Leading Large Projects: Axiom Lawyer Balances Technology, Teams, and Time
Financial technology lawyer Kelly explains how Axiom helped her escape the 14-hour workday, how she’s been able to manage a large team remotely, and how her career has been largely driven by regulatory requirements.
Axiom’s reputation preceded Kelly’s first-hand experience with the alternative legal service provider (ALSP). Before joining Axiom a little over three years ago, Kelly was working 14-hour days. “I was exhausted,” she reflects on her time living in San Francisco and working for a nonprofit located on the East Coast, meaning she was having 6:00 a.m. meetings with legal teams located across the country and was enduring seemingly never-ending workdays.
Kelly contends one of the greatest catalysts for Axiom’s growth and the mainstreaming of the ALSP model of employment and staffing is word-of-mouth. “I was aware of Axiom through some colleagues, and when the opportunity came around, it had such a good reputation that I just decided to go for it,” she remembers. It was a little bit scary for Kelly, going from full-time to contract positions, "But it’s been probably the best decision I think I’ve made.”
From arbitration to complex litigation: Kelly’s experience in the legal industry prior to Axiom
Kelly started her career in the legal industry in arbitration, an interest sparked by an internship at a law firm while preparing for the bar exam. This led her to a role at a Washington D.C. law firm, where she managed their arbitration program. “Arbitration, particularly consumer arbitration, is kind of an interesting topic, because it gets a really bad rep,” she explains. “But the reality is it's so much fairer than court litigation. In theory, it sounds terrible, but practically, there are no rules of evidence. There are no rules of court. There are no real rules.” Some believe arbitration to be more equitable than litigation, with consumers having the opportunity to present their cases more freely and arbitrators better allowed to make decisions that favor fairness.
At the time, Kelly’s extensive experience made her a popular choice for assisting with arbitration-related litigation in various states including Florida, Ohio, and West Virginia, which meant regularly interpreting complex statutes and navigating the challenges of arbitration awards in state courts. This also allowed Kelly to continue to hone her skills in research, memo writing, and briefing: “Partners at the firm were basically like, ‘Hey, can you go and help us with that litigation?’ because the arbitration litigation stemming from the arbitration awards was so complex.”
Kelly’s involvement in complex litigation eventually led to her handling regular dockets across several states and expanding the firm’s practice into creditors’ defense and rights. She jokes her career has been driven by regulatory developments and requirements.
Enhancing compliance and culture for Axiom clients
Kelly fears sounding idealistic, but she sincerely believes the work she has done in corporate legal departments since coming to Axiom helps corporations do what she considers to be the “right thing” for consumers, “It's like being the white hat in a situation where you can help organizations improve themselves by making sure that they're compliant.” She explains this brings value to the work she does for clients through Axiom and likens it to helping to be the “moral compass” for companies, guiding policy and practice as equitably as possible: “I get on a little bit of a soapbox about it, because at the end of the day, that’s your company culture.”
“And the people who enjoy your company culture,” she continues, “who feel like they’re doing the right thing, they’re going to stick around for longer, which ultimately is better for the company on different levels.” Kelly’s beliefs mirror the experience of the overwhelming majority of the 300 respondents to Axiom’s 2024 General Counsel (GC) Survey, who report facing a “revolving door of talent,” seeing an uptick in turnover over the past year. Repetitive and unengaging tasks, complicated work outside of skillsets, feeling overwhelmed by the onset of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in legal work, lack of professional development opportunities, and high volume of work were some of the other top reasons GCs anticipate additional turnover in the next year.
Encouraging collaboration among teams while completing large projects
Through Axiom, Kelly has had the opportunity to continue expanding her skillset, both her legal skillset and business skillset and acumen, in part by working on large projects for financial services institutions. In April 2024, Axiom announced it had completed over 250 large legal projects and that its popular on-demand large legal project teams can now be implemented as a fully outsourced, turnkey solution, providing cost-effectiveness with ground-breaking pricing to handle complex, urgent, or unexpected initiatives.
Kelly recalls building out the compliance management system (CMS) for a large financial services institution and serving as team lead: “I’ve built CMS models for small and medium-sized clients, but I was able to learn so much from this particular experience.” She stayed with this client for about two and a half years. Kelly particularly enjoyed the variety of legal tasks and appreciates she was able to play a role on the team beyond that of legal counsel by also serving as manager and as a true partner both to her team and to the business.
After she had been with the company for a while, the team grew. “It eventually became a huge team, and there are inherent challenges when you're at an office managing folks,” Kelly shares. “Management's always the hardest part of any job. And there are different challenges when you're all remote.” She explains how she had to learn how to deal with some of these challenges and how it quickly opened her eyes to the fact that by working with this client, she was expanding and practicing more than just her legal skills, “I think that's where I really saw my role is not really as a manager, but someone to kind of bring everyone together.”
