactly. It took 25 years, but we're finally there, you know. But it was fun and we won awards. So I did all that through a software company and then wanted to do broader legal department, office of the General Counsel kind of consulting. Went to work for Duff and Phelps in 2007. My first client was AIG. I was supposed to be at AIG for one year. We all know what happened in September of 2008. One year later, my project was ending. I had developed a great rapport with the general counsel. They needed help. I knew more about the legal department at the time than many and I was extended for two years. I had a great experience at aig. AIG putting global matter management, budgeting, you know, all kinds of initiatives in place. Working through what AIG went through during the financial crisis was more valuable than probably anything I could have done in my career. All for the Office of the General Counsel and that experience. I loved consulting with all of the clients I had. And going through that experience, I really kind of sat there thinking, I've been here three years, I am in house. It's foolish for me to think I'm a consultant at this point. I need to go in house somewhere where I can work collaboratively with a general counsel and make a difference. And frankly, it would have been aig, but the general counsel left. I was working with a woman named Stasia Kelly, who I thought the world of, and I went to Lincoln Financial Group, and I was in house at Lincoln for six years. And then the general counsel that I inherited at Lincoln, I actually started before him. He left to go to Campbell's to try a different industry. And ultimately I followed him to Campbell's. So we've been working together now at two companies for 11 years.

That's so interesting. I want to touch on a couple of things, but on that, I talk to so many legal ops people who are in the market looking for that GC or looking for that leadership team that gets it. And it's so great when you find someone that you work with. Well, we talk about the chemistry and the culture that you need to have that partnership you need to have with your leaders. You were lucky enough to find it early in your career, and then you stuck with that person, which is, I think, what most people are looking for. I mean, any comments or ideas about what it was. Was it just a great fit, or did you kind of learn all this together as it was early days?

Both. We absolutely learned it together. For a general counsel, not in his first general counsel role, he was exceptionally open to the idea of having an OPS person, but he immediately gave me the opportunity to experiment and was completely open to sometimes it's going to work and sometimes it's not. And we're going to learn along the way and we're going to figure this out. And we touched everything. We touched Org structure, reorgs. So it was people, it was process, it was vendor management, it was spend management, it was technology implementations from day one. He was super supportive of all of those things. And we won an award early on. And he was quoted in an interview coming out of that, and they actually named the article Operational Empowerment. And even that was influential. I'm not sure he realized the true impact of some of the things he did early on, but for instance, when we reorg the group, he put my office right next to his in the middle of the legal leadership team, which set the tone that this is a Senior person. So it was this spoken and unspoken things he did that really enforced his expectation of the role and of the department.

Yeah. I mean, that empowerment is so critical, but the mindset in setting the culture and the tone for the department that you mentioned is so important. And for someone, I often say, you just have to set the tone to get everyone to understand that things can be better. It's not to say anything's broken or that anything needs to be fixed. It's just, do we all agree that there's maybe a better way to do something? And just by setting that tone, it offers people the opportunity to experiment. Like you just said, that is. I think the most important thing is allowing people the opportunity to raise their hand, to fail to try something new and just to have that psychological safety of saying, hey, why do we do it this way? Can we try something different?

Yeah. And, you know, to your point, he and I talk about this a lot. One of the things that is so great about working with him is he's confident enough in his role that he's quick, not overly quick, but appropriately quick, to make a decision and not let questions faster and flounder. He makes a decision, and we all, the leadership team, drives forward with that as the mandate until enough information becomes available that maybe a better way of doing this happens and he's confident enough to go, hold on, maybe that wasn't right. Let's change course and we do it this way. It doesn't allow a failure to become an issue, just a pivot to the next best way of doing it. And the approach.

