Overwhelmed by an unexpected vacancy on your team? Struggling with how to get the work done now that you’re leading your own team? Too many of us fall into a trap thinking we have to “do it ourselves” and don’t ask for help. But research shows that effective leaders delegate.

In this episode, Elizabeth Smith and Michael Albino of Major, Lindsey & Africa share why delegating is critical in The Legal Department and how interim talent can help you keep your head above water. Elizabeth and Michael lead interim placements for MLA and have seen hundreds of legal teams. They share best practices for onboarding, how temporary help refreshes a legal team and brings a consultant’s mindset to the department, and how interim work can be an on-ramp to an in-house career. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and need an extra set of hands, this episode is for you.

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The “Why” And “How” Of Delegating With Elizabeth Smith And Michael Albino Of Major, Lindsey & Africa

On this episode of The Legal Department, I’m excited to welcome Elizabeth Smith and Michael Albino, who are from Major, Lindsay, & Africa, where they focus on in-house and interim placements. This is going to be an interesting conversation. Michael and I are connected through LinkedIn. He’s a fan of the show, which I’m thrilled about. Appreciate all of your promo.

Big fan.

We’ve developed a little bit of a friendship, and I wanted to talk with them specifically around building an in-house team and how you can use interim or fractional support for that. The core issue that I’m hoping you guys can help me unpack is this paradox, this difficulty that many lawyers, many people, have in delegating, why that’s important, and how we can be successful doing that and using fractional talent to do that.

If there’s time, I want to talk about how, when I’m retiring, you guys can help me find a really awesome interim role. Before we dig into the meat, I want to get a little bit of your background. Elizabeth, I’ll start with you. Just a couple of minutes about your background in this area, how you got here, and why you like it.

Excellent. Thank you so much. I took the traditional route in that I went to law school, and I practiced at an AMLA 100 New York City-based firm. Not long after practicing, I realized, I don’t know that I want to work 90 hours a week, and I like being surrounded by attorneys. As luck would have it, my husband’s job brought us to Boston, and I started interviewing for roles. I interviewed the partners with whom I was speaking as much as they were interviewing me.

Nicely done.

I happened to meet an absolutely wonderful woman who is now at our firm. Her name’s Nancy Reiner. While she and I were chatting, she let me know that she was starting the Boston office of a search consultancy. She asked, would I like to join her? I instantly liked her. If she had said, we’re going to work at Shake Shack, I would have said, that sounds like a great idea. Let’s do it. That was in June of 2008, and the rest is history. About four years after she and I started that office of that search consultancy, MLA brought us over.

That’s so cool.

I am very lucky how it all worked. As I said, if she had said, let’s go to Shake Shack, I’d probably be working at a Shake Shack franchise because I was so impressed and enamored with her.

I want to meet Nancy. She sounds amazing.

She’s amazing.

Michael, what about you? I know you also treaded the law school and lawyer track for a while.

Similar, I went to law school here in Atlanta, and when I graduated, it was 2008, so not the best economy in terms of options for lawyers. I ended up as a litigator. I did default litigation for a couple of years. When the market turned around, in other words, when the market got better, the firm that I was with most of the time didn’t really have a business plan after that. That was a time for me to exit from the firm. I knew it wasn’t for me, that work, litigation in particular. Obviously, it’s very adversarial, and I’m not. It seems foolish to think you’d go through three years of law school and then three-plus years of practice to get to that point.

I started networking around and trying to figure out, what are the other things that I can do with my law degree and my background? I eventually got into business development roles where I was. Most of the time, I worked with a big global law firm, the business development team there. That’s where I was when I actually got recruited by Major, Lindsay, & Africa. I met Elizabeth Smith, so if Elizabeth had been at a Shake Shack, I would have gone and joined the Shake Shack because I just realized, I think almost instantly, that this was the place for me. I’d found my tribe here. That was about six years ago. I was the first interim person boots on the ground in Atlanta, and it’s been a fun six years since then.

That’s so cool. What I hear from both of you is that the team that you work with, the people you work with, are really great, and they’ve developed a lot of loyalty among you, so that’s really great.