She learned the challenge, especially with bigger teams, is to figure out how to ensure you’re maintaining the right balance of providing support without being overbearing. “I want to see people give their best and enjoy doing it, you know? So, sort of a ‘light-touch’ approach is what I always did. I think most people really appreciated that,” she shares. “It was a great learning experience from a management perspective, learning how to motivate people remotely, and learning how to motivate people across a huge variety of backgrounds, even physical locations.” At one point, Kelly was managing a group of 50, “It helps the attorneys were so good.”
In fact, Kelly is humble and credits her ability to effectively manage such a large team to the caliber and high quality of Axiom talent: “There's no other way I would have been able to manage 50 attorneys remotely across four or five different time zones.”
“We get to work with people from Harvard, Yale, and all the top Ivy League schools, and it's great to have theoretical discussions around some of the finer points of statutory stuff. It’s fascinating. I can absolutely recommend the quality of our acting attorneys,” Kelly elaborates. Other corporate counsels and legal teams agree - Axiom recently announced results from its latest talent quality survey, which reflects detailed feedback from thousands of clients across 31 industries and 14 practice areas. Axiom’s lawyers achieved an industry-leading Net Promoter® Score (NPS®) of 68, compared to the legal services average of 37, positioning Axiom’s talent in the high end of the “excellent” category.
Working on this particular project with the financial services client also allowed Kelly firsthand experience with the AI that’s transforming the legal profession. “AI was kind of a hot topic, and it was fascinating to see their use of AI in that context,” Kelly explains. “AI isn’t perfect, but it was an interesting opportunity to work in that realm as well.”
Solving for stressors: Seeking work-life balance
Kelly likes to stay busy, moving from engagement to engagement, but she still enjoys how the inherent flexibility of the Axiom model allows her to work as much as she wants while still taking care of what – and who – she wants at home, “I have two dogs, and one is sick right now.** So it's absolutely lovely that I can be home with them right now.”
** At the time of publication, Kelly's dogs are in good health.
She really loves being able to work from home: “It’s always nice because the dogs started just hanging out in the office with me. My husband also works from home, so we have a great relationship where there’s literally just a wall that separates us. We're the most interesting coworkers ever.”
Almost as appealing as having her pets and husband as coworkers is not having a commute. She explains it’s one of the biggest benefits and allows her more time to do what she likes outside of work, like running, and lets her take every opportunity that the sun makes an appearance in the Portland, Oregon skies to take to the trails. She also likes to use that time to catch up on her reading list.
The time she saves commuting also allows her to pursue her hobby of painting. She enjoys working with acrylics and practicing different techniques to create works of abstract art and landscape scenes.
Axiom can help lawyers find the key to the intricate work-life balance puzzle because, as Kelly describes, “In a lot of ways, the Axiom model solves for a lot of the stressors attorneys often encounter like office politics or the stress and pressure of everyday practice. It's a lot. You're dealing with conflicts day in and day out,” she details.
But with Axiom, “It feels more manageable because you have more support.” Kelly has also found that she appreciates the certainty of knowing both the start and the end dates of engagements and finds it to be more secure.
“Okay, yes, maybe there is a little bit of anxiety around the end date [of assignments],” Kelly concedes. But the ALSP model of employment still makes her feel more secure than full-time employment given her practice areas of financial services and technology and the current state of fintech: “You know, at the same time, it's more stable in a lot of ways. I mean, I hate to say it, but having come from fintech where everything is so incredibly volatile, I was very worried about job stability, and Axiom has been more stable for me than fintech was.”
According to TechCrunch, there were nearly 80,000 layoffs in the technology industry from January through May of 2024, and they aren’t expected to slow down any time soon. The financial services sector isn’t doing much better; financial companies announced the most cuts of any industry at over 23,000 in January of this year alone.
“I've been so happy with Axiom and how it’s allowed me to be more flexible and given me more experience in certain areas.” Kelly sees herself staying at Axiom as long as the work remains steady. “It would be great because they've treated me really well, and I really, really like the flexibility they can offer,” she continues.
She explains that in order to be successful in her line of work, you have to be a bit of a generalist, having at least some knowledge of many different practice areas. Axiom allows her the opportunity to spend time learning about practice areas she hasn’t had a chance to previously.
“What Axiom has allowed me to do is, in some of these engagements, you actually get an opportunity to sit down and read through the law, read through the statutes in great detail,” Kelly explains. Summarizing them and explaining them to non-attorneys, or those in the c-suite, like the chief financial officer (CFO), or other business colleagues, has allowed her to better digest the knowledge of certain areas of law. “Working for Axiom has absolutely made me a better attorney.”
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