Allison Brecher
General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Vestwell
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Allison Brecher, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer of growing fintech startup and digital retirement platform Vestwell, shares her journey from journalism to the law, and from law practice to in-house. She provides insights into how to be a general counsel who is proactive and integrated into the business, and the opportunity to build a department and company culture from the ground up at Vestwell.
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About Allison Brecher:
Allison Brecher, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer of Vestwell, brings over 15 years of legal and regulatory experience to the company, having handled high profile and complex litigation involving employee benefits, ERISA, regulatory matters, data privacy, and electronic discovery. Previously, Allison was Senior Assistant General Counsel and Director of Information Management at Marsh & McLennan Companies. Prior to that, she handled ERISA, securities, and directors and officers claims for AIG.
Legal Journey
I'm pleased to have joined the show, Allison Brecher, who is the General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Vestwell. Welcome, Allison.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for joining this and being part of the collection of amazing women lawyers and leaders that we've had on the show. I'm interested in having you add to the insights from women leaders in-house and also talk about some different parts of your journey. I think we'll start at least with the law part, which is what made you think you wanted to be a lawyer. What inspired you to go to law school, to begin with?
Thanks again for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. I speak for Vestwell when I say how honored we are to be in the great company of many other amazing women trailblazers in our industry. I went to law school for reasons that are probably not ones that you may have read of from some of your other guests before. I went to law school with the idea of not being a practicing attorney, but going into journalism. That was something that I did. I started in college and interned at the local NBC affiliate near my college, near my undergrad. When I was in law school, I didn't work at a law firm like many other people did. I worked at Fox News. this was to date myself, during the time when the OJ Simpson trial was the headlines everywhere and a lot of news stations had a legal reporter. It was when cable news networks were developing like CNBC and Fox News. Stations that we take for granted nowadays, didn't exist back then.
Court TV was just starting, which I don't even think exists anymore. That was the path that I was pursuing. I was on the fence about even going to law school. At the same time, I applied to law school, I also applied to graduate school for a Master's degree in Broadcast Journalism. With the advice of many different mentors that I had had over the years, I realized that a master's in journalism was not going to add too much value to my career and that I'd be much more valuable with a more specialized degree, like a law degree. I have a family in Chicago. I still love Chicago. It is a second home to me. That's where I ended up going to law school. That's where I was going to go to graduate school too. I already had Chicago on my mind and ended up going to law school there as well.
Stacy Horth-Neubert who now runs one of our legal nonprofits here in Los Angeles worked at Court TV before she went to law school and while she was going to law school. There's one other person I've heard who has around the same timeframe in terms of the journalistic interest being intertwined with the law.
Like many things in life, sometimes you're at the right place at the right time. For me, that was definitely true because like I said, the OJ Simpson trial was on that was like the headline story of every single evening news and morning news show through that there was an interest in legal stories. Chicago, like any other major metropolitan area, has no shortage of criminal newsworthy stories and whatnot. That's what I did. I worked on the morning news show from 5:00 AM to 9:00 AM for my 2nd and 3rd year of law school. You can imagine what my doorman must have been thinking as he saw me reading out of the building at 4:00 in the morning wearing reporter-type clothes and coming home at 9:30 after the show ended, changing into whatever I'd wear to law school. You get the idea, but I thought it was like some woman of the night or something.
That's hard to do that at the same time.
It was a lot to juggle, but when you're in law school, you feel like you have endless energy and endless time for some of these things. That's what I did. I've reported on local trials of interest for a period of time. I was like the person on the street with the microphone on Michigan Avenue stopping people and, “What do you think about this, that?” and the other question, then working with the producers to edit that down and whatnot. What I realized is that a lot of the skills that you learn as a reporter are very transferrable to the practice of law, especially being a litigator and in-house counsel too, in that you're a storyteller.
You have to be able to summarize your story into whatever the time package was for the Brave News show 1, 1.5, or 4 minutes, or whatever it is. You do the same thing. I do the same thing every single day when I have to address my whole company. I don't want to hear myself babbling for sure. It's a skill that you learn how to work on a deadline, how to tell a story on a deadline and get to the key points. It carries over to a lot of different things.
How did you approach even some of your law school studies?
Totally. As a litigator, I think when you do your first trial, it's eye-opening to how you see the forest from the trees and how you approach cases. It informed everything I did during law school and while practicing for sure. It still does all these years later.
