Big Law to Big Tech: Scaling Legal for Hypergrowth - Jonathan Keen - S9E19

0:00Jonathan Keen:If you have an international business, get out there. There's nothing better than meeting people in person. You can get so much more value out of it. I know Zoom's an amazing thing, but it's not the same. You don't have those conversations on the way into work, any kind of software, app, website. Figma is the tool that you use to design that technology and see how it appears on a screen, how the user would interact with that. What it will come down to is how that looks and how the user interfaces with that technology. So I think that is one of the key truths.

0:28Nick Johnson:On today's Legally Speaking podcast, I'm delighted to be joined by Jonathan Keene. Jonathan is the Senior Director of Legal International at Figma, a leading collaborative design tool for building meaningful products. With over 12 years of experience as an in-house lawyer for high growth businesses, he provides legal advice on strategic initiatives. He's also a member of the global legal and international leadership teams at Figma. Jonathan has been recognized in the Lawyer Hot 100 Legal Business GC Power List and the British Legal Awards. So a very big warm welcome to the show, Jonathan.

1:01Jonathan Keen:Hi, Rob. Great to be here.

1:02Nick Johnson:It's a pleasure to have you on. And I know we've got a lot of mutual friends in the personal world and indeed the professional world. So looking forward to today's discussion. But before we get into all of the good things you're getting up to in and around the legal world, we do have a customary icebreaker question here on the Legal Easing Podcast, which is on the scale of one to 10, 10 being very real, what would you rate the hit TV series Suits in terms of its reality of the lore if you've seen it?

1:29Jonathan Keen:I think a 0.5. The fact that they wear suits is probably the only thing it has in common with reality.

1:36Nick Johnson:Fair enough, a very justified 0.5 and I think our first 0.5 given over the hundreds and hundreds of episodes we've done over the years. So with that we'll move swiftly on to talk all about you. So to begin with, would you mind telling our listeners a bit about your background and career journey? Yeah, sure.

1:51Jonathan Keen:So I started off doing a non-law degree, did history undergrad at the University of Nottingham, which I believe is where I first met you on one of your visits to mutual friends. And then after that, did the kind of well-trodden path for history grads, like become a history teacher or become a lawyer. So came down to London and did the law conversion course and then the second year of law school doing the LPC. I was very lucky to get a training contract in my final year at Nottingham with a firm called Watson Farley & Williams. So off to law school, went there to complete my training contract.

2:29Nick Johnson:Absolutely. Did you always want to be a lawyer?

2:31Jonathan Keen:My father was a lawyer and he said, don't do it. He said, it's too much hard work and it's not as interesting as it is on TV. So you never listen to your dad, though, do you? in your late teens. So it was kind of, yeah, to spite him that I went down that route. I think I wanted to keep my options open and I loved history. It was kind of a subject I was really passionate about and I thought might as well do three years or something I know I really am into rather than law, which would have been a bit of a gamble at that stage.

3:01Nick Johnson:Yeah, absolutely. Definitely listen to fathers, but not grandfathers. My grandfather ran his own law firm in Leicestershire originally, which was kind of my inspiration getting to law. And he said, definitely don't be a lawyer. And I actually took that advice. I thought I'd stay on the other side and be on the recruiting media side and everything else that we do. But yeah, I mean, you've done some great stuff. But let's stick at the sort of early part of the career. Because obviously you mentioned you trained with Watson Farley. You were the first U.S. law firm. You know, you worked into Milbank, I believe.

3:26Nick Johnson:So how did working at a U.S. law firm differ from perhaps your experience at a London-based law firm?

3:31Jonathan Keen:Yeah, so I moved on qualification to Milbank to read Hadley and McCloy to give them their full name. And they were a relatively new kind of market entrant in London.

3:40Nick Johnson:Yeah.

3:40Jonathan Keen:the time big new york presence big big u.s presence and i went into financial restructuring there so i guess culturally it was a lot smaller um they only had maybe two or three nqs at the time i went there so um a lot smaller operation um but the pace was um was relentless um in a good way um like you they were constantly uh business was coming through the door um at an incredible rates and you could kind of pick and choose which areas you wanted to work on but there was always enough work. So I think yeah Watson Farley was a great firm but they were doing more long-term kind of project financing, offshore wind farm, that kind of stuff which is a longer there's a longer play, there are longer transactions going over over years rather than the types of deals I was doing at Milbank were kind of PE bat, LBOs taking months, weeks to complete.

4:41Jonathan Keen:So yeah, pace and maybe a very different client base as well. So Watson Farley, your big institutional banks, export credit agencies, Milbank, like PE funds, vulture funds, people in the debt restructuring space.

4:57Nick Johnson:Yeah, no, absolutely. And I guess, is there a tip you would give to someone who might be sat in a UK law firm at the moment that's maybe sat on an offer with a US law firm or thinking about moving to a US law firm, something you didn't know, but have sort of subsequently would advise someone from your experience?

