#60 No-Redline Revolution Redefining In-House Legal with Rippling GC Vanessa Wu

Hello everybody and welcome to Pearls on Gloves Off. I am your host, Mariel Carroll, Chief Operating Officer at Goodwin. I loved my conversation today with Vanessa Wu, General Counsel at Rippling, the workforce management platform that unifies hr, IT finance and more and allows businesses to execute more efficiently. At Rippling, Vanessa oversees both legal and compliance and has been one of the driving forces behind its global expansion and advising on compliance and hiring practices across the globe as the company has grown from 100 to perhaps 4,000 employees across a dozen countries. Vanessa comes from the school of really innovative and forward thinking GCS that I love and we talk a lot about how she's been able to scale her team through hypergrowth, but in a really deliberate way, taking lessons from her past role as GC of Liveramp to create an efficient and effective way of working. She gets into how she's been able to create a standard sales agreement that is almost never negotiated and implemented that for thousands of customers, making her a hero to the product and sales teams and I'm sure the leadership team as well. She's encouraging the real use of AI in the day to day work that they do and encouraging the team to be naturally curious and willing to try new things. Finally, we hear about how she operated gracefully under the pressure of a really stressful work crisis and navigated through it smoothly by having very intentionally prepared for the unexpected. Vanessa also wins her way into my heart by mentioning Google, Gemini, Ironclad and Goodwin teams as secrets to her success. I promise I didn't make her say any of it, but I had a lot of fun during this hour together and I learned a lot so I hope you will too. Goodwin is wherever AI is, which means we'll be at Human x, the number.

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Visit goodmanlaw.com humanx for more details. Hey Vanessa, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thanks so much for being here. Let's just start with a little bit of background and context about you first.

I guess just for a little bit of background on me. I am the General Counsel of Rippling, which is sort of all in one fast platform combining HR, IT and financial services. And I've been here for about five and a half years. I joined summer of 2019 back when the company had just finished its Series A was a little over a hundred employees and fast forward to today. We are several thousand Employees. I think we recently finished our Series F in many, many countries in the world. And my team has expanded to include legal compliance and some enterprise risk internal audit functions as well. So it's been a pretty exciting journey. Prior to Rippling, I was at Liveramp, a publicly traded ad tech company, and prior to that at Latham and Watkins doing litigation, predominantly antitrust with some employment. Awesome.

And Liveramp was your first GC role, right?

It was. I had joined Liveramp just pursuing privacy. I was from the antitrust consumer protection space, really interested in data protection at that time, and it just wasn't an area that our firm was that focused on yet. GDPR hadn't gone into effect. I think most big law firms did not really have privacy data protection they do now. And it was just like a really interesting time to join that type of business. When GDPR went into fet, when Cambridge Analytica happened, when the California Consumer Privacy act was then passed, all in quick succession, that was really the intent behind making that transition. More than sort of like, like wanting to become a gc. That was sort of a happy accident.

Well, and I know your journey was fast and therefore very impressive. So what made you want to go in house into your first role?

I was a litigator. And I feel like most litigators don't necessarily think of in house being an option for them. And I was the same way. And so it really was this data protection bent. I thought if I went to an ad tech company, I would get to be on the front lines of a company that was experiencing privacy and data protection type legal issues and that would just be like a really interesting place to practice. And that definitely became true. I was also like the first and only attorney of the Liveramp subsidiary. It had been acquired at that point. And then we sort of went through a number of corporate transitions while I was there, hence the GC role and title. But just sort of following what is really interesting to one, I think has always served me well and I, I find serves like my colleagues well. So that's really all it was. It wasn't any sort of desire to be in house. My thoughts for myself were going into government at that time.

Okay, and was it what you expected? Was it very different than, you know, the law firm life or was it eye opening? Yeah, tell us.