Exactly, exactly. And we have to give you some credit too. Right. Because that trust, that relationship comes from somewhere. And you. You've probably done some things right to earn that position, to earn that empowerment. You know, I talked to a lot of folks who get into a new role and they're like, well, you know, the GC told me they wanted change, and then I got into there, and everyone's pushing back, and the GC didn't have my back, and so I'm out of there. Let me find another place to go. I think there is some responsibility on pushing and having the legal ops person. I mean, it's a hard job. Right? You have to build relationships. You've got to convince people to change and push this boulder up the mountain, despite a lot of pushback. But I think the most important skill in the job is finding a way to get stuff done. Even when you don't have someone rolling out the red carpet and saying, reece is here, do Everything he says and I will have his back. All the decisions that he's making are the best. You have to kind of build that trust and figure out how to get it done without that. Sometimes instead of just giving up because your GC is new and maybe needs to be educated and doesn't understand how to challenge and push back to his own team. What have you done or what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I do agree with you. I mean, my approach now at two companies has been go in with almost no expectations like go in, understand what the department needs and then prioritize those items. And I actually, especially in the beginning, use the leadership team to set those priorities so they're involved in the process and it's not me just pushing. And you know, I found great value in having an annual leadership retreat where you go around the room and talk about led by the gc, not by me. Right. Especially in the beginning. These aren't Reese's initiatives. And having those conversations and just being there to hear each department leader hear what went well, what really was bad from the prior year, what the biggest risks and issues are today, how we think we're going to tackle them where there are significant opportunities for improvement. And just listen and hear it from the entire leadership team. And I take out of that, especially in the beginning, I aggregate that into a list of items that from an operations perspective, we can tackle to influence and hopefully improve those items. At the end of the day, go off, sit in my bubble and world, come up with that list and then in a very focused meeting, get that same group together and say, here's everything I heard that we can impact from an operations perspective. Yeah, let's risk rank these and then based on risk, identify which ones we actually can do together and come up with a few that are going to be quick wins to get the biggest bang for the buck quick as possible. And the ones that are going to take longer. And my experience is by doing it that way, those leadership team people, my experience has been are question motives of a new legal ops person. Right. Especially if the GC is new. At the same time, everyone's nervous, the department is nervous, but if you bring them along in that way, they're really setting the strategy for the items that are going to be done together. And then as soon as you start delivering on those items and they see that their lives are getting better, maybe their life isn't getting better, but risk is being better mitigated and they can sleep at night even though maybe it is more work, they really Come around and instead of going, hey, don't put a bot in here to automate NDAs because you're going to fire people on my team, hey, guess what? That actually really did free people up to work on higher risk, more valuable items for the delivery of the business priorities. What else can you do for me? What's next?

Exactly. And because of that, I always say the first project you work on when you get there is really critically important. You mentioned some of the low hanging fruit. But your kind of big impact project needs to be something that makes their life better so that they welcome you back. Right. For the next thing they go, oh, you're back. I know that you actually make my life better. Let me welcome you to work on whatever's next and not feel threatened by it.

Yeah.

And I assume that you have a small team because all of us are resource constrained and maybe it's growing, but you can never get to everything on that priority list that you've talked to the leadership team about. And there's going to be some people that you say, no, I'm not going to get to your stuff. And you've got to do that.

Right.

You have to set your expectations. You have to focus on certain projects. Otherwise you'll just never get anything done. Because we all know everywhere you look there is a problem worth solving. So how do you then manage saying no, which I think is hard for an ops person? We are very service oriented. We want to fix everything and we also don't want people to go rogue and buy their own software or hire their own people to do it. How do you handle that? Messaging?

The first point, there's three of us. It is a very small team supporting the group.

Sorry, real quick, how big is the whole group that you're supporting? The government affairs?

Campbell's legal is about 70 people.

Okay.

Yep. So it's small. And I went from AIG, which was 1200, to Lincoln Financial was 250, and now Campbell's which is 70. So it's been different experiences at each of these companies and I've frankly had to take a different approach each of them. Campbell's, as things come up, because it's smaller, it's actually easier to answer with, hey, my team doesn't have capacity to do this. You know, that leadership team member knows what we're focused on. But I do often offer up a if your team has capacity to take this on, I will be involved as an executive sponsor to help guide the process and keep you within the guardrails based on my Past experience, but my team, we are not taking this on to lead this project. Sometimes there are things that really have to get done and they do take those on. And it allows me to deliver more for the department because I get a lot more resources through those various groups. There are stretch assignments and gigs for those teams they often appreciate. It also feeds into one thing that I think we all struggle with, which is development opportunities within Legal. When you have teams of individual contributors and subject matter experts and keeping them fully engaged. I appreciate those gigs and those projects because hopefully it does keep morale up and keep people more engaged. But at the end of the day, you're 100% right. Sometimes the answer is simply no. We're just can't do that right now.

