Getting to "Yes"

Please tell us what led you to join Ohmium.

The short answer is that I had written down a wishlist for my dream job, and Ohmium checked all the boxes. The longer answer is that my past career experiences really have set me up and led me to this role. I started as a paralegal in the Energy Project Finance Group at Skadden in their New York office, and I loved working on global energy deals. I went to law school with the intention of going back to that group. And then I graduated law school during the Great Recession. I was extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to go back to Skadden, but with the slowing market there was a greater need in the Capital Market group. There I worked with a very talented group of attorneys on IPOs and other financings and met some of my greatest mentors.

After that, I made the move to go in-house to Aflac where I held roles of increasing leadership responsibility. My most recent role was as the Head of Legal and Corporate Secretary for their global venture capital fund, which included a group of international subsidiaries. While I was doing that, I earned my executive MBA from Auburn University. This had a huge impact on accelerating my career and pushing me to take the role at Ohmium. I’ve always had a business-first mindset, but the executive MBA program deepened my financial acumen and helped me get more comfortable with risk taking. That’s when I realized I wanted to be on the startup side, as opposed to investing in startups, so I started looking for the right opportunity.

Ohmium was the ideal fit. Ohmium produces proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzers, which use water and renewable energy to produce green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is a sustainable resource that can be used in many sectors and applications across the world. I was thrilled to come back to my first love of the law, which is the energy space and it’s an exciting time because this industry is poised for exponential growth in the coming years. We just completed a $250 million Series C fundraising, which was one of the largest globally for the year, so I was able to put my capital markets expertise and venture capital background to work.

I have been incredibly impressed with the highly sophisticated and creative leadership team that we have. We have a very intentional focus on diversity in the energy sector, which historically has not been very diverse. I joined about one and a half years ago as Chief Legal Officer and first in-house lawyer. We have now grown to a team of five. I love being able to build my own team from the ground up and develop processes and procedures that work.

Talk to us about your leadership style and who and what has influenced it, and then we'll get into your hiring practices.

I've been very fortunate to have had wonderful mentors throughout my career. I'm a strong proponent of professional development and mentoring, at all levels on my team.

For example, I will send other attorneys on my team as delegates to meetings so that they get exposure to executive leadership. I bring business partners to our team meetings to teach us about our product and how we make money because I believe every lawyer needs to understand every way that their company makes a dollar. I end my team meetings with a “professional development tip of the month.”

I also believe in giving exposure to different topics to all team members. I am not someone who believes in silos. If I set up information sessions with outside counsel or with our business partners on our product or an area of the law, I include the entire team. I of course have team members who are more focused on contracts or regulatory work, but I want people to be exposed to as much as possible. I believe it makes you a better lawyer, it makes you a better issue spotter, and may spark a new interest too.

What qualities do you look for when you’re hiring new people for your team?

My team's mission statement is “Get to Yes”, so I really look for people who embody that spirit. Some overarching characteristics I look for in all of my team members would be curiosity, intelligence, creativity, a drive to learn more, open-mindedness, high emotional intelligence, good communication skills and attention to detail, just to name a few.

I want someone who wants to expand their skillset and who will volunteer to take on new areas of the law as the need arises. I know many lawyers are apprehensive about having a resume that's not exactly linear, but I see that as a strength. If you started out as a prosecutor and then you worked in environmental law at a law firm, and then you went in-house and reviewed contracts, that's a plus.

I want that person on my team because it means they are not afraid of change. They are open to learning new things rather than staying in their comfort zone. None of my team members have previous experience in the energy space, but what that has done is it has allowed us to come up with creative solutions by borrowing concepts from other industries.

I see being an in-house lawyer similarly to being an emergency room doctor. You are triaging, patching up whatever you can handle, and then you know when it's time to call in the expert. This is your outside counsel, who are like the highly trained surgeons who do one type of complicated surgery exceptionally well. When it comes to looking for candidates for my team, it also means I look for candidates with good bedside manner. The Legal Department is different from other business units in that each business unit has a small handful of wildly important goals they’re working on along with their “business as usual” matters. For Legal, our “business as usual” matters are working on everyone’s wildly important goals. It's critical to find lawyers who can manage that in a calm and effective manner, so that they can manage the work, but also find a balance with personal time, which is a particular challenge in the legal profession.

Lastly, I have a very intentional focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. I stress this with everyone who helps in recruiting and referrals. I'm proud of the fact that my current team happens to be all women, which is unusual enough in the legal field, but even more so in the renewable energy space.

How would you describe the culture of your organization?

I'd say Ohmium is fairly unique in that we're a young company, so we have a steady drive for innovation and a “roll up your sleeves” mentality where everyone is pitching in to solve issues that arise. However, we also have the benefit of having a leadership team with decades of experience in our field of expertise. That is a very powerful mix to have. Ohmium has a strong emphasis on diversity at the Board level, at executive leadership and throughout the organization that sets us apart from others in our industry.

What is the most influential career advice you’ve ever received?

The first piece of advice is to get comfortable being uncomfortable. If you take a new job and you're fully comfortable on the first day, you likely haven’t stretched enough. The cliché about lawyers is that we're risk averse, but I believe it's important to get comfortable taking calculated risks. Branching out into new areas of the law, moving into new industries, or leaving the law firm life to go in-house or vice versa. Whatever it may be, continue to push yourself to grow throughout your career. This also has the potential to open doors that you may not even know exist yet. That has certainly been true for me.

The second piece of advice is learning how to speak truth to power, but doing so in a way that will be heard. As lawyers, and especially as Chief Legal Officer, it's critical to be able to speak truth to power. But it's equally important to message it in a way that will be best received by your organization.

What changes would you like to see within the legal profession?

I could write a whole book on this, but I will give you my top 3. First, a willingness to try new things and rely less on how it has been done before. It drives me crazy when I ask why something is done a certain way, and the answer is, "Because this is how we've always done it." If I'm really lucky, they'll even throw in how many years they've been doing it this way. Perhaps you've been doing it this way for 20 years, but is it really still the best way to do it today? Or can we do it this other way that would be five times faster and still give us the same protections that we care about?

Second, I wish there was a more intentional focus on developing business and financial acumen. I believe it should be part of any law school curriculum, as well as part of new associate training at law firms. It is crucial for lawyers to understand how their clients make money, so that we can provide solutions that are practical and not lean into the gimmick of, "I went to law school because I don't like math." There should be a much more intentional focus on developing meaningful legal metrics that show your department’s contribution to the bottom line, and you can't do that if you don't understand the business and the finance side.

Third, is more humanity. Cultivate a life outside of work, whether it's with loved ones, passion projects, mentoring, teaching, sports, art, music, travel or whatever else. Somehow lawyers have become synonymous with machines that always have to be on call and willing to drop everything to work nights, weekends and holidays to get the job done as quickly as possible while sacrificing everything else. Could there be a true emergency that warrants this once in a while? Sure, but that should not be the norm. Even if you love your job, you should be entitled to living a life well-lived, which includes pursuits outside of work and an ability to truly disconnect. And I think that makes people better lawyers too.