#78 - The Joyful Legal Team

During crisis, it is stressful because folks feel like they're out of control. Think of all of the hours that go into reviewing bills and marking down bills. I would love to put it towards actually like advancing the interests of the business. One of the big differences that I noticed coming in house and being the consumer of legal advice is.

Hello everyone and welcome to Pearls on Gloves Off. I'm your host, Mar Mary o', Carroll, Chief Operating Officer at Goodwin. Today I'm thrilled to welcome Jacqueline Lee, known to many as Jackie Lee. She is Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Flynn Group, the parent company to household names like Planet Fitness, Panera, Arby's, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Applebee's, Wendy's and more. Jackie oversees the legal, risk management and compliance functions for this 5 billion dollar enterprise with nearly 3,000 restaurant and fitness locations and over.

Employees across the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Before Joining Flynn in 2018, Jackie was a partner at Jones Day in Silicon Valley and an accomplished trial lawyer. She's earned numerous honors, including most recently General Counsel of the Year. In this episode, Jackie and I dive into the real story of her path to becoming General Counsel. What it means to be a GC in today's world, and how she leads with both strategy and joy. We discuss everything from building and training high performing teams in a hybrid environment, to navigating crises like the pandemic, to how GCs can prove their value to organizations. Jackie also shares her perspective on leadership, mentorship and what General counsel need to be doing differently right now. Throughout this conversation, it was made clear to me that Jackie is a lifelong learner, unafraid to take on new challenges, always striving to improve herself and and constantly aiming higher. It's an inspirational look at what it truly means to lead at the top of our profession. I hope you enjoy.

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All right, Jackie, it's wonderful to have you here. Great to see you.

Thanks for having me on. It's really great that we're having this conversation.

Yeah. So you are the General Counsel of Flynn Group, which is one of these companies where people would hear that and go, I don't think I've heard of that. Company but of course we all have. So do you want to just tell us kind of what Flynn is?

Flynn Group is the largest franchise operator in the world. It operates in all of your favorite brands for restaurant brands and fitness, including Applebee's, Taco Bell, Panera, Arby's, Pizza Hut, Wendy's, and our most recent brand is the Planet Fitness brand.

That's so fun too. So do you get like discounts and free delivery of all these good foods?

All of the Mexican pizzas at the heart desires.

Your kids must love that. And we know each other through our kids. So your kids must love that.

Yeah, they do. As do I. Yes. Of living the dream.

Yeah. Makes you super cool. I'd love to hear your journey, your path to the general counsel seat as many of our listeners are aspire to be where you are today. And I know that looking at your background you're kind of a life run a law firm and then fell into this and then you became GC very quickly after moving in house. So I guess would love to hear your journey.