Yeah. And what about the type of work, again, the projects you work on at the onset, when you get to the new role, is really important to establish what the function does, what Legal Ops means. Right. Because not everyone understands or has worked in a department that has this function. And there is the fear of turning into the glorified admin or the, you know, as I always call the back office to the back office. How do you or how have you made sure that your team is viewed as a strategic partner, is working on the right things? Is that something you were conscious of or maybe happened organically?

Both, I guess. I've definitely been conscious of it. I haven't had to fight it necessarily. I mean, we all know that Legal Ops gets everything. There's a leak in the back corner and who do we call? And the gamut. I typically, when those kinds of things happen, I don't take them on as a department, it's, hey, you need to call X, you need to do Y. And the two individuals that report to me, I would say have learned that, learned that approach and gate most of that off. But they're buried in legal, finance, Legal it, the projects, the initiatives, working with finance, working with it, just like I am. But it seems to work. We haven't struggled as much with that as I think other departments do.

Yeah, that's great. Well, it's also that you have a GC that has put you in the right position, it sounds like. And your team is small but mighty and does a lot of scope. Do you use any outsourcing? I think that's another amazing thing that our ecosystem in our industry has gotten to the point where there's actually the ability to help outsource some of the Legal Ops functions so that you can focus on the right work within our own teams. Right. Do you have any resources that you use that are not full time employees at different times?

We have an internal philosophy with outside counsel which is we want the right attorney internally and externally on every matter, every time. And working for Mitra Tech we collaborated with, I don't want to name them because I don't want to forget one, but pretty much all of the consulting firms.

Okay.

And those people have moved on in some cases into different roles. But I have a really broad network from that experience of who, from a person perspective, is good at what at the end of the day. So I've been able to deliver projects economically by getting the right person involved in the right role in tandem with internal resources, whether they be IT finance, project management, you name it. I'll pair those people up to keep costs really low from an external perspective, but get the job done at the end of the day. I don't always get funding. More often than not, frankly, I don't get funding for those external resources. And the ramification of that is the projects move slower because it's more of my experience stepping in to fulfill the gap. But we're still able to deliver numerous projects a year, which is big, kind of meaty initiatives, which is good.

That's great. And what part of your background or your skill set do you think has helped you in your role? I love that you were a consultant. I had a stint in consulting as well, and I always give a lot of credit to the years that I did that in helping me issue spot and problem solve and project manage. Your background, you really had to learn on the job as well. I mean, no one established legal ops when you got there. And you fell into the industry by going to a software company that service legal. And then I guess you must have liked working with lawyers because you stuck around for a long time. But what skills did you pick up along the way in those experiences that you think were useful?

I had numerous clients that took different approaches to staffing projects and I learned from each of those, whether it be USAA or GM or Tyco. Some were focused on the finance, some were focused on the change management, some were focused on the project management and the toll gates. Some were focused on the reporting and the end result and the deliver. And I really was in hindsight, like a sponge, watching what works and what doesn't work and kind of applying all of those. I firmly believe in, even in a department of 60, early and often communication. So if we're launching a document management system, it's an email to the entire team at lyncl, it was the same way. Yeah, actually it was the same thing at aig. We were sending emails to the global legal team about initiatives upcoming early on in the process, structured what it is, who it is, who's impacted, not just paragraphs of communications. So it was learning how best to communicate the change management approach, the project management. You and I both know to of the most important skills the legal ops position can have is being able to build a rapport with finance and IT and hr.

Yes.

If you don't have those relationships with finance, IT and hr, you're dead in the water. So it was seeing the companies that had those relationships and then kind of bringing it all together and going, hey, this is a real function. That's not at the time, if there was a legal ops person, it was an administrator in the department. Not a true legal ops function.

Yeah. So for all these people that you know, I'm sure are coming to you or coming to me and saying, I want to do this role, I'm really passionate about legal ops. I want to get into it. There's no school for it, there's no formal education. Where can they go to learn and how do they get into this field? Whether they're a lawyer, whether they're a legal professional or not even in legal, if they're in law school, how do they break into this world?

Yeah, let's talk about this. I'm curious what you think and let's come up with the perfect answer to that question because I think we all struggle with this because of my experience and maybe I'm biased. Consulting. You mentioned it before. I think getting a job at a consulting firm, you get exposed to so many companies and approaches and teams and in my opinion, smart people, that it's almost hard to match the experience you get with that. And if you're someone that survives that, you can certainly survive and really thrive in a legal OPS position. Now 10 years ago I would have probably limited it to that. The legal ops landscape has changed so much. It isn't just a one man job at any company anymore. There's big companies with dozens of people and there is turnover because those people are coming and going and the ecosystem has changed so much. They're moving into positions like you moved into, moving into consulting roles, moving into working for software companies. So there are more opportunities at companies in legal ops positions to be the legal ops, finance individual or IT individual ultimately go up through the ranks. But what are your thoughts on that?

