Overwhelmed by how to organize your company’s litigation portfolio? Unsure how to strike the right balance in your board’s legal reports? Or are you a law firm lawyer struggling to craft the perfect pitch to a corporate client?

In this episode of The Legal Department, veteran litigator Adwoa Ghartey-Tagoe Seymour, VP of Litigation at Albertsons Companies, shares actionable advice to tackle all these challenges and more.

Whether your company is large or small, your budget is limited, or your legal technology is basic, this episode delivers practical tips to streamline litigation management and boost efficiency. Don’t miss it!

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Listen to the podcast here

Brass Tacks Of Litigation Management: Adwoa Ghartey-Tagoe Seymour, VP Litigation, Albertsons Companies

In this episode, I’m really excited to welcome Adwoa Ghartey-Tagoe Seymour, who is the Vice President of Litigation for Albertsons Companies. This is going to be a conversation about litigation management. I get audience questions periodically, and litigation management has emerged as a topic that people want to talk about. Adwoa started her career as a law firm litigator like many of us have, and now is managing litigation for one of the largest companies in the country. It’s great to have you here.

It is great to be here, Stacy, and thank you for having me. I’m excited to talk with you.

Transition From Law Firm Partner To In-House Counsel

I’m really thrilled. You have a very busy desk. The company is very busy, and you have a lot of litigation going on, so I appreciate you taking the time to talk. We don’t need to go into your career journey and every job you had, but you did come into in-house practice after being a law firm partner at Bryan Cave in the litigation group. I wonder if you could give just a flavor of your in-house experience doing litigation, how big a team, and what kind of portfolio.

I’ll be speaking at my individual capacity based upon my collective experience as an in-house lawyer and not on behalf of Albertsons, but I think it helps to start with even what my practice was at Bryan Cave that led me to an in-house role that I think was fortuitous for my skillset, and really helps with litigation management.

I was both a product liability and a consumer class action litigator at Bryan Cave. It lent itself to managing large portfolios of litigation. I sat on National Council defense teams. When you do that, you tend to see when you’re working on dozens or hundreds or thousands of cases where you start to see themes in those cases, like where you can be more efficient with your defenses or more efficient with billing practices and things of that nature.

One of my clients at the time, Cox Enterprises, had an opening for an in-house litigation opportunity because they were being very innovative and starting a litigation center of excellence where they were bringing the litigators to the parent company to manage litigation across the enterprise. Think about corporate risk philosophy across a company that has very diverse companies that were in various industries and various litigation portfolios. That led to my first in-house opportunity and really coming in and being able to set up practices and procedures and really evaluate the risk profile for the company and its very diverse businesses.

By the way, I want to talk about setting all that up because the housekeeping of managing litigation, I think, is an underappreciated function of managing litigation. I know you have a lot of great insights about that. I want to just bookmark that. We’re going to come back there.

Efficiently Managing A Diverse Litigation Portfolio

Coming in-house, my management of litigation can encompass active litigation, pre-litigation disputes, arbitrations, subpoenas, government enforcement actions, all of those. It can be a very wide variety and diverse portfolio of matters that I’m handling for my specific company.

Let me ask because I think substantively, in terms of the type of litigation you did as a law firm partner, was probably a great training ground to manage litigation in-house. I wonder for, especially general counsel, you see a lot of GCs that get the role after a transaction or their corporate partners somewhere. I wonder about getting up to speed on managing litigation in-house. Maybe you could just give the blocking and tackling of what is that function like.

I know for me, coming into a position, and especially if you’re not a litigator and you want to get up to speed quickly, my first core is do not underestimate leveraging your outside counsel and not in the way that I think people think about. If you are not a litigator, leveraging your outside counsel to get you up to speed on the litigation process, that is not your highest and best use as an in-house person managing litigation. The cadence of the filing of a complaint, an answer service of all of that, your outside counsel can bring you up to speed pretty quickly, and you can supplement that with CLEs.

I think our highest and best use in managing litigation in-house is to really understand your litigation portfolio, like the history of cases that your company has had, and understand the culture of your company and the goals of your company that can influence how you strategize and how you defend cases, or even how you bring cases on behalf of your company. To me, that’s your highest and best use.

