This GC Spotlight is a special one as we feature one of our own Annalise Haigh, a KorumLegal Alumni! We loved catching up with her and talking about the great stuff she's been doing as the General Counsel at Neat (a Rapyd company), a Hong Kong founded payments company.
You're doing awesome stuff - you go girl ✨
Living in Hong Kong, life outside of work is very social. There is always something to do for any mood. I love to visit great restaurants and cafes, go hiking and over the last few years I’ve been doing a lot of wakesurfing and mahjong. Pre-pandemic world, I did a lot of winter and summer travel.
Like most general counsel, my role needs me to be a jack of all trades. Neat is a regulated entity, so the role needs strong regulatory compliance knowledge and commercial sense to guide the business and support it to reach its north star and beyond. I work on commercial contracts, new product development, IP, disputes and we just recently completed an acquisition (where Neat is now part of the Rapyd group). I also sit in the management team with all the other heads of the business to develop the wider strategy of Neat.
The main skills required of a modern GC is to have business acumen while wearing a legal hat - it’s a must to really understand and support the needs of the business. This is not new, but still far too often I see legal blocking progress due to old school legal thinking and limited commercial thinking around the practical realities of the decisions.
From a work perspective the pandemic hasn’t really impacted the team. We already had flexible working practices in place and have always used remote working technologies such as Slack, Monday.com, Confluence, G-suite. The main impact has been on mental health and motivation in general - 2+ years of lockdowns has definitely taken its toll on everyone. Keeping everyone mentally healthy has been the main focus. Everyone needs a good holiday with no internet access!
I’m a big fan. I think particularly as the role of legal is now more business focussed, data metrics are important. All the other departments in a business use data and tech tools and legal shouldn’t be any different. The challenge I find is where it’s a small legal team (like Neat), justifying the spend on a legal focussed tool to the business is difficult. At the moment we optimise non-legal specific tools such G-suite, monday.com and Confluence - which works well for now.
I’d like to think that the standardisation of basic contracts will continue. The OneNDA initiative is a great example of this and hopefully is just getting the ball rolling. In addition I think the makeup of the legal department will continue to change with a far more spread out work force, and perhaps this is where the technology will focus as well. Remote teams management tech with a legal focus. I think however this tech needs to be able to sync with the wider business’ tech, not be stand alone.
I see New Law and ALSPs as a key pillar to my legal department. I’ve used ALSPs in a variety of ways over the last few years - remote consultant with specialised knowledge to a retainer that enables me to tap into a network of consultants and optimise as I like. Being a global payments company, being able to use payment experts with in-house experience from all over the world has been completely invaluable to the business - I cannot match this with a law firm or with an internal resource - for value or knowledge.