Yeah, happy to talk about that. So little background about my myself I am one of four kids. My mom is an immigration attorney, sole practitioner for many years. She practiced for three decades and retired at the start of the pandemic. And she was really the influence in my life that drove me towards thinking that I might be interested in a career in law. And really the idea of both of my parents was that all four of us were going to go to law school and we would carry on my mom's practice and we'd all become immigration lawyers. As it turns out, I was the only one who was actually interested in becoming a lawyer. The good kid, oldest daughter, like the birth order I think really matters there but was really interested in pursuing that career. Went to law school thinking that I was going to take over my mom's practice. Thanks to my mom who I think is a pretty good read on what suits her kids. She encouraged me after my second year of law school to try something else. I was going to just intern at her law firm during my second year summer and she suggested that I I try out something else. So I did on campus interviews. Ended up landing a summer associate position at Jones Day and I got to work with many of the different practices but realized that I was super interested in IP litigation, which was not something that was on my bingo card back then. The idea of being a litigator, the idea of doing IP litigation. My undergraduate major was philosophy, so no technical background. But what I loved about it is that I got to learn something new every day. The law was always changing. Super smart colleagues, really smart opposing counsel, got to work with experts. So that's what I did for the first 11 years of my career. I went back to Jones Day, started a career there, made partner at the firm, and thought I was going to be a Jones Day lifer, that I would retire at the firm. And then in 2017, my mentor, one of the first people I met when I was interviewing at the firm, Jane Freud. She left the firm to become Flynn's gc. Back then, it was called Flynn Restaurant Group because we only played in the restaurant space. She became Flynn Restaurant Group's GC not long after that, she started to build out her team, and she started to reach out to me to see if I'd be interested in joining. And I had recently made partner. I thought I was going to retire at the firm, so I demurred. But she ended up hiring me to represent the company's sister company, Flynn Properties, in a commercial arbitration matter. So I did that at the end of 2017, took that case all the way through arbitration hearing. I had an opportunity to meet and do the direct examinations for Greg Flynn. He's now my boss, as well as our cfo, Lauren Cortina, during that proceeding. And we won, and we got an attorney's fees. And not long after that, I got what I tell folks is an offer I couldn't refuse. It was with a company that I'd grown to really respect, having gotten to know it during the arbitration process, with very mature leadership that I had a lot of interest in working with and faith in working with. And then I was getting an opportunity to work with one of my very dear friends and mentors, Jane, who was the GC there. So I came to Flynn in 2018. I was associate general counsel, handling their litigation matters, mostly business and tort litigation. And something that's different about Flynn is that we handle our own litigation in house, much of it. So I was still in court, still doing depositions, still examining and prepping witnesses. Um, and then a year into my tenure, Jane moved on to her next opportunity. We were very small. Legal department at that time, was very quick. She left in March, announced her departure in February. And I sat down, had a conversation with my now boss, Greg Flynn, and it was a pseudo interview, although I'd never really interviewed with him before. My interview was winning an arbitration, which is kind of the way I like it. And not too long before Jane's last day, I was elevated to the role of general counsel, which is a surprise in some ways. In other ways, it was the result of having built a great relationship with Greg during that past year. And also Jane advocating for me to get this chance. So pretty untraditional path to the GC role. Pretty accelerated, I would say, one year into the in house life and having the opportunity to step into this role. So don't know if there's anything that folks can really take from that other than like, life will surprise you sometimes and do great work and maybe you'll find yourself in a position to grab an opportunity that's presented to you.

I mean, you were brought along with your mentor. And I always, as I look to hire people and they tell me their story and they say, oh, I was working here and then my manager left and then she called me and said, you want to come too? I always think those are good signs. The people that you want to take with you or that get taken with them are always like strong performance. I just think that's a good sign of confidence in that person and the importance of building those relationships within your organization and getting close to people you work with is important because you don't know where they leave to and they become your network.

That's exactly right. It's something that I learned, I think, at the firm and then being here at Flynn, that networking isn't just about going to cocktail hours and meeting strangers. It's about cultivating meaningful relationships with the people that are, like, closest to you and in your immediate vicinity, supporting them and making them look good and demonstrating that you're a good human being and a good lawyer. That kind of networking is probably 10 times more effective than handing out business cards.

That's exactly right.

The cocktail hour.

Exactly right. Your story is not finished. You were just promoted again. Right. So congratulations.

Yes, thank you very much. Yes. Very recently, in addition to the legal team, I am now overseeing our risk management and compliance functions, which we had a great partnership with already. And now I'm getting a chance to get to know those teams even better and work with them even closer than I had before. And so recently was promoted to senior vice president.

That's awesome. Congratulations.

Thank you.

When you moved in house and you said it was extremely accelerated and not expected, meaning, like you weren't trying to move in house, did you feel that it was very different than life at a law firm? Like, how much of a switch was that for you?

