#015: Pia Owens - In-House Technology Lawyer

This transcript was generated by AI.

Pia Owens [00:00:00]:

When you're writing a computer program or a contract, you are writing with a goal in mind. There's something you're trying to achieve. And so you always have to keep in mind, okay, this is the outcome I want. So how am I going to get there? Well, there are certain steps I have to take, and so I have to come up with a structure that makes sense, that covers all of the bases and takes care of all of those steps so that I can achieve my goal.

Jonah Perlin [00:00:20]:

Welcome to How I Lawyer, a podcast where I talk to attorneys from throughout the profession about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it. Well, I'm your host, Jonah Perlin, a law professor in Washington, DC. Now let's get started. Hello and welcome back. In today's episode, I speak with Pia Owens. Pia has worked as a technology lawyer, first in a law firm setting, then for the state government, and now as an in house counsel in Massachusetts, where she's responsible for commercial agreements, software licensing, cybersecurity, and data privacy. Pia is a graduate of Brown University, go Bears and Harvard Law School. Go Crimson. She began her professional career as a software engineer before attending law school in her late twenty s and beginning her career as a technology lawyer. In our conversation, we discuss how Pia handles new and complex cybersecurity regulatory regimes, how she drafts contracts, the differences between practicing as a technology lawyer in an in house setting, as outside counsel, and as a government attorney. And we also discuss some of the jumps that she took to find a career that was fulfilling both personally and professionally. We begin our conversation by taking a deep dive into her work. Now as an in house lawyer, here's Pia.

Pia Owens [00:01:30]:

I am in house counsel at a tech company, MathWorks, which makes software tools for engineers and scientists. So we basically create all kinds of toolboxes for things like robotics and data analytics and image processing so that our customers who actually make cool stuff can make it very easily. And my role is kind of half and half split between supporting our software development organization, so I do things like software licensing, open source compliance, doing business partnership and integration agreements, and then it's about 50% privacy and cybersecurity work. So I work closely with our security team to make sure that we're doing all the compliance we need to be doing, that we're assessing risk appropriately, and that we're keeping up with all of the changes in privacy law, which there have been lots of in the past few years, and keeping our operations up to date.

Jonah Perlin [00:02:24]:

Are you on a big team or is it just you?

Pia Owens [00:02:26]:

We've got about eight lawyers for our 6000 person company.

Jonah Perlin [00:02:32]:

Wow. Is that sort of a typical ratio in your world?

Pia Owens [00:02:36]:

I don't know. I'm guessing not. I work for a privately held company, and so our legal team is probably a bit smaller than a publicly traded company, where they have to do lots of securities filings and regulatory compliance. So in our company, everyone tends to do everything on the legal team. We don't outsource a lot, which makes it really fun. I was told when I went in house by law firm lawyers, you're making a mistake. The work is going to be really boring and routine. But what I find instead is that I do all kinds of different things, and at least at my company, I have the opportunity to say, I want to work on that. I don't want to outsource it to a firm lawyer.

Jonah Perlin [00:03:13]:

Great. And I was going to follow up with that, which is what kind of tasks are you doing day to day basis?

Pia Owens [00:03:18]:

So on the software side, I'm basically negotiating agreements every single day. Some of them are pretty straightforward licensing agreements where we just need to use somebody else's software. Some of them are very complicated. We need to interoperate with somebody's software and then distribute that to our mutual customers. And so there's a lot of what we call coopetition, where sometimes we are negotiating with our competitors, but we have products that we want to interoperate and there's a lot to think through and negotiate. When you're working with somebody like that, there are antitrust issues. There's marketing and sales issues, there's confidentiality and intellectual property. So those types of relationships really span a wide range of different legal areas. And then on the other side, the privacy side is similar to regulatory work, where I'm constantly monitoring all the new laws that are coming through both internationally and in different states. In the United States, there are just constant changes in this area, and it's really hard to keep up with. So, for instance, when I first started at my company GDPR, which is the european union privacy law, which was a huge change in how privacy worked, that was just about to come out. And so as a new person at the company, I was the only person on the legal team who didn't already have a full slate of tasks to do. And I said, okay, I'll look at this. And over the years, I've become the expert in not just GDPR, but privacy compliance generally. I really had to dive into something that I was only somewhat familiar with. I had done some privacy work, but I certainly would not call myself at that point a privacy lawyer. Now I absolutely do. So I dove into it, I learned everything I could, and I realized that it's a big undertaking. Privacy and security work in particular was different than the legal work I had done before. It wasn't just I'm going to negotiate this contract, it was I have to really understand everything our company is doing, and I have to understand all the legal requirements and what the enforcement looks like. I have to talk to people above me at my company and convince them that this is something important that they need to devote resources to. I have to talk to basically everybody who does anything at my company and explain to them what they need to know and answer their questions about, okay, what do I do now?

