Welcome to the Contract Lens! Today's episode is all about growth. Specifically, how our customer Pantheon leveraged Malbek's robust analytics, seamless integrations, and self-configurable solution to achieve stunning results for Legal that helped to grow the business in a meaningful, measurable way. Today's guests are Ronak Ray, GC of Pantheon, and Taeler Gannuscia, Product Marketing Manager at Malbek. Beginning with the challenges Pantheon faced pre-Malbek, Ronak shares how a CLM solution that is ready to scale and grow from the get-go was a defining attribute they needed. The conversation then shifts to how to get buy-in from stakeholders across the business- not just from Legal. Touching on the results of implementing Malbek, Ronak shares how AI functionality, no-code integrations, and contract automation made it easy to scale with the hypergrowth Pantheon is (and continues to) experiencing to this day. So now it's time to relax, grab a glass of wine, and let's talk contracts.
Taeler:
Hi, Ronak. Thank you for joining us today. Are you ready to talk contracts?
Ronak:
Hey, Taeler. Yes, absolutely. Always ready to talk contracts.
Taeler:
You woke up ready to talk contracts. I have a feeling. So let's start at the very top. We're fortunate enough to know you and work with you often, but that may not be the case for all of our listeners. So tell me your story. How did you get to Pantheon and what does Pantheon do?
Ronak:
Sure. Yeah, I'm going to start at the very beginning, relevant to Pantheon though. I started out as a web developer, believe it or not. I found I like web, but I'm probably not the best programmer, don't have the patience for it. So of course then, obviously you end up in law school. This is where everyone goes.
Taeler:
Obviously. That's where all the impatient people go, right?
Ronak:
That's exactly right. I started out in finance and economics, the financial model for deals, and what was frustrating to me is not being close to the deal, which ended up being contracts and negotiations and that's really how I found my niche, call it, is adoration for contracts, certainly, but also being closer to where value is. I think that's kind of been the through line for my career. As I've maybe grown or fumbled, depending on how you look at my career, it was always intentional to go towards value. The way that we understand private companies tend to look at value is certainly through their transactions, but how much they're delivering in value to the market or to their customer or to their stakeholders. I also think that includes employees and I think that legal particular is uniquely qualified to help push the agenda in many of these areas.
Ronak:
So Pantheon is one of these companies where the potential is very high. They existed for 10 years, quite successful before they had even a legal function. So I show up, they give me a stack of papers and say, "Here you go. These all look legal, can you help?" I think the potential of the company was just starting to form. Customers love the service offering and really what we do is put the magic of the internet in our customer's hands. We give them a single plane to work from. What I did back in the day when I was developing websites is kind of unheard of today, but for all good reasons. The power of Pantheon is to connect your marketer, your developer, your IT team, into what they're best at doing, which is their own work, and Pantheon gives them a single place to go run that open source website that's built below WordPress and connect with their customer.
Ronak:
So for me, this was perfect, right? It's technology, it's attaching customer value to the work that I do, and it's building a legal function for this company that desperately hopefully needed it because they have it now and we're very excited about where they are.
Taeler:
You know what? That makes a lot of sense. I had no idea personally, that was your background, that you started in web development, but it makes a lot of sense why you're at Pantheon now and also why you're so creative and business minded. I know that just in talking to you previously, you're very creative in how you approach solutions, you're very passionate about technology, so it's all making sense now. Thanks for kind of sharing that background. In alignment with that, you do have a new ebook out in which you talk about technology setting a foundation for scaling companies. I found that to be really fascinating, especially because most of my conversations with you have actually been around CLM and leading a CLM initiative. So now that we know kind of what Pantheon does, what events or challenges really led you to implement a contract management solution in the first place?
Ronak:
Yeah, Pantheon is one of these companies that ... it has a great product, a great service that they can offer their customers and they want to be sure that the experience through the first touchpoint with our customer to contracts and certainly any kind of negotiations, but even after they sign that, it's continuous and it's positive and it reflects the values that we have. It also indicates to the customer that this is a journey that we do with them. While the contract is an inflection point in that journey, we didn't really invest a ton in that process, and so as I walked in the door, what was clear is not just that we had to revamp how we thought about contracts at the company and how we negotiate contracts with our customers, but that we also had to bring the company along through that journey, right?
