The legal department at ediscovery provider Everlaw typically interacts with customers when they’re negotiating contracts for its software or explaining to them how their data is securely kept in compliance with applicable regulations.
Shana Simmons, Everlaw’s newly promoted chief legal officer, said one of her goals is to spend more time with the company’s customers talking about how Everlaw can best serve them in other ways.
These conversations would include gathering feedback from in-house legal teams, among other users, about how Everlaw’s investigations and litigation software could be improved. She would also like to hear about any data uploading or billing challenges they encounter.
“If anyone can be empathetic to the day-to-day struggles of what it's like to be a legal professional — not just a lawyer — but an ediscovery professional, a litigation assistant, a paralegal, it is me,” Simmons told Legal Dive. “I've done all of that. And so it's my hope to lend that voice and credibility at the C-suite level.”
Wider adoption of technology
Simmons said dialogue with legal departments who are Everlaw customers and potential new ones is particularly important following a period in which the COVID-19 pandemic drove an increased use of technology across the legal industry.
In the ediscovery space, nearly half of surveyed respondents earlier this year said cloud-based ediscovery has become the standard in the industry, a 66% jump from 2021.
Simmons pointed to the increasing use of contract lifecycle management technology as another example of legal departments in particular showing greater openness to tech.
“I think the CLO and the in-house counsel team is going through the digital transformation that CIOs, CMOs, CHROs have already gone through in recent years, so we're now seeing a big push in the fit-for-purpose technology like e-billing, contracts and ediscovery,” she said. “And what we're hoping to do is to let them know that we're automating the mundane and the repeatable, and we see the demand for metrics to quantify results.”
Supporting growth
Simmons joined Everlaw as its general counsel in August 2020 after having previously worked for nearly nine years in Google’s legal department, including serving as head of its Cloud Go-To Market Legal.
Everlaw has grown significantly in the two-plus years Simmons has led its legal department.
The company now has more than 500 employees, a 76% increase since it announced a $202 million Series D funding round last November. At that time, the company also said it had seen 80% year over year growth.
Simmons said she hopes her legal team’s “customer-empathetic” approach will facilitate further business growth while maintaining Everlaw’s compliance with applicable laws and regulations.
She will also work to ensure her legal department continues to grow as the business does so team members don’t feel overworked or stressed out as other in-house professionals have reported feeling.
“I have a lot of moms on the team and have a lot of folks who are caring for their parents,” Simmons said. “It's super important to me that I do grow and rightsize the team so I don't burn them out.”
Embracing authenticity
Simmons emphasized that even as Everlaw and her team expand and she acclimates to being part of the C-suite, she does not intend to change how she approaches her interactions with colleagues.
In fact, she said her promotion has given fuel to further embrace authenticity.
“So often I've seen women of color, or women, try to mirror other colleagues of theirs to their detriment,” Simmons said. “And I think it's at Google when I realized I needed to be who I truly am at the table, and that's when I began to add exponentially more value to the conversation.”
Simmons said she also intends to keep bringing levity to the job when appropriate, including at C-suite meetings, by poking fun at herself and others.
“It's about bringing the joy to our everyday lives to make us better leaders and more joyful for our customers and for our team,” she said.