Jonah Perlin [00:05:38]:

Can I just follow up on that? Because there's two things there. The first is the idea that the new person always gets whatever the biggest project of the moment is. Like every job that I've ever had, that's always the case, whether you're a clerk coming in and it's like, oh, we have this huge case that no one's working on, and you have the bandwidth, so go with God. And so that doesn't surprise me at all. The question I was going to ask though, is digging down a little deeper on how you learn a huge new area of law, like GDPR, right? I mean, do you just sit down and pull up the law and pull up the Wikipedia page? What's the process for sort of getting up to speed? And not just up to speed at kind of that superficial level, but getting up to speed at the level where you're issue spotting for your new company?

Pia Owens [00:06:24]:

That's something I really love about my job and about being a lawyer, actually having the opportunity to really dive into a new area and learn it. So with GDPR specifically, the first thing I did was print out the law. And I have a whole binder with like my 120 pages of GDPR. And I just sat there and read the whole thing very closely and marked it up and wrote down all the questions I had. Then I started trying to read articles about it. As in house counsel. Law firm alerts are gold. They're typically free because they're marketing for the law firm. And it's getting experts who have really deep knowledge in this field to tell you all about it. So everything I could get my hands on, I read articles. Law firm Alerts, I joined an industry group which is called IAPP, the International Association of Privacy Professionals. And so I had a network of people who I could ask questions to. I love webinars too. That's something that 20 years ago lawyers didn't really have available to them, but now you can basically watch a free video that will teach you about anything you need to know and at any time you want. So I do that a lot.

Jonah Perlin [00:07:30]:

I love that you start with, though, reading the law, right? Like the true lawyer in you. You couldn't go straight to the summary, you went straight to the text itself. Do you think that helped at least give you that big picture, that kind of skipping that step might have had?

Pia Owens [00:07:43]:

Yes, absolutely. Reading the law front to back is always my first step, and it's also like my third and fifth and 7th step because when you're just hearing people talk about it, it's easy to just kind of nod and say, oh yeah, that makes sense. I get that. Then when you actually read it and you start saying, what does this mean? Learning about something secondhand is no substitute for going to the actual text. And like I said, I go back to it repeatedly the first time I miss a lot and I'm confused. And by the 10th time, I have a much better idea of what it actually means.

Jonah Perlin [00:08:16]:

Right, and did that set you up? I know you mentioned that after GDPR, now we have a bunch of new privacy laws, it feels like every week or month in the United States. Now, did that sort of knowledge set you up to gain new knowledge on those systems as well?

Pia Owens [00:08:30]:

Yeah, definitely, because all of these law are based on a common set of principles. And it's been interesting actually learning about kind of the history and philosophy behind that too, because no law is just some random set of rules, right? There's a reason for it. There's a context, there's a problem that somebody is trying to solve, and there are ways that people have tried to solve it that have probably failed in the past. So understanding all of that, I mean, I know a lot of people accuse law schools of being too abstract and scholarly, but in my experience, the abstraction and scholarliness is useful. It helps you really understand why are we doing this? What is this trying to achieve? And as a lawyer who's trying to give advice to my organization about what they should do, that context is crucially important. So with privacy, there are a million different laws, but they're all based on the same set of principles. And a great experience I had was actually putting together a company wide training about data privacy. So every single person in my company, whether they are software developer who just writes code all day, or whether they're a salesperson who's making calls, or a tech support person, everybody, and not just people in the US. Around the world, had to have the same training and the same understanding of what is privacy? What are we supposed to do? What do I need to know? And that forced me to really go back to basic principles and say, how can I explain this to people in a way that they can grasp this, that it relates to their own life? It doesn't seem like just this abstract legal principle. So yeah, I mean, starting from the text of the law is great, but delving into the reasons behind the law and what it's trying to accomplish, I think is really helpful in getting an understanding that helps you actually give somebody advice based on that.

Jonah Perlin [00:10:17]:

If you're on a, say, eight ish person team for a large company, I assume most of the people, at least around you that you're talking to on a daily basis are not lawyers, which is probably quite different than some of your other past jobs, which we'll talk about in a little bit. How have you changed the way you convey sort of legal analysis or legal statements for that kind of new non legal audience?