5:13Jonathan Keen:Yeah, I think the gap is shrinking between expectations and kind of what it feels like to work at a US law firm versus a UK firm.

5:23Nick Johnson:And obviously, it's massively dependent on the type of firm and the area you work in.

5:29Jonathan Keen:but I would say think really carefully about what area of law you want to end up in very easy to specialize quite early on in your career and that's great if you really really know what you want to do but as a if you want to keep a more general practice then a smaller firm is better for that because you will be kind of everyone's resource and there's a chance for you to kind of take work from different departments and then really feel kind of what you like because two years is a relatively short period I think still as a training contractor know what you want to do for the rest of your career so if you can extend that and not necessarily go into a really niche area and perhaps that's where the US firms might still offer that that freedom of choice keeping that those avenues open for as long as you can yeah and I think being curious isn't it and open

6:19Nick Johnson:to learning and you don't you don't know what you don't know and I think if you're prepared to keep that sort of broad perspective. You can always, like you say, as you go up the sort of food chain, look at sort of specializing further into a niche and building out from there. Let's go to a very interesting time when I started out in the city of London, which is 2008, around the Lehman's crash. I remember the first day I walked into a FTSE 250 recruiting business. It was a bit of a boiler room environment, I must admit. And I saw people carrying out PCs saying, Lehman's has crashed. Lehman's has gone down.

6:48Nick Johnson:This is day one in, I think, September 08. So I want to kind of talk to you because you had the opportunity to work on super high profile, you know, corporate insolvencies as part of the Lehman Brothers financial restructuring team. So what did you learn during that time?

7:02Jonathan Keen:Yeah, it kind of explains why I qualified into financial restructuring. I qualified in 2011, which is when all of the Lehman stuff was kind of being unraveled through the courts and there was a lot of that work around. So Millbank advised the creditors committee to the Lehman estate or what was the Lehman estate. So incredibly lucky kind of within my first few months I was going down to the Supreme Court regularly to basically take notes and report back on the progress of these hearings because there's a huge amount of new case law and the case law that was made by the Lehman Brothers fallout because an investment bank of that size and complexity had just never failed so comprehensively.

7:48Jonathan Keen:And there were lots of kind of unusual and unique legal situations that needed to be resolved in the courts. And every creditor was kind of fighting for their dollar. So, yeah, very, very cool introduction to financial restructuring. It doesn't sound the most glamorous, but it was a very great NQ kind of introduction.

8:10Nick Johnson:Yeah, I think quality of work that you would have been exposed to and like you said, sort of, you know, really kind of forward work as well. If you think about all the new laws that were coming as a result of that, you know, really great way, particularly starting out in your career to pick up a lot of skills and be open to learning, I guess.

8:26Jonathan Keen:The problem was that they had QCs on both sides. So I'd go down as an NQ and here, you could be like, yeah, definitely going that way. 100 % go and brief like the partner back at the office and then the next day it would be the complete reversal so yeah never underestimate how persuasive like yeah those people can be

8:50Nick Johnson:where they need to be yeah absolutely and there's a reason for the title I guess so let's talk about your journey further then the sort of transitioning because obviously you work some incredible firms in a private practice capacity but what kind of led you to move or what wish to move from private practice to in-house and was there a particular moment you realized that perhaps in-house life was going to be the right fit for you yeah um it's a great question i don't think

9:16Jonathan Keen:there is one moment i think it's more of a series of moments that takes a position where you're like looking the next five years like do i want to be doing this is this where my strengths are can i make myself please can i make this my strength or do i want to go and do something else that sits more naturally with my ambitions. And I think fundamentally I wanted to advise. It's why I became a lawyer in the first place. And in private practice, it's fair to say you probably aren't advising, certainly clients, for the initial half of your career. There's a lot of internal feedback you'll be giving, providing stuff to senior associates who are giving it to partners.

9:56Jonathan Keen:And eventually you will get into that role. and I've got friends who managed to do that very successfully. But I'm not sure I had the patience or the ability to continue doing the transactional work with an indefinite, indefinitely. So yeah, I looked at a number of in-house opportunities at the time, spoke to a lot of people about that move. and yeah in the end kind of despite having to take a pretty chunky financial haircut made the move and yeah haven't looked back really it was yeah 100 % the right thing for me but it's not something you should rush into for sure like everyone has bad days like and it's a very very tough environment being in the city at these firms doing lots of transactions and then billing a lot of hours um it's something you want to make over the course of six to 12 months i think rather than kind of off the back of a very taxing deal exactly i think it's making an informed and

11:05Nick Johnson:you know i always say when emotions go up you know perhaps some you know rational thinking can sometimes go down i think like you say taking a period to review what's right for you personally and what you're looking to get out of your journey and where you're looking to go and i always say just generally regardless of your situation which i know is not the case but if you're having more bad days than good days, then that's probably a good signal to think about maybe when the next career move might be for you. Okay, well, in-house has definitely worked out. You're doing some pretty good stuff. So you're currently Senior Director of Legal at an international firm called Figma, a leading collaborative design tool for building meaningful products.