It's a pretty big switch in a couple of respects. I think one way it's very different is your Client isn't a lawyer anymore. In the kinds of matters that I was handling as an IP litigator, your client that you have the most contact with is almost always a lawyer. And now the client can be anyone from my boss, our CEO. We deal with folks in the restaurant who are leading the restaurant operations within the stores. We are working with HR professionals. So you're primarily working with folks who are not lawyers that are experts in their field. And so being able to be flexible in understanding what kind of information they need to make good decisions and how to present it in a way that resonates and grabs folks's attention and aligns with what their objectives are, what their concerns are, is a challenge at first, but most people figure it out because they care, especially the folks on my team. They care very much about giving our team members the information they need to make good decisions. So that's one piece. The pace of work is so, so different. The amount of email and the number of meetings is like 100x over what we were used to in the firm. And every day you've got your to do list on the computer, which is one thing I had to change. I used to have a physical to do list on a, on a legal pad. And that is like a fool's errand because every day you would go in with what you wanted to do that day, you would be so productive during the day, and you look at your list and you got to nothing. So then you have to just like cross it out and start again. Now all I have to do is delete the heading that says Monday and then Tuesday. So just the pace of work is very different and then the role is very different. I think to be effective, whether you're in house or outside counsel, you have to be thinking about what the client objective is. And in house, you're so much closer to the client, not only understanding what they're saying day to day, they care about developments that are happening within the company, but you get to know the people. And that's very difficult, I think, as outside counsel. But either way, you're having to deliver something that's useful to folks. But it's a lot easier as outside counsel to say, I don't have perfect information. Here are your options. It's really a business decision as to what to do, which is not a terribly useful piece of advice. In house, there's no escape. You have to give a recommendation. Whether or not the business agrees with you is another story. And over time, you get better and better at proposing something that is most likely to be something that aligns with the business's values and objectives. You just have to be far more practical. I think as an in house lawyer, because you want to be effective, there's no time to waste really. As in house counsel because your clients are depending on you to give them the information they need and move on.

Yeah, there's no time. You don't have time for perfect information. So you're making educated guesses. You have to balance the business impact with the risk tolerance. You can't always be the office of. No, nobody wants that. Did you have to make a lot of changes in the way that. In the way you give advice and I guess as you work with outside counsel now, or do you have advice for how to be better at giving that advice that is useful? Because you kind of mentioned sometimes they give advice and that's not helpful.

Yeah. I think one of the big differences that I noticed coming in house and being the consumer of legal advice is how often outside counsel does not actually take a position on what's recommended. And that's not helpful. In many instances they may not be well positioned to give a recommendation because they don't understand the business. But in house, you are an owner of the business. This is my business. This isn't just a client, it is a client. And that's important to remember as counsel for the company because we owe our clients many responsibilities and but it is our business and we ought to care about what happens to the business and the long term success of the business. And so the way that we frame our. Our advice is, I know this and this about your objectives. Here's the risk, here's what I recommend as being the best course of action given your risk tolerance, given what the objectives are, given what the actual risk is. And it may not be the most conservative advice. It's the advice that's really going to advance the business, not just protect the business.

Yeah. I've always told outside counsel and firms that do you want to put yourself in the shoes of the client and think about how do you make their life easier to get to the answer. Right. To understand the business part of the job is investing and understanding how your business runs. What is important to you? What are the priorities? What are the external and internal pressures that you guys are feeling? What's keeping you up at night? And so when you're asking for that advice, I think the ideal partnership is a law firm that actually understands the business and where you guys are and why you're asking those questions in Order to give you the real advice that you need.

That's exactly it. I noticed that during COVID when there was tons and tons of uncertainty, and I remember that everyone was waiting to hear from the Supreme Court on whether the OSHA emergency temporary standards were going to be put into effect because it was going to be a very expensive endeavor for most businesses. They had to plan ahead. And there are some real practical impacts and costs from that in almost every law firm. When asked, what do you think is the most likely outcome, when is this decision going to issue? Said something like, we can never know when the decision will issue. It's really unclear what the court could say. And there was one law firm that I thought did a great job because they studied the calendar of decisions and they could at least say decisions issued on these days of the week. So if it's not this day, it could issue this day. That gives already lots more certainty than the previous answer. And the other thing was that they went into detail with each of the the justices, how they thought that they would rule and react and gave percentage likelihood of one outcome over the other. Again, already way more information. Doesn't mean anybody's going to hold them to that being what actually happens. Like, we understand that if we're in House counsel at a senior level, we understand that there are going to be caveats to predictions. We don't need all the cya, we just need to know what's your best guess, as if this was something that you cared about for our business.

Totally. Totally. I kind of wanted to ask you about that experience. You've won a ton of awards and recognitions, one of which was about leading through crisis. And I noticed you did lead Flynn Restaurants, maybe Flynn Group at the time through the pandemic. And restaurants, as we know, were really hard hit and there was so much uncertainty, as you mentioned. What was that like?

