Technology will only evolve as time passes by, and you cannot afford to be left behind. You have to grow alongside it and use it wisely to your career advantage. Joseph Schohl sits down with Ritesh Patel, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary at Viant Technology, a publicly traded advertising technology company. He shares the role of tech innovation in his job as an in-house counsel, particularly AI-powered tools like GC AI. Ritesh also explains why adopting new technologies is now non-negotiable for lawyers—and highlights the tools that make it possible to handle large volumes of complex, highly confidential data.
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The Tech-Forward GC: How Ritesh Patel Turns Technology Into Strategic Advantage
I talk with Ritesh Patel, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary at Viant Technology, a publicly traded advertising technology company. Before becoming a lawyer, Ritesh earned his CPA and started his career in audit at PwC, bringing a finance meets law perspective to the GC seat. A graduate of UCLA School of Law and UCLA for undergrad, Ritesh has built his career across big law and high-growth tech companies. With in-house roles at Western Digital, Ixia, and the Trade Desk before joining Viant.
Along the way, he has developed a reputation for turning complex legal and regulatory issues into clear, practical guidance that actually moves the business forward. In this conversation, we explore his path from accounting to law, how he made the jump from outside counsel to in-house, and ultimately to the GC chair, and the role that tools, data, and AI now play in running a modern legal department. We also dive into why pessimists may sound smart, but optimists make money, and what that mindset shift means for aspiring GCs. Without further ado, I bring you, Ritesh Patel.
Welcome, Ritesh.
Thanks, Joe. Thanks for the invite.
How Ritesh Became A Lawyer
It is great to see you. What I like to do is go back and hear about your background and journey to the seat that you are in now. Before we go back in time, I just want to ask you what your favorite thing about being a lawyer, or an in-house lawyer, or a lawyer generally?
It is mostly on the in-house side. It is part of the execution of a plan. Being there, spearheading and enabling the business to execute the plan they want to execute, while also calling out, if you are going to make this turn, here are the risks associated with that. If we want to make this turn, here are the risks associated with that. Being in the seat I am in and being in the room when these decisions are made, and the strategy is formalized, having that opportunity to really drive the business towards our end game or end goal. That is what drives me. That is what I love about my job and my current position.
Let’s go back in time. Eighteen-year-old Ritesh, did you grow up in the LA area?
I did not. If we are to go way back, my parents immigrated to the LA area. My aunt lived in Corona, and so we landed there. We found a business in the Central Valley in Visalia. I grew up in what is south of Fresno. I do not know if you are familiar with Visalia or not, but it is the gateway to Sequoia National Park near Yosemite. It is a very small town. After high school, everyone who lived in Visalia at the end of high school wanted to get out of Visalia. I ended up fortunate enough to get into undergrad at UCLA, and I ended up going there for my undergrad.
Did you know you wanted to be a lawyer at that time?
I did not, Joe. At the time, I did not really know what I wanted to be. I started my journey as a freshman in pre-med. Most Indian immigrants and their parents have their set mind of what their kids are going to do in America. Mine wanted me to be a doctor. I took my first biology class, and it was not very easy for me.
I was like, you gravitate towards, and I have more success when I gravitate towards things that come easier to me. If it is easier, you feel better doing it. It’s just the flywheel starts spinning. For me, it was accounting and business. In general, the sciences were strong, but not biology or biochem, and those things just were not my thing.
Accounting then was your first job, right?
Yes, that is right. At the time, if you remember, in the late ‘90s, right before the internet bust, we had a huge boom. The accounting firms at the time, there were five, maybe six, accounting firms that were consolidating. My first offer was from Coopers & Lybrand. When I joined, they had merged with Price Waterhouse. I was at PwC at the time. I spent two years.
Back then, you had to have two years of audit experience to get your CPA, and you had to pass the CPA licensing exams. I took the classes to pass the exam. I knew I had to put two years into getting my CPA license. At the same time, going back to undergrad, when I did not know what I wanted to do and I was just trying to figure things out, I did take the LSAT.
