In this week’s installment of Contract Heroes, we sat down with the mastermind behind the creation of Counselwell, Avi Weiss. Avi is currently an in-house lawyer at Coinsquare, a cryptocurrency company based in Canada, but he also manages Counselwell simultaneously. His passion for in-house counsel and the drive to provide resources for his peers in this versatile and demanding profession have led him to take on both jobs, often working nights and weekends to achieve his goals.
Throughout the episode, we had the opportunity to learn more about Counselwell and its early days while also gathering some of Avi’s essential tips for anyone looking to find a job working as in-house counsel. Though a bit different from our typical subject matter, Avi’s perspective provides a great look at the world of in-house counsel, what it’s like, and how to get your foot in the door.
Creating Counselwell
So, what is Counselwell all about? Avi explained that he created Counselwell with the intention for it to become a resource and a home for in-house lawyers, which it most certainly has. Counselwell offers resources like online courses, a Job Board, a vendor directory, and a Slack community to lawyers all around the country, helping them to grow professionally in their careers and reach new heights.
The idea for Counselwell originally came to Avi when he made the switch to in-house counsel himself for the first time. He started out his legal career working at a large law firm in Toronto. Bigger law firms like this one, he explained, have lots of resources available for nearly any subject, as there are people working there from practically every area of law who can give you advice. When you make the jump to in-house counsel, however, you become the only resource for that company when it comes to all sorts of legal subject matter. Whether the questions are in your area of expertise or not, you are still expected to know or be able to figure out an answer. Despite searching around, Avi was unable to find any resources to help him when he first started working in-house. So, he decided to make his own resource: Counselwell.
One of the features of Counselwell that we wanted to highlight in particular are the online courses being offered, such as legal project management and contract management. Avi explained that working as an in-house lawyer himself, he was able to think about the types of tasks that lawyers have to do most often outside of the usual substantive law tasks. Dealing with contracts and managing legal projects were two of the most frequent tasks he noticed, hence why they were made into online courses at Counselwell. The legal project management course teaches things like staffing, balancing costs, and time management in order to help lawyers create a structure for handling various legal projects. The contract management course is designed to help lawyers assess their contracts and processes before adopting any form of legal-tech, like contract lifecycle management (CLM) software.
Tips for Prospective In-House Lawyers
Counselwell also features a unique Job Board that is specifically designed to help those seeking in-house positions find the perfect job for them. Avi noticed that in-house counsel positions can have an infinite number of titles, which makes searching for and finding job listings difficult. The Job Board eliminates all the clutter of different titles by listing only jobs for in-house counsel. Starting back in mid-2021, the Job Board has grown to include about 60 listings, with more and more being added each month.
One of the main points we asked Avi to touch on was providing some tips or suggestions for anyone interested in an in-house position, whether they’re at the start of their career or simply looking to switch paths for something new. He explained that the first step in the process should be to narrow down your search by thinking about key aspects of your dream job: what type of industry or company you want to work for (a government agency, a startup, a non-profit, a big company, etc.), what type of legal department you want to be a part of (small agile teams or larger ones), and what type of work you want to do. The type of work that you want to do is especially important, and Avi warned against picking a job based on what others might think of your title. Instead, focus on what tasks you’ll be doing at that job and what the actual experience of working there will be like in order to determine whether or not it will be a good fit for you.
We’ve condensed Avi’s checklist for finding your perfect job down below:
Create a spreadsheet of all the key aspects of your dream job mentioned above.
Create a list of companies that match all your criteria.
Reach out to people on LinkedIn who work in those companies and track the conversations on your spreadsheet.
Use the conversations to narrow down your choices more and more until you find a job that centers around your ideals.
For more exclusive chats with expert guests in the contract lifecycle management sphere along with valuable legal-tech advice, check out past installments of Contract Heroes, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode!
Episode transcript
Read the full transcript
Made with speech-to-text software, so a few words may be off.
0:01You're listening to the Contract Heroes Podcast, your one-stop shop for all things contract management. And now here are your hosts, Marc and Pepe. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Contract Heroes, w- and, uh, also welcome to 2022. This is our first recording of, of the year, so, uh, pretty exciting stuff. You should've just heard a new intro. That's pretty cool. Today on the show, we have Avi Weiss with us. Avi is the creator of CounselWell, and, uh, before I flip things over to Pepe to give you a little bit more background and info on what we're gonna be talking about, I wanna flip things over to Avi so he can give you, uh, some information on his background. And, uh, Avi, thanks for, for joining us. Uh, we really appreciate you coming on the show with us. Thanks for having me, Marc. Um, so I'm a in-house lawyer in Canada, and, uh, I work at a cryptocurrency company called Coinsquare, but I also run a company called CounselWell which offers resources to in-house lawyers across the country.