It was stressful. Stressful on a personal level, stressful on a professional level. We were just at restaurants at that time and it was unclear whether, whether and how this company was going to make it through the pandemic. At the same time, we have all these people we're responsible for at that time, something like 32,000 employees that work for our restaurants and trying to figure out not only how are we going to help the business survive during this time, where at the beginning restaurants couldn't be open, we didn't have to go or carry out capability and how to help our team members during that time, we were, I think, optimistic that we could bring folks back to Work after furloughing them. But in the meantime, folks were stressed and suffering, and. And it was our job. Everybody was looking to the legal team and to the HR team to help them through this crisis. And it was really important that we be there for them and maintain a steady hand and provide as much information as we could to help our team members. We put together resources that they could use during that time. And then for my team, there's so much uncertainty. And during crisis, it is stressful because folks feel like they're out of control. They don't feel like they're in control because they don't have information. And so one of the best things that you can do as a leader during that time is to at least share with your teams what you do know, what you don't know, provide some transparency so that they get some of their agency back. Because I think all of us felt very much not in control during that time. So it was, on the one hand, really trying to focus the team on our obligation, our duty, our privilege to support our many team members, and at the same time, recognizing that our team members on the legal team are human beings too. They're going through the exact same thing, the same worries and concerns and feeling like they're out of control and showing folks empathy and support.

Care. Yeah. What I'm hearing from you is more how to be a leader rather than how to be a lawyer. And I wonder is that much more of what the GC role is? A lot of the CLOs and GCs we've had on the podcast describe the role as being an executive first and a lawyer second. Like, how much of it is leadership and business acumen versus maybe what you expected it to be?

Yeah, I mean, I would say being a lawyer, being a good lawyer is probably right up there with being a good leader, because we're a big enterprise, and the enterprise is relying on me and my team to be really good lawyers. And you need to be able to draw upon your skills as a lawyer to develop your other lawyers and leaders. But it is so much of being a leader. And one of the best books I. I read recently was, I think it's called high output management or something. Something like that. And it's about how the output of a leader is not just their own output. It is the output of their organization and the organizations under their influence. So not just the people that directly report to you, but how you can influence other parts of the organization to also produce and produce good product. And that is one of the hardest things I think for folks who are stepping into a people leadership or a management position in the beginning because they realize that the people management piece takes up a lot of their time and so they think about it as well. I had to spend so many hours with the team or with a team member today and finally I'm getting to my work. And that's the wrong way to think about it. Your work is to get the most leverage out of your team by supporting them and developing them and making it so that they can act with independence and have your confidence in being able to execute at a high level. And you can only do that by investing in your team. So thinking about it as I have to spend this time with the team and then I get to do my work is counterproductive like that. That is the work.

And tell me a little bit about your team because I think you have a pretty unique setup in how you guys work.

Right.

Is it a big team and what is the makeup?

Right now my team is three teams. We have our legal team, our risk management team and our compliance team that originated in HR compliance and is now under the same leader as legal compliance. So those teams are combined together. The full org is now 35 folks, but just zeroing in on the on the legal team. We've got 14 lawyers and four legal professionals at this point. It started off a lot smaller when I was promoted into this role, there were two of us. Oh wow.

That'S a lot of growth. We've grown a lot and a lot of it was during COVID because the needs on the business. As an in house attorney, you can see how expensive it is to retain outside counsel. And you have to be really thoughtful about which activities you're having outside counsel work on. What are the like must haves, what are the nice to haves? And a lot of the must haves are litigation focused. You can't just ignore the litigation. And one of the things I think that I mentioned that's really unique about Flynn is that we handle much of our litigation in house. So we have in house litigators and we've really grown that that function. We have four different practice groups that operate under me. We've got our business and tort litigation practice, our employment litigation and counseling practice, our compliance practice, and then our real estate, commercial and franchising practice, each led by a practice group leader. And that's something that changed over time as we were smaller, everyone reported to me and at a certain point it became clear that wasn't in the best interest of the organization anymore. Not only is it very difficult to provide the kind of support and mentoring and development to 12 people as compared to three people, but you're losing leverage if you're not empowering leaders to be able to make decisions and act with some autonomy. And we can do so much more because we have four leaders that can run their teams and develop their teams and make decisions on behalf of our team with the alignment of me at the beginning. And that's been a very successful way to grow and scale our capabilities.