I was like, “Why not take the LSAT and see what happens?” I took the LSAT and knew two years into my journey at PwC, I was like, “I am doing the same thing over and over again.” No knock on auditors or accountants, they are our friends. Close friends in that field. I just did not find it very exciting. Exciting is not the right word either. It became mundane. It became the same thing over and over again. Same accounts, same audit tests, same checklists.
There is a lot of thought given to the accounting strategy at various companies and how to account for things at public companies. As I was talking to you about what drives me in my current position, I want to be in the room when the decisions are made to help the company grow, to help the company execute. I did not think I was going to get there as an accountant. Although the path to CFO and executing there could have been something I could have done.
Had you gone through the process of getting your CPA? Is it after the two years or during the two years?
I took the exam while at PwC. They obviously sponsor you. They will pay for your classes. They have CPA classes, just like we have LSAT classes or bar classes. They paid for it, and while at PwC, I took the exam. While at PwC, they give you, we know you need audit hours in the following fields, and the number of hours. Here are the accounts that you can be on to get your hours.
They want to get you certified fairly quickly because they want to market you to all their clients. “We have CPA certified accountants who are associates coming in on your account.” It was very kind of the path was known, and the steps were known, and they helped guide you towards getting your CPA license. Once I got my two years and I got my experience, I started applying to law school, and I thought at the time I could bring two years, which is not enough time to really understand how businesses operate, but I had enough experience in different businesses to know more than a normal first-year law student.
I felt, “Go to law school. You can combine your business acumen with legal acumen, and maybe that is your path.” Maybe it is not GC, maybe it is a law firm partner. At the time, I did not know. I was not creating a new path. I was finding paths that were created and saying, “This seems like it is something that fits what I want to do right now. Let’s go to it.”
At the time when I was in law school, corporate law firms were hiring. Post internet bust, we had, from 02 on to about 08 before the great financial crisis, it was a boom. Law firms were hiring. Every year in that timeframe, all the big law firms were raising associate salaries. It just had to be something that they were trying to attract new talent. I was like, “This is something that doors are open. Let’s explore. Let’s go into a big law firm.”
For me, it was not like that was my end game or end goal. It was just something that was set up for me. That is what I did. I took a corporate role at a Southern firm, Eversheds Sutherland, in Atlanta. I did that because my mom and my family had moved out to the Southeast. That was a very easy next region for me to explore and be in. That was fun. It was a good time.
How long were you there before you made the move to your first in-house role?
At Sutherland, I was there from ‘04 to ‘08, and then I married my wife in between. My wife got a residency or fellowship role at UC Irvine, which then prompted me to come back to California. I had a friend who worked at Manatt, Phelps in LA, who got me a job at the Manatt office in Orange County. I worked there for a couple of years, again, corporate M&A and startup company work. I got my first in-house gig at Western Digital in 2011.
Are they in Northern California?
Western Digital is in Irvine.
They are in Irvine. You were at the seaboard. Right at the mothership.
My wife got her fellowship at UC Irvine. It was easy for me to work. I lived in Tustin, and it was a 10-minute drive. Western Digital, at the time, digital storage was not a sexy job. It was a hardware company, not software. Software was where most folks wanted to go. The Googles, Facebooks, and all those companies were the attractive spots for in-house jobs. Western Digital was an established company, I think at the time 40 years public, and had processes in place.
I was under the tutelage of Michael Ray, who was a GC there for a very long time, and then worked under him and various other VPs. When you are there, and that is your first in-house gig, you start to establish your own habits based on the habits they create for you. For me, it was a great learning experience. Law firm life, everything has to be perfect. It has to be an A plus. They are paying you a thousand dollars an hour because they expect perfection. They expect you to be 24/7.
You go in-house, strategies change. Not everything is at stake for the company. Not everything is the most important thing you have to work on. There are NDAs, various IP patents, trademark issues, and whatever may come up. What I learned through that process, because there is just so much work and very few attorneys, and the timelines are tight, you have to prioritize.