Pia Owens [00:10:42]:

I think in any legal job, you have to be very conscious of who you're talking to. So even at a law firm where most of your colleagues are lawyers, you still have to talk to your clients and you have to know what they need and what they can understand. And I used to be a software engineer before I became a lawyer, and so I know how we used to think of lawyers, which was they're these annoying people who get in our way with stuff that doesn't matter. And I'm very conscious of that when I talk to anybody. So in my company, yeah, I think about, what does this person want from me? What can I tell them that will be helpful to them and that they can actually understand and feel as a good use of their time? Not just a lawyer telling them dumb stuff that prevents them from doing what they want to do. So I very much tailor what I'm saying to the needs of the person that I'm talking to and to their level of comfort with things like, does this person know what indemnification is? Am I going to use those kind of legalese words? I've noticed some people really like the idea of being kind of amateur lawyers, and they're proud of themselves for knowing all these terms, and they appreciate it when you talk to them almost like they're a fellow lawyer and other people want nothing to do with that. They really just want you to tell them what they need to do right.

Jonah Perlin [00:11:54]:

Or what they can't do right.

Pia Owens [00:11:56]:

Yeah.

Jonah Perlin [00:11:57]:

That's great. So let's talk a little bit about your past and your path because I think it's fascinating. I know you were a software engineer, you worked at a large law firm, then you worked in government. Now you've worked in in house. So you've done a lot of different things. Can you just kind of give me a Cliff's Notes about your path in your career?

Pia Owens [00:12:13]:

Sure. So I started out as a software engineer. Both my parents were engineers. I had a very limited view of what a job even was. So I became a software engineer. I did not know any lawyer in real life at that time. And then when I was in my late twenty s, I decided to switch careers and become a lawyer. And I didn't have a great idea of what kind of law I wanted to practice. I just had this sense that this was my last chance if I wanted to make a change in my life before I had a family. And I loved reading and writing and working with language, and that was something I really missed as a software engineer. But law had that same type of creative and analytical problem solving that I enjoyed as an engineer. So I went to law school, tried all kinds of different things. I did every clinical program I could do, interned. I worked at the Attorney General's office, I did legal aid. Everything I could manage to try, I did. And I ended up working at a large law firm in their corporate department, which, if you had asked me at the beginning of law school, that would have been the one thing I would said I would never do.

Jonah Perlin [00:13:14]:

So how'd you land there? What's the story there?

Pia Owens [00:13:18]:

So I never thought I would be a corporate lawyer, but I think there were two things that got me there. One, so in part of my exploration of different aspects of legal practice, I took a winter course during law school that was called something like advising the Technology Entrepreneur. And it was all about being a lawyer for tech startups. And it was a joint class with the business school. So we got to meet with venture capitalists and talk to tech startup lawyers. And we actually put together our own startup proposal and pitched it to the VC. And that was an area I didn't know existed. And I thought, oh, this is cool. I thought if I was using my tech background as a lawyer, I would have to be a patent lawyer. And so that was my first hint that, oh, wait, no, I don't have to be a patent lawyer, but my background could still come in handy. And then the second thing that pushed me into corporate law, I worked as a summer associate at a firm that had this corporate internship program because it's hard as a summer law firm associate to get meaningful corporate work. If you're a litigation associate or if you're getting a litigation assigned, it's easy to write a memo about a discrete issue or to research one thing without having to read every single document related to the case. But in corporate work, it's much more about your client's business. Who are they? What are they trying to do? What have they done in the past? What is their relationship with this other company that they're negotiating with? And also it involves a lot of contract drafting and negotiation, which is not something most law students and certainly not something I knew how to do.

Jonah Perlin [00:14:52]:

Sure. Not something we teach in the first year of law school.

Pia Owens [00:14:55]:

No. Yeah. So the corporate internship idea that this law firm had was to try to overcome that problem and expose summer associates to corporate work. They would have you shadow a partner in the corporate department, go to meetings with them, sit in on calls, and so you'd get to know their clients and get to understand their work a bit. And that also allowed them to give you some more meaningful work since you had more context being there for a few weeks. And during that time there's one meeting that still sticks in my mind and this now is probably 15 years ago. So this woman was the CEO of a company that she had built from the ground up and she was getting ready to sell her company. And that's exactly the kind of thing I always thought was so boring. Paperwork, pushing money around, stocks, I didn't care about any of that stuff. But sitting there in that room with her and hearing her talk about how her father had invested his life savings in her company because he believed in her. And the early employees who took a risk because they were committed to this company that they built together and how bittersweet it was for her to walk away. But she was trying to take care of the people who she worked with and who meant so much to her along the way. It really gave corporate work a human dimension that I didn't realize it had. And when I went to the law firm, I did do a lot of work with startups which lived up to my expectations. It was very much like this human touch and did not feel like I was just shoving stacks of money around.

Jonah Perlin [00:16:20]:

Did you just gain those skills kind of like on the job, figuring out what you needed? Or were there other things that you either did that helped you set up for that career or things you wish you did that might have set you up better?