11:37Nick Johnson:For people less familiar with Figma, can you tell us more about it?

11:40Jonathan Keen:Yeah, sure. So Figma is a SaaS company headquartered in San Francisco. I look after all of the international legal operations, which we kind of define as everything outside the Americas. Figma itself, it's now a multi-product company, which is exciting. But we kind of made our name in the design space, the kind of UX and prototyping design space particularly. And kind of taking a step back, that means basically any application that requires a screen to view it or interact so any kind of software app website is designed figma is the tool that you use to design that technology and see how it appears on a screen how the user would interact with that technology so incredibly powerful products and very kind of pretty unique in the way that it builds out it's following is very much a product-led growth business that kind of was built in stealth initially and then went yeah grew very very quickly into what it has done today and now we're branching out into developer tools so taking designs which are built by predominantly designers they then hand off to engineers who actually build the software so we have a product that will turn design into code so reaching a new new market there and we also have fig jam which is an online collaboration space whiteboarding tool which is

13:11Nick Johnson:one i probably use most in my day-to-day business i just love the name that's a good it's a good

13:16Jonathan Keen:name we are figmates as well at figma which i love oh i also like that as well that's good um

13:22Nick Johnson:okay so you know it's it's fair to say it's a it's a pretty pretty broad role you know you provide legal advice you know key strategic initiative business be that um data protection be that compliance like you mentioned their product development you know what are some of the specific projects if you can share that you've worked on that you've been most proud of

13:40Jonathan Keen:yeah it's it's hard because it's moved so quickly i've been i've been here for nearly four years now it feels both longer and shorter yeah um because we we are doing things at a pace that just other companies aren't and that's that's a luxury of growth and being successful i think um But it's rare you get the chance to look back and actually see the highlights from that. I think my role has changed significantly since I first came in. So I was the first non-US lawyer based out of London. We had a team of four, I think, in the US at that point. And so my initial scope was kind of everything that was legal within EMEA and JPEC regions, so corporate, regulatory, commercial, employment, anything that kind of looked like it was from those GOs that needed legal input.

14:42Jonathan Keen:But now as we've grown the team and we've kind of like 28, 29 lawyers now, we've become slightly more focused and specialized. I would say that it's still quite a generalist scope. I still have to work with the product legal team, the commercial legal team, the employment litigation team in the U.S. on all of these different matters. So I'm kind of like a link person between the US and the rest of the world on these issues. But I am focusing more on digital regulation. The EU is passing a huge amount of new digital regulation that impacts us in one way or another. So making sure the business is informed on those developments and that we've got a pathway to compliance and triaging and advising on that.

15:36Jonathan Keen:key achievements i think when i first joined we could only host customer data in the us so one of my initial projects was looking at customer feedback and regulate the regulatory environment and seeing if there would be value to have a european hosting option it's something that I'd had a lot of experience with at Auth0 and Opta. And it's an area where I kind of felt I had some inside space in my own experience and then looking at the customer interactions I was having and kind of knowledge of GDPR. So I think having conversations with product eng, the go-to-market teams around that, and then actually having that built and then seeing the impact that's had on the wider Figma business in Europe has been probably the number one kind of achievement, I think, as well as building out a team of wonderful lawyers.

16:32Nick Johnson:Yeah, I want to talk about that sort of building out of the team in a moment, but I just want to ask from that experience, again, for people that might be hesitant to make a move in-house because there isn't necessarily a large legal team or established, someone obviously who's been a success story of going in and it sort of being, you know, not necessarily a a built out team there and then what would you say to people or what have been some of the lessons you've learned from going in because obviously it's worked out for you've gone in then you've progressed you've got very senior yeah just share some lessons or learnings that'd be helpful people

17:04Jonathan Keen:to pick up yeah i don't think you would go in-house if you wanted to be a specialist but don't kind of go in with a view of like i'm only going to do this type of work make yourself a key business partner and by that i mean like do the difficult stuff that people need you to do put your hand up like it might not be purely legal um there might be a commercial element to it i enjoy that that's like helping the business grow is something that i really uh kind of is a key part of kind of why i enjoy going to work um but it's not going to be like a line between legal and and the business so kind of throw yourself in there there are skills that lawyers have that go beyond like the advisory so project management and just the ability to communicate effectively so use those skills as much as you can get involved in other elements of the business so we have like a social committee in the London office kind of making the office a really great place to work for all of the teams as well if you have an international business get out there there's nothing better than meeting people in person you can get so much more value out of it i know zoom's an amazing thing but it's not the same you don't have those conversations on the way into work or um kind of yeah in the bar after work you don't have that that same bonding experience um joining remotely so do take the time it's worth it it's like a it's a slow payback and it will come over months and years rather than immediately, but it's very, very real.

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