When you graduated, did you carry on with journalism or did you go into practice?
I had a very difficult choice to make because when you go down the pathway of broadcast journalism, what you're saying is, “I'm willing to sacrifice my family, my relationships, and all of that for my job.”
You move everywhere too usually.
As you move to different markets, you are usually given one-year contracts. The news doesn't stop when it's your birthday, your spouse's birthday, or your children's birthday. You better be sure that that's the pathway that you want. That was all I had known during law school. I took the bar exam and started working at a law firm as a litigation attorney in the litigation department of a larger firm. I got a ton of courtroom experience and I loved it. I love the idea of putting together a defense, which is what I did. I love that whole idea of putting those little pieces together and telling the story right to the jury. I could do all that without sacrificing my personal life. I made that choice. I suppose I could say facetiously never let my husband forget about that or my kids. I wouldn't have had the family that I have nowadays had I made a different choice for sure.
That's helpful to have a view outside of the particular profession because most law students or lawyers would say, “Being a lawyer is demanding,” but it's a different kind of demanding, thinking about those larger questions, at least you have more agency about where you go and some say about when those hours are instead of always responding to something external.
Not I was forecasting like the #MeTooMovements, but I mean, if you want to take a bigger picture, look at the broadcast journalism industry, look what happens to women sometimes when they get older or they're put in very difficult positions, which could happen at any workplace, but in the media, it's that much more magnified. I wasn't thinking of that necessarily when I made the choice, but it served as a validating factor of the decision that I did make back when I was in.
It seems like things are maybe appropriate at different times. I had one of our guests on a previous program said something to me that made me think, “Things evolve. Whatever your purpose is or what you think you are meant to be doing that can evolve over your lifetime, as circumstances change, as your skills change, not set,” even we feel that way sometimes, I think like, “I have to make this choice and it can never be moved.”
I tell this to my children all the time, “Life doesn't have to be linear.” I've seen that play out with myself many times. When you make a choice, it doesn't have to be final. I have to be filled with pressure. You can always have what we now call the side hustle back in the day, maybe it was called a hobby or a part-time job or something you can still fulfill those areas of your life and use that other part of your brain that can help make your main job that much more efficient, creative and fulfilling.
You get different skills from it, like you said, the storytelling skills, it's a different way of doing that from journalism but you can see the connection between that and the storytelling you're doing as a lawyer, but that's in different forms, it gives you more skills.
It's something that is in-house counsel. We're largely speaking to an audience of non-lawyers, and not only an audience of non-lawyers, but an audience of engineers, operations people, client service people, and teams that are stealing with sales and looking at legal through a different lens that they use in their day-to-day lives. Those are all the internal stakeholders that you need to make sure that you're sending the right message to them and speaking their language, much like I think my company tries to do with our own customers, meeting them where they are. That's one of those skills that you develop as in-house counsel through experience on the job.
You've also been in different settings in-house. I'm hesitant to say startup now, but I guess it still is, although I think it's a little bit more established. Prior to that, you were part of a larger in-house organization and company.
I spent about fourteen years, in the legal department at Marsh McLennan. I loved it. I met amazing attorneys there. I felt lucky to be part of such a great team and learned a lot. I had such an incredible experience dealing with all aspects of regulatory matters, litigation, defense, and then the advice and counsel, which like, I love the most, answering the phone of a consultant who was concerned that they made a mistake on something. To be helping them, coaching them through it, and navigating that and they're all nervous about, “I'm not going to lose my job,” whatever it is and I said, “At the end of the day, what's going to come out of this is that you're going to become a better actuary or a better consultant,” or whatever it is.
It's intimidating. To be put in that position, you're almost like part therapist. I was very lucky to be in that position. Many years ago, I got a call from a recruiter about Vestwell. I've always wanted to be in starting something. As a lawyer, we don't often get to point to or to my children. We don't often get to point to something and say, “I made that.” It was an incredible opportunity. I treasure every day, every minute that I'm with such an amazing company and with such a fantastic mission to help the greater good.
That's another example of an evolution over your career, The difference between being in-house in different kinds of settings and different companies. I think there's a point at which, you want to be able to start something or do something where you're building or somewhere where you want a new challenge to some degree.