Our highest and best use in managing litigation in-house is to really understand your litigation portfolio. Share on X

Can I ask you real quick, having the observation that you needed to understand the company’s history, their culture and their views of litigation, was that something that you knew going in or did you learn that was going to be important once you got in-house?

I learned it was going to be important once I got in-house. Honestly, it was because I was fortuitous enough to go, my first in-house experience was with a company that had such diverse businesses. For example, when I went to Cox, there was one subsidiary that was telecommunications. It’s a highly regulated industry. That litigation portfolio looks very different. It’s mostly against consumers like a lot of the litigation was consumer-facing litigation, or IP was very big with that particular company.

You juxtapose that with the media companies that the company owned at the time where you’re representing news reporters, you’re representing radio personalities where the First Amendment was incredibly important to our news reporters, and they move at a very fast pace. You may see a high portfolio of defamation cases. You could have a case that’s $5,000 in exposure, but if it undermined First Amendment principles, we may want to litigate that on the principle of the matter.

As you’re coming in as a law firm partner, you’re like, “Let’s just get rid of this thing. It’s $5,000. Who cares?” However, somebody in the company really does care.

Exactly. You being in-house, your outside counsel, they’ll know the law and really good outside counsel will know the industry as well. It can give you insight on what’s happening in the industry and the trends in the industry. You as an in-house litigator, you bring that triple threat, meaning you know your business. You know the goals of your company, the culture of your company and your fiscal situation with your company. Bringing that third prong helps influence the strategy that you bring to a litigation portfolio.

How did you get up to speed on that thing? At Cox, did you get run through like a formal onboarding, meet and greet or whatever, or they’re like, “Here is our portfolio. Deal with reporter Bratcher. She’s dealing with the defamation case and she’s a handful.” How did it work to learn this about the company?

We were building from the ground up. No specific onboarding. You’re coming in, there’s cases that are already active and it’s like, “This is a new case. Handle it.” There are also cases that may have closed and whatnot. For me, my initial approach was just getting an understanding of all of my active cases and looking at the history. You start seeing themes like, “The majority of our cases for this particular business may be more commodity-sized cases, cases that are really less than $50,000.” For every new case that I may have been assigned to, I was very intentional in the first six months to a year where I purposely would have business meetings in each of the cases with the key witnesses, understanding what their goals are for the litigation, what they thought about the case.

Not only am I doing fact investigation, which I typically defer and assign to the paralegals, as the lawyer coming in brand new to an organization, it helps me build a rapport with my business. It helps me understand really quickly in an active case what’s important to them, which then influences not only how I litigate that case, but also gives me a 360 view on how they may think about other cases and what’s important to them.

I’m very methodical in that regard and understand the existing portfolio. I remember coming in for one of the businesses. The list of cases was on a Word document. It wasn’t even like there was a matter management dashboard that I could go to and say, “Here’s my portfolio cases.” There really was some investigation of, “What cases are active?”

“How do we know what we’re managing?”

Getting up to speed through outside counsel and what was happening with those cases. It’s slowly building out using matter management platforms to build out more of a systematic way of managing cases. We are starting to see the trends and where we’re seeing the big pockets of litigation risk.

I love the trend. I love being at a strategic level. One of the things I like about being in-house is that you do get to see all of the issues that face your company, and you can think ahead on how to prevent things or how to manage them really efficiently. I like that part. Just thinking back to your transition, did was it hard for you? How did you realign your viewpoint? As a law firm lawyer, I’d imagine you’re moving the case along. We have a motion to compel. We’ve got this motion for summary judgment coming up. We’re litigating the case. In-house, that’s important. Also, as you’re saying, it’s the bringing the witnesses along. It’s reporting to the leadership. There’s a lot of stuff. When I got in-house, it felt like, “Is this real work?” You have to do all these other soft-skill things.

I would say the soft skills are the most important. As I said, those early conversations with my business people, starting with the business and understanding our culture and understanding our goals helped to realign and reframe my thinking. Foundationally, I think any in-house litigator, there’s almost two foundational core responsibilities that you have as an in-house litigator, regardless of how experienced you are on litigation or not. If you have that portfolio, there are two foundational things that may seem rote in our world as litigators, but really important to the business.

