Meet Emmy van Hengel, who worked at Stibbe and Van Doorne for more than eight years - including a year in London - before joining Crisp as their very first legal counsel in 2021. Crisp is an Amsterdam based online only supermarket focused on fresh produce sourced locally. At Crisp, she’s found a great new work “home”, leveraging her vast experience as M&A lawyer, getting more closely involved in a company’s strategy and able to contribute to making the world a better place.
1. Imagine you had to write a single line for a fortune cookie. What would you write?
“Dare to do it.”
This relates to how I ended up at Crisp. I was working as a corporate (M&A) lawyer and at a certain point started wondering: is this what I want to do for the rest of my life? There’s so much more out there. You start wondering what you can do and where you could end up. Many lawyers think that because they’ve been trained as specialists, this limits them. That they’re not well suited to do something different or broader.
Anyway, how I got to where I am now: at a certain point, I advised an investor in relation to their investment in Crisp as part of Crisp’s Series B investment round. During the investment round I got to know the founders & was really impressed by their approach and vision, but also the culture they represented. They didn’t have a legal counsel yet & I already loved the Crisp product and figured: wow, how cool would it be to work there? And I also thought: you never know until you ask. So I asked whether they needed a legal counsel - and it actually worked out! For me personally it was a different way of looking at things, more in terms of opportunities and possibilities rather than feeling limited by some kind of framework you’re “supposed” to operate within. The “you never know until you ask” approach also applies to work within the company; you can take on more responsibility. It doesn’t just have to be legal. Sometimes it’s just a matter of: you’re smart, you know what it means to provide top notch service, you’re able to manage processes & keep the oversight. That’s incredibly useful for many companies. You can do so much more than what you think you can do.
2. Please introduce yourself & share one “fun” fact.
I’m Emmy van Hengel. A long time ago, I studied business law in Utrecht. After university, I joined Stibbe and after a few years, when the senior I worked with a lot became partner at Van Doorne and asked me to join him, I changed firms with him to Van Doorne. I spent another 5,5 years at Van Doorne, including a year in London setting up the London office with everything that comes with that - I guess you could consider that my first little venture outside of full-time corporate practice. I’m the first legal counsel at Crisp (and recently got the sign-off to hire a new team member, so I’m looking forward to that)! As to my time, I’d say about 70% of it is spent on legal counsel work and about 30% of my time is dedicated to working more strategically on projects (more on that later).
I live in Amsterdam & love sports. I started playing tennis last year and really like the tennis “game”. As to a fun fact: people sometimes refer to me as “Shazem(my)” or a “walking Shazam”. Music is definitely my round during a pub quiz!
3. How would you explain your day-to-day and a typical month to someone who is considering leaving private practice? Any myths you’d like to debunk?
As legal counsel, I have 3 main responsibilities: (1) being able to oversee all processes, (2) assessing risk and advising the business on that basis and (3) enabling the company’s growth. Number one and two can “bite” number three. I’m involved in all legal aspects of the business. This means that after being trained to become a specialist, I had to become a generalist. I don’t just handle corporate law affairs, but also work on employment law, privacy, brand protection (you’d be surprised about how many businesses are “inspired” by our branding which we work so hard on in-house every day...), and so on. I also work on larger strategic projects like funding and expansion to other countries.
Every 6 months, we have company wide OKRs (objective key results) that are set that the whole company works towards. Per team, sub-OKRs are set and these determine your general priorities, focus and therefore also your schedule for the next 6 months. Obviously, smaller ad hoc questions and matters also pop-up and require attention and can take up quite a bit of your time, but the general trend and focus for every team is set by the OKRs.
There’s always much more work than you can handle, so focus is super important. Every day, I always get quite a few ad hoc requests. I make sure to keep an overview of those requests and every week I plan my week based on an assessment of how much priority things have as well as the potential impact legal can make. Having said that, not a day goes by that something unexpected doesn’t pop up. This means that I actually also try to “plan” for (a little bit of) the unexpected every day.