Ronak:
That there were very important business opportunities that we had to pursue together as a company. We needed to give them a platform in which to do that successfully and we needed to show the learnings from either the mistrials or the successes that can help us kind of advance to the next level as a company. So the CLM was really designed to do that. As the company is going through multiple stages of development, we needed software that could attach to a well designed, thought out process. We knew what the requirements were. We spent the time to build those requirements and we connected it with the advantages that you can have with technology in order to achieve those outcomes for the company.
Ronak:
For Pantheon in particular, it was multiple product launches, innovative solutions that we wanted to bring to our customers. We had a strong base of online customers who had effectively clicked through agreements and said, "Yes, we'll take this thing called Pantheon and we'll sign up for it and we'll swipe a credit card to customers who wanted to negotiate the spoke agreements with us," and somehow bringing those worlds together on a single view of what our customer base looks like really, of course, helps our come management team, but also helps us understand exactly where the market's going, how our products are doing, what potential expansion points we might have. The CLM was really designed to help us move through that journey again, right? Really being agile, giving us a place where sales can connect with legal can connect with Deal Desk. So the inside of the company can show the positive customer experience that we wanted to have reflected to anyone that's interacting with us outside.
Taeler:
Yeah, and I just have to say, I really love how you think about the end user in all of this, that you're really trying to improve contract management internally for a better customer experience. I think that's a really great way of looking at it. You touched on this a little bit, but very modestly, but Pantheon has grown quite a bit very quickly, hashtag unicorn status. So when it comes to leading a CLM initiative, especially at a high growth company like yours, how do you accurately assess your organization's needs and build a compelling business case? If you could just walk us through your process, because you mentioned having to get multiple teams kind of on board and understand their processes first.
Ronak:
Yeah. I think the first thing to understand is that every team is going to grow, every team's requirements are going to change. If we look at a point in time in the company and say Q1 of this year, we should anticipate Q3/Q4 is going to look somewhat different, and this is the nature of being in a growth company and it's also understanding that we're working with humans, right? That we have assessments judgements that we make, we make predictions about where we think the puck is going to go. The art of doing what we do in business is trying to skate to where the puck is today, but certainly we also anticipate where it's going to go tomorrow and be ready for that adjustment.
Ronak:
So in our requirements gathering, we really took that mindset of what gives us the best long term flexibility. We know certain things will always remain true. We know that customer first values are going to endure regardless of how we think about the technology. So we really needed that customer focus. We needed to understand what kind of products were we taking to market, how did our revenue operations team think about markets segmentation in the way that they were looking at our sales team and how we divide up our targeting efforts, our branding, our marketing. How that connects into legal is, well, we're reviewing MSAs, but an MSA for an academic institution is going to be very different than media or high tech and so we had to really roll with that and design solutions that would help them accelerate. Their average days to close in academic institutions MSA is certainly a little bit longer than media and high tech who has an urgent need for their website.
Ronak:
So we really adjusted our style to that and the CLM was at the center. So as we built out these requirements, we understood where did IT play a role in helping us get set up? Where did a team like Malbek come in and help us really accelerate the implementation phase for something that the company really needed as a near term solution, and then also set us up for that long term kind of infrastructure play, where we knew internally we were going to get a new set of leaders coming into their company. Maybe they were product marketing or helping with pricing and packaging. They were helping with security functionality that we were adding onto our platform.
Ronak:
We wanted to be sure that the CLM would allow them to roll in, become part of a workflow that was certainly well designed, but needed to accommodate all of their requirements as well. That's really how we thought about the requirements gathering is what were the absolute necessary items that we needed to accomplish? What are the KPIs attached to those near term issues and long term, how do those KPIs and those success metrics really kind of evolve based on where the company needs us to go?