MLA is very particular in the way that it interviews and the thoughts on this, which I think will inform your audience when they’re speaking with one of us or they’re speaking with an MLA recruiter. We’re catching people on their absolute best day when they have signed their offer, and it is an incredible move for them. We’re also catching people on a day in a compressed market, which might be one of the hardest days. Emotional intelligence in our line of work is critical. I didn’t go to Harvard, full disclosure, but I have high EQ, and that’s necessary for what we do.

Emotional intelligence in legal work is critical. Share on X

Interim Roles And Their Value

That’s a great observation. Let’s just shift into that EQ. I’m just going to call it a temporary interim role, like putting somebody in who’s not going to be there for a long time into an existing team, feels like you really have to test for fit. Michael, maybe you can lead off here. No apologies, but my bias is that interim roles or temporary roles feel like they may be like doc review, diligence, that kind of stuff, but as we’ve talked before, it’s more than that. Maybe you can just give a flavor of the type of positions that you’re sourcing and how we can have a good fit for those roles.

There’s a couple of things to unpack there. First, I think that’s common. Your perception is really what the origination of temporary work in our industry was back 15 or 20 years ago. Document review for large litigation was the origination. That was the origin story of temporary work. Since that time, though, it’s really evolved. We find that we still do contract management-type roles. We still do commercial transactions roles, some of those really basic, like blocking and tackling, that needs to happen on the legal team. We’re fortunate at Major, Lindsay, & Africa. As a company, we’ve been 40-plus years. We’ve developed relationships with lawyers throughout their entire careers.

We realized some of these people have very unique skill sets, sophisticated skill sets, that they can bring to the market. We do things like interim chief legal officers, interim compliance officers, and government investigations. It really depends on our client’s need initially, and then we use our DNA as a legal search firm to figure out, how can we take this and do it on a very compressed basis? Often, if there’s an interim need, there’s not much time for it. Your question about how do you source? We’ve been talking about EQ, and how do we make sure that we have the right fit? That’s very important for an interim role because you’re often going into a situation where usually there’s some conflict. There’s something happening that creates the need for the interim role.

I’m thinking you mentioned a government investigation, like that’s a super high-stakes thing. As you were mentioning that, I was thinking, what would make me think to get an interim person as opposed to going to my law firm and saying, “You guys are going to handle it. Give me your best and brightest associate, and let’s put them in this because it feels like a really important thing.” In that kind of scenario, why would I pick somebody who’s on an interim basis, not at a firm?

That is actually one of my clients who went through a difficult time, and they had already used us. They understood the model. They’d actually used us to bring in an interim general counsel. They understood how sophisticated we could get. I think they were still using outside counsel, we weren’t replacing outside counsel, but they were really understaffed. They needed somebody internal who was embedded. That’s another key theme. They want somebody who is really embedded with the business, who can help the business people understand how to talk to the law firm.

They weren’t replacing outside counsel, but they were a much more cost-effective way of trying to bridge the gap between what was happening in the business at that time and outside counsel, and the best way to bring the outside counsel in. By the way, they were a 20-year partner in an AMLA firm. They had plenty of good government credentials. Part of this fit goes to us scoping out the role and talking to our clients, really understanding what the need is, who the people on the team are that this person is going to be supporting, and what they’re like. I think there’s a misperception that it’s like, “Just flip me some people. Just send me some resumes.”

We don’t really engage with clients at that level because if we don’t really understand anything about the role, we can’t take that to our candidate team. We have teams of people that recruit for these interim roles. We then convey the information we’re getting from the clients to them, and they’re the ones who do this all day long. They’re matchmaking, and then they come back to us. Anyway, I said a lot there.

Can I ask, because as you were talking about the person needing to interface with the business, I reflected on an experience I had in-house where we had a lot of different government activity. We had some internal investigation, and we did bring in a seconded attorney. They were super smart. They were like a workhorse, you can work those law firm folks forever, and they just keep going, they’re Energizer bunnies, but they did not have the EQ. They did not know how to communicate with the business. They were a little rough around the edges. They were very like, “We’re driving, driving, driving. We’re going to get it done.”

