Episode 23: Leading Legal Operations - with Sean Houston of Heineken

Inspiring Legal

Today, we take another dive into Legal Operations. This time, we explore and discuss with Heineken's Legal Operations Manager, Sean Houston. We'll get into the how and why of legal ops with Sean, who also shares his journey from tech to ultimately joining Heineken in The Netherlands.

Thank you for listening to Inspiring Legal.

Full episode transcript:

Welcome to Inspiring Legal, the podcast for in-house legal. Get insights, learn from peers, life lessons from some of the most influential GCs.
If it's related to in-house legal, we cover it. For more inspiration, go to openli.com slash community. Welcome to another episode of Inspiring Legal.
My name is Stine and I'm your host. It's not going to be me talking today because I have a guest on the podcast that knows so much more about legal operations than I do. Sean is joining us and you'll hear from him in a second.
But before we get Sean's introduction, I can tell you already now, we're going to be talking about legal operations. More specifically, covering the baseline of what is legal operations. And then Sean is going to help us get smarter on what type of background
and skills should you have when working with legal operations. Welcome, Sean. Hi, Stine. Thanks for having me. Well, thank you for joining. We are super excited about you joining because, well, not only do you have
a lot of experience within legal operations, you have also really built that work and that topic for companies that are, well, in many views, big and doing a lot of great things and great work. So, Sean, before we start talking about legal operations,
could you maybe just tell people a little bit about who you are and your background and the company you work for and what you do? Sure. So my name is Sean Houston. I am legal operations manager here at Heineken. I'm a legal operations manager at Heineken.
I'm a legal operations manager at Heineken. I am legal operations manager here at Heineken, based at our headquarters in Amsterdam. I'm originally from the US, born and raised. I relocated to Ireland, was living in Ireland with my wife for about four years
and then relocated here to the Netherlands for this position with Heineken back in the summer of 2021. So coming up on two years as we record this today. It's been a very good experience so far.
And yeah, this legal ops journey, so to speak, in this field of legal ops is one that I'm particularly very interested in and happy to talk about with you today. So maybe before we start talking more specifically,
how did you get into legal operations and how did you end up in Europe? Yeah, so I think that'll probably be something, you know, over the course of this conversation, we probably come back to quite often, but there is no like very clear defined path that someone must take
to wind up in legal ops or, you know, wind up in a position like the one that I'm in here with Heineken. So for me personally, I didn't even know what legal ops was, you know, let's say five or six years ago.
So my background, I actually went to university for broadcast journalism and particularly was interested in that for sports journalism. So I was a play-by-play broadcaster for a few different baseball teams
in the US doing the play-by-play and commentating on the games as they took place. And I did that for a little over, right around six years and then decided that I didn't necessarily want to do that
for the rest of my life. I had enjoyed it a lot. It was a wonderful experience, but, you know, I guess I realized I preferred being a fan of sports more than anything else. And when you work in something, you can't really also be a fan of it. It's difficult.
So anyway, for various reasons, I moved away from the broadcast journalism side and I pivoted into working in software and technology. It was also something I'd always had an interest in and found very,
you know, let's say fun and inspiring. And I also saw, you know, a significant, let's say bright future in that industry because, you know, I don't think anything in terms of technology is going away. It's just going to continue to grow and grow and grow.
So anyway, I pivoted into that and did that for several years. First based in Austin, Texas, then with my wife, we moved to Ireland. I continued working for a few different companies there. And then most recently, before joining Heineken,
I was in at a base at a company, an Irish startup named Bright Flag. And Bright Flag is a legal tech startup. And so that was kind of my introduction into legal operations. So my role was in customer success for Bright Flag,
working with our customers across the globe to ensure that they were, you know, getting value out of the Bright Flag platform, using it as well as they could and, you know, kind of streamlining and standardizing their operations as it pertained to vendor management
and e-billing as much as they possibly could. So through that, I was working every single day with the legal operations teams and the legal departments at all of our customers, you know, very large global companies and also, you know, significantly smaller companies,
but always, you know, companies of a decent size, let's say, with a decent amount of external legal spend that we could kind of help them with at Bright Flag. And I became really interested in, you know, this legal operations field and kind of what it is and how all of the companies
that I had an opportunity to work with, how their teams were structured and what impacts they were making on the organization and, you know, started to peel back the curtain a little bit and learn a little bit more about it. And I realized, you know, how new of a function this was
for just about every company that, you know, I was talking to. I'd say more often than not, the legal operations person I was working with was the very first person in that seat at their company. Same is true for me here at Heineken.
And if it wasn't the first, it was maybe the second. You know, it's a new function with people who are getting a chance to create something kind of from the ground up. And that was initially what was so very interesting to me. You know, I don't have a legal background.
I didn't go to law school, but that's not a prerequisite or a requirement for this position, even though it's within legal affairs. And there was a lot of overlap between what I was doing in customer success to what, you know, a legal operations person
will do at most companies. Now, I do want to kind of not try and paint everything with, you know, one color brush here, right? Because I also totally recognize that what is legal operations here at Heineken, it does not necessarily mean that's exactly what that is
at company A, B, C, on down the line. It can change and it can vary quite a bit organization to organization. Now, I know, you know, you mentioned earlier what is legal operations. So I like to defer to the definition that CLOCK provides.
And for those who aren't familiar what CLOCK is, it's a large organization that is solely for – based on legal operations. So it's the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium. So they have a definition, which is legal ops describes a set
of business processes, activities, and the professionals who enable legal departments to serve their clients more effectively. And it continues on, but I think that first part is, you know, a pretty good summary. But if you even look at what I just said there, that's pretty va...