The Importance Of Financial Knowledge In Litigation Management

One is having a fundamental understanding of financial and auditing principles. Two, being attuned to anything that can cause reputational harm to the company. The bottom line is your GC and your CEO wants no surprises. I have yet to have a GC tell me to not give that mandate. No surprises in both of those instances, and I’ll tell you why.

Foundationally, in-house litigators have two core responsibilities: understand financial and auditing principles and be attuned to anything that can cause reputational harm. Share on X

One, the financial and auditing piece. We’ve all seen cases where you can get a surprise adverse verdict that you weren’t expecting. Can you imagine it hitting a quarter that your finance people didn’t expect? That could impact bonuses, hiring, and your stock price if you’re a public company. It has such far-reaching ramifications if you, as the person managing litigation, don’t have your hand or an understanding of what’s important to your company and what’s considered financially material cases to your company.

I don’t know that folks coming from a law firm would be aware of that. This could be personal to me, but I think you can get really tunnel-visioned about, “I’m just managing this case and not realize the accounting, the finance people need to know, do they need to make a reserve? Do they need to report this out? The worst thing that can happen is a wallop liability that nobody knew. It does reflect on the legal department, but it reflects on management. What the hell were you telling the market about your liabilities? It can cause all kinds of questions. I really appreciate you highlighting that.

Building Strategic Relationships With Finance Teams

If you’re one of those people who don’t have a finance background like I was a Diplomacy in Foreign Affairs major. This is things that I learned along the way. To this day, I still take a finance CLE every single year just to keep it going. In every company that I’ve come to, the very first person that I try to make friends with and really learn from are the finance folks. Albertson has such a great mentorship program for new executives.

I remember asking when I joined the mentoring program, I said, “I want somebody in finance. That’s who I want to meet,” and really learning from them. They can help you understand how your company makes money and what’s important to them, how that translates when you’re managing litigation. You can then work with your outside counsel when you’re getting close to settling a case, or maybe you have a say on when a trial gets set or when motions for summary judgment get settled or when you do mediation. You can have very sophisticated conversations with your business folks and your finance folks saying, “Do I need to push mediation out to the next quarter and then to what’s happening in the company?”

Those are the intangibles that in-house counsel and in-house litigators help bring to the company that outside lawyers can’t. I want to say this too. I don’t want to underestimate the second piece I’ve talked about. That’s that reputational harm piece. As outside counsel, they are drafting the briefs, the arguments and the defenses, but sometimes what you write in those briefs could potentially have reputational harm to your company.

Depending upon the outcome of litigation, you, as the in-house lawyer, should be attuned to that. If you’re a public company, something hits the press that could impact your stock price. Even as a private company, if you were consumer-facing, it could undermine your credibility with your consumers if you have litigation that could potentially cause reputational harm. Those are things that you should be looking for.

That is great advice because how many times have you read a Bloomberg article, and there’s a quotation from a brief, and the outside counsel is advocating for you? They’re vigorously trying to win. They use adjectives that are fine in a litigation context, but as you’re saying, if they’re quoted in a news article or customers, etc., you have a larger brand that you’re aware of.

A brand that you’re trying to protect on behalf of the company.

Another reason, folks, if nobody has in-house counsel, this is the benefit we deliver to the company. Let’s talk a little bit, and again, I want to draw on your experience transitioning from a litigation partner to an in-house. I’ve had a couple of conversations with GCs on the show about selecting outside counsel. I wonder about your experience like pitching business as a lit partner, and then now you’re a customer, you’re selecting counsel.

That’s interesting that you mentioned that because I remember that stark contrast. Incidentally, I have to say, too, after practicing for many years, I was one of those outside counsel where I was just like, “What did the in-house litigators really do?” I’m the one doing the research. My team is the one writing the briefs. We’re the ones arguing like, “What are you doing?” I hope that this conversation that you and I are having, Stacy, gives the in-house litigators and outside counsel some insight as to what litigators do. Even when it comes down to attorney pitches and how you pitch, now that I am in-house, and I heard in-house counsel say this all the time as outside counsel, but I believe this in my gut. You have got to know and understand my business and my industry.