Taeler:
Yeah, that's great. I like how you talk about determining the fastest path to value. One of the things that we try to do here at Malbek, or that we do here at Malbek, I should say, is take more of an agile approach, right? So what are those first three things that you just can't live without that you need done in your CLM, and how can we help you get there in the first 30 days, 60 days, 90 days? Looking at it from that approach so that you're enabling and empowering those users to expand usage across other teams. I think that's so important for any implementation, if you really want to see the long term adoption value.
Taeler:
So I love that you kind of touched on that and just talked about how you take it one step at a time. I think that's important for people to hear. So now that you have a solution in place, if you had to boil it down, because there are so many CLM features out there and there's long lists of them everywhere. But if you had to boil it down to two or three elements of your CLM that you just can't imagine a day without, maybe the difference makers, what would those be?
Ronak:
That's a great question. I think it starts with the underlying principles of change management. I think what we're trying to do is make change easier for people, right? We often talk about legal going through this kind of Renaissance period and I think that's where we are right now. We're, in some cases, surprising people by all the solutions we're bringing to the table and hopefully accelerating processes that we're a little bit more difficult to engage with legal reviews in the past, but we're also accelerating career paths for people. There's entire practice areas, functions, competencies that we're building within legal that didn't exist, or maybe weren't well known 10 years ago, weren't well understood, and those paths are now chartered.
Ronak:
So what we absolutely need from a CLM is we need to meet our customers where they are. That's really important. So if they're inside Salesforce or inside HubSpot, they're inside some other tool, we have to meet them where they are. So it becomes part of the way that legal connects in with the business, but it doesn't mean that the business has to absolutely unwind in order to accommodate this transformation that legal's going through.
Ronak:
I think the second is credibility and this adjusts for every company. For us at Pantheon, it was really important to achieve turnaround times and be sure that the markups that we were doing made sense to the business, they were well reasoned, but they also did not continue to repeat in a way that was inefficient. Efficiency was very much of a central focus. So for us designing the solution around that specific set of requirements was really important. The third is agility. We're a growth company and I touched on this before as well, but it's the idea that workflows have to be manageable by a non-technical team within legal.
Ronak:
So that meant no code or low code. That also meant confidence with the tool that if you move something around, it doesn't break. It meant that you had a strong relationship with their implementation team, with their customer success team so that when you reached out, you knew that there would be someone on the other line. If you suggested improvements or updates and other things, that it would be responded to, you would understand where it was in the priority list. I think those are really important for any team going through change and really stewarding a company through that change is they need to feel confident that this is the right thing, that the solution that they're offering to the company is making them better, is not creating a new dependency that they themselves are not confident in.
Ronak:
I think the CLM choice that we end up making has to be very much attached to the strengths of the team and also help make up for some of the areas that you can't do independently with better design process or just more headcount, right? This is where technology really helps us.
Taeler:
Yeah. You make a great point because this idea around an experience being self-service I think is so important because we live in a self-service world nowadays, and we're very used to the fast and familiar experience that consumer grade products provide us with. A lot of times I feel like our business solutions get a pass for some reason. I think those days are over. I think users are very adamant about the kind of experience they want and the kind of usability they're looking for and it shouldn't be any different, especially when you're implementing a new enterprise wide solution. You definitely need to think about that and it's really interesting how you all have approached it.
Ronak:
Yeah. I'd add to that, the ability to get the rest of the company to think about it is the bonus point for legal. It's the idea that this isn't a legal transformation project. This isn't a legal tool. This is an accelerator for a company value and how do we start to think of it that way? One of the things that we have done, I think quite well, at Pantheon is that we allowed our revenue operations and our sales teams to think about what the requirements were for them. If they had to go out and pick the tool, what would they pick? What would that look like? How would it feel for them and what would the experience be? What are some of the outcomes?
Ronak:
As we noticed that journey evolve for both the sales team, and even as we did it independently, a lot of those requirements converged. What we understood from that is really we're all after the same thing. We see an area that hasn't performed in the way that it can, right? Legal has been a bit further behind on their adoption of technology, thinking about design, thinking about things like legal operations. I think this has really helped us because it brings us so much closer to that business when it's not a CLM for legal or data that is relevant to legal or not relevant to the business. It's all one thing and it has to be.