In that role is the first time I learned the old adage, perfect is the enemy of the good. Be good and get it done, and let’s move on. Once I learned that, I had to get out of the habit of trying to do everything perfectly when I am in-house because it is going to kill my time, and you are not going to be able to get through all the things I need to get through to be an effective in-house counsel.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Share on XHow did you adjust to being an outside corporate transactional lawyer to coming inside and having to solve whatever legal problem was on your plate, even if it was outside your area of expertise? Again, this is in the pre-AI days.
It is a lot easier than it was before. At the time, I was fortunate enough that in my first in-house gig, I had a team of 12 to 13 very experienced attorneys. Most were previous attorneys at law firms. They had established themselves. They had expertise in various fields. When I was handed things, my first project outside of my comfort zone was worldwide warranties. I had no idea what a worldwide warranty is.
I had no idea what the compliance laws in Germany are with respect to providing a warranty. The team wanted to provide extended warranties. All those things come at you, and you have to figure out. At the time you start with Google, you get that initial set of information that you need. You may have law firm alerts that give you ideas.
You may then get to, “These two lawyers seem to be experts in this field.” You then ask, at the time, my boss was an AGC, Kendra, I might need a little budget. This is a little out of my depth, but I think we need to talk to these folks to get an idea of how this area of law works in this region so that we are advising the business accordingly. That is kind of how I did it. You start with back to law school, secondary sources, and then primary sources. You start with Google, you find out all the information you possibly can, but you have to find the expert. You cannot fake the funk.
It is a Shaq saying you cannot fake it. You have got to know your limits, and you have got to know, “I am out of my depth here, but be confident enough to know that I can solve this for you.” To a client, it is like, “Do not worry about it. I got you. I will solve it for you.” You have to then figure out how to get to that expert or how to get to whatever area that you want information on, and be confident in the information that you are digesting. Distill it and provide the advice that you need to provide.
Deciding To Move Into The Next Opportunity
You move through several in-house roles. Tell us about your path there and what was causing you to go to each next opportunity.
At WD, as I was saying, we had about fifteen or so attorneys when I started. We had clear lines in terms of your mandate or remit in terms of what you are going to manage and handle public companies. I had SEC, CorpGov, commercial, whatnot. At the time, you had very young attorneys who were at the top layer, and I was below them.
Five years in, I always say, “If you are not adding bullet points to your resume and you are just extending the timeline of what you are doing, you are not doing yourself any favors.” About five years in, I was like, “I want to do more.” I am at a public company, but I used to advise when I was at a law firm on corporate securities matters, but I am not going to get an opportunity to do it at Western Digital. Let me go to a smaller department where I am going to have those opportunities.
If you are not adding bullet points to your resume, you are just extending the timeline of what you are doing. Share on XI was fortunate enough to pick up the phone when a recruiter called and said, “I had this opportunity. It is in Southern California. It is at a company called Ixia, and it is led by a very dynamic general counsel, Matt Alexander,” who I think you know, Joe. At the time, I was like, “I am comfortable. I just had my third kid at the time. I did not really want to leave this job.
It would require me to move to the Agoura area. I got on the phone with Matt, and it’s just a very dynamic personality. He said to me, “You just have to leap. Do not get too comfortable. If you get comfortable, same thing. You are not doing yourself any favors for your career.” I leaped. I met with Matt. He had me and my family drive up to have lunch with him, his wife, and their kids. I just felt comfortable with him.
I felt like this is a good mentor to have to help build my skill sets as an in-house counsel to eventually make that jump to general counsel. This is the wisest move I made. At the time he hired me, I thought this was going to be a longer-term deal, but little did I know, a month and a half in, we had offers to be acquired. Just within a month or two, we were going through and selling ourselves.
Had you relocated?
I had relocated. I had some funny conversations about that. Matt, being who he is, is like, “Man, do not worry. I have got you. I have got a few friends who work in the area. I know this company called The Trade Desk, which is in Ventura. It is a hot new company in the internet ad tech space, and you would be perfect for them. I can connect you to a few folks there, and lo and behold, he did that for me. I was able to get a job as the third attorney in the Trade Desk’s legal department in 2017. That was fun. You had, at the time, a billion-dollar market cap company that was just on this trajectory.
