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Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. The interview is part of our AccelPro Career Tools series, where we explore topics including client relationship management and wellness.
Our host is internationally recognized journalist, author and NPR host Celeste Headlee. Today we talk about making career transitions that are right for you, with guest Erika Buell.
Buell is a Founder and Startup Legal Advisor at Buell Law, PLLC and a former professor and director of the Law and Entrepreneurship program at Duke University. Over the course of her very varied career, Erika has worked in big law, as an in-house attorney, a tech startup consultant and a stay at home parent. We talk about how to use your instincts to find a job and a team that provide you purpose and fulfillment without burning out.
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Interview References:
Erika Buell’s LinkedIn profile.
16:30 | Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc., 88 F. Supp. 2d 116 (S.D.N.Y. 1999).
20:37 | Cameron, J. (1992). The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path To Higher Creativity. New York, NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
TRANSCRIPT
Celeste Headlee, Host: Could you give us the elevator pitch on Erika's career?
Erika Buell: I didn't start out intending to have a varied career. So, the elevator pitch is: I've done big law, I've done in-house-counsel at a large company, I've done in-house-counsel at a startup, and then I've done academia.
CH: In your work with entrepreneurs, that’s a different challenge each time. When you're dealing with startups, that's different every time you do it.
EB: Yes and no. I think it's different and exciting in that you're dealing with entrepreneurs who might have a different vision or a different plan they want to execute. But in terms of the legal aspects of it, there are some hardcore fundamentals for what startup companies need to do from a legal perspective.
When I say startups here, I should clarify that I'm talking mostly about the kind of Silicon Valley high growth model type of company. There are some clear legal principles that those companies should all know about. So, it's similar in that way, but, as with counseling and advising, it's always dynamic and interesting in getting to know the founders and what their vision is and what goals they want to achieve.
CH: Let's get into these transitions that you've made. How did you know when it was time to make a transition?
EB: I've made several transitions in part because of my family circumstances. One of the things that's unfortunate when we talk about career is I think we tend to talk about it in a vacuum and don't necessarily bring in the fact that I had just had a child, or my parent was sick and needed care, or we had to move. Your career has to work with your lifestyle.
CH: Is there a guide for someone who might be thinking about a transition? What are the questions they should be asking themselves?
EB: I'll reflect on my most recent transition. After I was in-house-counsel for a startup company, I had just finished the acquisition, we sold the company and that was a very intense time. Super happy, but also just intense. I picked my head up and spoke with the Dean of Duke Law School.
He said, we're starting a Law and Entrepreneurship program. Would you like to come teach? I think for me there, I made that transition and I jumped at the chance to start teaching because I had a “why.” I had a burning thing that was like, oh my gosh, if I could teach what I wish someone had taught me, that would feel really valuable. So, I had a “why” really pulling me into that position.
Then contrast that with, 13 years later, I started as an adjunct at Duke Law, and I started teaching, what I wish someone had taught me. I ended up taking on an administrative role as director of the Law and Entrepreneurship Program and, 13 years later, I picked my head up and realized, I've taught what I wish someone had taught me. I felt like I also accepted the Law and Entrepreneurship Directorship because I wanted to be a different face for startups. Startups are typically young white dudes and I think this is an incredibly fun area of practice and so I wanted to be super inclusive. That was my “why” there.
CH: Before you made the transition from law to academia, you had decided to make a few other transitions, things like moving from working in big law, to becoming in-house-counsel. What could have made those transitions easier? What would you tell somebody else to make them better prepared for a transition like that?
EB: I wish I had known to trust your sense of who you are and what you love. I left big law ultimately because of a move, and then I was looking at in-house-counsel and what I trusted my gut on with that is that I love business. I love understanding why businesses are trying to do what they're trying to do and how they function.
I explored in-house and what I loved about in-house was you have one client, as opposed to several, and you are deeply involved in the business. I had a role of negotiating software licenses for a division of a very large company, but it was pretty entrepreneurial. It didn't have a lot of bureaucracy and I loved my team. I loved the people that I worked with. Knowing myself, I know that I really care about the people that I work with. If I'm working with people that I don't really enjoy, that's going to be a lot harder. So, I jumped at the opportunity to try something different. you don't have the diversity of clients, but you have a diversity of matters when you're in house.
You’re more aligned with the business, and you don't have the billable hour. Many lawyers bill in six-minute increments and I found, especially after having been in big law where I was drinking from a fire hose, I graduated into a crazy economy. It was the.dot-com, boom, slash, bubble, and drinking from a fire hose, just working like a dog, but my brain got to the point where I could tell when six minutes had passed. That's not particularly healthy.
CH: I want to talk about not just easing transitions, in your job title, but also easing some of the transitions that have occurred in the industry. You have all this experience with telecommuting, and I wonder if you have advice for other people who are finding this difficult, especially in this age of burnout that is so rife in the legal industry, other industries as well, but lawyers are burnt and so many people do this wrong. They aren't working from home. They're living at work. What advice do you have?
