Jenny's Experience as Product Counsel Turned Legal Recruiter
Meet Jenny. Jenny joined FLEX as one of two Attorney Development Managers. She sources, vets, and recruits technology and life sciences lawyers, in addition to managing FLEX clients. As prior product counsel, Jenny's background is like the attorneys we recruit at FLEX. Read below for insights on her experience as a product counsel and her path to legal recruiting.
Q: What is a product counsel in your experience?
I think of product counsel as one-part legal advisor, one-part business partner, and one-part cat herder. Every company defines the role differently but at the core, I think it means being the single point of contact anyone associated with the product(s) you support can come to with their questions (whether they're legal in nature or not). Whether it’s engineering, product managers, marketers, sales associates, or anyone in between, they each have their own priorities and business objectives and your job is to help them accomplish those goals while effectively mitigating risk and escalating as needed along the way. Sometimes this includes negotiating and drafting contracts, sometimes it means providing written/verbal guidance from ideation through launch of new products and features, and sometimes it’s a hybrid of the two. Product counsel essentially act as the mini-GC of the products they support—their eyes touch pretty much everything from press releases to marketing content, data flows, technical engineering schematics, collaborations, and partnerships. Often, it’s the product counsel’s job to ensure the right people cross-functionally are looped in and weighing in as needed. While you’re not necessarily expected to be an expert in all areas of the law, the role has broadened over time and you’re always expected to “figure it out” – whether by consulting with in-house subject matter experts, outside counsel, or doing independent research.
Q: How did you become a product counsel?
Many product counsel come from a litigation background because they are often generalists who are adept at efficiently picking up new areas of the law and learning about new products and businesses. I was no different. I began my career as a litigator at Bingham McCutchen (which later became Morgan Lewis) working on everything from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill case to water rights cases. I happened to be assigned a Google antitrust case during my fourth year as an associate and this opened the door to a secondment with the Google antitrust team. While I was part of a specialist team, I regularly worked hand in hand with product counsel to provide guidance on risk and product development to various in-house teams during my two-year secondment. Going in-house in tech has become increasingly difficult over the years, and having the opportunity to work in-house via secondment was critical to my route to full-time employment as a product counsel. A Google recruiter reached out to me about an open product role weeks after my secondment ended, and I joined Google as a full-time product counsel a couple of months later.
Q: How has your career experience helped you as an attorney recruiter at FLEX?
There’s only so much you can learn from a resume. While solid credentials are always a bonus, when I look for product candidates, I lean heavily into our discussion to try and get a good sense for how agile they are, how well they cope with ambiguity, how good their problem solving and communication skills are. A firm grasp of core legal issues is imperative, but based on my own experience I believe these soft skills are what separate good lawyers from great lawyers when it comes to product counseling. When talking to prospective candidates I look for concrete examples and the ability to articulate with clarity what that attorney’s role was specifically with respect to the accomplishments on their resume. While many product counsel do still come from a litigation background, I don’t think it’s a necessity. At Google I saw everyone from specialists (like antitrust counsel) to commercial counsel and litigators successfully become product counsel. It's easy to have a bias for lawyers that have a similar trajectory to your own, but there's no "right" way to become a product counsel. As long as I see potential in the lawyers I'm speaking with, I would consider them for a product counsel role. Otherwise, we'd miss out on fantastic candidates because we were adhering to arbitrary criteria -- which doesn't help our clients or our lawyers.