Completely different than law firm life. Definitely not what I expected. I don't know what I expected. And in several ways I think the incentives are entirely different in house. So when you're at a law firm, one of the things that Always frustrated me about law firms, which I think frustrate most law firm attorneys is the billable hour, of course. Yeah. And I get it. It is really hard to quantify a lawyer's work. And so by making it an hourly charge, that that is like a fair bargain across, like most law firms and clients. The main downside I see to that is it really disincentivizes efficiency. And that just drove me nuts at the law firm where I was working. If you could write in a really amazing brief in half the time, like, that might be personally fulfilling, you know, and your client would be happier because it costs a lot less, it's more efficient. But as a business proposition, that's not ultimately a good thing for the law firm. And that's just like, really hard to square as, like an efficiency nut. Like, you want the highest quality work for the least cost. Like, at all times in house at any business like that, incentive is just going to align a lot better because the business is not legal services, it's whatever product that company is selling. And I know sometimes that's why people don't want to go in house. But I think it also is a reason to be in house because you have to think really critically about what the legal function is offering and, like, how efficient you are being. And are there new ways to innovate as new technology comes about to continue eking out increasing that efficiency as a team. And that's not just like efficiency in commercial work. I think that's always where people like their minds go to. It's also in product counseling, in compliance, in, like, risk management, in the way that you're interacting with outside counsel, like, sort of across the board. Um, not just like contractual.

No, absolutely. You're going from being a revenue generator at a law firm to really part of a cost center right when you're in house. And so with your limited amount of time, you have to make it stretch across all the work that. That needs to get done across the department.

Yeah, yeah.

So as you think about that, and I know that you have efficiency as part of, like, your heart and soul and who you are. So when you mentioned the. The hypergrowth that rippling has gone through already, what was it, a hundred to several thousand in your company?

Yeah, I don't know our exact employee count right now. I think we're nearing 4,000, somewhere in the 3 to 4,000 range. So a lot of folks.

And that's a lot of growth in just the handful of years that you've been there, right?

Yeah, yeah. In about five and a half years.

So we recently had a couple episodes ago, Brian Israel, who's the general counsel of Anthropic. And we talked a lot about the hypergrowth and, you know, being the first attorney there and scaling that department. Were you the first lawyer at Rippling as well?

I was. I was the first lawyer at Rippling. I had been the first lawyer at Liveramp. So I understood what that meant. Full hats off to every solo GC out there is a very hard job. You don't have a backup. Everything does fall on you. I was really excited about that opportunity at Rippling because I had done it before, but I had inherited a lot at Liveramp, whereas at Rippling, it being just much younger, I could sort of build in the way from scratch that I wanted to. You know, one of the things I have been, I guess don't really tout much internally, but just sort of impersonally like really excited about with our team is how staunch we've been able to maintain essentially a no red line policy and that we have all 20,000 plus customers on our online agreement.

And that's like your sales agreement.

Our sales agreement.

Okay.

Yes. And that leads to efficiency for our product in terms of we're not maintaining different versions of our product for different customers. It's like incredibly fair. It means everyone is getting the same terms. You can look at it like our commitment is to ensure that they're benchmarked and we're, you know, meeting today's standards and giving folks adequate protections. It also means that all of our customers can look around and say, I'm on equal footing of every other one of Rippling's customers with respect to these terms. And it sort of also unlocks innovation because you're not having to let certain customers essentially hold back in a way. No one thinks of it that way, but when you're negotiating terms, you're making it hard for the vendor to innovate. In a way, you're sort of adding these additional approvals and roadblocks to innovation for the product and engineering teams.

Yeah, super interesting. So let's back up a little bit. I've recently worked at Ironclad, which I know is what you're using, which is a similarly like high growth SaaS company. And for our legal department, certainly like the number one driver of work is going to be the sales contracts, right? The closing deals at the end of every month, every quarter, but also obviously throughout the year. I imagine that was the same driver of volume of legal work for you as the first Lawyer. And then kind of as your team.

As you grew up, it never has been the number one driver. Because I got here so early, we were able to set out a deal, essentially a handshake between myself and our chief revenue officer and our CEO that we would always explain our terms. If any customer has any question about any of our terms, we are happy to have the feedback, happy to have those discussions, happy to explain if we are wrong, if we think we should make a change, we make a change for every customer. It's not going to be an individualized like event. And that if sales wanted to have like further negotiation, we never actually implemented this. We could start thinking about putting a policy in place where sales could cover the cost of commercial negotiations. And then they were like, no, no, no, no, we got this.