I think it's pretty unique that you do all the litigation in house. How does that work? Like, which pieces do you do yourself? All of it.

Yeah. So we do as much as we can. Given the number of attorneys that we have. What's really important is that we can provide high quality representation. Our mission as a legal department is to provide exceptional service, superior results at an unmatched value. And you can really do that with in house counsel as compared with outside counsel. So primarily, the areas that we deploy our in house litigators on our business and tor claims, many of our guest liability claims that arise in California, which is where our litigators are barred, or Florida, where one of our California litigators is dual barred, trips and falls, auto accidents, things like that. And then we have a team of employment lawyers and they can practice all across the country. We really focus on those kinds of matters. The matters in which we retain outside counsel tend to be the more complex matters or less frequent or more specialized matters. CAGA actions in California, the more complex wage and hour kinds of claims. If there's a specialty relating to, I don't know, liability or unclaimed property, we would hire somebody that's a specialist in that area. But much of our litigation is really within our wheelhouse and it's just a matter of figuring out which are the cases that it makes sense to deploy our lawyers on, given their time and area of a specialty. It's super fun. I'm a trial lawyer at heart. I'm not a recovering or recovered litigator. I'll never recover. I just love it. And one of the reasons why it's so fun to practice law in this environment and litigate in this environment is because you do get to know the business so well. You understand what is more likely and what's not likely to have happened in a place where someone said something happened. You know what it sounds like in the back of the house. You know how big the back of the house is, you know what the layout of the restaurant is. And so you can be so much more effective as cross examiner, as someone that's preparing your own witnesses, build those relationships over time. And we have some exceptional results. We routinely go to trial, we routinely win summary judgment motions. And you just get to experience client again and again. And it's a great feeling to know that you really are providing them that, that great representation. So we have a ton of fun litigating in house. I think it's an awesome model.

Yeah, that sounds fun because you're like as a team, going to bat together, winning and like doing it over and over and getting better. That, that sounds fun. I find it also fascinating because, and I mean this in the nicest way, like you came from a law firm where I am now. And it's just very different from the in house world where, you know, firms are not technically a people manager. You're not running teams in the same way. You know, the org structure is different. But you have done what sounds like to me from the outside a really good job of building your team, growing your team. Right. Sourcing, which is think about when do you use outside resources, when do you start hiring internally, thinking about the budget. And I know we'll get to the culture that you've built as well. But did you learn that somewhere or did that just come naturally to you in leading and building an in house organization?

That's a great question. It certainly wasn't in the back of my mind, only waiting to be unlocked. I think a lot of it was I didn't know what I was doing when I was promoted into this role. And I hate that feeling. And so what I do whenever I am starting something new is I read as much as I can about it. I listen to a million podcasts. That gives me at least like some framework and it gives me like a little bit more confidence and feeling like I just have no idea what I'm doing. But the most important teacher was failing again and again. And I hate to fail. And so every time I fail, I will think really hard and reflect on why was this a failure. Why didn't the advice that I provide land? Why was that not persuasive? And I like to think that I'm pretty observant as to what motivates people and can read between the lines on folks, give feedback. And so there are just many instances in which things didn't go the way that I wanted them to go. And I was committed to it not happening again. Now, of course there continued to be failures of like different flavors and stripes, but that is the only way that you can learn. And it's a very uncomfortable way in some ways, but it is the greatest teacher. And so it was definitely not something I knew was trained to do overnight. But at the end of the day, I like to think I'm a smart person. I like to think that I'm a caring person and care about the client and care about your team is just such an important basis on which to drive success. So those were pretty big motivators for me and I think that they helped me succeed and also persist when it was very uncomfortable. I think to be in a position like this, you have to be able to have some grit and be okay when you failed and just push forward. And I will say, like, this organization is one that is very forgiving because it is a very human organization. We're in the service industry and so it's very human. We deal with people all the time. It's a client facing, customer facing industry. We get that people make mistakes. What's most important is that they own the mistake and own how they're going to fix it. And so it's a very positive and productive place to, in which to grow as a professional. Because we've got high expectations, but we also are very realistic that people need some, some time to like grow to where they, where they're capable of. And it really allows us to bring out the best in people and see what they're capable of.