As lawyers, in law school, I won't say pigeonholed, but I think lawyers and new law grads get into this mindset that there has to be this very defined pathway. You're an associate, then you're in a partner, then you might go in-house, maybe you go to the government, maybe you become part of the firm. It's all very laid out. Your swim lane is defined and you're either an M&A attorney, you're a corporate attorney, you're a litigation lawyer, or whatever it is. You have your swim lane all nice and neatly mapped out for you.
When you're in a startup like our CEO when I met with him the very first day, he said, “I water the plants.” He meant that literally, but I think he also meant it figuratively, that there is no swimming and you do whatever you know you need to do, and you figure it out. Lawyers are not used to necessarily figuring it out on their own. I'm not saying they can't. I mean that's not the way that most lawyers are trained.
That's not our training usually. We assess risks. We look for where things could go wrong. There's a more cautious approach that I think we're trained to have.
When I joined Vestwell, I was employee number around 25 or so, the first in-house attorney, still the only in-house counsel and dealing with a highly regulated business. There was no roadmap to follow. We're used to researching the precedent and the regulatory guidance and whatever. At the end of the day, what moves the needle on risk management is trying to make the best decision that you can with the information and resources that are available to you at the time and you will create your roadmap of maturity and you'll be involved.
Just trying to make the best decision that you can with the information and resources that are available to you at the time will create your roadmap of maturity.
You may not do things perfectly on day one, you probably won't, but when you act in good faith and set chart that course of what your compliance activities will look like over the next 3 years, 5 years, etc., I don't think anybody could disagree with that. How could you possibly take issue with the firm that's trying to do the right thing? You may not have the resources on day one to do that.
There's so much of a challenge on the business side for a startup as well. There's a lot of things going on. You have that shared experience with the rest of the company.
It's an excellent point because as an in-house counsel at a startup, you are as much a business person as you are an attorney, at least at some stages. Sometimes you have to wear your lawyer hat a bit more than the business hat and sometimes vice versa, but it's exciting to be part of knowing what my CEO's priorities are, knowing what the sales team wants to accomplish and what their metrics and knowing what the product team has on their roadmap.
All of those things that we talk about, inform my priorities and what I focus on and where I spend my time, and the sort of thing where I tell my team to spend their time as well. It's a completely different dynamic. Every day is different. At the end of the day, we're all rowing in the same direction because we're all trying to help the ultimate end user, which in our case, the the American worker, right? And helping them save for retirement and life's milestones and, and doing it in a way that they never had access to before.
Vestwell
Tell me about that. Tell me about Vestwell, what you're doing, and how that's different.
I've spent my whole career 27 years and 20 years prior to becoming Vestwell in the retirement space. Small businesses and medium-sized businesses when they want to offer retirement plan benefits to their employees for a retention tool or whatever it is there were a lot of players involved. There's the law firm to write plan documents. There's the record keeper to administer the plan, an investment manager to select the mutual funds or ETFs or whatever it is, and other players as well. They all take a piece of the pie.
By the time all is said and done, your retirement plan needs to return 4% or 5% or more just to get ahead. When you add that on top of the fiduciary responsibilities it becomes very intimidating to the small business owner. This is our neighborhood dry cleaner, the hair salon, medical practice, and that kind of thing. That's who we're talking about here. They don't always have a dedicated HR department and they're running a business. They don't have the time or interest probably to learn about a 401(k) plan and ERISA and all that stuff. They've historically been underserved or overcharged or both, or not even opted into sponsoring a 401(k) plan altogether. Thereby, their employees have been deprived of an opportunity.
It makes it to be competitive with other employers, it's good to have that to attract talent.
The employees lose out on the most tax-efficient way to save for retirement in this country. It's a lose-lose proposition. What Vestwell does is we build everything online, and we are a full turnkey platform so that if you're a small, medium-sized, or whatever size business owner, you tell us who your payroll company is and choose from some various plan features that we explained to you in a very layperson friendly way. Within a couple of weeks, you're up and running and you're able to offer your employees the most tax-efficient, effective vehicle that they could use to save for retirement. While you're at it, we also offer add-on services, college savings plans, and student loan payment solutions so that you don't have to choose between paying off your student loan debt for you, your spouse, or your dependent and saving for your own retirement.