When selecting outside counsel, make sure they understand your business and industry. Share on X

You just have to and it’s important to me. I tend to have worked for companies where the largest part of the litigation portfolio is defending the businesses and disputes with their consumers. It’s important to me that counsel is representative of the communities that we serve, that they’re relatable. There is an aspect of making sure that the outside council teams are diverse, come from all walks of life and bring humanity to the litigation because of who, our core customer base is. That’s important to me, as well as bringing up younger lawyers. They’re cheaper.

We can talk about that too. It’s all relative.

They tend to be cheaper. I love seeing my firms really bringing up the younger lawyers and allowing them to learn on some of the smaller cases. By the time they do become partners, they’ve been so embedded in the business that they’ve learned my business along the way. That’s important as well.

I get the sense that you stick with firms for a long time. Maybe you have firms that are like your go-tos. We all do. I was approached to help make an introduction for a firm with a company that I’m familiar with. They’re saying, “We pitched all these times and we don’t get it.” I was giving some feedback like it’s really hard to try somebody out. This firm was pitching on something high-profile. I wonder about your philosophy. For me, if it’s a high-profile thing, I’m really reluctant to go with an unknown quantity. Even if they’ve got great materials and they seem really great, I don’t know. I wonder, do you have your go-to’s that you always use or when do you bring in a new firm?

Yeah, I do have my go-to’s, but I’m actually one of those in-house where I think it’s advantageous to always hear from new firms. The reason why is because your business is constantly innovating. They’re constantly moving forward. Sometimes, your go-to firms may not have the expertise needed for where your company may be headed. I think, for example, generative AI. So many businesses are incorporating generative AI technologies and systems into the way that they do business. You may have your core firms that you’ve worked with for twenty years, but it may be a new firm that has lawyers that are on the cutting edge of that technology and how to litigate it, but if I’ve never tried that firm, to your point. It’s hard to bring them in new.

I’m actually one of those that I’m always open to pitches and sometimes, you may not hear from me for a year or two but you’re on my radar because I want to know and I understand what your capabilities are for when I have gaps in my council where I need to fill a gap. Also, I’ve seen instances where some counsel can get complacent because they’re used to getting the business. Sometimes, that can impact the quality of business. If I don’t have someone sitting second bench that I can pivot to, you can really be harmed when you’re not able to pivot quickly. Nine times out of ten, you don’t know when that lawsuit is going to be filed against you. That 30-day or 20-day period you have before you have to file an answer and then quickly trying to find counsel can be difficult.

How To Evaluate And Select Outside Counsel

I will say this. For material cases, what we tend to do, a practice I tend to have over my in-house career for material cases, sometimes we will run many RFPs. I may have my front runner, but if it’s a medium to large size case, I may actually ask 2 or 3 firms to go ahead and fit for the work. I may not choose the other two, but it keeps you top of mind for me about what your capabilities are. If something happens with the firm that I chose, I still know that I have a good backup with the other firms if I choose in a later case.

Let me ask a little bit about the RFP situation. I did an episode. I don’t know if Chris Chorba. He’s the head of the class practice at Gibson, Dunn. I was asking him about pitching business. It’s funny. I love him so much, but he was a little prickly when I asked about RFPs and the firm giving a peek into their strategy for defending a case. He was like, “You need to just work on references. I think it’s really unfair to ask somebody to show you the goods.” I want to compare that with, I interviewed Eric Lentell, who’s the general counsel of Archer Aviation, and he’s like, “I make everybody do an RFP, give me a pitch. I want to see the goods.” What’s your approach to RFPs?

I actually agree with Chorba. I sit in the middle and here’s why, because I was the partner who had to do the RFPs. It takes a lot of time, money, and effort to put those together. A lot of folks who have gone in-house, sometimes you’ve gone in-house at a stage where, where you weren’t yet a partner and understand the time, effort, and money that it takes for those firms to put together those RFPs.

I have been on the side and understand when you have some clients, not all, who may sometimes take the work product of the firm, not choose the firm and then implement that strategy. I do like the RFPs and I advise my team. When we ask for the RFPs, I don’t sit here and just ask, “What would be your litigation strategy?”

What do you ask?