At the time, we did not know the trajectory, but it took off. We started with three attorneys. I was managing most of the corporate securities and commercial, along with two other attorneys whom the GC there, Vivian Yang, had hired. We went from those three attorneys to 20 attorneys in two and a half years. Our market cap went from a billion to almost 7 or 8 billion by the time I had left. It was a fun little experience there at the Trade Desk.
What was it like being part of a department that grew so quickly?
It was exciting. The other thing was, and I tell this to the attorneys I hire, we had to do all the work up front. Being in a small department, having to do everything that comes in the door, whether it is NDAs, DocuSigns, whatever it was, there was no task too low. We were just trying to get everything done. The role was generalist. The role was just to get what needs to get done, because we are growing, and we do not have time for excuses, and we do not have time for process, and we do not have time for you to say it has to go to this person. The job was to get it done.
That was fun, but it was also hard. They say 996. We were working 997. It was around the clock because we were international. My remit grew to managing Asia and China and launching our product in China. Calls at various hours of the day, 2:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the morning, did not matter. You had to do it. It helped me in my role now because I also feel like empathy is key. Knowing what your team is doing and knowing what the task requires helps you be empathetic towards your team.
Now you know what they are going through because you have done it yourself. It helps as a leader or GC. It helps you help them. “I have been there, I get it. Let’s work it out this way, or this is what I did way back when, but I am with you, I have done it. I will help you through it.” It means more when you have actually been there and done it than if you are just guessing as to what they are trying to do.
When you do that, when you anticipate, how often are you accurate? Generations are different, and things have changed.
It is not as accurate, but I think ultimately they just appreciate the fact that you acknowledge that their job is difficult, or you acknowledge that there are difficult personalities involved in what they have to do, if it is somebody they are dealing with in sales or somebody they are dealing with that may not be appreciative of legal services in general. I have seen it all. I have heard all the complaints.
It is a lot easier for you to create that rapport and relationship and get the loyalty back.
The Right Way To Deal With Difficult Clients
What are some things you have learned along the way in dealing with difficult clients?
The biggest thing, and this may lead into our conversation on legal tools, is always having receipts. I think the conventional wisdom is that everything stops with legal, or legal is the cause of the delay. At the time, we used Jira, but there are a lot of legal tools out there that help you matter manage, that help you create SLAs, and that help you track where matters are, whether it is a contract or a question.
You know you have assigned it to an internal attorney, you know that internal attorney has answered the question or provided feedback, and you know if it is stuck. Whether it is stuck with an internal business person, or it is stuck with a counterparty. You are not creating a narrative just by talking. You have data, and you have receipts.
You can say, “Sales leader, here is what is happening with your team. Here are the offices, or here are the folks that if you are saying these things are not getting done, here is how my legal ops person and I have figured out where maybe the bottleneck exists or why it exists.” I have learned in my current job that once I send quarterly reports out to the entire management team, and I say, “Here is all the work that we are doing. Here are the SLAs for the work, for the different types of work with the NDA, MSA, and procurement. Here is the trajectory of the SLA, where it has gone and why.”
SLA is an acronym for?
Service Level Agreement. How quickly you are turning. We have an internal, “I tell our sales leaders, you guys take top priority. You are the driver of the business and the growth of our company. You are prioritized. You will never see your document not turn in within a certain time frame. Right now, I think it is two business days.
You have a system in place where that is entered in and tracked, and it is not your email system.
That is what we live with, Joe. When I was at Trade Desk, and there were only three of us, we had an email intake, and we used to color-code. The legal email would come in, and if it was purple, that meant it was assigned to me. If it was red, it was assigned to Julie. If it was black, it was assigned to Arisha. That is how we were doing it. I did not know the advice that Julie was providing or that Arisha was providing.