Pia Owens [00:16:32]:

So at the law firm, people always tell you if you can work at a large law firm you get incredible training. That is true. I have found that to be true. I mean, I had mentors and formal training where partners would sit down and teach a group of first year associates in addition to just any number of resources at my disposal. We had a library, we had subscriptions to different publications. So there were many, many ways both formally and informally set up for me to learn. And the nice thing about the startup practice that I did, it's really the same issues over and over. Very quickly you get familiar with the issues so that by probably the end of my second year, clients would call me directly and especially the very early stage startups where it would be one person with an idea in their basement and they'd say, well, I have no idea how to turn this into a company. And early on, as a pretty junior associate, I was able to say, oh, I've done this 40 times.

Jonah Perlin [00:17:31]:

Right? I get students all the time, ask me, I don't feel ready to do this task, like how am I going to be able to do it? And my experience also I was a litigator but once you've done it for a short period of time, or a relatively short period of time, you go from complete novice to functional mid level. So much faster than you think, as long as you stay in a niche. So that's really interesting to me that that's the same from your practice. And so it sounds like you enjoyed that practice area. What was the path to thinking later on, maybe this isn't for me.

Pia Owens [00:18:07]:

It's not so much that I thought that practice wasn't for me. Law firm life, I realized, was not for me. And I can get into that if you want.

Jonah Perlin [00:18:14]:

Sure, yeah. Feel free.

Pia Owens [00:18:17]:

So I was very conflicted about leaving my law firm. I loved that job. And at the same time, there were two things that made me leave. One was work related, that large law firms are often siloed where you're in the corporate department or you're in the litigation department. That's the work you do. You don't really do work cross departments and you have to do all of the kind of bread and butter work for your department, which is you have a certain stable of clients and they need certain things that your firm is known for. So in my firm, it was really fun for me in the first few years to do lots of venture financings and learn about stock and equity and do credit and loan agreements. The first time I did those things, I thought, oh, this is cool, I'm learning about it. But after a few years, I realized I did not like any of the financial part of my job. And as a corporate associate, that's a big part of your job. And what I really wanted was to be a tech lawyer somebody who worked in that industry vertical and did a variety of things related to intellectual property and the privacy and security work that I do now and corporate work and strategic agreements things that spanned a pretty wide range of areas which were not necessarily all part of my sanctioned department work. So I was a little frustrated that I was spending half my time doing stuff I didn't like and not being able to do more of what I wanted. And I think if I had stuck around the firm for a few more years, that would have been solved. I think I would have been able to, as I got more senior, push my practice more in the direction that I wanted it to go because that also would have been good for the firm. And my clients liked me because I understood as a former engineer, I could talk to tech clients in their own language and I understood what they were doing. So that was part of it. I wasn't getting the work that wanted, but a big part also is work life balance. And this was something that really only struck me in hindsight. If you had asked me at the time, I would have said, yes, I'm struggling, but also there's this work issue and that's really why I'm leaving. But with time and therapy, frankly, I realized that when I left the firm. So, first of all, I started the firm with a toddler. I had a baby during law school. He was two when I started as a first year associate. And I had my second child while I was, I think, a third year associate at the firm. And looking back at when I left, one of my children had an undiagnosed chronic health issue, which I didn't realize at the time. So at the time, it just felt like, I can't handle this. Everything all the stereotypes are true in my case, that women can't do this, and all they care about is being moms, because I don't feel like I can at this moment be a mom and be a lawyer. And I'll never forget to there were very few women partners in my department, and the ones that there were didn't have children, for the most part. But one of them who did have children but didn't start her legal career until after her children were grown pulled me aside one day and told me that it was impossible to do this job well and be a good mother. And I was like, okay, what am I supposed to do with that?

Jonah Perlin [00:21:24]:

Right? How do you even respond to that comment? Wow.

Pia Owens [00:21:28]:

Yeah. But that's how I felt before I left the firm. All I knew was that my child was constantly sick and my clients were not letting up, and I couldn't handle it. And when I tried to talk to people at the firm about it, the advice that I would always get is, well, you have to set boundaries. And at the time, I felt like I was going insane because I was like, I think I'm setting boundaries, and yet I'm just not doing it well. And so this is my fault. But that's one of the things in hindsight, that it wasn't my fault that's blaming an individual person for a systemic problem, what was actually happening is a partner would call and say, I need you to take on this new matter. And I would say, my time is completely booked right now. I have these other high priority projects for these different clients, and so I'd be happy to work with you if this can wait until next week, but I will not be able to take this on. Now, that's a boundary. And the partner would say, okay, that's fine. And then half an hour later, I would get an email to the client where I would be Cc'd, where the partner would say, oh, PIA is the associate who will be helping you with this. She will have everything drafted and ready by our meeting tomorrow morning, and we'll have a two hour strategy meeting where we'll go over all the documents that she has drafted by then. And at the time, I thought, why am I bad at setting boundaries? And later on, I realized boundaries are meaningless if they are not respected. And I think that that's not a problem with my particular firm, which has a reputation for being family friendly. I think that is a universal problem at large law firms, and it just wasn't how I wanted to live my life.