What I ask is, “Tell me what your initial approach would be.” You’ll have some firms who will give the complete litigation strategy, but I’ll leave it to the firm to tell me how much they’re going to tell me. What I have come to know that when you ask it that way, those lawyers who really understand the legal issue that you’re trying to litigate, like they have just done it all the time, and they are experts in it, they are the ones who, off the top of their head, can almost give you the litigation strategy without thinking in a lot of work. They really can. Those who may have only done it a couple of times, or they just really want to do this work for you.

Fake it until they make it.

It’s going to take them a couple of weeks to put something together. When I ask for those mini-RFPs for, like I said, those medium-sized cases, I usually give the firms a week. My assistant’s going to set up a call in a week. I’m going to want to know these questions. I want to want to know your initial approach what you know about opposing counsel, the jurisdiction, all of those things. It’s usually in that call or that quick email response that they give me, if they can turn it around in a week, that tells me that you really understand this issue. I leave it to the firm on how much time and effort they’re going to put into it, and them not feeling as if I’m just trying to take their ideas later.

That’s really helpful to think through because, again, I was shocked because I’ve known Chris for a while, so I was shocked that he reacted as he did to the question. I do appreciate your perspective on this. I’m wondering, so you said a couple of things. You want to know what they know about the judge, what they know about the jurisdiction. You’re not asking for the state secrets. What are the things that we should be asking for in an RFP? Quick turnaround. I like that.

What I’m talking about when I say mini-RFPs, I’m not talking about the large RFPs you may do where you’re trying to select your panel of firms that will be your go-to firms for a specific portfolio. Those are a little bit more detailed. I approach those differently. Many RFPs where I have a case that comes in the door and I need to pick counsel quickly, I pick my 2 to 3 that I think could do this work. Jurisdiction, judge, your initial defense approach, your potential for settlement in these types of cases and views on opposing counsel.

What about budget? Do you ask for budget at that point?

Yes.

I think that’s great. Let’s just take a couple of minutes and talk about if you are trying to find new panel counsel to handle your slip and falls or your employment lit or whatever. How is that different?

That’s different because one, when I approach that type of RFP process, the first thing you have to do is understand your litigation portfolio and your current spend. Knowledge is power. If you don’t have an understanding, let’s say once you understand the history of your cases, and what types of cases you have, you may realize, “For my company, I notice that 60% of our cases tend to be IP cases, 20% product liability, 10% slip and falls,” or whatever that may be.

You’re then working with finance to understand what you are spending in those various buckets and what the firms have been charging you. All of that gives you leverage in how you approach the RFP process. You can sit here and you can bid for this work, but they’re going to want certain data points and you’ve got to already have a number in your head on what you’re willing to spend. It’s understanding your current litigation portfolio and understanding your litigation spend.

I’m the type that when a firm is bidding for panel counsel, I want to see the entire team. When we’re interviewing you, there are times when you just see the two main partners who come to the table, and yet you gave me an RFP packet with 10 or 15 lawyers who are going to be part of my team. Give me a sampling of the others. I want to see the associates. What you’re signaling to me is are you going to tell me that I’m going to have more partner spend and associates spend? On my cases, are you signaling me that your associates aren’t good enough for these cases? I am the type that I do want to get a feel for the entire team and who is going to be managing my cases and working day to day with my business people as we get through cases.

When you hate to see when the bill comes, like, “Who’s this? What exactly what does this person do?” I think for the law firms out there that are reading, we want to know. We don’t want to be surprised. Just like we don’t want to be surprised with the big development in the case, we don’t want to be surprised on who’s staffing our matters.

On the point about knowledge is power and understanding the litigation portfolio and spend, you mentioned the Word document that you got when you went to one role. I want to really dig in. I know you have a lot of passion around metrics, data and all that. I want to dig in a little bit about how to track, how to get our arms around this information. I want to talk a little bit about tools and tech. I am challenged at my company. I was the first GC, so I’m building a lot of this infrastructure and it’s hard to get a lot of this data. What should we do to be prepared?

