My days look a little different from the average CGer because I’m currently working from New Zealand (and feeling extra appreciative of CG’s flexible work policy while I enjoy NZ summer in early February). The time zone means I start early to overlap with my US East Coast and Europe teammates, and it also means my mornings are pretty meeting-heavy.
Today, my day starts with a check-in with my manager, Daniel Binette. We talk through weekly priorities, which this week include working on spinning up an entity in Australia and putting together an agreement to govern some internal entity restructuring, anything I’m stuck on, and squeeze in some high-quality life chat.
Next, I join a team meeting with Partnership-Operations (affectionately and officially known as Parsnops). Because this is a newer function, our role is still evolving, so there is lots to cover! We get to build processes, test what works, and iterate quickly. On the legal side of this project, common tasks include reviewing incoming donation agreements, helping with outgoing reports, and sanity-checking how we’re allocating donor funds.
Then it’s time for my first sync of the week with the rest of the Legal team. We meet often partly because we genuinely enjoy each other’s company (which, for a group of lawyers, isn’t always a given), but also because new legal questions come up all the time. I feel like I’ve never stopped learning in this role, which the former (current?) nerd in me loves.
I have a short break in between meetings, so I go say good morning to my family and sit in the grass to meditate for a few minutes. Meditation is a big part of my life, and I’m grateful that I can be transparent about it with my team and the wider CG-verse without any judgement. Being able to bring my whole self to work is something I really value about CG; I’m actually in a zen-ethics book club with a few other CGers! We’ve just started reading Robert Aitken’s The Mind of Clover, which focuses on the zen precepts.
After brushing some grass off, I head back to my office and settle into my focus project for the day: redesigning our templates. CG uses multiple entities so we can fund a broad array of activities without being limited by logistics. In practice, this means we have a lot of templates. I’m redesigning them to streamline processes, reduce back-and-forth, and hopefully save everyone time and headaches.
Many Google Docs later, I’ve made some good headway, so I turn back to my inboxes and triage what needs a response today versus what can wait until later in the week. Each week, I monitor and respond to CG’s legal@ inbox, which is open for business for any legal questions CG staff members might have. Today, I review an amendment to a grant agreement, leave thoughts on a new proposal our Farm Animal Welfare Team shared with us, and suggest some mitigation steps for a potential conflict of interest.
Because I started extra early, I sneak out for a cheeky surf to break up my computer time. Once again, I’m grateful for our flexible working schedule — the tides don’t operate on a 9–5! Luckily, I live close to the beach, so I can be back and forth in under an hour.
Refreshed-ish (after getting smashed by some waves), I spend the afternoon developing some internal heuristics for legal holds — our process for preserving documents if litigation is possible. I was a litigator before starting in-house at CG, so it’s fun to dust those mental cobwebs off. I circulate the draft to the team for feedback, then look through my priorities and to-do list and make a plan for tomorrow before signing off.