Jonah Perlin [00:23:06]:

Wow. And if you talk to people now who are in that position, do you have any better advice besides set boundaries?

Pia Owens [00:23:14]:

I think the advice that I would have is you have to be pragmatic first, it's useful to understand that law firms are kind of playing mind games with you. Right. They say that they're flexible and they're family friendly, but the truth is, as much as they want that to be true, I believe that everyone who told me that told me with the best of intentions, that's what they wanted. But the business model of large law firms is that you get paid large amounts of money, and part of that is for your expertise, but a big part is for your availability. When the client says something, you do it and you respond immediately. I mean, this is a universal thing at large law firms. What's your response time? You are expected to respond I've heard anything between 20 minutes and an hour, which doesn't sound crazy until you realize that many, many different clients are contacting you about many different things, and you're supposed to respond to all of them within an hour. So if you need to, let's say, go to the bathroom or, God forbid, pick up your kid in an emergency school pickup, that's really not compatible with those expectations, and that's really how the business is set up. That's how it works. And so my advice to people who are struggling with this is just to understand it is not you. This is the system. And, I mean, my personal feeling about work life balance at a large law firm is that large law firms demand that you prioritize their work above anything else in your life. And so you can do it, but you need a lot of support. And that could come from your partner. It could come from family members or people you pay, but you need that. I really don't think you can do it by yourself. So I'd say if you're committed to that life, and I know a lot of people who are, a lot of women, I don't want to suggest that it's not possible, but you need a lot of support. And especially as a woman, I think you're less likely to get that from your partner. And you should really consider what other sources of support are out there for you that you can rely on so that you're able to prioritize work and you have somebody else kind of in charge of those other parts of your life.

Jonah Perlin [00:25:19]:

Yeah, no, I mean, I remember when I was a young law firm associate and this is so funny. I haven't thought about this in so long. My wife said. Let's go to the movies. And I was working on a crazy matter that had international components. So I was getting emails, twenty four seven and I literally said to her, I can't go to the movies because I can't not look at my phone for 2 hours. And that was like one of those moments where I was like, no, that can't be right. And in the partner's defense, I asked him later, kind of jokingly, how do you go to the movies? And he said, you find someone else to make sure that there is someone to respond so that you can go to the movies. And it's not weird to do that. And that's just part of the practice. But I think you're right. I think it's much harder for women and I'm hoping that my generation or our generation of male partners starts chipping in and being part of that process as well. Right. You said it takes a partner, but maybe we're doing better, maybe we're not. I don't know. I want to go back a little bit. You talked about starting law school at 29 years old and jumping from a career that you had to this brand new career. What was that like? Was that a huge challenge? What do you remember about that time?

Pia Owens [00:26:30]:

Honestly, after working for six years, law school felt like a vacation. And I loved law school. I know I'm weird in that way, but working, I had to be at my desk from nine to five. Plus I had to meet other people's deadlines and do things I didn't want to do and worry about earning money and all of that kind of stuff. So in law school, all of a sudden my time was really my own. There were very few hours I was scheduled to be somewhere. I spent all my time thinking about really interesting things and talking to smart people. So I loved that. I think the other thing too, after working, grades didn't matter very much to me. I didn't stress out about what my grades were going to be or what my GPA was because it just didn't seem very meaningful. I did felt like I was doing it for my own benefit, which I was right. When you write a paper, when you take an exam, you're doing it to show how much you have learned. It's for you. You don't have to do it to please somebody else or meet their specifications. And so after working for a while, I was like, oh, this is easy. I'm just doing whatever, I'm learning stuff and it's fun. I don't have to produce something that I'm going to get criticized for or evaluated on.

Jonah Perlin [00:27:42]:

Do you think having been a software engineer or having a science background helped you in law school at all?

Pia Owens [00:27:49]:

I think the mindset of engineering and law are very similar. You're solving a problem, you have a set of constraints, you have to think about risks and their likelihood of happening and how to mitigate them. So in many ways, I think that for me, writing a computer program and writing a contract are like the same thing.

Jonah Perlin [00:28:07]:

Say more about that. I'm really curious. Say more about that.

Pia Owens [00:28:10]:

Well, okay. When you're writing a computer program or a contract, you are writing it with a goal in mind. There's something you're trying to achieve. And so you always have to keep in mind, okay, this is the outcome I want, so how am I going to get there? Well, there are certain steps I have to take, and so I have to come up with a structure that makes sense, that covers all of the bases and takes care of all of those steps so that I can achieve my goal. And then so you design it and then you write it, and then you see if it works. You say, oh, what if there's this weird edge case? Does my contract or my program take care of that? Does it handle that? Or do I need to build something in? And then you might say, well, how likely is this to happen? Do I have to spend lots and lots of time fixing this problem that has like a 0.1% chance of ever happening, or can I just kind of pass that off? So writing a contract is actually easier than writing a program because a contract can't really break. There's always somebody who can step in and say, oh, well, this is what I think it meant. So that was actually a relief for me in the law that there were so many times when something had to be reasonable.