I always say I used to hire a lot of Ex consultants onto my team at Google just because they know how to issue spot, know how to problem solve, know how to build relationships, and figure out how to get stuff done in an organization without any authority. Because, like, you were right. You were a consultant, you didn't even work there. And you've got to get people to buy into your advice. So I love that background and I think you get good training, like a big consulting firm that has the resources to train their folks. Well, I think there is no formal education and I don't know that one path is more successful than the other. Like you said, I always encourage people to get out there, go to the conferences, network, listen to the podcasts, listen to the webinars, talk to people about their journeys. And I mean, this community is really small. It's big, but it's small at the same time. And if you want to break into this, start talking to people, let them make introductions, right? And that's honestly the best way to break in.

As you were talking, it made me think of one more thing. I think this was the key to success 10 years ago, and I still think it is developing your network of trusted advisors who are in the same role at other companies and tapping into them on a regular basis, whether it's through the networking groups that exist, and I'll even call them educational groups at this point and those conferences. But developing that list of trusted advisors and really tapping into them to brainstorm and learn from each other is really, really, in my opinion, it's the key to the future of legal ops.

Yes, that's critically important when you're in the role. It's key to your success in the role. I was just also thinking to the comment you made about generalists versus specialists and yes, so when I was starting my team, I hired generalists. Everyone needed to be good at everything because who knew what was going to get thrown our way and what we were going to work on the next year. But as the team got bigger, you suddenly stood up. Like, this is a team that focuses on outside counsel. This is the team that focuses on data and analysis and business intelligence. This is the one that does project management for system and tools and knowledge management, and you start to get more specialized. So when people are trying to break in and I ask them to look at all the scope of the role, do you really have passion for all the things on that wheel or do you just really want to work with outside counsel, or do you really have a passion for technology? You can actually go in and be willing if you Want to break into a new field? Sometimes you have to be willing to take a step back a little bit in your career with the confidence that you will get promoted and you will learn the skills and you will move on. But when you're new, you're going into a new field, maybe take a step back and start in one of those specialty areas, maybe in a little bit more junior of a role than you previously expected. And learn on the job, learn from someone who can mentor you like a good leader.

Yeah. And be able to pivot. It's amazing the kinds of things that come up. I joined Campbell's. We almost immediately had a proxy fight. All encompassing, consuming. We sold our international business. All consuming. We bought Snyder's lands, needed to integrate the two legal departments. All consuming. The pandemic started all consuming. So best laid plans, have those strategic planning, have the annual check ins halfway through the year come up with the best laid plans. And almost certainly something happens that's going to derail a lot of that 100%.

I don't even think there was one year where we didn't switch directions midway through the year. Yeah, agreed. Just happens. It happens. Another thing that I loved about your background was when you told me your title or the teams that you support, it's beyond traditional, just legal. So you also oversee operations for compliance, government affairs, corporate responsibility and sustainability, global security even. Is that all under the scope of your gc? And how did that happen? I mean, did he have all those under his role when you guys started or. Tell me about that path because I'm hearing so many folks expanding into these areas.

Yeah, his world has expanded. So when he started and ultimately when I started, he had legal, which I would call traditional legal. He had compliance and government affairs. I really like all of those. I guess maybe because I'm just generally an inquisitive person. But he also had the same functions at Lincoln. So I've spent a lot of time with compliance and trying to do process improvement initiatives and risk mitigation initiatives with them. His world has expanded and as it expanded and he added corporate responsibility and sustainability and global security, I just naturally took it on. So I'm the only person that sits across all of those things with him because he treats them as they're kind of three functions. So it's been great. It's been probably kept me more engaged. I don't want to make that sound like I'm disengaging from legal ops, but adding those things have certainly been interesting. And frankly, going back to the beginning of this conversation. My degree is environmental biology. So 25 years later, to be adding CRS in the capacity that it is being added in a very substantive change the world way that every industry is facing right now has been super interesting. And one of the things I'm very involved in is hiring. I work with him on org structure and people planning and I almost lead with the HR recruiter, the recruiting strategy on each of the more senior positions across the group. So that's been fun to help him build out a CRS function and almost with him be the lead on the CRS leader that we're bringing in to reimagine what the CRS function of the future is. So, yeah, it's been super interesting and fun and certainly given me more opportunities to expand my world of knowledge.