A typical day starts anywhere between 08:30 and 09:30hrs. We have the best coffee at the office (with Oatly). Then I get to work. I start by reviewing my inbox and Slack, which always takes a bit of time. Often, that review can lead to me shifting my previously planned priorities around a bit. I’m generally in a lot of meetings with the business. It can be difficult to stay informed about everything that’s going on, but it’s important to have a general idea of what they’re doing so you can advise them on time as well. I also have 1:1s with founders and where necessary with management team members. I work on a number of strategic projects, where I attend weekly update meetings on how we’re doing and what’s next. Given I tend to have quite a lot of meetings on some days, my approach on those days is to try to get as much work done “in between” meetings. To make sure the balance is right, though, I try to plan my week in such a way that I have about 2 “meeting heavy” days and about 3 with fewer meetings to make sure I have enough time to get a lot of work done.
“Work” in this context is contract review, drafting templates, answering small and larger ad hoc questions and things like brand protection. We’re not a fashion brand or anything of the sort but you’d be surprised about how many people become very “inspired” by our Crisp branding. We put a lot of work into our branding so it’s important to protect that. We have grown fast and have a lot of employees in our hubs, warehouses and delivery teams. The sheer amount of employees means I also handle a lot of HR related business like answering questions about our contracts and policies, assisting in creating new policies, drafting of new templates and so on. My work also consists of major strategic projects. We are working on a very exciting expansion to Belgium - that project itself is enough to keep me busy throughout the week! Given I’ve been trained as a Dutch lawyer, this is quite the challenge, although you might think as it concerns our direct neighbours, how different can it be in Belgium? Well, let me tell you: very different. You can’t just copy paste what you do in the Netherlands. Another example is national delivery coverage which is easier said than done. As a customer, you don’t realise what you need to make that happen. You need more of everything, from hubs, vans, warehouses for our products and employees right down to charging stations for our electric delivery vans.
As legal counsel, part of my job is also to work with advisers. When I first joined, it was good for me to really dive into everything myself to really get to know the business and learn more about all the different areas of law. It’s also the Crisp way: we try to do as much as possible in-house. I’ve been with Crisp for about a year now so to ensure I spend my time on the right priorities, I also engage law firms to advise on certain matters from time to time. A large part of my job is therefore also managing external counsel: agreeing on ways of working, connecting them to the right people in the business, monitoring progress and making sure we get the results and deliverables we need. Even though you become a generalist and you’re expected to know a bit about everything, I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to know when you need to ask for help and engage external lawyers - either to do all the research for you, or to double check your own hunch or proposed course of action.
4. “The good, the bad and the ugly” about your job. Spill the beans!
I LOVE our product. I’m truly our biggest fan (something which wasn’t always the case when I was working in private practice working for a large variety of clients in different industries).
What I also really love is the scale-up lifestyle. What’s that? Well, it’s a lot of things, but to name a few:
People are very decisive - you don’t have to jump through 10 different hoops to get something signed off. Yay!
You feel like an entrepreneur. Every day you’re thinking about how we are going to approach things, from the Christmas season to how we’re going to expand to other countries. You help shape the company.
It's not a very hierarchical organisation, which means that you’ll quickly end up working directly with the founders. Our founders have a lot of prior experience with scaling and you can learn so much from them.
You get to work with like minded people. I love great food, cooking, contributing to creating a better world. This was one of the reasons I left private practice: sometimes I felt like all I was doing was helping people who already had a lot of money make more money. Sustainability was important, but it wasn’t a priority. Here, sustainability is at the core of what we do, it’s part of the business model, creating something that makes the world a little better. It really motivates me.