Yeah, I give you a lot of credit for that because risk taking and failing isn't something that lawyers are necessarily very comfortable with, especially if they've worked in big law where there's a very high bar for getting everything right and giving perfect advice. I learned a lot about it growing most of my career in big tech where, you know, that is like the culture. You fail fast, you pivot. But yeah, you certainly don't hear that at law firms. Let go, let's go around and make mistakes. Still, even though there was that culture at Flynn, I think that was very brave or like just very admirable that you're willing to learn quickly.

I appreciate that. Yeah, it was not comfortable. I'm actually very risk averse in general, but I also love to win.

Litigator.

Yeah, I wasn't gonna let the job swallow me up. Although it had that potential. Like I knew that I wanted to come out on top. That kind of motivation really drove me to get through some times where I had self doubt or was disappointed with an outcome because I knew that better with me than without me. Mantra I told myself at the time and helped a lot.

That's great. And then as you were building your team, because it sounds like you. You grew the team quite a bit since you joined. Like, how did you identify talent? How do you know what good training looks like? And how did you think about building that team? And I guess, curious if you guys are hybrid or are you virtual? Are you in person? And how big of a difference does that make in trying to establish your. Your team and the. And the culture over time?

Because of the way the team has grown and because we have a number of support centers within Flynn, our team is no longer just confined to San Francisco, which is where we started. So we have team members in San Francisco. We have team members in Cleveland, where our larger support center is, as well as Overland park, and a couple of remote team members for folks in the offices. We're four days a week in the office Monday through Thursday, with Friday an optional work from home day. It is actually a lot simpler to manage teams that are always in the office and not in separate offices. That's the easiest thing, like, completely remote. Everyone's on the same footing. You have one format in which you need to communicate. One or the other is probably the simplest for managers. It's this sort of, like, hybrid style. Can be the most challenging and requires the most intentionality so that folks feel as integrated into the team no matter where they sit and no matter the format in which they're participating. Definitely found that as we came back from being out of the office during COVID it was the hardest time to try to figure out how to manage and support folks when you weren't even in the office the same days of the week. Having folks in Monday through Thursday simplifies that a lot, but it's still like a hybrid work environment. And then in terms of picking talent, hiring talent, I think we have our core values for the company, which I think really mirror what we prioritize as a team on the legal team, which is the team that I've recruited for in the past. And our core values at Flynn are care genuinely for people, play like a champion, and win as one. We're big on teamwork, we're big on winning, and we're big on care for the client and for each other. And that was very much like the way that I was brought up within the law firm with some really fantastic mentors, super smart, love to win, won together and cared about each other and that I loved and I never took for granted at the firm. And when I Was in a position to start building my team. That's what I wanted to build. I wanted to build a team where people would enjoy practicing law, where you could hear laughter in the office every day, which is what I hear every day, which fills my bucket. And it is a privilege to practice law. We are getting to use our brains and sit in offices every day. And it's fun for many lawyers. Unfortunately, like, the joy is gone. Like, people don't enjoy being a lawyer anymore. And that's really sad because I love being a lawyer and I love practicing with lawyers who love being lawyers. So that's one sort of filter through which we hire and recruit. And the other, I think, key is that we involve a lot of people on the team in interviewing the candidates that come into the office. It's really important to me that not only does the candidate feel really excited about the job and working here, but that our team feels really excited about the candidate and will be there to support them through that process. And what I have found as a very effective recruiting tool is introducing candidates to as many team members as, like, the process can sustain. It used to be they met with all of our team members.

We're now, like, way too big for.

That to be process. But every time the feedback from the candidates is that you have an amazing team. They all seem so warm and lovely and smart and like that they love their jobs and that there's no higher compliment than that. And it's also a really incredible recruiting tool. Yeah.

Did you end up hiring people that you used to work with or like a bunch of new people?

They were all new people.

Okay.