Yeah, legal now has some established best practices and functions and we know kind of what we need to tackle if we go to a new legal department. But the csr, the government affairs, the compliance world, it's still pretty Greenfield, would you say, for the operations?

Yes. It's interesting that you say that because. Let's take those individually. Compliance. I'm trying to think. It was probably 10 years ago I joined Lincoln. I had been there about two years. I was really heavily involved in compliance. And as Legal Ops positions were growing, I would say to my peers at other companies, are you focused on compliance? Are you doing anything for reg change management?

Yes, yes.

And all of these things. And so often the answer was no. And I remember speaking at a conference and saying, I think the future of the Legal Ops professional is the compliance operations and government affairs and all these things. And I'm not sure that's happened completely. I guess it is starting to more now. But it didn't happen as fast as I thought it was because I saw to your point the opportunity for process improvement and technology automation and leveraging technology to better mitigate risk in those areas than what we were seeing. And now it's crs. So in a very tangible. To your point, when I started in Legal Ops, it was, well, who's paying for this matter? And it wasn't like a structured discipline on, okay, we're charging back to the businesses these types of matters, these types of matters in legal and all of those questions that need to be answered. And now CRS is very much struggling with the same thing. It's all right, we have to do these initiatives. Is it being funded centrally by a CRS function or is it within the business? It's exactly the same.

Exactly. Years later, what's the data we want to collect. What does success look like? Where is the tech and tooling? It doesn't exist yet. It's coming, all the investments going into the space. So, yeah, I think has a lot of parallels. And your comment about compliance, obviously you can see me. I was nodding violently in agreement because compliance was growing and had so many parallels with the legal function. That, to me was an obvious extension of where legal ops was going to go. And the regulatory nightmares have grown and gotten much more complicated for almost every industry and every company out there. So that seemed obvious to me. Although I agree with you, it's taken a couple different paths where sometimes the GCCLO oversees compliance, and in some functions, it's gotten so big that it's broken off and it's its own standup organization. So, yeah, I guess the future of how that all looks remains to be seen.

This is also fascinating to me. I mean, the volume of work that comes to the legal department today as compared to what it was 25 years ago. And the legal departments haven't grown as much. I mean, I think about an org structure within a legal department and the importance of your thumb on the pulse of everything from a strategic planning perspective on people and resource planning, IT investments, process improvements, external vendor management, the overarching implications on budgeting, and how important it is to be frankly, able to juggle all of those things to best use the resources to best mitigate risk and deliver for the company. I mean, a great example is we have, which I think a lot of companies, most companies have these days, centralized centers of excellence that handle labor and employment litigation, food law, corporate secretary, all those things. And when we acquired Snyder's lands, I knew how important that kind of structure was to be able to handle large volumes of work. And we hired a company that had a more generalist approach, and ultimately we acquired this behemoth of a company, and we have less people in legal at Campbell's today than we did before. Even with those people. Like, it's been amazing to see how much work the team has been able to take in because of the structure of the department and just how important all of these factors are in making a really efficient, functional department.

Yeah. What do you attribute that to? Is there tech and tooling that's helping you scale? Is it having the right people? Is it the structure? What do you think it is?

I would say all of the above. So I think first and foremost is probably the structure and the right people.

In the roles and clarifying the responsibilities. Right. So people aren't duplicating efforts all the time, which we know 100%.

I mean, I was keeping track. And in the first two and a half, three years. I forget exactly. I think it was two and a half years. 60% of the department here was new to their role. In the first two and a half years of me, general counsel and I coming in. So we changed a lot. It was a mostly new leadership team now all new leadership team with a lot of movement within those roles, within those groups. And some people exited the organization. We hired a number of people, but I think we've got a really efficient team. At times, I'm just amazed at how lucky I am because we sat in a leadership team meeting, we hired a new person, and we did a meet and greet around the room, and we all just talked about who we are as people. And when it came to me, I was heavily involved in hiring the person, so I knew the person intimately, whereas the rest of the leadership team was meeting this person for the first time, other than, obviously, the general counsel. So I went last before the general counsel, and I said, I'm sitting here listening to all of you talk about your lives and your families and things that are important to you. And I'm just thrilled because I would be thrilled to go to dinner with any one of you and just sit and have a conversation. I feel really lucky for that. Anyway, it's on both levels. Just a little personal sidebar there.

