Meet Leonie van Gulik, who worked in the M&A practice of top tier firm Stibbe for 4.5 years before she decided to make a career change and transitioned in-house to head up the Legal Operations team at one of the world’s biggest players in fashion, PVH (known for Tommy Hilfiger & Calvin Klein). Almost 3 years later, in 2021, she decided to spread her wings and now provides Legal Operations consultancy services to law firms, listed companies and everything in between.
1. Let’s kick off: what if you could choose any fictional character to have a drink with? Who would it be and what would you talk about?
Ah that’s easy: Hermione from Harry Potter. I’d talk about why I wasn’t accepted to Hogwarts and I’d like to know more about how she was nerdy yet super brave at the same time.
2. Introduce yourself, elevator pitch (concise) style.
As a person, I’m driven, energetic, no nonsense. I like having a goal and working conscientiously to achieve my goals. I’d say I’m quite a versatile (veelzijdig) person with many interests (can sometimes get bored quite easily though!). I’m an active person and love doing sports. I also like games, but am not that competitive to go for the win ruthlessly - I enjoy and believe in working and creating together.
3. Legal Operations is broad and it’s also a fairly new field in the Netherlands. How would you explain what you do for work?
I started as a self-employed consultant recently, but just to give you an idea about my current and next few months on a high level: I work ad interim for one law firm3 days a week and recently started an assignment for another listed company one day a week. The hours can vary - but I love the freedom that I have being self-employed. If I want to, I can head out to the gym or go for a run at noon. In the evenings, I can decide at 21:00hrs to continue working - just because I want to get something done that day. Companies engage me for my expertise - and my work is focused on providing that advice and delivering on and completing the assignment I defined with my client. I don’t participate in standups, team meetings, etc. and can work around office dynamics, which in my previous role sometimes felt challenging and time consuming.
For all the people who don’t know yet, what is “Legal Operations”?
A good way to describe legal operations is: the business of law. Legal operations covers all the operational aspects of delivering legal services - finding efficiencies and managing the provision of services in an optimal way.
In-house, this covers everything from strategic planning, how you help your internal client, vendor management, financial planning and budgeting (for the legal team) to concrete and specific process improvements (e.g. tooling for contract management, signing, but also in the way you service internal clients or collaborate with other departments). You often also work on specific projects - usually related to process improvements. Legal operations is the operational model behind the “Legal team”. It is about the strategy (why) of the Legal team and the implementation thereof(who does what & how).
At a law firm, it can cover anything from tooling to staffing to business development endeavours.
With my business, I aim on advising my clients on strategic planning for legal operations. This means I help clients identify stakeholders and their needs (as well as the company’s broader needs) and on that basis set a legal strategy (if not yet available). I then prepare a legal operations plan - which is the “how” behind the strategy. A legal operations plan includes a playbook for the team, which sets out a way of working, including systems and tooling to be used to do this in an optimal way. It covers the process from A - Z, how a question comes to Legal, how it is assigned within the team, systems used, who owns the process, etc. Once the legal operations plan is written, the Legal (operations) team implements that strategy with the ultimate aim of improving their way of working, including the speed and quality of legal services delivered to their clients.
For many lawyers, all the “operations” aren’t something top of mind or something they spend a lot of time on, and this is why it’s good to get dedicated specialists on board to help you out.
How do you find new assignments? Any tips for other self-employed consultants (lawyers or otherwise) out there?
Until now I found all my assignments via my network. For me that works great. There are also some helpful platforms out there that you can join where interesting assignments are published. My tip would be to always keep your eyes open in your network and have coffee chats with e.g. former colleagues or interesting folks you met at a conference.
You also co-founded an academy on Legal Ops. Could you share a bit more on that?
When I started in legal ops, there was just a handful of enthusiasts that had a dedicated role in this field. This group would regularly have dinner together where we would talk about the development of legal operations in The Netherlands. First we did this just for ourselves but it grew into a group on a mission to demystify and accelerate the development and adoption of legal operations in the Netherlands. Part of doing so was by setting up the first Legal Operations Academy in collaboration with Dialogue. The first class was a great success, and the next edition starts in Spring 2022.
4. What makes your job great and what makes it a little less great?
I’d say there’s three things that make my job great - and each of these upsides also includes a downside.
It’s such a new field in the Netherlands with so much untapped potential - I feel like I’m pioneering. The fact that it is so new is also part of the challenge, the industry in the Netherlands is still (slowly) becoming familiar with legal operations.
Legal operations is very broad, and I love the variety and versatility of the work. Downside is that there’s always so much to do, so much to improve - it forces you to make choices. It’s a common pitfall to want to take on everything at once - you just can’t do it all at the same time.