1:10Um, and we offer things like online courses. We offer a job board, a vendor directory, a Slack community, things like that, basically open to any, open to building any resource that could potentially help in-house lawyers grow professionally, and that's what I'm all about. So kind of juggling both of those things, um, and it's, it's been amazing so far. That's awesome, Avi. And I really like this conversation with you because, you know, traditionally I think that most of the lawyers globally, they think there are either two paths, right? Either go to a law firm, be in-house. Maybe a third one if you include academy, right? But I think that there's, there are new opportunities out there, right, like what you build together, uh, in CounselWell. I think there's a lot of people that is in- interested into exploring, like, a different path in their career.
2:02And I would love you if you could go a little bit more on the details in how you came with, with the idea of building CounselWell. Yeah, so the idea came about because, you know, I, I started my career at a large law firm in Toronto, and, you know, at a law firm you have a ton of resources. So if you need- Right... help with a specific area of law, you can talk to someone in that department. If you need other types of resources, there's just so many people there to help you because everyone, you know, there's lawyers, there's legal staff, there's, you know, there's, there's so much help out there. Then you make the jump in-house, and all of a sudden you've gotta help whatever company you're at, um, you know, deal with issues on every area of law all of a sudden. Um, and not only that, you're also dealing with other things like how do you deal with contract management? Um, you know, how do you deal with legal operations? All of these other skills that you didn't realize you needed to have, um, but all of a sudden, you know, you're being asked to do it on day one.
3:00And for that reason I thought, "Okay, there's gotta be some resources for in-house lawyers where we could get help." And I just looked around, um, and I couldn't really find anything, and so that's why I decided to create CounselWell to, you know, to kind of deliver on that to myself and to other in-house lawyers. And, you know, that's, that's why it's really great that I'm doing both at the same time because, um, you know, working as an in-house lawyer I'm able to identify what my problems are, right, like what I need help with, and then I talk to other in-house lawyers and say, "Hey, does this resonate with you? Do you also struggle with this?" And then I could kind of build a resource around that. Yeah, Avi, I, I think it's, especially now, you know, these, these past couple of years, uh, folks are looking for more resources to, uh, that they can leverage just, you, from being at home. Uh, you know, i- i- everybody's kind of remote now and, and some self-paced training is- is definitely something that we've seen in, um, a lot of departments that's, that's becoming, uh, something that people want and need.
3:59Uh, they're really looking to grow in their career, so I, you know, I really think it's a, a fantastic idea. Um- Thank you... uh, uh, so kind of my next question is, you know, what, what has it been like trying to build this out, you know? Because you do have your day job. Y- you have CounselWell. Um, you know, when are you trying to find time to, to, to work on this a- and kinda what was that startup process like? Yeah, so, uh, you know, the startup process was at a time when I was in between, you know, my job at Coinsquare and my previous position. So that was a little bit easier because, you know, I was, I had the time. Um, but when I, you know, when I started working at Coinsquare, it, it became a lot more difficult. And I don't... When people ask me this, like, I don't actually have a process or a structure in place for how to switch back and forth between these two things. I think anyone with two jobs will probably agree that there's no easy way to actually balance the two and, um, you know, divvy up the t- the time during the day because just, you know, things come up, and your one job might be slower that day, so then you could work on the other one- Right...
5:07uh, or vice versa. And it's really just a matter of always being in tune with what your task list is in, in both places and just switching back and forth. And I, you know, I, I probably switch my laptops to, to connect to my monitor, I probably switch my two laptops, like, 10 times a day, um, and, and night, right? So part of that is working nights and weekends, and, um, you know, i- if you wanna have two jobs, then you really have to be comfortable working more than the average nine-to-five job. Just be- you know, you can't fit two things into nine to five. Right, and I think there's a lot of project management there, right? You gotta be, like, super org- organized with all your tasks that you have with your, uh, day job and especially when you wanna launch your own startup. And maybe this will be a good, uh, a good time to shout out one of your courses, because I was just looking... Well, it was last week, but I was looking at the courses that you are, uh, uh- Putting together in the counselwell.ca, and we're going to put the link on the description so everybody can just take a look.