Delegating And Overcoming Obstacles

As you’re describing that, I can see how you might need both. You’re going to need your technical outside counsel, but if you have a lean in-house team and some catastrophe on your hands, you need some bodies, and you need somebodies who aren’t going to make more work for you by upsetting the rest of the business. Elizabeth, let me ask you, it can be very hard for us as in-house leaders to know when we need help. We’ll get into more of the delegation later, but it’s really hard sometimes when it’s not a budget cycle to think, “I need headcount,” but you might need folks during the year, like Michael was talking about with the investigation work. I want to know, in your travels, what have you observed from GCs about what factors help them decide they need to find some temp help?

First of all, I think this is a very prescient question. Just as what is expected from an in-house counsel and what is expected from our business line, we’ve actually had the luxury of evolving together. We’ve had the luxury of figuring out these questions together. The first question that I always ask, if I’m speaking with a client and she says, “I’m incredibly stressed,” I’ll say, “Let’s just table-set. What can you get rid of?” I’m not asking you to be a traffic cop as general counsels were expected to be 30 years ago and just say, like, what can go to outside counsel and which firm handles what? I’m not asking you to do that. Rather, I’m asking, what are your skill gaps? What are your knowledge gaps that you feel comfortable delegating? Answer that question honestly.

It might be something as easy as, “I don’t have the technical proficiency on the CRM. Can you have someone come in and help me with this? Because I’m underwater, and it’s going to take me three times as long to figure this out.” It might be something as simple as consulting on the selection of a contracts management system and the provision of either a contracts attorney or a contracts manager to help with that implementation. What I ask that general counsel or a CLO that I’m speaking with is, what do you feel comfortable delegating? What are you great at? What are you not great at? How can we help you? Because what happens when we don’t delegate is we work 19-hour days, which is not sustainable.

When we don't delegate, we work 19-hour days, which is not sustainable. That's when mistakes can happen, no matter how great we are. Share on X

Frankly, that’s when mistakes can happen, no matter how great we are. Similarly, if we’re not creating a workflow, we are unintentionally burdening our existing teams and, quite honestly, causing potential attrition in that unburdening. A lot of times, it’s just simple questions like that, what are you comfortable with? What are you not comfortable with? Your expertise is not in securities? Let me find you someone who can help you with that. Let me budget it for you. This is what it looks like. Really simple questions.

That’s really smart. Michael, do you have more to add to that? Because I’m just trying to think, as Elizabeth was talking, it didn’t occur to me, we did a CLM implementation, and my team wasn’t the lead on that, but I added that to their deck. That was on their desk, and they hadn’t done it before. It was important they learned how, but that’s a one-and-done kind of thing. We’re not going to get a new CLM every year, or every five years even. That would have been something that would have been smart for me to seek some resources for. Michael, as you’re talking with CLOs and GCs, how do you help them figure out what they need?

I think she said it right. It doesn’t have to be this binary thing where you have to take the entire role or whatever it is and hand that off to the interim person. It’s starting with the comfort level. It may not be like if somebody’s leading a team and they’re going out on leave, you’re probably not going to bring in an interim person to lead that team because they may not have the management experience. What you’re going to do is try to take that core functionality of their job and give that to the interim person. Maybe that’s an actual opportunity for you to delegate the leadership piece to somebody else on your team to see how they do.

Give them a try.

You give them a try, and maybe what you’ll say, so this is a conversation that I’m having currently, while giving that other person on your team that leadership opportunity, maybe you take some of the work off their desk too. Maybe you say, “You’re not going to be doing 15 to 20 hours of contracts this week. Let’s find a resource so you can really focus on the management piece.”

The Benefits Of Interim Roles

I got to say one thing, and I don’t know if others have observed this or if you have heard this from your in-house clients, but when you have somebody that goes out on leave, you learn a lot more about what the team was doing. You learn they had some workarounds. You learn they had a huge volume of a certain type of work you weren’t aware of. You learn about their relationships. I wonder if there are any anecdotes or stories, or any treasures, that you heard from your in-house clients about what they learned or what you helped them learn during the interim placement. Elizabeth, I’ll start with you.

Quite often, you learn that, to your point, a lot of people have workarounds, and unintentionally, a lot of times our interim consultants will unintentionally find where the bodies are buried. You might have a colleague that you’ve worked with for five years, and she’s telling you, “I’m so incredibly busy. I couldn’t take something else on,” and then she has to go on leave, and our person comes in and they’ll say, “Stacy, I’ve done these 20 hours’ worth of work. I’m done.” This has happened on more than one occasion. Quite often, it’s on both sides. Maybe there was some institutional knowledge that the consulting person didn’t have.

