Alumni Profile – Megan Bradley, Deputy General Counsel at Better.com

How did you make the jump from S&C to your first in-house role, and how did S&C help in that transition?

It was by no means easy or seamless. When I left S&C, I was 11 or 12 years in, and it is tough for a senior litigator to get a good in-house role. Most companies don’t necessarily need an in-house litigator⁠—if they get sued, they hire outside counsel. Many of the companies that want an in-house litigator prefer to hire more junior litigators and train them. So there’s an even smaller group of companies that’s trying to bring in someone senior from outside. I took a lot of shots on goal; I did a lot of interviews, even for roles I wasn’t crazy about, and that process was immensely valuable. When I found this role, I knew it was a great fit and that I wanted it. It’s a little bit like New York real estate: you go to a lot of apartment showings because when you finally find the apartment, you want to be able to move quickly.

S&C was supportive in my efforts to interview, even when it was time-consuming. If there was ever a position with a client or an S&C connection, partners were always eager to lend a hand or make a phone call whether I knew them personally or not. The S&C Career and Alumni Resource Center also helped me in the process.

How did your work at S&C prepare you to handle litigation in-house and also to be a leader on your legal team?

When I joined Better, we were an online mortgage originator that had grown very rapidly from 900 to 10,000 employees. Now we are at about 1,000 employees again. From that fact alone, you can glean that it’s a turbulent, fast-moving environment, and it’s one in which I’m often called upon to expand my role. I started out as the Head of Litigation and Investigations, but as we have shrunk, my role has grown. Now I have litigations, investigations, IP and corporate transactions functions reporting into me.

I would say the startup environment is very different from S&C, in that it moves very quickly, it is more risk-tolerant, and the ideal work product looks very different. If you spend hours crafting the perfect memo here, you have wasted the time you spent getting it perfect⁠—your second draft was good enough to be able to move on to the next problem. But S&C also prepared me to handle this environment by training me to learn new things very quickly. Because you don’t specialize as an S&C litigator, one of the basic job requirements is learning a new field very quickly. At S&C, I had to learn about diesel engines, the semiconductor industry, mortgage-backed securities, nail polish manufacturing, voting rights and natural gas options trading⁠—none of which I knew anything about at first. If you do this enough, you learn how to learn quickly. The ability to get up to speed, to ask the right questions, and to quickly come to an understanding of the key legal and strategic questions in an unfamiliar area is definitely something that I honed at S&C. I also honed the ability to manage tense situations and tricky personalities. At S&C, we would get our clients’ worst legal problems, and not everybody is in a great mood when they’re dealing with their worst problems. Managing that kind of scenario calmly was a skill I developed at S&C, and I use it every day.  

What has your experience been working with S&C as outside counsel?

I really enjoy it. We are not an easy company to be an outside lawyer for because we move very quickly, and we are constantly trying to innovate and disrupt in a highly regulated area. We really push for speed, quality and value. And we get our fair share of crazy problems.

At S&C, Jared and Alan Fishman and Alex Willscher have been fantastic at helping with that. They’ve shown a lot of tenacity and much appreciated loyalty, and they also have a depth of understanding of our complicated structure. Jared and Alan in particular have been a much-appreciated resource for me as I take on the transactional role, which is not an area where I have deep knowledge.

How helpful has the S&C alumni community been to you?

I’ve been surprised by how useful I found the S&C alumni connections, particularly on the commercial side. One of our major counterparties is a fellow S&C alum and was a good friend during our time there. It’s great to reconnect, but it’s also nice to go into these transactions and negotiations knowing the person on the other end, and knowing how thoroughly they’ve been trained.

It’s also a very useful thing in a startup environment to have an S&C background. A lot of our challenges involve trying to transition from being outside-the-system disrupters to a place where we can work with people in the system like bankers and  companies with conservative risk appetites. The S&C reputation means something in that space.

As a woman transitioning from a law firm into an in-house position, what were the challenges you faced in finding the right mentors in a completely brand new environment?

The two environments feel similar to me in that respect. I had some committed mentors at S&C who really invested in me. I definitely felt like Bob Giuffra was a significant mentor for me in my final years at S&C⁠—the first email I had in my inbox in my new job was from Bob! In my new environment, I’m similarly fortunate to have an extremely supportive General Counsel who has a fantastic background. She is also a woman, and her mentorship has been invaluable to me.

One thing that distinguishes my role now is that I deal much more with the senior business people⁠—in addition to the General Counsel, I advise the CFO and the CEO, the Chief Admin Officer and the board on a regular basis. As a result, I now find myself needing business mentors as well as legal ones. I have been fortunate in that my CEO and CFO have invested a lot in me, but I’m always on the lookout for people who can help me succeed as my scope expands.

What would your advice be for junior lawyers to succeed?

Know what you want and be honest with yourself about the kind of environment where you will thrive. I happen to work in a very unusual environment, a small environment with a very flat organizational structure where my role is constantly expanding, and the challenges faced by the company are always changing. That’s something I love⁠—I believe a litigator needs interesting problems to be happy. If you are interested in a role like mine, a start-up is a perfect environment, but it’s not for everyone. For the people who want a less fast-moving gig, I think the good news is that many in-house jobs, particularly junior associate jobs, have much more defined roles. For me, this was what I wanted. The reason I was interested in going in-house was that I wanted hard problems, and I wanted to quickly move to a level where I was the one (or at least one of the ones) making the highest-level legal and business strategy calls on how to resolve those problems.

I would also advise junior lawyers to put themselves where they want to be. At S&C, I was fortunate enough to go to trial five times. At trials, like at startups, things move fast and can be a little chaotic, and I quickly learned that if I waited for someone to tell me what to do, I would get a dull job. Instead, I found the issue, or the motion, or the witness I wanted to handle, and just started working on it, because, nine times out of ten, if someone has already started a project, it will be assigned to them. It’s the same in business. At Better, I put myself where I wanted to be, particularly as the mortgage market started to deteriorate and the company was experiencing more challenges. I wanted to handle our hardest strategic legal challenges, so I did the job I wanted to have. That’s how I came to be in this role—it’s a habit that will help me anywhere.