But there are a couple of folks that brought folks over with them when they came over. So we had a little bit of daisy chain going with some of the folks we brought over. I lucked out, I think, at the beginning when I was starting to build out the team. I just met some really incredible folks who are still here today and have helped me build the team to what it is. And they share this sort of, like, delight in practicing law and care for people and the client and doing great work and having pride in the. The product and just feeling really good about supporting a fantastic company. And we're very lucky. I think that's another sort of distinction from working at the firm. We had lovely clients when I was at the firm, but you don't really get a chance to develop or. I didn't, at least at the time at the. At the firm, like, relationships with these clients to the point where know the names of their kids and can ask them how their, like, anniversary dinner went. And I think that is so gratifying. All the clients, no matter who it is, somebody I've worked with a million times, a GM that I've met only once, they're so appreciative of the work that this team does. And that's a credit both to the team that's really working very hard for our clients and. But also to the kinds of folks that we work with. It's very much a team environment. And yes, my team members are the folks on the legal risk and compliance teams, but they're also the folks in hr, and they're also the folks who are in the restaurants, and they're also the folks in the gyms. And I think everybody has that sort of feeling around them. And so when, you know, a colleague does something for you, they say thank you. And when they do something for us, we say thank you. And so it's a very pleasant and productive relationship where, like, we can enjoy their wins and they can enjoy ours.

Yeah. It really sounds like you have a true team environment, that it's very human. And I've heard you use the word joyful to describe your team several times, and I don't think you hear that a lot from a team of litigators or in house counsel, so that's really awesome. Yeah.

Thank you. Yeah.

Another thing that comes up a lot when we talk to in house teams is the question of how do you demonstrate value? We as in house legal departments, I guess me, not anymore. But the old we there was constantly the board, the CEO, the CFO looking at legal and saying, how do you measure your teams? How do you demonstrate you're getting better? How do you demonstrate that you're adding value to the business? How do you think about that?

As.

It seems to be one of the hardest questions that GCs grapple with.

That has evolved over time for me, in part because when I was promoted into this role, my predecessor Jane, had, for the first time, started reporting out what the legal department even did. I think there was a lot of. There were huge knowledge gaps, I think, within the business and within leadership as to what were all the contributions that the legal department was making in many different disciplines. So that was a very good start. And for many years, my reports, which are like biannual reports, would describe, like, on a productivity basis, what we were handling in terms of lawsuits and lawsuit outcomes and the number of contracts reviewed or the number of leases reviewed and what the equivalent that would have been had that been performed by outside counsel. So that's sort of like one layer and like probably 101 in terms of communicating your value and impact to the business. But over time, a couple of things I learned, which I probably wish I probably have learned earlier, the way in which you present this information. So I was doing these long word reports, like just narrative reports, which my boss, to his credit, he reads everything, Greg reads everything. And so he read it. I think he was the only one that read it. And I realized nobody in the business communicates through these kinds of reports. Nobody does. Everybody communicates through decks. It's all PowerPoint and slide decks. And so I realized maybe I should try speaking in the language the business likes to speak. I've seen many a deck prepared within the organization and so used similar ways to present the data. So more graphs, more charts, more excerpts from Power Bi, which is like a business analytics tool that Microsoft has in which really the business uses to evaluate business performance in the business. So how's a store performing? How's a club performing? The first time I produced a report in that format in the form of a deck, like the engagement was like throughout the elt, so I was getting questions and engagement, it was clear that people had read it. And that was like a huge eye opener. Like you have to meet people where they are and provide them information in.

The way that they like to consume it totally.

Which is a lesson I should have learned far earlier. And then the other piece is from those reports, a lot of the like metrics by which the business evaluates its own performance is year over year performance. And so many more of our metrics became tied to how are we performing year over year. Like our spend, for example, what is it as a percentage of revenue? Like actually having benchmarks that are not like out there on their own, but are tied to the business growth. And how are we, like how do we fit into how the business is performing? Became much more incorporated into the way that we report our impact and performance. And so that has been like layered on into how we, how we report out. And I think the not only is reporting in this way whether or not you're asked to. Nobody ever asked me to produce these reports. Like we just, we did it proactively for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's really important that the business actually knows what the legal team does. Number two, related to that, they need some way to measure if you're at capacity and how you're performing. Because if you are seeing that you need a resource and they have no basis by which to compare your busyness now versus like a year or two ago. It'll be very difficult to persuade somebody, everybody very rightfully wants data and, and business insights to be able to make decisions. And like your subjective feeling that you feel busier this year than last year is just not cut it and nor should it. Like that shouldn't be. The metric helps us provide information to the business as well as provide a, like a Runway for a business case should we need it in the future. And it also provides us accountability for our own performance. Even if nobody read these reports, I would still produce these reports because I need to know how we're performing against our prior performance. There's lots of different ways, I think to like choose what you represent to the C suite or the elt. But thinking about it in the form of how are they consuming information, what matters to them about other business units is probably a good layer to put on top of how you're presenting the data.