So interesting. Just shows how successful you've been in building out your organization, because that's really the ultimate metric of success. If the demand for legal services has gone up exponentially and you're able to do all that with a smaller team and hopefully not too much of a growing budget, then that's the goal.

To your point, also, which I've been hearing more departments, this is the case which I am thrilled about. But we did an employee engagement survey. The company did an employee engagement survey the end of last year. And coming out of the pandemic, and the volume of work that was really placed on legal. I know this is across the whole organization, legal. I was petrified at the results. You're thinking, are these people happy? Are they motivated? Are they engaged? We've taken on so much work, the volume of legal work. We've done these acquisitions, and the results were spectacular. I think we had either the second or third and forgetting now, best scores in the company, which I was just thrilled for. And there were a couple areas where the scores were still good, but they were the lowest scores on the list. And I thought, all right, well, let's tackle this. So I did a department specific employee engagement survey that focused on those items and gave some options, but it was more open ended. What do you want? Because this is such a hard nut to crack.

Yeah, yeah.

And I just asked them, what do you want? What would be better in these buckets? And the things they came back with. I was worried we were going to get like big transformative. We need a new org structure. We. I didn't know what was going to come out of a very pointed anonymous survey. It wasn't. The scores were actually quite good, which was reinforcing. And it started with what's the morale of my team? What's the morale of the department? And then it went into some of the lower scores were on career development and advancement and access to tools. They were fairly easy things that Honestly, for under $100,000, I was able to fix almost all of them. Wow.

Wow.

Yeah. It's been an interesting road.

That's the win. I mean, you think that you right size, you write source and people are going to be unhappy about it, but they end up being so much happier because they're doing the right kind of work. So I know that we're kind of at time and this has been so fun. The time has just flown by and I feel like we could keep talking for another hour. But I will wrap with a final question. Advice to a GC who's thinking about putting in this role for the first time.

A couple things. Operational empowerment. I really do think both verbal and I also as part of this journey. I don't want to go too much into this, but I did have a general counsel for a while who was someone that would have been really hard to work for. And I did kind of sit there thinking, how long do I stick this out? Can I write the ship on this person's approach?

At the time, this was a new general counsel that I was working with. So I was how much can I be a strategic advisor to this person when I don't have a rapport with this person yet? Because I'm seeing things that are going to prevent this person from being successful and things that they could easily pivot on to be far more successful than maybe they're going to be otherwise? And started tiptoeing into that and learned very quickly that there was not an opening for those kinds of conversations and had to focus on me and the role. And it really was about, at the end of the day, delivering value. I would say to that GC leverage the legal ops team and department. You can use them in a way that maybe you can't the rest of the function. This is often someone who is not an heir to being the general counsel. So they've probably got a very unbiased view of the entire department in a way that none of the rest of the leadership team members have a view of both the department, the functioning of the department, the things that are consistent, the things that are inconsistent.

So true.

Some of those things are these subtle things that can really take the train off the tracks when they're more political in nature than functional in nature. But you can right size and correct very quickly and easily and you can really leverage the legal ops team on those initiatives and items without disrupting the legal ops team's ability to deliver. But make the entire department more functional and deliver at the same time. But it's really about the empowerment. Let them experiment. Expect failures. Don't fire them in the team and abandon when there is a failure. Learn from the failure. Figure out what you're going to do next, how you're going to make it better. Also, be realistic. I've heard so many people say new gc, they want me to do all of these things. We can't possibly. Okay. No one or two or three or ten people, depending on the size of the company can deliver that much. You need to be really realistic and work together. Come up with a realistic plan of what you're gonna work on. And if you throw more things on that person in the course of the year, you have to expect those core items to be derailed. So whole host of things.

Yeah. Well, that's great advice and great parting wisdom to a very difficult question. So thank you. Rhys, it's been such a pleasure chatting with you today, as it always is.

Yes, same. Always a pleasure. I appreciate it. Thanks for asking me to come on.

And to everyone else, we will talk soon. See you next time.

Bye.

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