EB: Just for a little bit of context, my family and I moved to St. Louis, for my husband's job. I interviewed with a lot of places there, law firms, in-house-counsel positions, and nothing felt right. Granted, this was a long time ago, so I just think there wasn't a big entrepreneurial community in St. Louis, and I've heard that's changed. I ended up sitting in my home office in St. Louis advising a company that was in Florida, it was a startup, largely on Delaware law. I would fly down probably once a quarter and that was amazing.
It gave me an opportunity to have an entrepreneurial practice, to work with a team that I loved. It was also nice that I could work on my PJs, like we all learned in the pandemic. What is important though is having boundaries.
It's great not to have that commute, but that commute also is a way that we can separate from when we're in our work mode versus when we're in our home mode. Thinking about your own boundaries is really important. And having the time that you devote to your work can be really intense. So, I use the Pomodoro method to try to be as focused with the work when I'm doing work and to try to step back when I'm not. And I'm not going to say that it's easy. We're in an attention economy. Our devices are trying to pull us to keep scrolling
When I picked my head up after the pandemic and realized that I wasn't super happy with being a law professor, which sounds crazy. I had clinical tenure, which everybody wants. That's the other lesson. Just because everybody wants it doesn't mean you want it.
And I love my colleagues. And because I was adjunct to a clinical tenured professor, I didn't necessarily fit in any one slice of academia. Academia has a lot of hierarchy, which was great because then I could just float all around and talk to everybody and it was super fun but that also meant that I didn't have a team. I started teaching Negotiation because there was a team of people who taught that, and I wanted that experience.
I started because I had a “why” of teaching what I wish someone taught me, I did that for over a decade, had a “why” of wanting to increase the inclusion in startup law and business law in general and then I picked my head up and I was like, oh I'm a person who loves startups and trying things and being hopeful about the future and embracing change. And that is not how large institutions are generally set.
CH: Definitely not academia. Nobody describes academia as nimble.
EB: Quite right. And it's hard because, honestly, the students kept me there for the longest time. The Duke Law students are insanely spectacular and to be in a learning community where you're talking about ideas all the time and everybody's really smart And I can't say enough good things about it
CH: But it wasn't for you.
EB: But it wasn't for me and that I think is really hard for a lot of lawyers.
CH: There's supposedly a laid-out plan of rising, right? You do this and then you do this, and then you do this, and you become a partner and possibly judge. They're supposed to be this laid out clear ladder of success.
EB: Yes, we’re really analytical, we are rules-based people. Give us a plan and we can do it.
I'm at the point when my youngest is now in college. So, I have some freedom to really think about what I want to do. And I've given myself a year to, sandbox, where I'm trying different things, talking to different people, following my curiosity and having a ball.
CH: I wanted to go back to this idea of embracing change, because it's not just remote work that has changed, in the legal profession. The emerging issue of new technologies, AI, which is not just an ethical, moral question right now, it's a legal question. What do you think about all these new developments in artificial intelligence?
EB: I have been geeking out over open AI. I think it's super exciting. I'm an optimist by nature but let's be real. We also need to think about how we put guardrails on this? How do we make sure that this is moving us all in a positive direction, so we can harness the power of what this is and the markets do without having too many horrible consequences?
CH: You mean for me to go on to chat GPT and say, write me a legal pleading with these parameters and then not call a lawyer at all? Is that what you mean?
EB: Exactly. I've been thinking a ton about corporate governance, especially with Open AI because I like to try to think about how you prevent problems. How do you have systems or values or whatever it is in place when you're starting something?
Let's look at where the incentives are. Are the incentives aligned? How can we structure things so that we can hopefully have a better shot at having a decent outcome.
CH: It's so interesting you say that because that leads me right to the question about relationships, specifically because working with a startup, you're working with a different client and you're trying to explain to them why they need to be proactive. That can be really difficult.
EB: It's really hard. In essence, I'm really trying to say, if you want to grow something, your soil is super important. Let's say it's a tomato. You should have a scaffold, you should have a structure for thinking about how things should be talked about.
I think process, structure, and corporate governance are important. It's like, going to get your annual physical, or going to your pediatrician. The pediatrician does everything, we just want to make sure that you're solid, you're on the proper growth trajectory, you're okay.
CH: But this requires you over and over to build real trust with entrepreneurs. And sometimes you're going to be telling them things they don't want to hear. How do you establish that level of trust with someone? So, If I'm your Duke University law student, and I say to you “how do I establish those bonds of trust with clients so that they will believe me, even if they don't like what I'm saying?”
EB: Number one for law students, especially after they've come out of first year, the first thing is centering the client all the time. What is your client trying to achieve? What are your client's goals? What's your client's risk preference? What's your client's vision?
I think, and this is going to sound so cheesy, active listening and curiosity and respect, I think gets you like 95 percent of the way. I've heard a lot of people say “yes, I'm a business lawyer. I've been telling people no for 40 years.” That's not how you get your client's trust.
For example, a client who wants to do a large sweepstakes for marketing, and you don't know anything about sweepstakes. Number one, if we want to do this right, we're probably going to have to call an expert, and that's going to cost money. But let me just dig in a little bit. Dig in, find out if you run afoul of, anti-gambling laws, your CEO can go to jail. Cost benefit analysis. I'm going to talk with the marketing folks about whether there's another way that we can achieve their marketing objectives without risking that.