Yeah, and I have to ask because I know you're managing budgets, like how important is predictability and how are you thinking about outside council expenses, the billable hour, alternative fees, like, is that important to you? And, and do you care how the pricing is done?

Super, super important. Not only from the perspective of predictability and budget management, but think of all of the hours that go into reviewing bills and marking down bills. If I get an hourly bill, I am going to review it and most likely there will be something that I have to mark down. And all of that time I would, I would love to bottle up that time and put it towards actually like advancing the interests of the business as opposed to ensuring that someone's not over billing me or forgot to like remove the time entry. That said that they were preparing the pitch for me, like that's not a good use of my time. But with value based fee arrangements, I know we can align on what something like this should cost. So I'm getting the right value for the client. And then we don't have to quibble about the hours spent, we don't have to quibble about who worked on it. I would love for more junior folks to have an opportunity, but they are expensive for not having a lot of experience. If we agree on what the value of the product should cost, do what you want, just make sure the product looks great. And for me I think that's great. I think it's great for relationships with law firms because then you don't have to quibble about like why did I mark down 0.5 here. And why did I mark down like 1.2 over there?

Yeah, it erodes the trust, it erodes the relationship. If it's a partnership, you want to be aligned on your incentives and what you're working towards. And yeah, the quibble, it's a great word. The quibbling is an unnecessary suck of time and trust. And in getting to that number, though, because I think the billable hours already created this issue about knowing what the right number is and the trust, like, how do you feel about getting there? Is that always hard or is it actually pretty straightforward in talking to the partners?

You know, it has become easier in many ways over time because when, for example, you've seen a million bills for preparing a response to an agency charge, or you've taken a number of cases all the way through summary and judgment, you know how much those things have cost because you spent a lot of time reviewing the bills. And so I think on the one hand, we have a pretty good sense of how much those things should cost. We ourselves, many of us litigated these cases. So we know how long something should take to brief, we know how much money it should cost. The other piece though is I've really benefited from working with some really smart people in the legal ops field, Steph Curry and Ken Callender, who has great insights into value based arrangements and is like an even bigger advocate of value based pricing than I am. They have been really fantastic resources because as as large as my own data set is, they have an infinitely larger data set and they know what is persuasive and not persuasive in terms of how to structure an arrangement with a law firm. But we've also been really lucky with some exceptional partners in our law firms that want to deliver value and care about great client service and the overall experience, which includes the business aspects of the relationship. And when we have a good relationship, I'll be your biggest advocate. I have sent emails to managing partners for firms. When somebody's up for partner saying, this person's great. I think they should become a partner. I like whip the team up to make sure that they've approved all the bills before fiscal year end so that our client service partner has a great realization rate. I will do these things for you because it is a partnership, but it really has to be a partnership. I understand that there are our business considerations of the law firm, like the law firm is running a business, so am I. So if we can have a really productive collaborative relationship, I think everybody can win that.

That is so great. I want to end on that because that's such a perfect call to action on both sides. There are things that clients can do to be a great partner to the firm and that the firm can do to be great to the client. And honestly, we have so much more data than you guys, so shame on us if we can't explain why this is the right price point and work together with you. But you just explained so many great ways that you, as a client, can add value to the partnership, and that's awesome.

That's great.

All right. Thank you, Jackie. It's been wonderful chatting with you, and congratulations on all the success you've had at Flynn Group.

Thank you so much, Barry. This has been a great conversation.

All right, everyone, we will catch you next time.