Maybe there were some additional steps that he or she was not adding in and now knows to do so after that conversation. Maybe it was just something that could be automated that we hadn’t thought to do. Quite often, you’ll hear of sales folks in a large organization saying, “It takes two months for me to get a contract back.” It shouldn’t. We can fix that with a workflow. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to buy a $100,000 workflow system. It can be as simple as do we have a calendar of deliverables? Do we have a 30-minute meeting where we discuss on Monday, or whatever day, what is needed and who needs to do it? Honestly, that half-hour meeting can be life-changing in terms of efficiency, in terms of who is doing what, because you can’t hide in that half-hour meeting.

I got to say, I had somebody that was on leave, and we had an interim person that was pinch-hitting, and they discovered, “You guys need a checklist for this. I find it’s really helpful just to have your standard operating procedures for these things.” I think that when you’re doing the job full time, there’s so much work coming at you, and you don’t necessarily have the perspective or time to pull up and say, “How can we do this differently, better?”

You’re reactive, you can’t be strategic.

Michael, have you found any treasures in these interim placements?

Yeah, I think it’s a challenge to come in and replace somebody’s entire job, that can’t be done. I think it is a challenge to come in and do a leave, and you just need to make sure that you scope out really what the key things are because you don’t just think about your direct reports. You spend maybe an hour with them a week, you don’t really understand somebody’s entire job. I think it’s a pretty common phenomenon that we see, but I also would say it is nice to get an interim person. They’re like a mini consultant because a lot of times they do have exposure to other legal teams, and they see how things are done. You can get the benefit of that broader experience.

Also, when someone comes in on a consulting basis, in addition to being a fresh set of eyes, he or she has not been there for five years, so there’s not the emotional entanglement associated with that. If they came to you and said, “Stacy, we thought about doing it this way,” there’s no sacred cow for that person. It’s really just them trying to make you more efficient or them just pointing something else out as a fresh set of eyes.

I think that’s an underappreciated benefit of having somebody from the outside, that fresh perspective and, as you said, Michael, a consultant’s view on things. I do think, especially teams that have been together for a long time, you can get just a, “This is what we do, we’ve always done it,” and we’re just going through the motions. Michael, I wanted to ask, this is what I refer to as the meat here. Elizabeth talked about this a little earlier, delegating is one of the hardest skills, I think, for leaders to develop or for lawyers to develop. But certainly, I found as I’ve progressed through my career that you want to maintain, like, “I am the person, I do have this technical knowledge, but I have this management job too.”

There’s this trap that you can fall into, which is, “It’s just easier for me to do it myself.” I have that problem where I’ll have, like, a queue of things. It’s like, “It’s just easier for me just to look into that,” and guess what? It’s not, because I have no time. Again, because you have such a unique perspective, having worked with so many CLOs and GCs, what have you heard? What have you learned about our inability or ability to delegate?

I agree with you. By the way, I have some of that same tendency myself. I’m a practice lead, but I was trained as a lawyer. I have this feeling of, like, everything needs to be perfect, and I have to control it all. It’s scary. It’s scary to give pieces of your job away to other people because they’re not going to do it exactly like you do. What if you get it back, and it’s not right? What if it gets sent to the business people, and somehow that causes a problem? I get the compulsion. I also agree, like you’re saying, it’s a trap. The fact is, if you are a chief legal officer, GC of a growing company, there’s only one of you.

If you’re just constantly in the weeds, if you’re constantly, “I know how this contract works, I can just get it done,” rather than sit there and explain it to somebody else, then you’re not going to have time to align yourself with the other members of the C-suite and get closer to the business and really spend time understanding the strategic initiatives of the business. I agree it’s a trap. I don’t know that there’s an easy way out, but you can start with basic things. This may not be revelatory, but if you get a lot of contracts in, what are your most common types of contracts? Can you sit there? Can you make a playbook? Can you start with, like, “Here’s our accepted provisions”? Kind of those basic things with just trying to figure out what’s the common work and sit there and document your processes.

