Edy Glozman (Corporate M&A, 2015-2020), Vice President, Legal, at Axonius, practiced in the firm’s Corporate Department. Edy received his LL.B. from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his LL.M. from Columbia Law School.
1. What are the most challenging aspects of your job? Has your law firm experience helped you in any way?
Axonius is a high growth tech company that moves rapidly. The challenge and the beauty of the job has been keeping up with—and often staying ahead of—change. Our CEO has a metaphor that the life of a company is like the Super Mario game: every time you successfully finish a level, there is a new level that is harder and more complex, and that requires new skills. Success in the prior level does not guarantee success in the current level; you need to constantly learn and evolve. When I first started almost four years ago, I was mainly reviewing commercial contracts and building core legal infrastructure. Today, I’m running a multifunctional department that does everything legal—from contracts to corporate, securities, employment, privacy, IP, procurement, compliance and legal operations. While I can’t be an expert in all domains, thankfully my prior life as an M&A lawyer at Paul, Weiss gave me a fairly broad perspective. I benefited from the exposure to a significant and varied deal flow—sponsor and strategic, private and public, capital markets, activist defense and more—as well as the daily engagement with specialists and the close partner mentorship. All were instrumental in building my legal toolkit, shaping me as a lawyer, and preparing me for the next stage of my career.
2. What traits would you say make a good Vice President of Legal?
The best of the best are typically great lawyers with superb technical skill and business judgement; great managers driving high performance while at the same time remaining human-centric; and great leaders inspiring and motivating others. Each of those can be a theme for an entire essay, but one trait that can perhaps be viewed as the connective tissue is courage. Courage is a trait that is often overlooked: the courage to make hard decisions and take risks, the courage to speak truth to power, the courage to be truthful to yourself and see the world as it is, the courage to solicit feedback from your reports—encouraging them to challenge you and show you your blind sides—and the courage to rely on domain experts with humility and acknowledgment that they know better than you.
3. What advice would you give a young lawyer who wants to be an in-house lawyer?
Forget what you think you know about having business acumen. People looking to move in-house often believe—somewhat automatically—that they are business-minded lawyers when in fact this is something not easily attainable. It is arguably the biggest adjustment an attorney coming from Big Law needs to make. When I joined Axonius, I realized that the company's win is not necessarily having the best legal contract but rather winning the customer, and it is our job to strike the right balance that accounts for the company’s risk tolerance. There are a lot of actions we take daily to ensure being business-first or having business acumen is not just a nice slogan, but is actually a fundamental principle of how we provide legal services.