Anthony Justman joined Sony Computer Entertainment America in 2007 as a senior corporate counsel with no in-house experience.

He's been with the company ever since. Now the vice president and deputy general counsel at Sony Interactive Entertainment, he grew into leadership roles that require business skills. Some of that he learned on the job. And some of those skills came from his unique background, working in real estate before moving in-house.

Corporate Counsel spoke with Justman about his management style, growth as a business leader and advice for lawyers developing in-house. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Corporate Counsel: Sony was your first in-house role. Did you have a business sense before you came in-house? If not, how did you develop one?

Anthony Justman: In retrospect, I had the good fortune to take some time from private practice to start my own business in a different field. So when my former boss recruited me for this role I was selling real estate in San Francisco. I had gotten worn out by the litigation thing and I was looking at doing a career in something completely different.

I was founding a company with a friend of a friend and was getting that off the ground. Now I look back on that and realize the three years I spent doing that was super valuable to this role, because it helped with that business acumen part of it, that a lot of private practice lawyers don't always get. But there was still a lot to learn.

CC: What skills from your real estate job best translated to an in-house role?

AJ: The pseudo startup skills. I wasn't a startup technology company, we were a small company. Being a small business owner and learning how to do everything yourself, or needing to do everything yourself.

Although PlayStation wasn't a startup when I joined, we were a fast-moving technology company. And being in that role as a business owner, knowing the urgency of needing to have an answer and being practical about it, was a skill that translated really well.

I think as lawyers you put primacy on the skill set of raw intelligence and understanding the law. In an in-house role, that's part of what you need to do to give good legal advice, but there are soft skills you need to learn and adapt to your company.

CC: You moved up to in-house leadership positions. Did you have leadership skills when you moved in-house? How did you gain those?

AJ: Leadership is something you have to actively cultivate and my analogy there would be my time working at a real estate company. I went from private practice doing complex [intellectual property] litigation. I thought I was going to walk into real estate and be very successful very quickly. What I learned is that it's mostly a sales job, and that was not a muscle I had exercised much.

What I did come to learn was that some people are better at sales than others, but everybody can be effective. You just have to find what works for you. I think leadership is a lot like that. For the vast majority of people, it's about realizing that opportunity is there and stepping into that position of leadership with certain ideas in mind.

For me, those ideas have been authenticity, being who you really are, transparency, telling people what you're doing, and in a legal department, the other piece is confidence. It's going to be hard to have a leader in legal who isn't good at some part of law.

CC: What does being authentic mean to you?

AJ: It's about being yourself as a professional. I've always seen myself as very “what you see is what you get.” Some people might accuse me of being too frank. But those are traits that are authentic to me. The challenge or the opportunity is how do I leverage that in my leadership role.

If I sit down and have a difficult conversation with someone on my team, who wants a promotion they're not going to get, I can get the script from HR and say job done. But that's not nearly as effective as if I put the message in my own words, in a way they would understand is coming from my heart. Because they've had lunch with me, worked with me.

If that performance conversation is conveyed in my voice, it's going to be much more effective. They still may not like it. But if I do it in an authentic way, they know I believe it, that I'm not going through the motions, and they're more likely to hear it and come around to acting on it.

CC: You lead different teams within the legal department—transactional, clearance and litigation. Do you change the way you approach each team?

AJ: I have a team of about 50, including staff, and six senior people reporting directly to me.

Substantively, each team has different needs. I feel I'm effective in my role because I've done all three of those things. I was a litigator for more than 10 years. I've settled cases, taken depositions.

And I learned how to do high-level and high-volume transactional work here at Sony. In the first role that I had, I got to roll up my sleeves and learn how to be a transactional lawyer, which, if you're a litigator, you've got to practice and be willing to learn. The clearance piece goes back to the first role I had at the company, which was being an advertising lawyer.

You need to be confident, authentic and transparent. I feel like I have confidence in those areas.

CC: How did you grow and find new experiences while staying in-house at the same company?

AJ: Part of it is good fortune. I was hired for a role I hadn't done before. I remember looking at in-house positions when I was in a firm, and there just weren't a lot of litigator positions. At the time, technology startups were looking for corporate lawyers and it was hard to convince somebody that I could succeed in a role with a skill set they didn't need.

When Riley hired me, he knew that I had litigation experience in an area we needed to fill, which is advertising law. And he knew litigators had good judgment generally about those kinds of issues. So he took a chance on me, and I think I delivered. That opened up opportunities when positions created themselves [as] the company grew.

We went from a company that sold boxes and discs to a global online platform. And the business and legal needs created themselves, and those were opportunities that needed to be filled by somebody, and I was there and able to do the work.