Taeler:
Absolutely, and I love how you brought up change management, because that truly is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you're implementing a new solution that may very well and should touch every team at the organization. So I think that one of the most important things we have to be able to do as leaders is be able to communicate the value and really speak their language. Right? So if you're talking to a sales leader, how are you communicating the value to them versus a procurement leader, right. I think it has to change, and I kind of want to get your thoughts on this. So we recently completed our first annual benchmark study about AI enabled contracting. I think that as we talk about culture, as we talk about change management and just perspectives in general, AI is a really big buzzword for everyone and we either love it or we hate it, it seems like.
Taeler:
One of the findings that really surprised us in this study was that most respondents mentioned that they believe efficiency gains are the main benefit of contract automation in general. So we're talking people across industries, across different countries, across different roles. They all believe speed and efficiency is the main driver. What I think is interesting about this is, as you know, because you've seen it in your own organization, so much more can be achieved with the right processes and technology, particularly AI. So I was hoping you could talk a little bit about how you've grown into your CLM and how AI has factored into that growth.
Ronak:
Yeah, Pantheon very much needed its initial foundational improvements made within its operation, right? This is really where our CLM solution helped us. It gave us the speed and the efficiency and the effectiveness and quality of legal review that it was looking for. You need to do that, this gives you the credibility to go do other things. But if we really look at what speed and efficiency does, those are all internally facing, internal to legal, really, focused issues. Once you've achieved credibility, does it matter whether you've turned things around within 24 hours or 22 or 20, right? It really doesn't. As long as you've achieved credibility, it really isn't that difficult. If it's a one page NDA and you're saying that it's going to take you 24 hours to review, I think you've lost credibility. We forget about the focus being, what value did I serve to the company?
Ronak:
The company is really focused on its mission. This is really how we've started thinking about the work that we do. So initially for the legal team, it was important to meet speed efficiency adoption of the tool, understanding that we actually achieved what was set out to be achieved by the CLM. So that was good and it was important for us to celebrate, show the team that they could do what was necessary, prove to the stakeholders within the company that this is something that can be achieved with the right design work that we do together.
Ronak:
The next stage for that is AI. That helps our team do very different things and I don't think it's ... oftentimes we think of AI as a way to operate more efficiently, to think about ... maybe it's a second round of review and so therefore there's potentially quality because the system caught a bunch of things and then our experts in contracts have caught a number of other things and they can really focus their time on it. I think it's quite different. I think if you focus on the business, how much market potential did you open? How much revenue did you unlock within that quarter, within that year? How much risk did you drive down because you're not spending your time looking at certain things that can be processed on a routine basis? Now you could really focus on connecting with that business and that's really where the potential is.
Ronak:
So as we think about the next few quarters of what Pantheon needs to do, we've far exceeded the expectations in turnaround time and efficiency and quality. And I think that's great. We don't rest on that. Where we are today is at some point the volume and the demand from sales and the complexity of product catches up with you. The complexity of customer requirements catches up, right? So we really need to think about how could we advance the team that we have, put them in a position where they're not stressed about the work, the double, the triple volume that's going to be coming through the door. Instead, they're confident because they have another jet pack effectively attached to them and it allows for them to take their expertise, point in a direction where it can really build value for not just that deal, but for the company and the ability for us to measure, which we've found ways to do this quite effectively at Pantheon, is how much market value did you unlock? How much risk did you manage down?
Ronak:
Those metrics don't end up talking just to speed and efficiency. We still track those and those are important for legal to understand, but that's not what we face our internal stakeholders with and that's certainly not what customers feel. Customers need to feel that legal is making a difference, that legal is building value within Pantheon and that's really what we're striving to do. If we get a testimonial from a customer that says, "Wow, your legal team is so easy to work with ..." Doesn't happen often. It's not-
Taeler:
You don't have a whole list of those you want to share?
Ronak:
Not yet.
Taeler:
Okay. That's fair.
Ronak:
But we have a board that started, which is great. I think that's when legal can really help differentiate a company. That's when it makes sense to invest more in legal. So your conversation on AI or any other initiative that you have within legal, you've already earned the credibility to do that and now it becomes a sensible second round, third round, fourth round of investment to continue to transform that legal function into one that's much more a business driver.