Yeah, it's fine.

But just putting the incentives in the right place I think does a lot. Because ultimately commercial legal costs are part of the sales process. And I don't think most companies capture that as part of the cost of customer acquisition, but it should.

Yeah. I love this story. I find it so interesting because you've had this blessing of an opportunity to basically start from scratch or start like an organization, a legal department that was clean, you know, without inheriting everything after you'd already run live Ramp learned, you know, the challenges of running a legal department and like what you would have done differently. Right. If you had started from scratch and taken those learnings. And so when you first started at rippling, knowing that this was going to be like a high volume area and making that go away was that hard to do. Like tell me about your journey in making that happen and how you sort of identified that to all your stakeholders that this was maybe a different way of doing things, but the way that you thought was the right way.

It was sort of advocating for the business that this company wanted to become. Yes, we were only about a hundred plus folks at that time, but even at that time our C suite had the vision of building a like a massive outcome and looking towards those other benchmarks like Microsoft and Amazon and Salesforce and others, these mega stat software platforms and how they do contracting. One of the biggest fights in legal contracting is over liability caps, particularly in data breaches. I wish we could quantify the amount of spend in hours between commercial lawyers talking about caps, super caps like 1x2x3x monthly, yearly, what have you. Because that amount of cost alone I feel like is not equal to the amount that's ever been paid out under subsidies. Capsule. And the reality is we're just talking about rich shifting when at the end of the day every cloud based software platform is using Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud and all of them have pretty standard 6 month or 12 year 12 month caps period. And I've really yet to hear about people ever negotiating something beyond that because they're really sort of the underlying plumbing for this entire ecosystem and so always boggles my mind that we'd have more consistency on the software application layer when underneath we're all getting the same level of coverage from our cloud providers. They're able to maintain a standard, so why can't we maintain a standard? And that somehow is compelling internally.

Yeah. And did you get pushback? Do you continue to get pushback from your customers, your new customers and prospects about that? And people always want to negotiate. Right. Even when you say it's non negotiable.

We do have a commercial team but a very small one and they also work on procurement and vendor agreements as well. And like really hats off to them for maintaining this volume at this size and scale. I think customers, some customers do want to push back and I think as I mentioned we will hear them out. And we've also now just developed a lot of collateral on. Here is our contracting approach. Here are all of the other providers we've benchmarked these terms against. Here's how we can give you assurance. We put a lot of work into explanation. Interesting to get people comfortable with the terms as is.

Yeah.

And then it is pretty compelling to say are you customer legal counsel, like somehow unique in that these tens of thousands of other customers don't have this thing you're advocating for. You know why you and having built up that base now is incredibly effective.

Yeah. I bet it gets easier as you have more of a base. And tell me about when you were crafting your template or your standard language. You had to of course make that very fair. Right. And very pro customer as well. What was that journey like? Did you work with outside counseling? How did you think through how to make it as fair as possible to both sides?

A few layers there I guess. In full disclosure for the listeners of this podcast. We are both customers of Ironclad, but we have also been long term clients of Goodwin as well. So Goodwin had a first draft and then when I came in it was really understanding who our key competitors were because that's who we would be negotiating against. Even though you're not like actively negotiating against them like that is usually a buyer is comparing a couple different solutions and you Want your terms to be fair in that marketplace. And so it was looking at those key competitors, understanding how they were slicing and dicing liability, what kind of reps and warranties they were offering, and making that match up with what we felt was appropriate. And then as rippling has expanded over time, because we've added additional products beyond payroll and hr, we now have a corporate card. And so we have the corporate card competitors and build pay or IT services or employer record services that we also look at those competitors, their terms, and have that all benchmarked and as part of our collateral for potential customers.

How interesting. And then when you send out this contract now, is it just like a click to accept because you want to tell them it's not really negotiable or how does it like, it's.

Yeah, it's always been, since I joined at rippling on online terms. Oh, wow.

Okay.

And then referenced in our order form.

Gotcha.