How incredible is that? Starting an emergency savings account with higher interest rates than you can probably get at your neighborhood bank. All of those things work in tandem with each other. Our platform is holistic. That's why our CEO called it Vestwell because it was meant to be a total financial wellness solution with a one-stop shop. You don't have to log in to eighteen different systems to be able to understand where you are in your financial journey.
We map that out for you in an easy-to-use framework. That's the employee side of things. For the employer side of things, they delegate all of the heavy lifting to us. We are the ones that integrate with the payroll system you have. Before telling us who your payroll provider is, we give you some easy-to-follow instructions about how to set up your payroll file to be compatible with the features that you selected, and we're off to the races. We handle pretty much all the compliance testing, the tax filings, and all of those other things that previously were left to the business owner. We take that on for you.
Comparison Between Different In-House Experiences
What's similar and what's different between being in-house with a larger established company with many people in-house department and being in the situation you're in now where you get to grow the department and with a more nimble, newer company? What's different about that? What is similar in terms of the role of an in-house counsel or general counsel with either of those kinds of companies?
There are a lot more similarities than I saw there.
That's what I think. I think people think about differences, but I think the advising role that you have across those settings, there are a lot more similarities.
I'll start off by saying I have been in a very unusual position and this is all the great thinking of my CEO and our board. It's not often that a seed-stage company, does not even they hire a general counsel. That is a once-in-a-lifetime type of opportunity It speaks volumes about my CEO, our board, and where their compass was and is, the emphasis that they put on wanting to do things the right way by bringing in someone like me very early on.
Especially in the business, you want to set up a good foundation and framework for everything that you're doing.
I wanted to do it the right way. We're in a highly regulated business and it's a business that's based on trust. We're not the custodian of people's assets, but we are in that position of managing them. We hold the keys to it. It is very important obviously you establish with internally and externally. How it's different is I walked into a situation where we had zero templates, procedures, or even a baseline education across the company about ERISA, the Investment Advisors Act, and all the different roles and whatnot that apply to our business. That was my starting point. In those early days, it was awesome. I led training every single month about a discreet area of record keeping that aligned to the time of the year that we were in or whatever.
You would think that only the client-facing people employees would attend those kinds of trainings and maybe the engineers wouldn't be interested. We had everybody there. The whole company used to come to this training. I wasn't giving away anything for free. We were a scrappy newbie in the industry, but you would have our CTO and the entire product team sitting in the front row as eager to learn about this, what does that tell you about where the engineers and everyone wanted to understand what they were doing? On some level, you need to have that understanding of like, “Who is your end user? What are the rules that apply?”As we've become more and more mature and built out those systems, a lot of what I do is very similar to what I did at a larger company.
It's about risk management advice and counsel. In my case, it's also taking that next step so that if there's something that went wrong because a procedure wasn't as clear as it could be, or maybe a team needed some enhanced training or whatever the case might be, that's always been my work ethic is like, I don't stop when just because you've been able to resolve a situation. To me, that's not closure. Closure happens when you then take a step back, look at the root cause, do a postmortem, and understand teams that are on the front lines, like, “How is this working?”
If you have a procedure that's not being followed, it's worse in many ways than not having a procedure at all. Connecting those dots is a lot of what I do. It's how I think that's always how I've been even at a larger company too, but it's more acute when you're at a FinTech company like ours I consider us not much a startup anymore, but a scale-up, finding out how people can scale to support our growing platform is extremely rewarding knowing the direct impact that my team makes on the end user every single day is a lot of fun at the same time.
The way you describe it is a much more holistic view of what a lawyer's role is in-house setting in particular. In general, you want to make sure that the processes are working, and that you solve the root cause of things, which makes it easier for everyone, even everyone who isn't even in the legal department in terms of how things function. It helps streamline everything in the company overall.
That speaks to a lot of how we have structured ourselves. Legal has a seat at that table for product releases. I review Figma boards so that I see the wording that our end users see. At a large company, you don't get that. As a litigation attorney, I would've been brought in five years after the mistake happened. There's no opportunity to have taken the lessons learned and prevented it from happening again because this was already five years later or whatever it was. Here at Vestwell, one of the most fun parts of my job is being a part of the actual product design. It is amazing. I'm lucky to have that. I think our end users are lucky because compliance was built into our features from day one.