I would say just start small. Start with something that is probably low risk, that you’re comfortable with, but you can get a lot of return from taking, again, a type of contract that you see repeatedly. I don’t know, there’s no magic to this, but I do think it’s something you have to tackle if you want the legal team to grow, and you want to grow in your role.

If you have trouble delegating tasks, you can start small. Start with something low-risk that you're comfortable with. Share on X

That’s the why. Elizabeth, when you were talking earlier about helping folks scope an interim placement, it occurred to me that your role is a counseling or a coaching role. That is something that maybe folks don’t realize if they partner with a firm like MLA, you see a lot of these different legal offices, and you talk to a lot of different GCs. Can you add on to what Michael was saying about those conversations you’ve had with folks? How have you helped them to work on delegating?

We have the good fortune of just parachuting in. Day to day, we’re not dealing with the stress that you’re dealing with. We have the luxury of getting you to think strategically instead of just drinking from a fire hose by asking some questions. A guideline thesis that I use for some of our larger clients is, you just doing an excellent job is great. Is it sustainable? If you’re working a 19-hour day, that’s likely not sustainable in terms of providing excellent work product. But I’ll ask you to think about this, lawyers in most organizations are no longer just lawyers. They are also considered partners to various members of the team.

If you are working 19 hours a day, and if you are constantly harried, you are inadvertently giving away your power because people are saying to you, “Michael’s so busy. Stacey’s so busy. I can let this slide. I probably don’t need to worry about this particular issue. I’m not going to bother her with this.”

That hits home a little bit.

That’s hard. I ask you to think not only about the development of your team, which is what you should think about, development and legacy, but also your movement in the organization, as well as your reputation in the organization. If it takes Stacey two weeks to get this contract back, if it’s every time I go to talk to Stacey, my goodness, she looks really stressed out.

You’ve just given away your power, and so then they’re not going to come to you when it is about the company issue or it is an indemnity issue that would keep you up at night. Think about it that way. When you’re thinking about, “What am I comfortable giving away? What is my skill gap or something that I would like to learn? How is me tap dancing like the red queen trying to cover all of that? How am I inadvertently affecting my position in this organization?”

That’s a big one, lady. That’s heavy. That’s a really great insight. I think we get back to the trap, like you think, “It’s me, that’s what I’m here for.” I think you’re really honing in on, it’s not what you’re here for, and you’re not going to be in that role that long as things start to erode underneath you when you can’t get everything done because it’s impossible. Let me shift a little bit relatedly.

Onboarding Interim Talent

One of the reasons for the trap is that there’s this idea, it’s faster, easier for me to do it. It’s too hard to onboard somebody, getting them up to speed. You guys are great at matchmaking and helping people scope, but what about the onboarding process? If anything helps that go smoothly, what are some tips? Elizabeth, is that something you can talk about?

My overarching theme, overcommunication. That is what is going to help. It sounds so trite to say that, but when we have a consultant join a new client that we have not had the pleasure of working with before, we remind both sides to overcommunicate. We might even remind them, on Monday morning, put fifteen minutes aside and discuss what is needed, when it is needed, and how much time should be allocated accordingly.

So clear expectations?

Clear expectations, and the one thing that we’ll share with our consultant is, be comfortable in the gray. What I mean by that is, if you go to work at insert name of large biotech, and you think, “I’m working on this all week. I’ve got everything planned out.” If the FDA decides to investigate you, scrap your plans with that because it’s going to be all hands on deck for whatever is needed. Or, if a new initiative comes, or the general counsel to whom you are reporting says, “Stacy needs additional help. Can you give her a hand?” Communicate, but also be comfortable in the gray and know that, as a consultant, that’s okay. It’s okay if you have to ask questions because you are taking the time to learn the client’s institutional business.

Communicate but also be comfortable in the gray. As a consultant, it's perfectly acceptable to ask questions because you’re taking the time to learn the client’s institutional business. Share on X

That’s the best advice I can give for anyone. The other thing that I will say for a client, when I hear, “Onboarding is so hard,” I don’t disagree with that at all, but in every piece of the way, ask if the return on the investment is worthwhile. If I give ten minutes, is this worthwhile? That’s just how I look at it. I always share this example, I have a ten-year-old, and anytime I teach her to do a small chore, it’s so painful, but the investment’s worthwhile because eventually she’ll get it. She’ll also feel great about herself that she has this new skill or this new piece in her arsenal of talent, so look at it that way.