Taeler:
That's really powerful. I love how you're talking about legal as a strategic business partner, because I think that it's common for legal to want to zoom in, to zoom in and focus in on the very tactical, every day risk management tasks that they're doing. But I love that you're saying it's also important to zoom out every once in a while and be able to communicate the value of AI. Because another thing we found in the study was that legal is still named as the executive sponsor for all of these initiatives. They really are the ones that are building consensus, that are creating a compelling business case and tracking the metrics that really lead to better outcomes. So I would love to talk about metrics because you did mention a little bit that it's not just about having that data at your fingertips, but it's also about using that data to improve and accelerate. So what are a few of the contract metrics that you track at your organization and why?
Ronak:
Yeah, it's interesting. When I first started and I'd say probably for the first six months, nine months, and as we were still rolling out our CLM, really thinking about the metrics that we were using to track, often we would hear, "Legal's really taking such a long time to get back to me," or, "Why is it so hard to get all of my requests done at the end of the quarter?" It would be a lot of these questions that I would hear for ...I mean, I've heard this for the entire time that I've been in the legal space, so this isn't surprising. This is something that you certainly pay attention to as a legal function, certainly as me accountable for what the legal function is providing as a service to the company, I take that very seriously.
Ronak:
What I found is that metrics that you can not only share with people, but keep accessible to them, that it's distributed, it's an access point to how is legal doing today, they end up kind of falling away. So this idea of turnaround time, how are we doing on volume? What are we busy with? Who are we supporting? Where is my request in the overall process of other requests being pushed through, all of those things we've now made accessible through our metrics, through information that executives and other people within the company who are heavy stakeholders of ours can access on a regular basis. So once you give them the power of that data, and I do think that that data shifts based on the type of company and the stress on your legal function, it should shift, it needs to be relevant. If you could provide that relevant data back to them, the engagement interestingly evolves with their level of comfort with legal.
Ronak:
So it's no longer why is legal ... that feels like pointing a finger, that no longer happens. It is how can we attack this account management issue, pricing changes, new product launches. It ends up becoming much more of that. So your metrics sort of evolved. They end up becoming how far along has legal progressed in establishing market presence in this country and market presence might be vendor requests, might be client requests. It might be anything, but for us to provide relevance in a very deep area of the business ends up becoming more valuable to them than spewing metrics that could be relevant initially, but certainly need to evolve as the business starts to get comfort with what the legal function provides.
Ronak:
So there's a few that I think are really important to always track. Volume is really important to track. You may or may not publish it externally, but you always want to keep that track so that your team is healthy, that they could keep up with all the requests that are coming in. Turnaround time is also very important. What I look for now is different than what I looked for two years ago. So what I look for now is if someone has taken vacation and they're on a three person team and they come back to a red number on turnaround time, that doesn't feel like vacation, that feels like a full inbox that you come back to. We all know what a full inbox feels like, but we also know what it looks like when you see a flashing red number. It's important to me that we all understand maybe that team isn't set up for success because they can't take vacation without coming back to a red flash of numbers. So we ought to think differently about these metrics, but they're really important to continue to track.
Ronak:
I think on the flip side, we are looking at other more leading indicators of success. So how much impact does the legal team drive in reducing overall risk on our balance sheet? So we look at how many uncapped liability deals did we have this time last year versus this time this month, and has the legal team been able to bring down the overall volume or percentage of ARR in our case of risk at the company? This gets us better prepared for other conversations with bankers, with investors, with other parties, certainly outside the company, but it also helps us understand how well a legal team is delivering on the mandate of building long term value and success for the company.
Taeler:
That was a great response and I love to hear how integrations play a huge role in bringing data from disparate systems together, because I think what tends to happen, or at least what I'm seeing happen a lot, is there are a lot of co-owners when it comes to CLM, because as you're bringing in data from your CRM or your ERP, for example, there are a lot of people involved that are owning the subsystems. How do you bring people together and how does a seamless integration really make way for that?