And I think, you know, you were asking sort of like, was this the focus from the get go? It was a big focus for me from the get go, but because it is what the rippling business demanded. And what I mean by that is rippling sort of structurally. And I think this is, like, really important for folks who are in house, like, understanding what your particular business needs. Rippling structurally is trying to build a ton of different businesses around the employee data system of record at once. And so that requires us to try to put as much of our resourcing into engineering to not to build all of these different solutions all at the same time. What that means for every function, including legal, is that I want to try to have as much resourcing around these different products as possible. So, like, product counseling, our employer of record, that's something that is highly legal in nature. We are employing personnel on behalf of our customers in all of these different countries. And so that is a very, like, intensive exercise for the legal team to understand, like, what are the employment rules in, say, Germany and how do we do this so that we are compliant and we're not exposing our customers to risk? And so trying to think about how we slice and dice our resources as a legal team and make sure that we're able to spend as much time on the product. Counseling means trying to find an almost unnatural efficiency level on commercial contracting. And so I think a lot of solutions are geared towards making the negotiation faster, making the negotiation more seamless, but, like, even more efficient than that is just to try to eliminate the negotiation. So that's always been our, like, high watermark is not eliminate it unfairly, but how do we create terms, create emotion, create training so that we can get as close to that as we possibly can?

Yeah. The ideal situation for both parties, really. No one wants to waste time on these things.

And I think a lot of negotiation comes from not wanting to be the person who got screwed.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, like everyone else gets that. You know, there are certain vendors out there that you're like, you have to negotiate and if you ask for X, Y, Z, you get the better sla. And if you ask for this, you know, and so then you negotiate because you actually get meaningful concessions. And these vendors have actually created a playbook that you only get more if you ask for.

Which is why I think the crafting of your initial document to be very fair to both sides. All the documentation that you've now created about, like why it's fair is really important to educate both sides.

The one specific one we did there is, you know, so I mentioned like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Azure. I forget if they're at 12 months or 6 months, but most SaaS providers cap their liability in their standard forms at 12, 12 months per year. We do 18 months off the bat. And that was sort of one of those concessions to demonstrate like a step in the right direction for our customers. Hey, we're going to go a bit above and beyond. Yes. If you go to some other SaaS providers, you can negotiate up to 18, you might even be able to negotiate to 19, but we're just going to do 18 across the board instead of the 12 months that all of our competitors were at. Great.

This whole story is just one example of kind of what I alluded to at the beginning of this episode, which is that you're very focused on creating the legal department of the future. I think those were the words that you used and thinking about, you know, how can you do things in an innovative way, in a different way. I'm sure there are other things you're thinking about like AI and how AI is being used across the legal team, specifically at Rippling.

I'm flinching a little bit with legal department of the future because it sounds very like self aggrandizing and I, I don't mean it in that way. I do think the legal profession has a bad habit of being behind the ball with new technology.

Absolutely.

And there's just sort of a, a resistance to change. As a profession, we're generally more risk averse and sort of see the downsides of the new technology and less of the positives there. I'm on a lot of These sort of GC lift serves. When ChatGPT came out and other large language models started becoming more popularized, every channel was threaded with who has an AI policy. Like how do we suppress almost. And that's not the intention. It was like how do we make sure this doesn't catch on? Product backfire. And we've put in like appropriate guardrails. Sure. For the organization. But there was this overwhelming amount of volume among the legal community about guardrails and very little about like how could we use this technology to accelerate this profession. You know there is a lot of like guardrails and a lot of fear about being replaced.

Yep.

And not as much, hey, this could be an accelerant. Like maybe it is not a great use of junior attorney legal time to be doing doc review and tagging documents. Hot. Not hot. Relevant, not relevant. Like I did when I was a first year associate and costing that amount of funds. I remember as a first year associate thinking like this is a bummer that you take folks who've just graduated from law school who are at their peak amount of excitement about legal profession. Yes. And then you're like, you know what you are now qualified to. You know, some folks go off to clerk and they're like shaping decisions, like meaningful court decisions and others are being very well compensated and saying this is relevant, this is not relevant. And I need to do that. Like maybe it's a thing that we are now like having tools that do a really good job at doc review as just like one of those examples. So. So that at rippling our mission is to free smart people to work on hard problems, AKA automate all the administrative work that is associated with running the business. Is there a lot of administrative work associated with the legal profession? Like absolutely. That could be automated to free up folks who have spent all of this time getting this education, who really enjoy high level complex reasoning to spend more time doing the complex legal reasoning and less time on the administrative work.