That’s great. Michael, do you have the relationship with the GC? Are you involved in the onboarding? After a placement, are you still like a sounding board and helping them along the way?

Yes, absolutely. That’s one of the things that we say, we are very hands-on in our approach. On our end, we’re not high automation. We’re going to check in at the end of the first week to see how things are going so far. We want to be involved throughout the placement. We want to understand sometimes, this is a really best-case scenario, things are going well.

They’ll realize that the contractor has other skill sets. Are there other areas that you can plug them into? That’s only if we stay close and really stay close to our clients during the entire assignment to figure out. We do the same thing with our colleagues who work with our contractors. They’re checking in with them also to see how they’re doing. We really want to ensure there’s a good fit, while we’re scoping out the project, but during the project also, just to make sure that everything is done well.

We talked about this early on. It’s not just big diligence, document review, contract review, all that, but maybe you could talk a little bit more about, “I’m going to MLA, what kind of placements have you had? What kind of assignments?” Just so I think more broadly about what I might use somebody for.

You’re thinking of specific projects that you come in for?

Yeah, and the type of talent that you’ve been able to match.

Probably the most common, what we see is a transactional role. I think that’s the most common application for an interim attorney to come in and help with. It’s the end of the quarter, or it’s the end of the year. We expect to be super busy. We want to make sure that we keep up with the business, so that transactional work, IT contracts, that’s a big thing that sometimes our clients will struggle with. Particularly as they’re getting more and more complex, you’ll see the privacy provisions that come in that, 15 or 20 years ago, didn’t exist. We need somebody to come in and update our templates so that we are addressing these privacy provisions that we get in our agreements. Other common overflow work, we just talked about that.

Future Roles And Career Advancement

This is a personal question. I’m pretty senior in my career, and I love my job, but I am thinking ahead for the future. Throughout my travels at different companies, I’ve seen where interim executives come in, and that always seems fun to me. It would seem fun, like, “I don’t have any allegiance to anybody here. I’m here to clean something up. I’m a great remodeler, great at remodeling. If there’s a team that needs to be zhuzhed up, I’m good at that.” How common are interim CLO or GC roles, and how do you position yourself to get one of those? Elizabeth, maybe I’ll start with you on that.

That’s a great question, and it is industry-dependent. For instance, I have the luxury of doing a lot of the work that you’ve described, where someone has the luxury of parachuting in for six months and then he or she can move on because I do private equity-backed life sciences. Generally, the PE organization wants to get out in 3 to 6 years, and they will be wise enough or forward-thinking enough to say, “If we want to sell this asset, we need to make sure that the IP is protected and we need to make sure that the contracts are in order.” In a situation like that, we have the good fortune to place an interim CLO or interim GC. He or she might be in the role for six months, depending on how long it takes to protect everything.

What happens a lot of times in those situations is twofold. When someone who has experience of the breadth that you have, Stacey, they’ll come in and say, “Client, you have a whole bunch of issues you weren’t even aware of. I can zhuzh up this team, but in order to make sure that you survive a due diligence, you’re going to need to do X, Y, Z, and Q.”

They call you back and say, “Can you give me someone that could just look at those IT contracts?”

No, because you have a duty to the organization. Once you’ve done that, you’ve done what you can do. A lot of times, it’ll extend. A lot of times, we will scope it as three to six months, and then, once our consultant gets in there, it can result in a much longer project. But it does really depend on the industry. That’s very common in life sciences, very common in any of the health service organizations that you can parachute into. In other industries, it really does depend. In private equity organizations of, frankly, all stripes, we’ll see someone will say, “I’d love to have Stacey fix this asset for a year. I think it’s going to take about a year to get everything.” What we see when we work with certain organizations is it’s interim in name only.

