Episode 21: Opportunities for Legal with Sarah Ouis

Inspiring Legal

How do you create user-centric legal operations? And actually, what does user-centric even mean in a legal context? Wonder no more, because today we're joined in the studio by Legal Design & Content superhero Sarah Ouis. Sarah will take us through her own journey from in-house counsel to out-of-house consultant and delve into the opportunities for scaling in-house Legal teams.

Thank you for listening to Inspiring Legal.

Full episode transcript:

[00:00 - 00:07] So, we're back with another episode of Inspiring Legal.
[00:07 - 00:11] My name is Stine and I'm your host.
[00:11 - 00:14] Openli is all about the community.
[00:14 - 00:22] It's all about inspiring each other and us to become even better in-house privacy counsels,
[00:22 - 00:29] GCs, head of legal, and working with that every single day.
[00:29 - 00:32] Today, I'm joined by Sarah.
[00:32 - 00:41] Sarah Ouis is an amazing person, one to get inspired by.
[00:41 - 00:48] And today, she's going to be talking about her journey, having worked in-house as a legal
[00:48 - 00:58] counsel, moving up in the ranks, so to speak, heading up legal teams, and now working no
[00:58 - 01:07] longer in-house, but from the outside, taking that view on how can we, working in-house,
[01:07 - 01:08] improve?
[01:08 - 01:09] What works?
[01:09 - 01:10] What doesn't work?
[01:10 - 01:16] With that maybe more objective view, because she's looking in from the outside.
[01:16 - 01:17] Welcome, Sarah.
[01:17 - 01:22] Thank you so much, Stine, for having me.
[01:22 - 01:26] Sarah, so people might know you.
[01:26 - 01:27] They might not know you.
[01:27 - 01:32] You have a massive following based on LinkedIn, and we'll talk about that as well.
[01:32 - 01:37] But maybe for the ones that don't know you, could you maybe just tell a little bit about
[01:37 - 01:40] yourself and your journey and who you are?
[01:40 - 01:41] Yeah, sure.
[01:41 - 01:44] So a little bit about myself.
[01:44 - 01:45] So I'm Sarah.
[01:45 - 01:52] I am a French qualified lawyer, but I've pretty much developed my career in the UK.
[01:52 - 01:53] That's after law school.
[01:53 - 01:56] That's pretty much where everything started for me.
[01:56 - 02:04] I worked as an in-house counsel in multiple industries, mostly in technology and pharmaceutical
[02:04 - 02:06] life sciences sectors.
[02:06 - 02:11] So these were really the sectors I knew the most.
[02:11 - 02:16] And I developed my career as an in-house counsel, first being part of a legal team, and then
[02:16 - 02:17] I joined a scale-up.
[02:17 - 02:24] I started off as a sole counsel, built the entire legal function and privacy function
[02:24 - 02:25] from scratch.
[02:25 - 02:34] So I've been for the weeds of what it takes to grow as an in-house team.
[02:34 - 02:41] And then in 2021, I kind of felt that I couldn't see myself doing this again.
[02:41 - 02:52] And I just figured that I was more passionate about problem solving in-house as opposed
[02:52 - 03:06] to being an in-house counsel on a daily basis, which made me move to work part-time with
[03:06 - 03:15] Contrapod AI, which I have a CLM, and also found my own consultancy, Lobeth House.
[03:15 - 03:23] So it's all about I really help legal team design user-centric in-house legal departments
[03:23 - 03:32] for them to increase customer satisfaction, but ultimately also be more fulfilled in everything
[03:32 - 03:33] they do.
[03:33 - 03:38] So yeah, that's about me.
[03:38 - 03:40] You say that's about you.
[03:40 - 03:41] That's quite impressive.
[03:41 - 03:49] And I also think you've kind of like did that journey where you started your career, right?
[03:49 - 03:56] And then you just built on from there, building the teams, building yourself, and being on
[03:56 - 04:02] that journey where when you're a part of a startup or a scale-up, you have to keep up
[04:02 - 04:03] with the business, right?
[04:03 - 04:12] You have to keep your team motivated, having massive workloads, having to improve yourself,
[04:12 - 04:17] motivate yourself, build out your own kind of career while doing this, and still trying
[04:17 - 04:24] to get that work-life balance to kind of, well, work, or at least just get some kind
[04:24 - 04:28] of normality into it.
[04:28 - 04:35] So Sarah, if you were to kind of like maybe put a few words on when you're now sitting
[04:35 - 04:42] at your consultancy and working with those legal teams, if you were to kind of like take
[04:42 - 04:48] a look at your own journey and think a little bit about what have I learned and what would
[04:48 - 04:54] I have done differently maybe, could you maybe just share some of those kind of thoughts?
[04:54 - 04:57] Yeah, sure.
[04:57 - 05:05] I think probably when looking back, one of the things that really hinders, hindered me
[05:05 - 05:13] as an in-house counsel, and I think it hinders a lot of in-house legal teams, is mindset.
[05:13 - 05:25] We are really, we lack the skills that it takes to really run an effective user-centric
[05:25 - 05:28] legal function that doesn't burn people out.
[05:28 - 05:36] Again, because the legal functions tend to be unfortunately cost-centered, that's just
[05:36 - 05:39] the reality of the way we are perceived.
[05:39 - 05:44] We obviously get buried in an amount of work, and we are pretty much helpless about it.
[05:44 - 05:46] We don't really know what to do.
[05:46 - 05:48] And I've been that, I've been there.
[05:48 - 05:54] I've been that in-house counsel that didn't have any budget, that had to fight for months
[05:54 - 05:59] if not years to get additional resources, et cetera.
[05:59 - 06:08] And in a way, it was a blessing in disguise because when you are, resources come with
[06:08 - 06:09] resourcefulness.
[06:09 - 06:14] So you really have to kind of find ways to build that foundation in order for the resources
[06:14 - 06:15] to come.
[06:15 - 06:20] So since I had no budget, I had to work with what I had, which was nothing.
[06:20 - 06:26] So I had to look inward and be like, okay, what is it that I can do better?
[06:26 - 06:34] What is it that I can, what area of the business can I start, build efficiencies into, et cetera?
[06:34 - 06:38] So it kind of made me think.
[06:38 - 06:46] And I think that a lot of where mindset comes a problem is that we tend to kind of think
[06:46 - 06:51] that we can't problem solve unless we have more budget, unless we have more bodies.
[06:51 - 06:58] So we lack this kind of resourcefulness and we don't take a step back and think, well,
[06:58 - 07:03] actually, let's look at what we have here.
[07:03 - 07:07] Does every contract, is every contract worth the same?
[07:07 - 07:08] Absolutely not.
[07:08 - 07:15] I always use the example of the office furniture agreement, like office furniture supply and
[07:15 - 07:19] low risk, zero value type of contracts.
[07:19 - 07:21] Why do we handle that as a legal function?
[07:21 - 07:25] So all of those kinds of questions, right?
[07:25 - 07:29] That we don't necessarily ask ourselves.
[07:29 - 07:36] So looking now from an outsider's perspective, it's obvious that the first change that we
[07:36 - 07:39] have to make is...