Jonah Perlin [00:29:12]:

Right. Contracts have safe harbors that code can't always find, I would imagine.

Pia Owens [00:29:17]:

Yeah, exactly. Someone can look at it and say, well, I think good faith means this, which in a computer program, you don't have that kind of leeway. Computers, unfortunately, will not do that for us.

Jonah Perlin [00:29:28]:

Yeah. Do you think there's this whole movement now of teaching lawyers how to code? Do you have any thoughts on whether or not lawyers should be learning how to code or no code or whatever?

Pia Owens [00:29:37]:

Hopefully by the time you're a lawyer, you have already absorbed that analytical mindset that you need. And so I don't know if it's necessarily useful for lawyers to know how to code unless they independently want to.

Jonah Perlin [00:29:49]:

Right, got it. Great. Let's talk a little bit. I'm curious how you write a contract. I know that sounds crazy, but I have a lot of One L's who are taking contract law and none of them ever have to write a contract. How do you start?

Pia Owens [00:30:02]:

So that is a really funny question because it never occurred to me, taking my one L contracts class, that it was strange to leave that class with an A having never written a contract.

Jonah Perlin [00:30:14]:

Or even or read a contract.

Pia Owens [00:30:16]:

Right, exactly. So at my law firm, I talked about how so many resources and so much training is available to you at large law firms. And this was something that they actually have a course that they taught themselves. Different partners would rotate, and it was about how to draft contracts for first year associates. And there are books on this. So I think it's Ken Adams who has a popular book on contract drafting. There are other books out there, and I highly recommend reading one of those. And early on in law school would be great because it brings you through the anatomy of a contract. It says, okay, here's the beginning. It always looks like this. It names the parties and it has the date, and it tells you what the agreement is. And then here are the parts that you always need. And then when you get to the bottom, you have this catch all with all the stuff you need because courts have interpreted contracts in strange ways, and now you need this specific sentence there so that they won't do anything weird with your contract. And then here's the signature block and how you make it. So having a resource like that, you can find articles on the web. There are these great books which you can find at your law library totally worth doing and typically not something you'll get in your contracts class.

Jonah Perlin [00:31:24]:

So after you worked at the law firm, if I think I have my timeline right, you went to go work in government, or at least for the state, is that right?

Pia Owens [00:31:33]:

Yes, that's right. My government job was really interesting. I worked at an agency that does technology oversight for the state of Massachusetts. And again, this was a job I had no idea existed. In fact, the only way I found out about it is that I was just doing some career exploration. And I asked everybody I met, do you know any tech lawyers who work in Boston? Because the advice I would always get as a tech lawyer is, you got to go to California. And I like Boston. So, yeah, I just talked to everyone I could find, and I talked to this one woman who said, oh, I am a lawyer at this agency that does technology oversight. And here's what? And I thought, huh? I had no idea that existed because during law school, the thought of public service or government jobs appealed to me. But literally, I remember being at a government career workshop where I raised my hand and said, if you're not a litigator, can you still be a government lawyer? And they said, no, these were all DOJ lawyers.

Jonah Perlin [00:32:30]:

Yeah, right, okay, that makes sense.

Pia Owens [00:32:31]:

Yeah. And so I thought, oh, well, I guess that's not an option for me because I wasn't interested in being a litigator. So hearing that this job that I had as an agency lawyer was more of an in house counsel job, it was not regulatory work and it was not litigation work. It was a lot of similar to what I do now contract. There was some privacy work. Some of it was routine procurement, which was kind of interesting actually, just to understand how these things work. Like, how does the government buy things, how do you put something out to bid? Who are these vendors that you hear who always get these lucrative government contracts? Just learning about that whole system was very interesting to me, even though that actual work was not terribly interesting from a legal perspective. The part of my job that I loved, though, was I was almost like a consultant. I would go out to other agencies who were doing large technology projects. And you don't think of government as being a source of large technology projects. But then when you think about it, everything you do, every interaction you can have with the government is now online. You can file your taxes, get unemployment insurance, you can register your vehicle. All of these things all have technology systems associated with them. And all the agencies who put these things together have deep subject matter expertise in housing or lottery or whatever it is that they're doing. But they do not usually have deep expertise in technology. So I would go into those agencies and I'd help them think about what their system could look like. What do you need? What are you trying to do? I'd help them put together their RFPs, their requests for proposal, which was basically like their specifications for their project that a vendor would come in and bid on. I'd help them negotiate agreements with vendors and I'd also, I think critically help them set up a governance structure to make sure that once the contract was signed, they wouldn't just walk away and say, oh, that's done. That they would make sure that they had a system in place of making sure that they had goals set and metrics for their system to work and that they were monitoring that and there were people in charge of it and they had ways to fix problems. And that's an area where I felt like my legal expertise came in, not because there were necessarily laws and legal issues, but because I thought a lot about systems and how they work, rules and the consequences if they're broken. And that really helped me be able to set up something that would continue to work going forward.