Using Metrics And Tools To Track Litigation Trends

Yeah, it is. I totally geek out about technology and metrics, and I think, again, that’s a function of the work I did in private practice. I worked with large portfolios of litigation, so I had to work closely with our PEG team, our Practice Economics Group. I really got an early introduction into how you can use data to drive litigation strategy. I’ve worked at companies anywhere from a Word document where you’re keeping your cases all the way up to very sophisticated matter management and eBilling platforms. I do encourage, if you are someone reading who’s managing a lit portfolio and maybe you don’t even have the budget for a matter management tool just yet, but you’ve got to start somewhere. At a bare minimum, start with an Excel spreadsheet, listing your cases and then thinking about what’s important for you to know about the cases.

Having the column for jurisdiction, having a column for the state that the case is pending for the subject matter that’s at issue in that case. I am a big fan of tiering my cases. What I mean by tier is looking at each case and then designating whether or not it’s a low-value commodity case all the way up to I vet the company, whether I rank it 1 through 5 with 1 being a low-value commodity case all the way up to 5 being bet the company or ranking it red, yellow, green or whatever that may be for you, but organizing the cases in such a way. Even if you’re just visualizing an Excel spreadsheet, if I need to go in and talk with my GC once a quarter or biweekly or whatever that may be about the hot cases, I can sort by five.

We can talk about the company cases or the things that are on the radar. There are all sorts of metrics that you can put in there. The reason why I say start with Excel, because almost any matter management platform, you can once you get budget for it. You can export that Excel spreadsheet into that matter management platform. It makes it easier for the vendors to take that data and export it into your matter management platform so you’re not building it from scratch.

I think the best part too is that not only do you need that matter management tool, you need the eBilling piece of it where you’re keeping track of what your spend is. We talked about many RFPs and the fact that I want the budget. In the Excel spreadsheet, I may have a column for what my budget was for each of these cases. You can sometimes keep that information in your eBilling platform. Sometimes, it has that budgeting tool. Not only are your invoices going in where you’re paying your invoices, but also, you can keep budget information there. To me, the holy grail or the bonus is when you have your matter management tool and your eBilling platform, and there are a lot of vendors where there’s a tool for both of them, but if they are completely separate things.

Even if it’s an Excel spreadsheet and an eBilling tool when you can find a tool that you can lay over it to start building out reporting on your cases. What do I mean by that? There are tools like Microsoft BI or Tableau. I call them widgets that can sit over both of those platforms and pull the data from your Excel spreadsheet or your matter management from your eBilling platform, and then start building out pie charts and graphs to show you that 60% of your cases may be cases that are ranked number 5, vet the company and 20% are at number 3.

Start looking on an aggregate level what your spend-to-budget is. There are all sorts of metrics that you can pull from. Whether you have a budget of Microsoft Office of zero all the way up to $1 million or 6 or a 7-figure budget for your tools, I think if you can just have some matter management system, some eBilling system. When I talk about a reporting system, more likely than not, your business probably already has a license for a reporting tool because finance teams, marketing teams, a lot of other business teams already use those reporting tools that I talk about. You may be able to leverage that license and the knowledge of somebody in your IT department to pull that data together for you and pull one of those reporting tools to sit on top of it.

That is a great takeaway because I think that we can all get overwhelmed with all the legal tech and the vendors coming at us, etc., but to use what you have and maybe in one of those conversations you’re having with your finance people just ask because they do a ton of reporting. That’s really great advice. I want to just let everyone know how much your face lit up as you were talking about the magic, the holy grail of bringing these two things together. On the topic of reporting, there’s the blocking and tackling, the trends that you’re talking about. What about reporting to your senior leadership or the board about litigation? Do you have any advice around how to do that well?

You’ve got your litigation portfolio of cases and sometimes, it can be difficult to think about, “What do I talk about every month? Do they really understand what discovery is and all of that? What am I supposed to be reporting about?” I tend to think about litigation in four buckets. When I’m deciding what cases to report on, I think about four buckets and those four buckets guide the lens in which and how I report out on those cases. The four buckets I think about are I am looking at all my cases. Which ones may have a material financial impact, number one. Number two, are there any that may impact a significant business relationship?

Number three, is there one that could have a significant operational impact? Number four, is there a compliance issue? Am I concerned about our current practices that we’re going to have to course-correct or improve? When I think about it in that lens, the way I report out is not, “We’ve got a case, Stacy versus Adwoa.” It’s in the complaints’ been filed and our answer is due in 30 days. That’s not how I’m going to think about it.