6:09And I, I really like the one about legal project management, and there's another one from tackling the contracting problems. Maybe you can talk a little bit more, like, uh, what it's, uh, what it's offer in the legal project management so people can have, like, some... If, if, if, if they've ne- never heard about it, maybe you can give them a, a li- little bit on what they will be learning on that. Yeah. So, so the way I thought about this when I started building courses is, you know, like I, like I mentioned before, it's not just that in-house lawyers have to advise on substantive areas of law, but they also have to advise on, you know, legal operation skills or business skills, whatever you wanna call them, things that aren't technically substantive law, but equally as important in the administration of your day-to-day tasks or, or day-to-day duties, right? So, um, I started to think about, okay, what are the things that in-house lawyers do the most that isn't substantive law? And I thought, okay, they gotta deal with their contracts. They've got to manage legal projects.
7:12Um, and so those were two of the areas, and we have a few more courses and, and some more planned. But, um, you know, for legal project management, it's all about, um, project management with a legal twist. So, uh, you know, when you get a project and you have to... you're tasked to do, like, a big thing at a company, you've got to think about, um, you know, how do I staff this? Like, who has to be on the team? Um, which external counsel am I using? How do I balance that with, you know, being cost-effective? And, and how do I balance my time? All of these different things, these moving pieces. So the course is about putting them all together and, you know, creating a structure, at least in your mind, when you're going about, um, you know, completing a project. So that's that. And, and then for the contract management course, um, that is, you know, more about thinking about how to deal with your contracts, uh, and then getting to the technology.
8:13So it's, you know, a, a lot of in-house legal teams, the first thing they do when they think about, uh, you know, how m- like, how messy their contracts are is, okay, let's just adopt technology right away. Um, so this course is more about first, you know, legal tech and, and CLMs are amazing. Right. But first, think about your processes. Think about... Right? Because if you go, if you rush too fast with this without thinking about your people, processes, all of that, then you're gonna end up, um, having a really hard time implementing a legal tech pro- a legal tech or CLM properly. So that's what that course is about. Um, and it's been great. Like, we've, you know, we've had a lot of customers in both Canada and elsewhere just because, you know, since they don't deal with jurisdictional law, um, we can open it up to everyone and, um, you know, and, and the feedback's been great so far. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
9:08And, and, you know, I mean, Avi, that's obviously something we talk about a lot on, on the show is, is making sure that you, you have the groundwork done before you go out there and start to look at technology that you think is gonna solve your problem because, you know, if you're not looking at your internal processes, uh, you don't have proper, uh, folks in place to, to really manage these, these flows, uh, you know, putting a Band-Aid on something really just is not going to, to fix the problem. So, um- Yeah... I, I think that that's great. I think that that's definitely something that, um, everyone, all, you know, all in-house legal teams definitely can probably use some help on. But it's, it's great that there are resources out there that, that, um, folks can leverage to, to help them get better at, at some of the stuff that they probably weren't taught and, uh, you know, these smaller legal teams might be scratching their, their heads on. Right. And one of the good things is that it's not, um, limited into a specific jurisdiction. All this kind of, uh, knowledge can be applied everywhere, right? That's one of the things about being a lawyer.
10:07You don't have to pass a bar right, on a, on a specific state to, to learn about project management or, or contract management. And I think you really hit the nail there that, uh, a lot of in-house players, they wanna jump straight to the technology, but it's not like a magic wand, right? You have to take, uh, care of your processes first, otherwise you'll be only automating processes that are, are already broken, and it's not going to solve anything. Yeah. Exactly. So, so Avi, I know that there's a couple other parts of CounselWell, and one of those things is, is the job board. Uh, and, you know, I, I'd like you to, to give our, give our listeners maybe a better understanding of, of what that is, how it might be able to help, you know, those out there that, that, one, are searching for a job or, or, B, maybe those organizations that are, are looking to, to hire somebody on their, uh, legal team. Sure. So to start, LinkedIn is by far the best place to find a job. Everyone knows that, and I'm not competing with that. Um, a- I'm not trying to be the next LinkedIn, that's for sure.