Yeah, Philosophy aligns a lot with mine and with I think a lot of folks who are trying to innovate in our space. You're right. There's a lot that is part of this industry structurally that prevents us from wanting to jump in and to try this. But there's so much upside and I love that there are leaders like you that are thinking that way. Are you encouraging your team, like specifically your team to use AI in their day to day.

What happened is over the summer, summer my daughter broke her arm. She's nine and so she couldn't go to soccer camp. And so she accompanied my husband to his office. And then I was being sent all of these text messages and videos that our daughter was having a blast making PowerPoints using Google's Gemini. And she was making a PowerPoint about chips. And I was like, chips as in food or chips as in like computer chips? And it was chips as in food. I got home that night and she was so excited to show me this like really high quality, perfectly formatted slideshow about chips as in food. There was a slide about Cheetos, you know like the orange crunchy chip and like one about Cetos and there was one about Lays. She would just generate new images and new text until she found what she wanted. That was like my revelation moment which was her generation is going to work entirely differently developing pretty high quality content at this age just using Gemini. And that's really when I started checking out all of the LLMs a lot more. And at Rippling we we have enterprise GPT in house. And then when OH1 came out I started saying like we need to get much more serious about this. So we're doing planning for 2025, thinking about legal vendor budget and checked out a couple different solutions. There's the language models like ChatGPT and Gemini. There's a bunch of like legal specific AI software vendors that are looking really cool and really innovative. And then there's the traditional data providers like the Westlaw, Lexis and so on and so forth. And we decided after testing a few to just make sure everyone on the team was using ChatGPT. That's where we've landed. Right now I do like highly encourage the team to try to think about ways to incorporate the LLMs into their day to day and then to share what they've discovered because it's a little bit different for every person. And what I've noticed is there's like these stages of acceptance. First time someone like they're like oh I can. And yes, we have like our contained enterprise version. Yes, you can upload a document and ask for a summary or analysis or a compare or like a rephrasing for a different audience. Then folks sort of feel like they're cheating is what I've noticed and sort of like getting folks over the like hey, I'm cheating by using this tool like I've been trying to liken it to. You can handwrite your essay or you can use word processing and you can type it. So it's like you can operate like using word processing now or you can word process and use a GPT or large language model to help accelerate. And so I do really encourage folks to, to just explore and experiment. And we now take part of our like team, all hands to go into breakout rooms and have people explore with different prompts. So like I'll often take our company's financials which we share with the whole company, but they're very much in financial speak and oftentimes like lawyers and compliance professionals have a hard time understanding like all of the acronyms ERR and what our gross margins mean and is this good, is this bad? And sort of my view is there's no longer any excuse for anyone on the team to not understand the financial metrics of this business because you can Upload it into ChatGPT and you can have it summarized for wherever you are at and then you can ask questions. And so even using it as a tool to have better understanding with cross functional teams what content they're providing, fitting that content in a way that they can understand as well.

Yeah, it's not cheating, it's more like you can view it as a life hack, which is, you know, the positive spin on making something easier for you. Like it's a hack, it's not cheating. So it's a good thing.

Yes, you can do it the hard way. You should learn how to do math, but you should also learn how to use a calculator.

Yeah.

And maybe an Excel spreadsheet as well.

It is a tool. And you mentioned, you know, with your daughter, it's a great story, the idea that they're going to work very differently this next generation. And then you also talked about how when you were trained and you are clicking on documents and doing doc review the old fashioned sort of manual way compared to the way it's done by AI now and software. How do you think about this whole like how do we train associates in the future?

Right.