It wasn't an afterthought. Same thing with security. In a lot of traditional financial services firms, it wasn't necessarily designed with security in mind ours was. We've taken steps even before the day that we launched and went live with our platform to think about how are we protecting the social security numbers that we are ingesting from payroll files, and how are we masking that from people who don't need to know it as part of their jobs and thinking about all those things. When a mistake does happen, our product team, our head of product, and our head of engineering should know when there's been a failure in testing or some deficiency so that they can take steps. Having all of these parts play out and interrelate at every single stage of our company is like a real gift.
It's not something that everybody thinks about, but it's something I think about all the time. I think our product has been a lot better for our end users. I know it has been a lot better for it because we've been able to take lessons learned, not just that happened that, that were things I worked on in a prior life. but things that like our peer companies might be struggling with, that you read about in the news, we're able to take that and say, listen, we're going to think about it differently and we're going to put in guardrails and procedures not to get ourselves into that kins of situation.
As you were saying, like a root cause and even more than being preventive about things and proactive about how you do.
I do that all the time. I read the SEC Risk Alerts. I read all the the litigation in our field and regulatory guidance, and we're constantly thinking about the better way. How do we operate a platform when you have to deliver notices electronically, for example? How are we going to collect people's email addresses and cell phone numbers so that we can tell them if there's been a distribution or a change in their account profile, how can we make sure that they know about that so that they can tell us if it's not something that they recognize and take better controls on security and not get into the situation that a lot of other companies in our space find themselves in, as an example?
Certainly some companies will have, let's say, a product council embedded in new products within their company, but this is much more big picture view of that.
I love the fact that I literally sit next to our CFO, my chief technology officer and many days sits right outside where I sit. You get the idea like we are literally and figuratively next to each other all the time at every stage. The same thing with sales. That way the messaging about the product feature or the limitations or you know, where our responsibility begins and ends, it's all connected with sales so that you have consistent messaging out there and whatnot. It's a great thing, and I'm lucky to have been part of this since like day one because it's become part of the culture of the company is getting legal and compliance into everything that we do on some level.
What a neat challenge and what a neat opportunity.
I know how rare it is, and I know how luck I am.
Words Of Advice
What kind of advice would you give to somebody who's considering going in-house in terms of what they should think about before they make that decision or what kind of skills or training is good before
I have these conversations all the time. We have law students who intern and extern with us. We try to the extent we can to, you know, give those opportunities to law students who may not have always had those opportunities given to them so that we can help. I enjoy helping give a leg up to the next generation of attorneys. What I tell them all the time is being in-house is what I was saying before, it's about wearing many different hats at some and being mindful that like unlike at a law firm where your stakeholder is your supervising partner, I have about 50 different stakeholders I have.
Being in-house is about wearing many different hats.
I've got my board of directors, my CEO and my peers on my executive team, but in my minds, I have 450 stakeholders, which are our employees. I need be there to support all of them and how do you do that in a scalable, efficient way that fills the company's mission while also meeting the metrics and the expectations that everybody sets for you? It's definitely not for everyone, for sure, but if you are a person that loves like advice and counsel, while at the same time helping solve problems and prevent problems, I think it's a fantastic role for people, for attorneys.
Your description of the multiple stakeholders that you have to be thinking about all the time at different levels and what you're doing, that's a good point in terms of the difference.
They all see risk in a different way, all look at legal through a different lens and like I was saying before, like their priorities inform my priorities, it works both ways. If you are the lawyer who enjoys working with non-lawyers and counseling on HR issues and, and you understand how to pivot as well, that's a lot of what happens to me is things come up, you can't predict it, and you have to be a super organized, diligent time manager and understand how to prioritize and mind your time. When something might not be appropriate for legal and business decisions, a risk-based decision or whatever it is that someone needs to make, and how do you empower that person to make the best decision for the company is an important skill for the role as well.
This is probably more true for a more spread out or larger organization, but Lisa Lang, who's been the general counsel for a lot of university systems, told me that she also finds her role because she hears from many different stakeholders, even if it isn't a legal problem, should say, “This other person over here or this other department is dealing with this issue, as well from a different perspective. you might connect with each other so you can talk about how that all fits together.”