11:09Um, however, what I've noticed is that in-house lawyers have 1,000 different titles, and sometimes that makes finding an in-house job a little bit difficult because are you searching for in-house legal, in-house counsel, legal counsel, legal director, manager legal? There's like 1,000 different things, right? And, and, you know, when you search each term, you get a few different results. And so I thought, okay, if I'm anyways building, uh, kind of like a home for in-house lawyers, which we say on the homepage, um, that we're trying to be a home for in-house counsel, uh, then, you know, it would be great if we could have a job board where if you're an in-house lawyer and you're looking for a new job, you can just head on over to that landing page and you'll find jobs just for, just for you, right? No clutter, no dealing with different titles. Um, you don't have to see everything else. You just see jobs for in-house counsel. Um, and so we started that back in, you know, mid-2021 or so, and we had around I think around 60 jobs posted so far. Um, and it's growing. You know, every month we get a few more jobs than the month before.
12:17And, um, and it's been great so far. It's good. So Avi, keeping talking about the, uh, in-house jobs. So what ideas or suggestion do you have for those who are looking into an in-house job? Maybe somebody that it was in the exact pos- position as you that, uh, was or is working right now in a law firm but wanna make that change. What recommendation would you give them? Yeah. It, it's really a loaded question. I could talk about this for hours, so I'm just gonna try to distill my thoughts here. But the first thing that you should do when looking for an in-house job, or I guess any job, is to really narrow down your search, um, because otherwise it's gonna be overwhelming. There's so many postings out there. Um, and so when you're narrowing down your search, you've gotta think about a, a few different factors, right? You've gotta think about what type of industry do you wanna work. I- uh, what type of, what type of company do you wanna work at, right? Do you wanna work at a government agency? Do you wanna work at a nonprofit? Uh, do you wanna work at a startup or a big company?
13:17And then feeding into those things is what type of legal department do you wanna be a part of? If you wanna be a part of a small, agile team, then don't go work at Walmart because, you know, you're gonna have a 200-person legal team. So it's really important to think about all of these things and then s- you know, start your job search from there. And also, it's important to think about what type of work do you wanna do. So, you know, I, I think a lot of people make the mistake of giving weight to what their friends and family might think about how, a- about their job title and their, and the company they work at, right? Like some people might go into new and cool-sounding, um, industries because of how they sound and how they look, but they fail to think about what are they gonna be doing on day one. When they start on Monday, what's the first task they're gonna get? Are they gonna enjoy that task? Um, so that's really the most important. Like that's, before everything else, think about the work you're gonna do.
14:14And the, if you've never done that type of work before and you don't even know what type of work it will be, um, you know, the way to find out is just talk to other people in similar positions and ask them, "What can I expect?" Um, or you can ask hiring managers during the interview process, "What can I actually expect?" Um, instead of trying to impress them and talk about all your achievements, ask them questions about what you can expect on day one. So by doing all of those things, you can start to narrow your search down. Uh, and then also don't only look at open listings because in-house lawyers are extremely busy. Um, sometimes they don't even have time to do a job posting. Like they know they need extra help. I don't think you'll find any GC who says, "We're actually great right now. We, you know, we're not swamped and we're, we're feeling great." Um, every GC is, is overworked, swamped, uh, and they need extra help. So, you know, talk to...
15:09I- if you found a company after doing all of that initial work, you found a company in the right industry with the right type of work, then, um, talk to people at those companies and ask them if they could use another lawyer, right? Like show your interest, show your passion, and, uh, and that's how you, that's how you get there. I think that was a lot of great advice. Uh, you know, I, I think that there's a, a lot of folks that are, um, coming out of college and, and I, you know, I do think that there is this trend that, that in-house teams are starting to look more attractive to, um, individuals that are out there because they just, they, they understand, you know, what the law firm life actually looks like and, and you can get burnt out, you know, m- probably much more quickly at a law firm than, than in-house. I'm not saying that that doesn't happen, uh, when you're working for a, you know, a larger corporation. Um, but, but it's, it definitely, um, allows you to also focus on maybe different parts of legal, right? There, there's that legal tech aspect that, uh, you can m- look into and, and the legal ops team and, and working with technology is always a different path that, uh, wasn't really a thing, you know, let alone 10 years ago, probably even 5 years ago.