The skill set that you need is going to be different. But should you know how to do math even though you can use a spreadsheet, are you ever going to actually do long division? How do you think about what it means today to have these tools and if that changes, you know, if they don't learn to draft or if they don't learn to sit in the room and go through documents, that they'll never be the lawyer that we want them to be. What's your philosophy on that?

I think it's still really important to be able to do the work and use the tools and that's What I hope to see continue in terms of training at law firms and in house, I think my fear for the team is just that. And most in house teams is that they get out innovated. And unless you're actually putting time and attention to saying we're going to embrace these tools because there's already this just like natural resistance from these functions, I think it really takes saying we are going to embrace these tools and we want to build the legal and compliance functions of the future to get people to unlock that creativity, to go where they maybe didn't feel that they had permission to go and to like rethink some of those underlying assumptions. Like doc review requires an individual to click yes or no versus maybe we can do an automated layer and do more comprehensive checks.

Right.

And maybe it will create more time to review the hot documents for relevancy. And so like then I'm better focusing my time on the most important thing. So it's not really getting rid of the underlying training, it's maybe removing more of the noise. Yeah.

And the mindset and the culture. It sounds like that you've set out for everyone is to really focus on efficiency and effectiveness and moving quickly and being agile, which is great. Do you train for that? Do you hire for that quality? Or is that something that you just kind of put over the top as like a cultural layer?

It's definitely an expectation in terms of hiring for someone who would succeed at rippling. I have like sort of one quality I look for above all the others. Which, which is curiosity.

Yeah.

And that is for any role, not just legal and compliance roles. Sometimes I'm interviewing for roles outside of our immediate function. And the tip, the scale is always, you know, does this person have thoughtfulness about what they're doing? Are they excited about sort of reinventing what they're doing? Are they thinking about sort of other businesses or other functions? Just demonstrating that level of curiosity generally breeds a lot of success here.

Do you think you're able to suss that out in an interview or do you have questions or things that you.

Try to, you know, really whatever an interviewee is talking about, just asking follow up questions and drilling in tends to demonstrate how far they've gone themselves. You know, if that's a lawyer who has worked on a litigation case or a deal, just probing about that deal or about that litigation matter, I think it comes through how deeply they've researched it, how much they've thought about all of the different factors that have gone into that particular deal and the dynamics and what happened at the very end and what went wrong and what went right and what they would have done differently. I think all of that goes to curiosity.

Yeah, I agree. That used to be something I would always try to interview for as well, is does this person have natural curiosity? So sort of related. I also know that you're a big believer in learning on the job and how you can learn a lot from high stakes and high pressure moments. I know that you've had to tackle challenges that were unexpected as well in your career and like demonstrate grace under fire. And I believe you mentioned kind of the Silicon Valley bank crash and having to do a financing over the weekend and that was like an unexpected thing. Tell me about that chaos and the collaboration and like how everyone learned from that and rose to the occasion to make it successful.

I wouldn't say I'm an advocate for learning on the job. I just do think it tends to happen quite, quite a bit sort of related to your question. And speaking of interviews, sometimes folks are often, you know, expressing that they are really good at building the train tracks while the train is moving and they are like expert at building the airplane when the airplane is flying. And I totally understand where people are coming from. They're trying to indicate I'm not a stodgy lawyer, I'm not a stodgy compliance person, I can pivot and I am fast moving and I am flexible and all the things that are definitely necessary in house. But I often say I really rather that the train tracks be already built. I'd rather be riding on a train that was going on tracks and I'd rather be in an airplane that was not being built while it was in the air. I'd rather we actually have fully built that airplane and checked it and fully gassed up, has all its safety checks in order, like the oxygen masks are going to work. As a passenger, that would be my preference.

But you can't always have that.