You can truly make an impact - every single day. I love that. A good example about making impact is our secondary employment terms. As a start-up, that’s not your number 1 focus but as you grow, that changes. So you get all the decision makers in a room together, make sure everyone is well-prepared and have the discussion: “what makes people who work here happy?” & everyone can chip in with ideas. Then you literally decide on the policy and roll it out. It’s great to see some of your own ideas brought to life and how that impacts the Crisp team. Same goes for strategic projects like a country expansion; the way things are set up can be quite driven by legal considerations and it’s also super strategic. I really appreciate that my opinion is taken seriously.
You’re very flexible in the way you do your work & you get a lot of responsibility too; there’s no template or guideline for everything you do. You need to figure things out yourself.
The perks & social aspects: we have incredible lunches and snacks, you can have a drink after work pretty much every day if you’d like. In private practice, we’d have our annual ski trips and when I left I thought I’d never get that “feeling” back, but we have it here as well. There’s a major social component to working at a scale-up and people are really encouraged to organise social gatherings.
And last but not least - the casual atmosphere. I can leave my heels at home!
Before I move on to challenges, a quick myth I’d like to debunk is that as legal counsel, you have an incredible work-life balance. M&A was hard work and sometimes at absurd times and I don’t pull all nighters anymore, but now work is always busy. It never stops. I kind of miss the “slow” M&A summers! On the other hand, I’m also more in control of my calendar, can schedule whatever I want in my free time and don’t have to cancel things I’ve scheduled - a major improvement.
What’s good about my job is that I went from being a specialist to becoming a generalist. Few teams within a company are as involved with every aspect of the business as Legal (and Finance). People in the business are also very grateful when you help them out with things they struggle with, e.g. negotiating a contract.
The change to becoming a generalist is also the first challenge I’d like to mention. You need to be able to form an opinion even if you don’t know much about it. I really had to get used to not knowing the answer right away, having to figure it out but also not really having enough time to really get to the bottom of something. In private practice, I’d really dive into the law and all relevant material before I’d give advice. I needed to learn to live with not knowing everything, but being comfortable about knowing just enough to make a decision. You really have to be super pragmatic and entrepreneurial & you don’t want to hold up the business. That’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and I can imagine people can really struggle with the uncertainties and this way of working.
A second challenge is that there’s always more demand than supply. As a lawyer, you are trained to be very client and service oriented. “You ask, we deliver.” You can’t get away with that here. You need to be super critical about what work you take on and also have to say no a lot. Tell people: this isn’t a priority right now, we’ll revisit this at a later stage. When you work in M&A, your project starts, you know it’s going to take X amount of time to closing and you move onto the next. That’s not the way things work when you’re in-house. Things are never finished. Everything is always a work in progress, and work never stops piling up. This dynamic also forces you to think about and make sure that you set up the legal team and way of working in a scalable way - to make sure you can continue maximising your impact.
A third point to keep in mind is that you’re no longer part of the core business. In private practice, you get an incredible amount of support to do your best work. Secretaries, assistants, paralegals, you name it. Now, I just scan documents myself. When you go in-house, you’re not a fee earner anymore and you’re going to need to get used to that role. The upside is that even though you’re not part of the core business, as legal you have a very “central” role, know a lot about what’s going on in the business & you’re a sparring partner to management. You can’t have it all, so I’m good with scanning my own documents.
All in all, I’m really very happy to have made the transition. I learned so much the past year and am still learning an incredible amount every single day. The atmosphere is incredible and there’s so many cool things on our roadmap. I’m very excited for the future!
5. At what point and how did you realise you wanted to take on a new challenge?
The two main reasons for my switch were wanting (1) to work somewhere that prioritises sustainability and making the world a better place and (2) to become more involved in strategy (planning & execution).