16:16Uh, so, you know, I, I think those are some, some awesome tips. So if you're out there and, and you are looking to maybe take a little bit of a different path than some of your peers, uh, I would definitely lean on some of those tips that Avi just shared to, uh, to get an understanding of what to look for when you're, you're starting to look for organizations. Yeah. And, and I just wanna add that, you know, there's definitely gonna be a big salary gap if you're coming from a large firm. Um, I think it was just yesterday that Milbank raised, uh, salaries by 10K or 15K. Um, so that gap is getting bigger and bigger, and now it's harder to hire in-house lawyers from law firms because they have such high salary expectations. Um- Right... so, you know, if you're going in-house, you're not doing it for the money. You're doing it for the lifestyle, the variety of work, um, and, you know, a whole host of other reasons that, you know, you might not be able to get at a law firm. So it's important to keep that in mind. Right. And- It's a completely different path, right? And what about crypto, Avi? I, I think that's a whole new market over there. I, I think that, uh, there's so many new things.
17:21A couple of years ago, e- everybody just thought about, uh, Bitcoin, Ethereum, but now with the NFT, there's a whole different market. I was just looking a couple of weeks ago about OpenSea, and it's incredible how people are getting, uh, you know, like, uh, CryptoPunks and then selling, uh, these NFTs for over a million dollars. It's, it's crazy. What, what are you seeing in the market? But I think, because I think, especially students right now, I'm pretty sure that one of the main goals is working in crypto. What would you, uh, uh, tell them, right? Uh, like your, how, how are you envisioning the market in the upcoming years? Yeah. So, you know, I, I can't comment so much on how I see the market, but I can comment on how, you know, some tips for how to get jobs in the market. Right. Um, so, you know, you can, w- if you're interested in that type of space- You know, the first thing to think about is what in that space interests you? Is it NFTs? Is it the metaverse? Web, what part of Web3?
18:26Um, is it just crypto? 'Cause that real- will really influence what type of company, you know, you'll wanna work at. If it's just crypto, then maybe a company like Coinbase is, is what you want. Um, if you're looking at NFTs, then, you know, OpenSea or LooksRare or whatever. Um, but before you get into that, because all of these things sound very interesting and they are very cool, like I said before, you want, you'll wanna talk to lawyers who are already in the space and ask them what they're actually doing on a day-to-day basis. Like, you'll wanna talk to s- a lawyer who has in his or her profile, you know, NFT lawyer, and then message them and say, "Okay, what, what legal aspects touch NFTs? Like, what are, are you doing copyright? Is that, is that all there is? Is there more? What, you know, what are you doing on a day-to-day basis?" So, um, doing that initial work to, to figure out, um, how to marry your passion plus, you know, what you'll actually enjoy doing is very, is very important. Yeah.
19:23No, that, that's definitely s- you know, again, great tips. Um, I, and I think as Pepe said, you know, that space is, is something that more and more folks that are, uh, younger are, are, are definitely looking into. You know, I just purchased my first NFT the other day, so- Congrats... um, pretty, pretty, uh, pretty interesting stuff there. Um, but, uh, but Avi, you know, we really wanna thank you for coming on. You know, we like to keep these sessions, uh, a little bit, little bit shorter. Um, but, uh, let, let's, you know, for a final takeaway, what, um... And I know we've talked a lot about, uh, a, a number of things, but, um, it, you know, again, if you could give one tip to, um, somebody out there that's, that's looking to make that change from, uh, either starting i- on the in-house path or, or transferring from a, a, a, um, a legal team to, uh, in-house c- counsel, uh, what would be the, the thing that you would suggest to kind of start that and put that in motion? Uh, the first thing to do is honestly just it's, it's sounds kind of boring, but just create a spreadsheet of, of all the things that I talked about. Um- Mm-hmm...
20:27you know, what industry, what, what, um, what type of company, and start, uh, what type of work do you wanna do? Like, all of those things, create a spreadsheet, and then once you narrow it down, create a list of companies in that, that match all the criteria that you're looking for, and then start reaching out to people on LinkedIn from those companies. And track your conversations on this spreadsheet. Um, you know, and, and from there you're narrowing and narrowing and narrowing, and you'll, you'll, you'll find a job that perfectly matches what you're looking for. Great tips, Avi. Well, we wanna thank you for, for coming on today. Uh, we're excited to see what direction CounselWell heads out, uh, heads in. And, you know, if you are searching for a job, maybe check out that job board. Uh, so thanks, Avi, really appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much for having me.