Right? You can't always have that. But I think you can. North Star plan. Sure. And I'm a big believer in North Star planning. And so like we were talking about legal teams, like, you can North Star plan that the future of a legal team is not going to look like it looks like today and that a lot of administrative roles will be automated and more efficient and more accurate using new technology and you can start to think about proactively, like what those changes might look like and retrain your own team to meet what that future world is, look like and have an opinion on it. Similarly with like The Silicon Valley bank crisis that Rippling had last year and what that was. Rippling, among as many products and services, also has a payroll product. And as part of payroll in the United States, payroll companies have custody of funds typically for about four days before that payment is released. Because it takes about four days to go through our ACH system. Sure. When Silicon Valley bank collapsed, Rippling was a banking customer with Silicon Valley bank. And that Friday was a big payroll day for hourly workers. That was like March 10th I believe. And that following Wednesday was March 15th. So it was the semi monthly payroll run. So all of those funds, Friday payroll and the mid monthly pay cycle were being held in this Silicon Valley bank account. And they were protected, they were insured. But the FDIC had frozen those assets and we did not have any sense of when that would be released. And obviously lots of customers and more importantly, there are thousands and thousands of employees everyday. American workers across the country are wondering when they're going to get their paycheck because they have bills to pay, they have mortgages to pay, they have health insurance to pay. Deal for our customers, their employees. Big deal for us as a company. We ultimately made the decision to do a financing that Friday. Our CEO Parker is a fundraising extraordinaire. We had a term sheet in hand by that Friday evening. We negotiated the terms over the weekend and then closed. And you know, part of those terms were the money needs to be able to be wired. I think it was 500 million that Monday. And what we plan to do with it is if needed, loan it out to our customers through our platform to cover the payroll differences to ensure that our customers and their employees would be paid on time. I don't know that anything prepares you for that. But the reason we were able to do it is because we do a lot of Northstar planning at the company. Like we were able to do it because we were able to migrate our entire payroll system over to JP Morgan over the course of a weekend. We were able to do that because we had bank accounts with JP Morgan through our money transmitter licenses. We were able to do that because we had started obtaining money transmitter licenses two, two and a half years before to go through state by state, every state that we would need money transmission so that we could do it through our own bank accounts. And so I do think there's how you are handling the unexpected event, but also like how you have planned to create redundancy in your system so that you're able to do that. I think that sometimes what folks don't See is just like how many pieces we had in place to make this happen. We're able to fundraise because we had all of our disclosures ready to go. We try to keep those up to date. We try to think like a fundraising should never be a surprising event. We're a private company that's a high growth tech company. We're going to seek additional capital through that life cycle. Like it's not a surprise that we may at a moment's notice want to fundraise and that we would need to have disclosures ready and that we should just know what our disclosures are and that's healthy for the company. So just trying to think through some of those things makes it a lot easier and it's why we're able to pull the full diligence folder together overnight.

Wow, that's a tremendous story. It sounds also very stressful, but you also make it sound like just another day at work.

No. Sounding like maybe the least sleep I've ever had. I don't know if in my life, but maybe. Major kudos to the team at Goodwin on the corporate side who helped us make that happen. I definitely heard have immense gratitude because for us it was an existential moment for our business at the law firm. It's obviously not like the existential moment for Goodwin's business, but like seeing your client go through one of those moments and rising to the occasion.

Yeah. It's good to know that you had those relationships all set up and ready to go when you needed them to.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So as we approach 2025, what's kind of on your radar for next year? Do you have big North Star plans for the year or any big priorities that you're thinking about?

We covered the main one, which is like I have been playing around a bunch with not a whole bunch of AI tools, just the LLMs, because I feel like they are really powerful on their own and increasingly so at such a rapid clip. Just staying with all of the new releases of Gemini and GPT on their own, it's an endeavor, but just rethinking through every single one of our processes and seeing how we might leverage some of these tools to do our work better has been really exciting and I love it. Now when we have a bunch of European operations, you know, there's like a new FCA consultation paper on safeguarding that was released a few weeks ago that was like two to 300 pages. You can pop that into, into an LLM, get a really nice summary, still work with outside council but you can get nice good reads on Pacific Standard Time and then go to European Council after that. And same with things that come out in other languages. I think it's just like a really exciting time to be in our profession and think about how to incorporate some of these new tools.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Vanessa, it's been such a pleasure. You are a true innovator, an inspiration. I love the way that you're running your department. It's safe to say that we all look forward to watching what you do next. So thank you for your time and for sharing your stories with us.

Thanks for having me.

Until next time, everyone.