Through the pain of having to go through and live through that, I said, “I do not want to have those issues occur where I do not know what is happening within the team and what advice team members are giving to various folks in the business because they are your shop, as you know. I found a tool called Xakia, which is a matter management tool. It is a software company out of Australia. It was the hands-down most bang for your buck legal tool out there for matter management. You can basically get it up and running within 24 to 48 hours. It was amazing.
You do not need consultants to come in.
Joe, amazingly, at the time, the licenses for five attorneys were $6,000 a year. It was a no-brainer. Ultimately, what that helped me create is a process, a system, and data and receipts. If you have those and you share those with the rest of the management team, you enable them to push their folks to say, “The legal team just gave me this report. It is saying these MSAs are getting stuck. The MSAs out of this office are taking a lot longer. “Head of this office, what are we doing? Is there something training-wise you need to help you understand what the MSAs mean or help you share them with the client?” It is all data.
You have got data. You have got something to look at and figure out where the bottlenecks are. What about how it is baked in? We know, as in-house lawyers, that a lot of times you are getting requests, but they do not have all the context that you need to do a proper job. There is a follow-up, etc. How do you make sure you are getting all the context in order to do that? When does the clock start ticking, so to speak, on your turnaround time?
The way we have done it is with a form. The Xakia tool helps you set up a form. The form is then customizable by request. Depending on the type of request, you can add different fields and say, “This is a customer contract. Here are the things we need information on. Attach any emails you have with the client in terms of additional context.” Context is key. If you do not have enough context, the lawyer does not know what they need to do.
Context is key. If you do not have enough of it, a lawyer will not know what to do. Share on XWhat to spend their time on.
The form itself creates the questionnaire or survey that we provide to the internal client, and they provide all that information. Our LegalOps manager reviews the intake initially, and then we have a small enough team. LegalOps is able to manage those requests based on, “I know this person is in this office, I know the requester is in that office, let me give this request to that person because they are in the same time zone or same office.” It is made easier because the form and the tool allow you to provide that context within the request.
The Many Benefits Of Using GC AI
I cannot wait to look into that one. What other tools are you using to make your law department great?
When AI came out in 22, I was just blown away by it. I was on CNBC, and somebody, I forgot the name of the product now, but Thomson Reuters owns it. It was Legal Connect. It was an AI tool. I was early in evaluating legal AI tools, and I evaluated them, and it was good, but it was not what I needed. We started using enterprise licenses for Chat and for Gemini. Just this year or last year, I do not know how I got connected with GC.AI, but somebody in my network had talked to me about leveraging GC AI. It is like Harvey, but it is not as expensive.
Harvey is great for law firms because law firms can push every agreement they may have ever drafted, every white paper they may have ever drafted, all those things to then create a database for them to leverage. With GC AI, it is very customizable to your business. It is great for in-house attorneys because it allows you to initially provide the context upfront. I can set up my company and give GC AI all the context behind my company and my risk appetite. It knows my filings.
It knows and can scrape my website. It has an understanding of my business. Immediately as I start typing questions in, it is the same chat prompt that you would see in ChatGPT. It has the context it needs to provide advice that is catered towards my company and the risk appetite that my company and I have. You can change that risk appetite, too. You can have different profiles like Viant Inc., Risk High, or Viant Inc., Risk Conservative. It will also then dial up or dial down the type of advice.
Also, GC AI has a Word tool. Within Word, you enable GC AI. As you are reviewing the document, GC AI has a side panel. You can type in, “GC AI, can you find all provisions where Viant has obligations in this agreement?” It will give you bullet point lists. Here are all your obligations. GC AI, what is my cap on liability? Can you review to make sure that it is consistent with our policy? You can provide policy documents within the Word add-in, and you can provide playbooks.
Once you have done that, it becomes very easy. You are going away from the rote work that a lot of attorneys do not like. You do not go to law school to redline. That is not why you are there. You are learning law. You are learning how to interpret the law to help people or help businesses. You leave the redlining to the tool because the redlining also takes a long time, and then you review it. That is what most attorneys want. They want that first draft done by someone else.