For instance, Stacey goes and fixes company B, and the client says, “We just sold off company B, but Stacey did such a great job. You just have to go to company C.” Your plan of just having that six-month beautiful engagement and then going to hang out on Nantucket sometime, good work gets more good work. That was the first part of the question, and the next part of the question was, “How do you position yourself for this role?” The short answer is doing exactly what you’re doing. You’re keeping your resume active, you’re keeping your social presence active, you’re writing, you’re commenting. That’s who clients want. Clients always want to know, “Stacey’s amazing. How come I get her for six months?” We just tell them, “Stacey would like some control over her life and calendar. She’s earned the right. She’s had a good long career to earn the right to do this.”

You’re getting me pumped up, lady. I got kids I got to get through a private high school and college, so I’ll be doing this for a bit longer. But that is something, and I don’t know if other people think about this, before retirement. I have friends that are moving into retirement, and I see that they haven’t necessarily planned. I feel like it would be hard to get off of a really intense, high-demand, high-profile job and just be like, “I’m going to do Pilates.” I’m not going to be that person. When I do my retirement planning with our financial advisor, I’m never going to not be working in some phase. I do appreciate the coaching to keep looking ahead and keeping the resume, etc., updated.

Can I add something onto that?

Yeah, please do.

I think it’s also the importance of maintaining your network, letting people know you’re interested in those types of opportunities.

You’re singing my song, by the way.

This is a great way, like this podcast, I imagine, is a fantastic way of just establishing a network and keeping in touch with it and putting that out there. Elizabeth and I have conversations with GCs and CLOs all the time. We don’t necessarily go into that with the perspective of, “I’m going to see if they’ve got somebody on their team who’s going out on leave.” We’re just talking to them. Our currency is basically having conversations with people. It’s the ability to just establish your network, but maintain it too. Keep up with people, let them know, “This is what I’m interested in,” and also start a fantastic podcast.

It’s so easy. That’s what someone told me once. This has been really a great conversation. You’ve given me a lot to think about, even as I look at my own team. Elizabeth, just real quickly, you mentioned getting somebody to do CLM-type, contract lifecycle management, install. Do you have folks in the firm that source for legal operations, temp interim work?

Yeah, and I can bore you with the details, but I’m happy to share some articles that I’ve written on how you select a legal ops person for your organization. That could probably be its own element.

Fun Question

I think it could. I’ve become a convert to legal ops, a late adopter or an early adopter, depending on which industry you’re talking to, but just want to give a shout-out that you guys cover a broad landscape of different roles and skills that are needed. We’re going to do the fun question. I do have a Spotify playlist that’s made up of pump-up songs from my guests. I love to learn what people’s taste in music is. Elizabeth, what is your pump-up song?

Let me begin with, I love music of all shapes or forms, but my pump-up song from law school remains my pump-up song, anything by Journey, but particularly Don’t Stop Believin’. Have a bad day after you’ve sung that at the top of your lungs, I challenge you.

Good one, especially being an East Coaster. I always associate that with the Sopranos finale.

You’re hitting me where I live. So good.

Michael, what about you? What’s your pump-up song?

My pump-up song is Like a Rock by Bob Seger.

A slow go in there.

That song is in honor of my late cousin, Dan Gamache. That was a song that was on his playlist, and it’s something that pumps me up.

Awesome. Guys, thanks for being here. This is really fun.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate it.

Elizabeth Smith, baseball stats.

My name is Elizabeth Hackett Smith. I’m a partner and practice leader at Major, Lindsay, & Africa in our Boston office. A fun fact about me is that I went cage diving in South Africa in 2005.

Michael Albino, baseball stats.

My name is Michael Albino. I am a managing director and practice lead at Major, Lindsay, & Africa in our Atlanta office. A fun fact about me is I am training to run my first marathon in thirteen years.

About Elizabeth Smith 

A former big law litigator, I have spent the last ten years collaborating with in-house legal departments and AmLaw 100 and 200 firms alike to provide seasoned and skilled contract attorneys, paralegals, and compliance professionals for substantive interim assignments.

In addition, I assist these departments with efficiency analyses and legal staffing projections.

About Michael Albino 

Feel free to reach out to me at 404.683.0698 or malbino@mlaglobal.com.

In my spare time, I enjoy biographies of business leaders, baseball players, musicians, and also crime and mystery novels. Unabashed fan of self-help, sales and personal finance podcasts.

For fun, I run, coach a little baseball, and enjoying checking out local breweries and restaurants.