Jonah Perlin [00:35:02]:

And I guess having had that experience so having worked in a private law firm, having worked for the government, and also now having worked in house, what are some of the differences for people who are thinking, I'm in. One of these, and I might want to pivot or I'm a law student, and I have no idea which of these three is a good fit for me. Can you just talk a little bit about the differences between each having experienced a little bit of all of them?

Pia Owens [00:35:25]:

Sure. So law firms. A big plus is having so many other lawyers around who you can learn from. There are experts in just about everything you need at a larger law firm anyway. And at a smaller law firm, there will be really deep subject matter expertise in the area that you're working in. So that can be incredibly valuable. My law firm experience sometimes even felt like an extension of law school where I was working with people who were really smart, who understood exactly what I was doing and was able to learn so much from them. Downside of law firm life is you're really beholden to your clients when they say jump, you jump, right?

Jonah Perlin [00:36:02]:

Whether you're at the movies or not.

Pia Owens [00:36:03]:

Exactly. So you have to be prepared for that. My government job. So one thing I loved about it was the sense that I was doing something meaningful. Some of the projects I worked on were things like getting broadband out to rural areas where the market had kind of failed. These companies didn't want to invest in bringing fiber optic the last mile. So people in rural areas could have WiFi and broadband. And so that's to me, exactly what the government is for, right? To step in when the market fails, to help people who need, you know, who need something and help them get that. So I loved that sense that I was doing something worthwhile and meaningful that was helping people. The thing I could not stand about my government was the bureaucracy. There are so many arcane rules and power struggles. There were so many times when I said, this makes absolutely no sense. Why are we doing this? And the response would always be, this is the way we've always done it. There's less flexibility in a government job to change things than there is in the private sector. And then for my in house job in house jobs vary very widely. So I would say if you go to a place that you feel good about, well, at least it's important to me that I have a job that I feel good about, that I feel is producing a net good in the world. And so when I was interviewing for in house jobs, I was very picky about who I worked for. I ruled out entire subsections of the tech industry that I feel are not necessarily doing things that help people. And so even though in in house you are still profit motivated, unless you work for nonprofit, there's still a chance to work for a company that you think is doing something good and that you're proud to be associated with. And one nice thing about my in house job is there's so much work to do and I have a lot of latitude in saying I'm really going to focus in on this project. I understand the entire context. I know everyone in the company. I understand how to make this project happen, which you don't have as firm counsel, or outhouse counsel, as some people call it. I always thought that was a funny term. So, yeah, you have this really close relationship with the business. You know exactly what the company is trying to accomplish, what the obstacles are, what's happened in the past that makes them worried about this or what they might not be thinking of because they've never experienced it. So that's one of the things I find really satisfying about in house counsel. I know the business so well that when I make a legal decision, it really has that context. Whereas as a law firm lawyer, I was often worried that, am I spending too much time on this or is there something I'm not thinking about that is going to come up? Which that's the thing that probably kept me up at night the most as a law firm lawyer, that you're expected to imagine every possible contingency and account for it so that nothing bad ever happens to your client, but you're not in the trenches with your client the way you are as an in house lawyer. And so I never felt like I had that really deep understanding of my client's business as much as I tried as a law firm lawyer. So that's something I find really satisfying about my in house job.

Jonah Perlin [00:39:06]:

How would you recommend someone who wants to get into this industry, go about doing that? Are there certain classes they should take, certain experiences they should get? Or should you just try to get an in house job and learn it.