I remember when I was a first year at a law firm, I am sure you do too, everything went to us to “Run the redline, give me a bullet point list, summarize all changes made, and give me your recommendations.” Guess what I do with GC AI? Same prompt. “Review this, give me a breakdown of everything that is changed, give me a summary of what is material to us based on the playbook I have inserted, and then give me recommendations.”
I use GC AI as well. Now I came a little later to the AI movement, and so I just call it GC.AI
Maybe it is GC.AI. I always thought, because I just thought it was.
No. I think they probably are brand new or whatever, but I think we are talking about the same product because it is very familiar to what you are talking about. I was actually at their first summit ten days ago or so. I was on Cecilia, one of the co-founders’ podcasts, recently as well. It is a product that I use, and I believe in, and it is good for somebody who is in a fractional GC role like I am, because then for each of the companies that I serve, they each have their own profile. Profile, exactly, which is really nice.
I liken it to having an exceptionally smart, confident, sometimes overly confident, first or second year associate. Who knows way more than I did as a first or second year associate, let’s be clear. That requires supervision. They will tell you the same thing. What an incredible start it gives you. I also find that the more experience you have, like an experienced GC like you, it is going to be even more powerful because you know when it is right, and you know when it needs to be pressed on because that does not seem right.
What I like about it and what the prior tools did not have, and notebookLM does have this by the way, that is the Google tool, and it does review. It does a really good job of reviewing documents. For one of our diligence on one of our prior deals, I gave it a closing binder that the company that we were looking at had put together for one of their financings. I just put everything into notebookLM, and it gave me a summary, and then it had footnotes so that I could, as you said, trust but verify.
You are like, “Is it getting it right? Did I miss something here?” At the time, I was just like, “What are the voting requirements for us to get this type of deal done?” I gave it context and the deal terms and whatnot. It went through very quickly, gave me a bullet point list of things, but then it gave me the footnote, so I can scroll over it, and then I can go to the document and verify.
GC AI does the same thing, as you know. The footnote is one of the key things for lawyers. It is the trust but verify aspect of it. It is saving you a ton of time, and it is giving you the support that you need to say, “I see where it reads this provision and provided this advice based on that provision.” That is great.
Different Incentives Of Using AI Tools For Legal Purposes
In-house lawyers are uptaking AI tools at a faster rate. There are incentives for doing so that do not exist at the law firm. As you mentioned at the beginning, in any in-house role, you have more to do in the time that you have to do it. Efficiency is key. A law firm with hourly billing, which is not always the case. It is going to be interesting to see how things play out. I sit at the intersection because I am an outside lawyer who serves as an inside lawyer at the companies that I support. Most, but not all, of our work is fixed fee, but we do have hourly work as well.
Even in hourly work, it is a competitive advantage to do it faster. It is faster using the tools, but it is not as fast as it could be. It is going to be faster, and it is going to be higher quality. I am going to look at those footnotes and make sure that they are accurate. It is going to lead me. I am just going to know more. I am going to be able to bring more to the client. I am going to have time to do that because it is making me way more efficient on the stuff that used to take a lot of time, like marking up a document and redlining.
As we know, that is not strategic. You are not thinking when you are doing it. It is all administrative. You are marking a document. You are putting comments in terms of the rationale as to why you made a change. Things like that are very easy for these AI tools.
You know what tool does a great job at giving the rationale? Spellbook.
I have not used that.
It is especially good at red lines, and it will give you a comment that is very persuasive to the other side or to business people who otherwise would not necessarily read through the red line, but can read what you are proposing and why you are proposing it. Anyway, yeah, there is a lot of good stuff out there, and obviously, it is a dynamic area. It is only going to get better.
Claude came out with their free legal plugin.
I am nodding as if I know that, but I did not know that. I will have to check that out.
If you have seen the market and the market reaction to a lot of SaaS companies and the drawdown of their market caps. It is caused by or was caused by Claude announcing this freeware. Folks are realizing that AI is like for non-critical software tools that most of these companies are licensing. The AI companies that are out there right now are creating the same tools, and they are going to be either free or a fraction of the cost.