The client is everything. What are their goals? Who are they also as people? What do you know about them? How do they like to learn? Do they like to walk and talk to process things? Do they just want to hear the high level?
CH: That calls to mind that 1990s case where the man sued Pepsi because he didn't get the Harrier jet that they had jokingly put in their ads for their sweepstakes, having that conversation that the impossible might become possible at some point.
EB: We go to law school, and it shapes our brain, it reconfigures how we approach the world. Oftentimes that means that we're hyper-analytical. We give the “it depends” answer, and we just answer on the kind of, here's the analysis. And sometimes we just need to remember the human part of it. I tell my students, because I like to say, yeah, you know, everybody screws up.
I was working with a company that had never had an outside investment. There were two founders who had a company that was spending a ton of money and they wanted to sell, and they'd never had an outside investment. They'd never been through a diligence process, so I was helping them with that. One of them called and said “oh, one of our customers isn't going to renew.” I immediately went okay, we can fix the disclosure document here and we can put this in here and then it'll be all wrapped up and that'll be fine, right? Wrong. Wrong answer, Erika. Wrong answer, Professor Buell. Stop for a second and say “gosh, I'm really sorry that happened.” I know that sounds so ridiculous, but just remembering to check yourself every once in a while, and remember the human piece. The other thing that I will say about my practice that is different from a lot of other lawyers is that a lot of lawyers only talk to other lawyers so I don't know whether you really need to have high EQ for that or not; that's debatable.
CH: You have multiple times apologized for being human during the course of this interview.
EB: It's awful, we don't even have a term for like regular human beings. If you're talking with people who aren't accustomed to talking with lawyers, they might not know how to frame a legal question. They may not even know if they have a legal question. So, lead with active listening, empathy, compassion, and curiosity. how can I help? Hold back on that lawyer stuff for just a heartbeat.
CH: You have been able to sustain this over a very long career and you've done that despite the fact that you're also a mother, you actually took time out to be a stay-at-home parent for a while.
EB: I did. Oh my gosh, that's so hard.
CH: I'm so glad you admitted that.
EB: It's so unbelievably hard. I realized very quickly that I was going to put my kids in therapy in a heartbeat, right? Like I like accomplishing things like, close a deal, do a transaction, get something done, that is not the way to parent, or at least in my opinion.
CH: Yeah, no billable hours when you're raising toddlers. But wonder if there's particular behaviors that have been helpful for you. Have you developed habits that prevent you from burning out, that have helped you be able to sustain your work?
EB: A couple things come to mind when you're asking about what sustains me. Number one, I am super grateful for having a life partner that I love spending time with and kids that I love spending time with, that's just fundamental. Number two, I know what I love to do when I get stressed out. If I'm super stressed out, I go for a run. If I'm only partially stressed out, I do karaoke.
CH: What other habits have been helpful to you? Do you use things like yoga or meditation or journaling? What kind of things have worked?
EB: In my sandbox time, I've created what I call sacred mornings, and that's just me basically saying “love mornings.” I do some meditation, I've got some mindfulness practices. Sometimes I do yoga. I'm trying not to be as structured as I always am. Super structured, super achievement oriented, and I just feel like that's not serving me anymore, and I want to move into other ways of thinking from the mind, meaning overall all body stuff. So yes, I do morning journaling. I don't know if you know the book The Artist's Way, it's classic.
CH: It is classic
EB: I also realized that I like being a lawyer. I actually enjoy the work of putting together the puzzle of a deal and helping to advise and counsel. I got sworn in to the North Carolina bar just this summer, because I had Massachusetts and Texas.
I sat for Massachusetts after law school, sat for Texas because I didn't have enough practice experience to wave in. Then I waved into North Carolina and I went to the courthouse and you know I don't normally go to court. That's for litigators. I was just overwhelmed with the sense of what a privilege it is to represent people and to help them figure out complicated scenarios, things they don't know.
How does venture capital work? How do you set up a company if you want to pursue a high growth trajectory? Part of my practice is teaching; it's teaching the founders. Now, some of them don't care and don't want to hear it. You give the advice. For those who do, I have some founders that I'm working with who are just the smartest kids, and they're engineers, and they just really want to understand everything, and I love that. And I just realized, I love that aspect of what I do. So, I will probably find another way to flex that teaching interest beyond practice.
CH: So as we end here and wrap up, I hate to pull structure out of what you just said was inspired by no structure, but it sounds to me like some of the advice given is have a life with other people outside of law who are not lawyers, have those deep relationships with other people outside the legal profession. Check in with yourself to make sure that what you're doing is what you want to do. Find out what activities or hobbies actually do work to reduce your stress, and don't turn it into a regiment. It sounds like essentially some of the advice you've given.
EB: That's excellent. I think I would come back to point one with the relationships. Work on and pay attention to your quality relationships but also try to get out of your bubble. Everybody can teach you something, whether it's something that they know that they can teach you or something you learn about yourself.
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This AccelPro audio transcript has been edited and organized for clarity. This interview was recorded on January 8, 2024.
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