Legal is in an interesting spot and a rare one. it's one of the few like corporate functions that has a bird's eye view on some level to every single role in the department. Finance is very similar. HR works like that, but oftentimes, the product team, as an example they may not have the bird's eye view that I get we're able to connect those dots and then also be able to say, “Here's what you might want to keep in mind. The Department of Labor is about to issue guidance on something. We may need to rethink how we're deploying emergency savings accounts,” or whatever the news of the day is. We can help them plan because then that might mean that Squad A defers a little bit on releasing a certain product feature and doesn't start with the coding.
Legal is in an interesting spot and a rare one. It has a bird's eye view on some level of every single role in the department.
It has a real practical impact on how the company is functioning and it isn't just what regulations apply to what I'm doing.
We can help the business become more efficient. I know that sometimes legal and other functions are always thought of as a cost center. Some think of it that way at all. I think of us as an efficiency center because one of the things that we can do if you're mindful of all of the different stakeholders is like legal can be help you move the needle on saving costs because the reality is, is that if you have a settlement payment or something and you're operating on a 20% margin, it's going to cost $5 of revenue to replace every dollar that goes out the door, plus the loss of the client and loss productivity and whatnot legal can step in more often than not.
If we know about a situation, we can help you resolve it, and there's always a solution. The earlier you get in and can help clients or resolve the situation, but we can help the company become more efficient and save money that way. We can also help with product, engineering and whatnot. We can say to them, “You should not have this as your roadmap today. The rules are about to change in January,” or whatever the case may be, likewise with HR, there's a huge role with legal and finance that we can help in many different ways, make things more efficient and be a little bit scrappy. the lesson that I've learned for sure in the very earliest days of the company is like, “How do you operate in a highly regulated business with much at stake as a VC-backed firm with super high expectations with no budget?”
“How do you do that? Where do you find resources to help you for free, no cost or whatever?” There were a lot of friends that I leaned on that my husband's firm, Jackson Lewis, I mean, they did a phenomenal job helping me with, like setting up a lot of these employment fundamentals. A lot of outside counsel who I've worked with for many years like Goodwin Procter and other firms, Davis Polk. They came in to help when we were nothing. We were a little newbie on the block and here we are now. They're all part of that team forming your arsenal of trusted outside counsel and getting them embedded in your business has been a successful strategy for any new general counsel.
I was going to ask about that from the in-house advice, but also for those who are outside counsel, what tips or advice you would give them. I think that's a great example of building, bringing them into the fold and building a team.
I get asked that question a lot. I'm sure you ask your guests a lot, and one of the things that worked out, I think so well for me is in the early days of Vestwell, we didn't have the budget to hire some big fancy law firm, but we still needed trusted advisors. I'd like to tell this story because I think it's played such a pivotal role in the success of our company. Back when I was scouting out like who was going to be in our go-to outside counsel on different subject areas, a friend of mine who I used to work with introduced me to a woman-owned firm called Cohen & Buckmann.
They were forming themselves. They were two partners from Sullivan & Cromwell spun off, and started their own firm in like an ERISA boutique. My people felt very seen. We did a product demo for them, explaining what we were trying to do. We weren't in any crisis. This was like a friendly get to know-you was sitting in my office, like watching a platform demo. They loved what we were doing, and were supportive of us that their own 401(k) plan became one of our first clients, as an example.
That was just icing on the cake. What I think is helpful to do is like get your outside counsel in to learn your business when you're not in crisis mode because now when I'm able to do with them all these years later is I can call any of those attorneys and say, “I'm having a question on X.” They'll know exactly what I'm talking about, both because they seen the platform and our product as a client, but also as outside counsel. That was coincidental. You're able to get that like, great piece of advice because a lot of times outside counsel, they don't know what you're doing. You're a number to them to some level. I think it's like wonderful time well spent and it sets you up for someone who can give you a second set of eyes on something, I call outside, my go-to people all the time, wanting to get a second set of eyes on something.
Get your outside counsel in to learn your business when you're not in crisis mode.
I think that's been like tremendously useful to spend that hour. When you're not in crisis mode, have them over. Let them meet your CTO, your head of product or your CEO so that they know the players and they know the pressures so that when and if a crisis does develop, you don't have to worry about like educating them on like, “Let's start from this beginning of here's what we do.” 0They're already coming in with that background knowledge, which is cool.
It also helps them give better advice because they can see beyond like the particular legal issue and go, “That's important for whatever purpose.”