Being self-employed feels very fair. I love the freedom, flexibility and the fact that you have direct influence on your own “bottom line”. If you work very hard, you also reap the benefits from the extra hours directly. If you take it a bit easier and work less, it’ll hit your bottom line just the same.
Another perk is that I get to work for many different clients, allowing me to learn a lot from the different environments and industries, and hence grow as a person.
5. What motivated you to make your career changes?
The intense workload in private practice was one of the main reasons I decided to make a change. I started looking into legal operations because I wanted to use my legal training and background, but wanted to focus much more on the efficiency & management side of processes. When I was a M&A lawyer, project management and deal coordination was the part of the work I enjoyed most, I cared more about the process than the legal substance.
As to setting out on my own: during the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies - including the one I worked at - put projects on hold and cut costs and budgets and I had been hoping for the opposite to grow my team. In addition, I realized I wanted more autonomy in my work, and now that I’m self-employed I enjoy more freedom. All in all, very happy about having taken the leap!
6. How were you able to make the transition out of law practice? What are some good tips for others looking to make a similar move?
Have courage! Many lawyers can be a bit risk averse and think “things are never going to get better or be as good as they are.” It’s not very lawyerly, but you can - and should be OK - with making potentially a wrong choice. It’s fine to make the “wrong” choice, return to what you were doing before, or decide to do something else again. You can always course correct - you are in charge of your own career path. Just make conscious decisions about your life and career, and that also means you should consciously decide to stay on a certain path and don’t stay in a job out of fear.
After quitting my job as a lawyer in private practice, I used a career coach but what also helped me a lot was just speaking to a lot of people in my network - that I knew well but also people I did not know very well. Go for coffee chats, tell your story. Key here is that you know what you’re looking for, because if you don’t know, people also won’t be able to help you. Most people are prepared to give you 30mins of their time to talk about their work. Just ask and go for those coffees. You’ll grow your network, learn a lot and it can also help open doors.
It was during one of the coffee chats I had that I was telling a friend what I was looking to do and she said: that’s legal ops! I started researching it more and came across a vacancy for a legal operations role and interviewed for it. Around the same time, I also interviewed for legal counsel roles - and that only confirmed the hunch I had that I was looking to move away from substance and towards legal ops.
Lastly, it’s a bit of a cliché but seize opportunities. Don’t let them pass you by. Have the courage to go for it!
7. What do you consider the most valuable transferable skills that you developed as a corporate lawyer?
I’d say three very important skills that you train as a corporate lawyer are:
Analytical thinking skills - you learn to get drill down to the problem quickly, and you’re trained to be solution oriented
Managing stakeholders - from CFOs and supervisory board members to support staff, you learn to keep everyone on board and engaged
Business acumen - you become more commercially minded, which is useful in any other profession
8. What were you trained to do as a corporate lawyer working at a law firm, that did not / does not serve you well in your current job? What did you have to “unlearn”? And what skills did you have to pick up on quickly?
As a contract / M&A lawyer, you are taught to write in a very specific, “contract”-like way. Formal and filled with legalese. Once you leave that setting and context, you may need to ‘relearn’ to write more freely, more creatively. In business, language is much more practical, you need to communicate in simple and concise English. You need to communicate a message to the company and customers - the legal memos and contracts you’re used to writing won’t cut it.
Another thing I learned was that not everything needs to be done today, or even tomorrow. Things move more slowly than during the heat of the moment in an M&A deal. Oftentimes you’ll need to set a few things in motion and then be patient before you can go full steam ahead. Because there’s less time pressure, there’s also more room for creativity.
What I had to learn very quickly was how companies really work. As a lawyer, I thought I knew things about companies and how they worked, like that there’s a procurement team, a sales team, a finance team, and what they all do, but I didn’t truly know what it all entailed and how it all fit together. And what you need to do to get all trains running on time. On that front, I learned very much once I moved in-house.
9. Where do you see yourself in 5 years, in an ideal scenario?
I don’t tend to make very long-term plans, but what I’d love at some point is to set up my own business with a team, building and marketing a super innovative product. Doesn’t need to be in the legal industry. My current work is quite individualistic and not very scalable because it’s linked to my own hours and availability. I’d like to work with a scalable product.
10. What’s some of the best (career) advice you’ve ever been given, read or heard?
Remember a career path is not linear, it’s a path. It has twists and turns, and sometimes you take a right, sometimes you take a left. It rarely goes exactly according to plan. That’s also part of the charm of it all!
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