Worst Part Of Being An In-House Counsel
For anybody who is tuning in who is not leaping, I highly encourage it. It is not really an option. It is more like how are you going to use it to your advantage? I asked you at the beginning what your favorite thing about being a lawyer is. And you gave a great answer. I am going to ask, if you could get rid of one aspect of your job, what would it be?
I could get rid of one aspect. Honestly, think it is the worst service provider. We have to do everything with a smile and build relationships. If there is mutual respect, it is great. When there is not, it creates a lot of difficulty and frustration, especially for my team. I am at a level where hopefully everyone is respectful and treats you in a respectful manner and respects your time. For my team, they go through it, and I hear it. That is one of the worst parts about being in-house counsel, that you are just legal or, in general, get blamed for everything. I wish that were not the case.
One of the worst parts of being an in-house counsel is getting blamed for everything. Share on XThere have been times when I put it. The prompt basically is to make this sound nice. I am going to send somebody, like, make it sound nice. I am like, sometimes I wish other people sending me messages would put that in.
It is so much easier to do now. I wish the same. In the age we live in now, everything is digital, and digital communication is just cold. If you were to pick up a phone or just talk to someone down the hall or knock on their door at their office, I guarantee you that tone is not the same as a tone in an email. That is all it is. It is making it more like the human interaction aspect of it. We are doing things too much digitally, and it can create conflict, and I do not like that.
Advice For People Coming Out Of Law School
Totally agree. We have talked about where the profession is now and your path. What advice would you give to somebody coming out of law school, or maybe they are at a law firm, and they are thinking about making the transition in-house? What do you think is going to be most important for skills for those people to have? What should be on their checklist of things that are important for them to get to the GC chair someday?
I will go back to it. I alluded to it in different ways, but there is a podcast I was listening to where the podcaster said something that stuck with me, and I have shared it with my team. It is “Pessimists sound smart, optimists make money.” Lawyers by training are pessimists. We are smart. We find all the reasons to say no. We say, “If we do this, these are the bad things that can happen.”
To be successful in-house, you have to be an optimist, and you have to provide an answer that gives everyone the assurance that here are all the bad things that can happen. Guess what? I figured out a path that we can skirt this issue here. We can tailor it so we can mitigate this risk here, and this is the path to go. It is hard.
You are not going to get there on day one because you do not have the context of the business. You do not have the experience, but build it. It is a process, and every day you learn something new, and every day you have more context. You have to keep grinding. I honestly think my days at Western Digital and Trade Desk.
The biggest restriction we have is that finite time while having so many things to do. Share on XMostly, if you grind and you do the work and you concentrate all the work in a short time period, that is the most helpful to give you that foundation to be a great in-house attorney because you have provided the advice. You have seen it being executed, and you know whether there is risk associated with it or not. You build off that. Pessimists sound smart, optimists make money.
Why Adopting New Technologies Is A Non-Negotiable
Love that, have not heard it before. A brilliant answer. It sounds like on your career path, you had mentors who taught you along the way. Obviously, that is the role that you are playing now with your team. Your team is very lucky to have you for that reason. Anything else you want to leave our audience with?
Times are changing. You have to adopt the new technologies. I honestly think businesses are going to get smart to the fact that there are a lot of cost-cutting measures that they can make. If you can show future GCs in-house that you have adopted these tools and you can come in and be efficient, I think that is going to put you head and shoulders above other in-house candidates. We are always looking, and you see the resumes come through, and great resumes, great experience. If you are afraid to adopt these new technologies, you are going to be left behind. Do not be afraid to dive into AI or other tech.
Right on. Thank you for those words of wisdom, Ritesh. It has been a real pleasure connecting with you.
Same, Joe. Thank you.
Take care.
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About Ritesh Patel
Ritesh Patel is Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary at Viant Technology, a publicly traded advertising technology company. Before becoming a lawyer, he earned his CPA, bringing a unique finance-meets-law perspective to his career. A UCLA Law alum, Ritesh has made a career of translating complex legal challenges into practical solutions.