Ronak:
I think data governance is such an important area for any team that is thinking about investing in technology. What becomes rather difficult three, six, nine months from the time that you've implemented your technology or your new processes is is it working? Is it having the desired impact? But guess what? That impact story has changed and whatever you were measuring before may no longer be relevant. So for you to be able to pull relevant data, if you designed it out of sync with the rest of the evolution of the company, it could be far off from where you need to be one year or two years from now.
Ronak:
So this is why I think the ability for us to identify key data facets across the ecosystem of the entire legal function is important. It's not just legal as you mentioned, Taeler, it's thinking about what's coming from my sales force or other CRM, what is coming from NetSuite and my purchase order process, who are the requesters and is there an intake solution that we're using? For Pantheon's legal function, we're really tapping all of those and the need that we have and the need that doesn't exist or there isn't a solution that exists in the market to fill this need isn't enterprise legal system. It's some sort of work day for legal or NetSuite for legal that doesn't exist today.
Ronak:
There's no ERP. That there's single solutions that help solve very specific sets of problems and if you're running a legal function and you don't have a broader strategy on how you bring data together to make informed decisions, they do end up becoming reactive. You can't really predict where the business is going. Legal is not just contracts. Legal is not just litigation. It's not just how much I spend on outside council. It's an entire narrative that we need to help paint and what we did at Pantheon is really take data from each one of these systems, understand which data is relevant, where is it easily accessible, and how can it be combined with the decisions that we must make as a legal function?
Ronak:
So strategy is really important to set out early on. It's also important to understand what the security requirements are for your makeshift, call it, ELM data solution that you're putting into place. But what's also important is maintaining that same flexibility you thought about with the CLM solution as you also think about how do I want my data feeds to go. We chose to change our data visualization options from year one to year two. We may end up doing that again in year three. The sources of data that are being pulled from are different than what they were prior. We also learned a lot more about where does the company start to get its data? Well, it's not getting it from Salesforce anymore. It's getting it from a subscription management tool and that's different for us and we needed to maintain that agility to say, "Do I know which contracts have actually made it through? Do I know the value of those contracts?"
Ronak:
Well, the value isn't going to come from Salesforce. It's going to come from a different tool and that helps me understand how much dollar risk am I adding to the company for every point of risk that I'm adding into the company's balance sheet. So it really gives us this sense of being able to move where the company moves. Again, if I can paint the narrative or where this data is going or telling me that I should be going coming quarters, years, then it's effective. It's worth the investment and it helps the company actually be stronger.
Taeler:
I love how you're saying paint the narrative for legal, because I do think there is a lot of new ways that legal's being viewed. Modern lawyers are different than the lawyers that we've heard about 10, 20 years ago, and they are flexible and they are creative and they are strategic. So I love that you're part of really making that shift, especially at Pantheon. Knowing that you're pretty far along in your CLM journey now, and that you've been ... how many years has it been for you at this point?
Ronak:
It's been three years almost, I would say, through lour solution. Yeah, it's been quite some time.
Taeler:
Awesome. So what results have you really seen? From the starting point until now, what results have you seen and what has been surprising to you and to other stakeholders?
Ronak:
We've seen a single place where the legal Deal Desk team and finance teams and InfoSec teams can come together. That's been quite remarkable. We initially thought, "Well, no, it's good in design to get these other teams into play, and their adoption and their understanding of value coming out of our CLM solution and certainly our broader data sets, it's helped accelerate their ability to connect with what information legal is trying to provide. These things are very risky. Here's where I want you to manage your priorities." I mean, those conversations are so much easier now because they're backed by data. It's not a lawyer or a contract risk manager or someone else on the team trying to convince them. We're really good at arguments. This is a superpower of legal. We could certainly do that all day and all night, but this is us, as you say, Taeler, thinking about how practice was done before we had these additional abilities, these areas of connection that are now allowing us to be much more strategic with our business.