Pia Owens [00:39:18]:

On the fly so you can do this work in just about any setting in government, in house, at a law firm in all of these places, they have privacy and security work. So really you can do it almost anywhere in terms of how to get prepared for it. I learned all of it on the job. I would say there are probably more resources out there now because it's such a hot area. So if you have the opportunity to take a law school class or something like that, that's great. But there are lots of resources out there. They're like webinars and books that you can read and things like that, but just getting somewhere and doing the work, once you have anything privacy or security related on your resume, it's much, much easier to get that second job. And one thing I would say, if you're interested in this practice area, you really have to be interested in the technology and the underlying issues. If you're like a constitutional lawyer, you might not enjoy this kind of work because there's a lot of kind of nitty gritty operational stuff. So as a cybersecurity lawyer, for instance, it's crucial that you understand what kind of security vulnerabilities and what hackers are doing, what attacks are out there right now. And it's constantly changing. And you have to know on top of that, what are all the laws? What legal obligations do you have or could your client have if they get attacked? And not just legal obligations, but what are their risks? Is there confidential information going to be out there? I mean, the biggest challenge that I have with privacy is it's so wide ranging and everything is constantly changing, and that may shift. People who are studying privacy now may find that five years from now, when they're getting into their practice, I hope there will be some sort of more cohesive privacy regime globally. But what I'm finding is I have to keep up with 50 different laws in different countries and states and legislative developments and keep track of bills that are being proposed, because all of those, as in house counsel and even as a law firm lawyer, those are going to affect your client. And your client is going to have to do something as a result of all of these new referendums and laws and things. And since all of these are brand new, nobody knows what that something is. You have to figure it out. And it's often unclear. You read this law and you think, okay, I get it. But then you look at your actual organization and your systems and your setup, and you think, how does this abstract law translate to where we store our data? When engineers are telling me, oh, we can't make changes, it'll be massively disruptive, it'll be extremely expensive, our customers will hate it. And then I have customers telling me, oh, this new law requires that you completely change everything about your business, right? And if you don't do it, we will not buy anything from you. So, yeah, I would say both privacy and security involve working across a lot of different groups and being willing to kind of get into the operational and business work, as well as just the pure legal work.

Jonah Perlin [00:42:15]:

And you said having something on your resume helps you get the second job. Any recommendations for someone trying to get the first job?

Pia Owens [00:42:22]:

So I'd say if you're at a firm that has this kind of work, then it's pretty easy to just raise your hand and say, I'm interested in doing that. And usually, no matter if you're in litigation, if you're in corporate, often this type of work will be available because, again, it's such a hot area. It kind of affects everything. If you are not at a firm and you're looking at something like an in house job or a government job, anything that involves information is going to have this kind of work. So, for instance, when I worked in government, I did a lot of work with our health and human services department because they have massive amounts of data about people. Absolutely same with motor vehicles. There's a lot of opportunity if you're interested in a certain setting or subject area, higher education, for instance, and you are interested in security and privacy work, there are so many intersections between security and privacy work with other fields because nearly everything involves knowing something about people and having information about them.

Jonah Perlin [00:43:16]:

Well, I always end these interviews by asking if you have sort of one piece of advice either you've given or you've received or you'd to give to people in our profession or people coming into our profession, what would that advice be?

Pia Owens [00:43:29]:

So the piece of advice that has always stuck with me, somebody told me this once, that when someone gives you advice, they are teaching you how to become them. And that really helps me evaluate whether I should take advice or how much weight I should give to it. When I was leaving my law firm to go in house, a lot of partners sat me down and said, you are making a big mistake. You're taking a huge step down in terms of prestige and pay and your career will never recover and you're going to be bored. You're making a mistake. And I was confused. I thought, these are people I respect who are trying to help me. Are they right? Am I making a big mistake? And so that advice. People who give you advice are teaching you how to become them, helped me realize, oh, they're giving me the advice they would give their younger selves. But these are people who have chosen this life. They have chosen this career that revolves around law firms. And I've already decided that for me, that's not going to be my path. And so that helped me kind of separate myself from this advice and say, okay, I get why they're saying it, I appreciate it, there's some validity to it, which I should keep in mind. And also I don't have to follow it because I know that's not the same path I want to take. I mean, I remember early on in my career having that fear, should I be doing this? And people will advise you, especially people who are in positions of power and prestige themselves, they'll say to you, let me help you. You can get here. Don't do this weird thing you're thinking about doing. Stay on the path because otherwise you will not get where I am. Which is valid advice. It's just you have to at some point think about, what do I want my life to look like? What do I really want? And if that's what you want, go for it. But if you're just doing that because you feel like that's what you're supposed to do, it's worth examining and thinking about, well, what's my path going to look like?

Jonah Perlin [00:45:21]:

Again, that was Pia Owens, who's an in house counsel who works on commercial agreements, software licensing, cybersecurity and data privacy. What is so powerful to me about PIA's path is her dedication to being a technology lawyer and her excitement, even more than a decade out of law school, about learning new skills while drawing on those skills that she's gained during her career. More than that, though, Pia's never been afraid of doing it on her own terms, trying different things, and really working to find a position that fits her as both a person and and a lawyer. If you enjoyed the episode, I hope you'll consider subscribing to the podcast@howilawyer.com or wherever you get your podcasts. And as always, you can find me at howilawyer@gmail.com or at Jonah Perlin on Twitter. Thanks again to Pia. Thanks for listening, and have a great week.