I thought about A, B and C, which maybe I didn't think about, but they're seeing it through the lens of their other clients or the industry, then I would say my next piece of advice is your networking groups, there's a networking group called TechGC, which is a nation by a network of general councils at technology companies. I didn't even know that this existed. When I started, I was like, “I can't be the only one struggling with wanting to find a template for a great compliance manual, a vacation policy or whatever it was.” Somehow, I got connected to TechGC, and it's a lifeline. I can't explain it any better than that. It's the most incredible organization of people like me, constantly bouncing ideas off each other as a sounding board to know that you're on the right path and getting a little pulse check and a sanity check on maybe some nuanced issue you're dealing with. UIt's fantastic.
That's great when you can have appear in the same position as you to say, “Are you dealing with this too?”
When some new regulation comes out that like the whole industry is struggling with, it's helpful to know what your peers are doing and it helps you establish good faith, “Should a regulatory matter come up?” It is also as I said. It helps you know that you're on the right track and sometimes you can't even put a price tag on that.
The importance of having that community building in one way or another. That's what you both of go to, whether it's community building in your team, including outside council, or whether you're talking about community building amongst your peers.
that's a lot of what we do. That sums up quite nicely. That's how my role was.
Lightning Round Questions
Thank you so much for talking about your path, especially you, you've got some interesting insights into the in-house council and general council role, and your view of it and your ability to execute that in the space that you're in now is remarkable. I can see why you took that opportunity when it came along. Usually, I conclude with a few lightning-round questions, I'm going to ask you a few of those. The first question is, what talent would you most like to have, but don't?
Predicting the future. We're in a time of such uncertainty. I can't help but think about the election right around the corner. There's a lot of legislation and whatnot happening in my space that I'm constantly on the lookout for. That's a lame answer, I know. That is my superpower that I'd love to have right now is like, “How are these things going to play out?”
It seems, particularly helpful at this point in time. A lot of things in the air and entropy and stuff like that. That's for sure. Who is your hero in real life?
I'd want to say a few people. I know it’s corny to say that, but my CEO and his wife. His wife is an entrepreneur. I've never been around entrepreneurs until I was around Aaron and his wife. I read a quote from the actress, Lily Tomlin, it was on a coffee mug that I saw in a store. it said, “Have you ever looked up and wondered why someone didn't solve a problem and wish that you could?” I like being around people who solve problems. They go the next step and they are the solution that everybody else wants to see. I love that about where I work and working with the two of them.
I'm fascinated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her whole history. I love everything about her whole story and how she navigated law school, having a one-year-old, I still don't understand that, but love her whole story maybe because both of my children are also at Cornell and one of them is in Ruth Bader Ginsburg sorority that she was in there. I'm a history buff. I love that I love her whole story and what the path that she blazed for for other women. I'd say those.
For what in life do you feel most grateful?
My family, my husband, my children. They completely support what I do. My job is very demanding. You have to be thankful for your family because my job is my third child in many ways. Sometimes my third child has to take priority, and I've never missed a school assembly. I've never missed a parent-teacher conference, nothing. That's because I have such a supportive company here. Without the support of your family, you who you do everything for. I’m super grateful for them. I know that these aren't probably the most creative answers, but they come from the heart.
It shows that you have a good heart. Last question. What is your motto, if you have one?
I wrote a screensaver for this. No joke. We launched screensavers. I figured let's use the real estate of our laptop screens effectively, cascade messaging about ethics, integrity, legal, and compliance. I wrote on. We love pets at Vestwell. We love dogs, cats, rabbits, gerbils, whatever it is. We have a Slack channel devoted to our photos of our pets. I love the quote and, I have it on a mug myself, “Be the person your dog thinks you are.” I love dogs. I am a total dog person. If my dog could talk, I would love that too. It speaks a lot about how we, on our management team, in the very early days of my company, what we all wanted from our company.
We wanted to have the company that we wished we had when we were starting out in our careers. One that allowed flexibility, autonomy, being your best self and being the role model for everybody else. When you're a dog, you're empathetic, a listener, but also a doer. There are lots of things that my dogs embody. They are happy to see you, but you're trusted and loyal. To me, that's a real motto that I try to live by.
That's great. I relate to that as a dog person as well. I feel that one. Allison, thank you so much for joining the show, chatting with me and sharing your insights with some of our newer members of the legal profession.
Thank you again for having me. I'm privileged and honored to be a part of it.
Thank you so much.