Ronak:
It helps them feel much more comfortable in access. The CLM is something that is an enterprise tool. It's not a legal tool, right? So that's really critical for us. It also gives us an ability to transition teammates and I think that's been kind of a surprising benefit of it is we knew that CLM would bring all these teams together. But as changes happen within the organization, we hire a CISO, we hire two new contract managers, we even bring in more legal ops folks, which has been a blessing at this company, that allows them to plug into something that's already in place and their ramp time, their ability to feel like they're adding value to the company is so much faster than having to read a stack of documents that I was handed on day one. They now have a lot more confidence, a lot more information, and they can start to add expertise into the business much faster.
Ronak:
So to us, I think it has been somewhat surprising and perhaps not as strong as what we would want is, I'd say, the ability for the rest of the business to keep up with what legal has done. We've really changed radically over the last few years. Certainly we've seen this evolution happen at Pantheon and the business wasn't accustomed to seeing all of this information from legal. They're not accustomed to us helping them get competitive insights, helping them understand where the high points and low points are in each one of their contracts in a single view. Those are things that we now have that they just never knew existed. For them to process those into new initiatives, new priorities, and keep up with where we want to take the company is a little bit of a negotiation today.
Ronak:
So I think it's good. It's remarkable how much we've been able to achieve and we're certainly very happy with the progress that we've made. The type of talent that we hire understands the potential. As you say, the modern lawyer or the modern legal practitioner is thinking so differently about potential of legal departments inside growth companies. I write about this a little bit. I think it's actually an exciting space to think about as a community is how has that expectation changed? As legal professionals, we are experts at reacting to this, right? How many times have we been called, "Hey, this thing is broken," or, "I've got two minutes. Can you help negotiate this very complex thing and get it done?"
Ronak:
This is where we've been thriving. If you came from law firm, if you came from any sort of in-house team, you don't get a lot of lead time, you don't have access to it. What technology does is it gets you to a place where you can be proactive, where you can be more thoughtful, where you're not feeling burnt out, frankly. This gives you the ability to really do a lot more for the company than you were previously able to.
Taeler:
Absolutely. Well, we never have enough time to talk about everything I want to talk about with you, but this has been a really great discussion, and I do want to congratulate you on all of the radical growth that you've seen and just how you've really built a team that is an agent for change in the legal space. So that's amazing. Thank you for taking some time away to spend time with us today. Before we let you go, though, tell us what you've got going on right now, because I hear that you have a new e-book out.
Ronak:
Yeah, this was a lot of fun to write. I'd say it's half cathartic, half vision forward and maybe delusional.
Taeler:
My favorite type of reading to do.
Ronak:
It typically does not come from a legal team. So I think what was interesting to me was sharing this back with my team and having them say, "I wish I had this two years ago because this really feels like the playbook or the rule book for what we evolved Pantheon to be over years." I really took that to heart. I think so many of us are going through similar challenges, seeing similar opportunities, and if we could just share notes and really this is what the ski book was about was opensourcing some of these learnings, helping people understand what was my playbook, what were the secret weapons that I had in place for us to be successful. I think Pantheon's legal team is the only reason that I can be here today and I feel confident in this is because they helped carry the ball.
Ronak:
It wasn't me. I had some ideas. I paid through budget for some of these initiatives, but the team really drove it. I think that's what's really interesting out there in the market is if you can attract this talent who connects with the vision who feels the potential of a legal function to do more, to deliver value, to be positioned differently within a company, and then you strap onto them all of these other opportunities, these assets, CLMs, tools, data, and give them the right positioning with the rest of the stakeholders in the company, that's really magic. This, in some interesting ways, takes us back to the Pantheon mission of delivering magic to our customers through websites and legal, hopefully if we're position correctly, can do the same for our internal clients as well as our constituents.
Taeler:
Amazing. I have to say, I did read it before talking to you today. It's full of brilliance. If you're listening and you want to read it, we will be dropping the link in this podcast description for the ebook called Avoiding Burnout In Legal At Growth Companies written by the brilliant Ronak Gray. Thank you so much for joining us, talking about your experiences and, as always, dropping nuggets of wisdom.
Ronak:
Thank you, Taeler. This was a lot of fun. You're too kind.
Taeler:
We did it.
Ronak:
Yay.
Taeler:
I only fumbled twice, so that's actually a pretty good thing. Usually it's more than that. So how are you feeling?
