Our hosts and Erin Abrams, Chief Legal Officer at Via, discuss the role of in-house counsel in business decision-making. Erin emphasizes collaboration, early involvement, and building a culture of trust and safety within legal teams.

Via builds innovative software to enable our customers — cities, transit agencies, transport operators, school districts, universities, and corporations — to transform their legacy transportation systems into advanced digital networks.

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“ In addition to having a framework for how decisions are made, I think it's really important to have a framework around the life cycle of what you're trying to accomplish. And I think of it very much in sort of a product lens, but what I've seen be really successful at organizations, especially as they're starting to scale, is really going to the teams and saying things like, "legal can't come at the end.””

“With our joint ownership model, I think part of that means not running away from the consequences of your decision and saying, okay, we mitigated this risk to a place that the business and the legal team felt comfortable.”

“There's not necessarily tons of in-house positions for litigators, but what you can do is become a professional risk mitigator. You can kind of shift and say, okay, I'm really good at pattern recognition. I know what has led to litigation in nine out of 10 cases. So now that I'm looking at this much earlier in the pipeline, I'm looking at it and a contract that seems vague. You know, there's an area of sort of like a gray area. You know, it feels a little bit squishy to me. I've seen litigation result in similar circumstances. Okay, well, this is like a risk I can mitigate.”

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00:48 - Meet our co-host Ken

04:01 - Meet our guest Erin

09:25 - What effective partnership looks like

14:18 - Evaluating business risks

21:41 - Making challenging decisions

28:35 - Using compliance as a competitive advantage

31:35 - How to hire well

42:53 - Keep or redline?

45:30 - Where to find Erin

45:52 - Final takeaways

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