LAS VEGAS — Google’s legal department encourages in-house counsel and other employees to be willing to take measured risks and not be afraid of failing, team members said during a session at the Association of Corporate Counsel’s annual meeting on Monday.
This risk-taking with supervision stems from a culture of trust that the department has established throughout its different units, said Bert Kaminski, director, legal for Google Cloud.
“We try things, we do the best and then we recalibrate and just get things done,” he said.
Liz Daly, director, legal for Google Ads, said she too has appreciated the department’s willingness to allow employees at different levels to engage in informed risk-taking. This approach can help prevent people from being scared to make important decisions.
“One of the things that I try to instill in my team is, ‘We make the best decision we can with the information we’ve got,” Daly said.
As long as the decisions were carefully thought-through and not snap judgments, department leadership has provided support even in times when the results weren’t what was envisioned, Daly said.
Prioritizing communication
Panelists during the ACC annual meeting session also emphasized the high value Google’s legal department places on frequent communication among different units and employees spread across the organization chart.
Kaminski said employees are provided forums for asking questions of managers and other higher-ups, ensuring the leadership is not solely top-down.
“It is a flat culture where we are encouraged to communicate with one another irrespective of rank and be respectful and communicate openly and promptly with whoever is writing to us,” he said.
Christoph Endell, a corporate counsel with Google Cloud based in Germany, said communication with non-legal professionals in other areas of the company is also encouraged and has proved beneficial.
He cited the example of a contract draft that he had a member of the Google’s product team review following a discussion about a product development.
“He proofread it and made some pretty good suggestions of how to actually improve the contract without having ever studied law,” Endell said.
Daly made a similar point, saying she learns something new from everyone she speaks with no matter their title or how long they have been at Google.
“What I particularly love is being able to really deep dive with our engineers and our product teams to be able to really understand what the products do that we're supporting and contracting for,” she said.
DEI
Another key component of the Google legal department’s culture is promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
This includes ensuring that all hiring managers learn how to practice “inclusive hiring,” said Althea Brown, director, legal at Google Devices and Services.
The hiring managers are encouraged to consider candidates from different educational and professional backgrounds.
“We want to make sure that we're really casting a wide net in terms of who we're bringing into the organization, so training is important,” Brown said.
Along those lines, Google’s legal department also tries to diversify the pipeline of the legal profession.
One way it does so is by partnering with law firms to have diverse law school students from across the country spend a few weeks in the summer working with its in-house team and outside counsel.
“It's a wonderful opportunity to expose them to the work at Google [and] to the work that they would be doing when they become in-house counsel years down the road,” Brown said.