When I was younger, I always thought that practising law for 3-4 years would provide a solid foundation for the rest of my career. Being appointed partner was never my goal. After about 3 years at Stibbe, one of the seniors I worked with closely moved to Van Doorne to become partner and I joined his team at that firm. At the time of the move, I also told him that I’d probably only stay on for about a year and then pursue something else because I thought the longer you stay in private practice, the harder it becomes to transition to something else. And if you really miss law practice, I figured I could switch back. After the switch, I worked at Van Doorne for about 5,5 years. During that time, I found myself trying to create a bit of niche for myself working on projects for clients and start-ups that had a sustainability angle or were in some way, shape or form involved in making the world a better place, but that type of work wasn’t my day-to-day and I worked mainly for clients less focused on sustainability. Also, I realised I wanted to get closer to the action on a strategic level. M&A is strategic by nature: you help your client take over a company but that’s where it ends for you as a M&A lawyer. I was curious about what happened before and after: how and why you decide to take over another company & how you integrate a company. What companies focus on & how you implement it all. I also wanted to know more about how decisions are made based on financials. These two reasons were my major drivers for looking for a new challenge and I figured taking on a role as legal counsel at a sustainable scale-up made the most sense; I could build a track record as legal counsel and figured who knows where that could then lead.
I made the switch during the pandemic. It was difficult in the sense that staying put was comfortable. I also felt like I was looking for a needle in a haystack - I knew I didn’t want to end up in a legal team the size of a medium sized law firm and I was looking for a perfect combination of working for a scale-up type business focused on sustainability and where I could also get involved with strategy. Crisp came up and I gave it a shot and it worked out, but in retrospect I’m sure if this opportunity hadn’t come up something else would have.
Also, fun fact: when I first started out here, people actually told me they weren’t sure we really needed in-house legal counsel but they were very happy I was so broadly interested so I could help out on strategic projects. Now, we’ve all come to realise there’s (much) more than enough legal work to keep me off the streets, but I still love that I’m able to learn all about how various different business perspectives impact strategy & decision making.
6. How did you make the move to your current job? For others looking to make a similar change, what would be the #1 advice you would give them?
Think outside the box. A lot of companies don’t realise legal is important and that it can add a lot of value. A lot of start-ups and scale-ups actually think: only corporates have in-house legal counsels (and that’s not really a compliment to corporates). If you’re interested in a company, reach out for a coffee. Show them you’re an ambitious professional, you can work hard, you’ve seen a lot of different companies - and that you’re interested in them. People tend to be quite receptive to that kind of (flattering) approach & you never know if they’re open to having a chat with you unless you ask.
Look beyond vacancies. Think about what makes you happy, what type of work environment will help you thrive, what you’re looking for. Are you at your best in a traditional company, or a more casual fast growing environment? Do I need to be a product’s biggest fan? On the basis of all these questions, I made a list of companies thinking if an opportunity were to come up there, that would be incredible. And guess what, Crisp was on that list! When I wrote my list, Crisp had only been live for about 6 months and they had a pretty small (~20 people) team at the time so I figured it was a bit too soon to come knocking, but that list definitely helped define what I thought would be a good match.
7. How does your experience as a corporate lawyer in private practice contribute to your current role?
If you’ve worked as a corporate M&A lawyer at one of the big firms, you learn a bit about everything because you work with all the different teams during transactions and this helps you to be able to assess whether you need to action something yourself, you need to engage a specialist or whether it’s OK to park it or leave it.
You also become a pro at project management & keeping the general overview. When you work at a fast growing company - or any company for that matter - you’ll find that project management is not everyone’s core strength, and your skill set definitely adds a lot of value. Last year, I was Crisp’s “Christmas (or CrispMas) Project Manager”. It was incredibly fun and challenging. Christmas is the most important time of year for us, and as project manager I had to make sure that all teams delivered: from the marketing campaign to help customers decide what to eat for Christmas, to changes required in our app, to making sure that our suppliers could fulfil the extra “Christmas demand”, to making sure we had enough capacity to actually deliver all orders to our customers on time.
Lastly, your attitude & mentality are likely great assets. You know how to work hard, are a go getter & you can think conceptually. Most lawyers also tend to be quite communicative; as a lawyer you constantly need to talk to your clients and understand their needs to be able to serve them well. These are all incredibly valuable skills.
8. How is the work that you do now different to the work you did as a lawyer working at a law firm? What did you have to learn, what did you have to unlearn, and what do you do differently?
We already discussed it earlier but in a nutshell: I used to be a specialist in corporate law and now I do everything.
As to what I had to learn: I’d say the three most important things are learning (1) how to say no, (2) how to make a (better) translation from legal to business, and (3) that making mistakes is really OK.
Firstly, as a practising lawyer, you’re trained to be very service and client oriented. I don’t like doing it, but I had to learn how to say “no” more often. You simply don’t have time to do it all, and you need to prioritise in the company’s interest.
Secondly, as to the translation from the business to legal: when you’re working in practice, you try to do this too but you’re also trained to identify and flag risks and include plenty of disclaimers like “on the basis of the information provided”. You don’t get away with that as legal counsel, you need to be much more decisive and give the business concrete guidance: a “yes” or a “no, but you can do this and that” answer.
In addition, as legal counsel, you start assessing risks very differently. When I think back to my time in private practice and what I’d sometimes read or write down myself in due diligence reports, it actually makes me laugh now. Lawyers can be meticulous in identifying every tiny little risk but in the broader scheme of things many of those risks are non-issues. As legal counsel, you learn to filter what risks you flag by assessing the risk in the interest of the company. Could this decision lead to reputational damage, is it a “bad” decision for employees or customers or other stakeholders, or could the risk associated with this decision lead to significant monetary impact? If not, go for it. In order to get a better understanding of business risk, I think client secondments should actually be made mandatory for lawyers in private practice. You need that first hand in-house experience to really get a proper idea of what truly matters. It’ll make you a better adviser.
Thirdly, I have learned that making mistakes is inevitable and that mistakes can also lead to really valuable insights. You just need to try things and sometimes things don’t work out - and then you know. We often ask ourselves the question: do we want to create a 100% perfect company? Without any risks? Or do we want to achieve more by taking action quickly, trying things, and then learning from that?
9. What - if anything - do you miss from your time working as a corporate lawyer in private practice, and what are you most happy about to have left behind?
What I miss most is the team, the social aspects of my old team. It’s a real cliché, but it really was “work hard, play hard”. I had great colleagues and really enjoyed working there. The pandemic also made me realise how important the social component and working with great colleagues is. You work hard, and a lot, but you never do it alone and we also had plenty of laughs. And sometimes I miss how well things were arranged. The whole support system, I took that for granted back then & didn’t appreciate it enough.
I don’t miss the hierarchical culture and the fact that in general, it revolves around making money and making more money. There’s not as much room for ideals and principles. I definitely think people try, but in my view they don’t try hard enough. This probably also has to do with the fact that a majority of the partners running the big firms are from a different generation and simply value different things. And lastly: I do not miss the all-nighters.
10. If you were prohibited from doing what you currently do, what would you be doing for a living instead?
I’m a real foodie and I think it’d be great to run a restaurant or cafe. Don’t know whether I’d really do it, but I used to like the idea and still do. When I was younger, there was also a time I wanted to become a journalist - but I also get to do my fair share of research and writing in my current job!
11. Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give your 10 year younger self?
Three main pieces of advice:
Don’t take everything so seriously - and that includes your work. At the end of the day work is just work. Doing your best really is good enough. Sometimes a lot is asked of you, and you learn from that, but looking back I also think that sometimes I was a bit crazy just going along with it all.
As to making a career change: I thought about how to go about it and how I would end up somewhere for quite some time. Sometimes it’s much simpler than you think it’s going to be and more a matter of just getting out there and trying.
You work to earn a living, but it’s important to do something you really love. You may think that doing something you love isn’t an option, but you’re more in control of doing something you love than you think!
*Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the interviewee alone and not their employer.
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