If I’m reporting to my GC. It may be, “We’ve got a case, Stacy versus Adwoa. Stacy is a significant vendor for us. That brings in an X amount of dollars a year in spend. I know that we’re in the middle of contract negotiations this fiscal year. I do not anticipate that this litigation will impact the contract negotiations. In fact, they shouldn’t be retaliatory because it can cause an issue in the litigation. If you’re hearing anything, please let me know.” Do you see how it’s a different reporting, and then I may talk about where the case is actively, and it goes back to that’s because I know my business. That’s the value I bring as an in-house litigator.

I was thinking the exact same thing. That is the in-house skill. It’s not the Ps and Qs of what’s happening in the litigation. It’s what does this mean for us?

For legal, which is often considered the call center, and especially for the litigator where they think all you’re doing is litigation, our highest and best use is not just in those conversations, again, talking about it through one of those business focus lenses or financial focus lenses, but also demonstrating to your business or GC how legal is working to fix it or move the business forward.

For example, if there’s a case where there’s operational impact where, alright if we lose this case, it’s going to require us to make some changes in the way we do A, B, C. We are already talking to the business about how we’re going to make those changes. I’ve pulled in the commercial sub, the commercial legal subject matter expert and partner with them to talk with the business about how to implement some of those changes. To me, that’s our highest and best use as an in-house litigator and as a true business partner.

They’re lucky to have you. You’re thinking at a very high-level strategic level. I think very clearly from this conversation, you’re a huge partner to your business folks. I really appreciate you being here. The final question I ask everybody is, what is your pump-up song?

Adwoa’s Pump-Up Song And Fun Fact

I love a lot of gospel music, but I’m also a former dancer. I’m always dancing around the house and I’ve been in this Earth, Wind and Fire mode lately. I think lately it’s been probably Let’s Groove Tonight. I love that song.

Yeah, that’s a great song.

I can’t stop dancing.

I’m ready to get up and start grooving myself. That’s awesome.

That’s my current pump-up song.

I was taking a ton of notes. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me, Stacy.

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Adwoa Ghartey-Tagoe Seymour baseball stats.

My name is Adwoa Ghartey-Tagoe Seymour. I am Vice President of Litigation for Albertsons Companies Inc. A fun fact about me is that I was in an off-Broadway musical at the age of twelve.

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About Adwoa Ghartey-Tagoe Seymour

A senior legal executive and former AmLaw 100 partner, Adwoa thrives on solving complex business problems. While in private practice, she counseled Fortune 1000 companies and household brands across multiple industries through unprecedented major economic cycles, from the aftermath of the dot com bubble burst to the Great Recession and recovery. She has an innate ability to know when a problem requires her to dive deep to unravel systemic challenges or to pivot with agility to provide clear and decisive advice to executive leadership.

She currently serves as Vice President of Litigation for Albertsons Companies, Inc. (NYSE: ACI), one of the largest grocery retailers in the US. Prior to joining Albertsons, she was Assistant General Counsel for Cox Enterprises, Inc., a privately-held global conglomerate where she helped to develop standardized litigation processes and risk mitigation strategies for Cox’s 20+ businesses. She is in her element when she partners across divisions to improve business practices, streamline operations, and resolve disputes and regulatory enforcement actions. Through her collaborative approach, she gains a deep understanding of business objectives, enabling her to accurately assess and mitigate legal risks to assist executives in making informed business decisions.

Adwoa is also a servant leader who strives to identify the unique strengths and qualities of each individual to empower them to bring their best and whole selves to work. She also believes strongly in building deep professional relationships based on trust and confidence.

She has been a speaker for 20+ national and local bar associations on a variety of topics including business decision-making, commercial disputes, corporate litigation, investigations, global arbitration, analytics, legal operations, leadership challenges, and talent development. Dedicated to her community, she has served as a strategic partner and board member to multiple associations and non-profits that are committed to child advocacy, economic empowerment, and the legal profession, including the Truancy Intervention Project, Urban League of Greater Atlanta, and as a Georgia Supreme Court appointee to the Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism.