Trisha Kozu, general counsel and sole in-house attorney for Panopto, a startup tech firm in Seattle that offers an online video platform that integrates with Zoom and has spiked in popularity during social distancing, contracted COVID-19 in June. 

The timing couldn't have been much worse. 

"It was the fiscal year-end as well as the quarter end, which means you have to do as many deals as you can," she said. "So it was really hard for me to think, 'Whoa, I need to take time off.' I've always seen the month of June as, 'You're going to do as many contracts as you can.' And I definitely had pressure to do as many contracts as I could because we are so small—I don't have backup." 

Against her doctor's orders, Kozu continued to work while self-quarantined in her bedroom for nearly three weeks. She couldn't be around her two children. Her husband left food by the door. Stuck in her bedroom, she worked. A lot. Sometimes more than 10 hours a day.  

"The lack of division of space from your office and your bedroom, I found myself just working. And when I was done working, I would realize I was exhausted and how much worse I felt," Kozu said. 

Later, she added: "It's partially not having strong enough boundaries to say, 'Hey, I'm not going to work for a week.' It's partially self brought on."  

But when asked if she could have taken time off, if that was even a real option, she acknowledges that it wasn't. Then she recalls what happened during her 40th birthday when her husband took her and a few of her close friends to Hawaii for a trip that he'd spent a long time planning. 

"I could go only if I agreed to be on call. And I was on call more than I had hoped during that vacation," Kozu remembers. 

'Executives are putting the foot on the neck'

Being stretched too thin is an all-too-familiar feeling for many corporate counsel, especially those who serve as a company's sole in-house lawyer. But the coronavirus outbreak has dropped even more work and responsibilities onto already-overloaded lawyers and legal departments. 

Jessica Nguyen, a former Microsoft Corp. lawyer who has served as the first-ever general counsel for several startup tech firms and currently is chief legal officer for Seattle-based artificial intelligence-powered contract management startup Lexion, recently highlighted the increasing pressure that in-house lawyers are feeling to do more with less.

She wrote in a now-viral LinkedIn post that she'd "had a ton of 1:1 virtual coffees with GC pals the past few months and a persistent theme I've heard is 'I need to figure out how to do more with reduced headcount' or 'I'm not getting the headcount we budgeted for 2020.' We're all in the same boat." 

Nguyen subsequently spoke with Corporate Counsel about how she prioritizes legal work to be more efficient and ensure that the critical projects are getting done while managing increased pressure from her company's executives. 

"I feel like now executives are putting the foot on the neck, like, 'No, you have to do more with less. Our revenue projections have been cut by 80% or 60% and legal is a cost center,'" she said. "So legal and other operational departments get cut first or get pressure to do more with less first."

After Nguyen's interview was published, several in-house leaders in her circle, including Kozu, agreed to speak about the challenges that they've experienced during the pandemic and how they've responded. Like Nguyen, most described how they've been looking for new ways to be more efficient. 

"We're spending a lot more time focusing now on reducing friction," said Jolene Marshall, vice president of legal at Smartsheet, a software firm headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. The firm, which also has offices in Boston, Edinburgh, London and Sydney, has an 18-member legal department and about 1,800 total employees, compared with about 300 when Marshall joined four years ago. 

During pre-coronavirus times, Smartsheet's executives had planned to add five or six members to the team, including an in-house lawyer based in Sydney who was going to manage sales and tax operations. Now, those positions are frozen. 

"So there's been a bit of an adjustment to try to figure out how we're going to provide the same coverage out of our office in Bellevue," Marshall said. "We're trying to figure out how to provide good and efficient service with less people." 

Smartsheet recently acquired a company with an artificial intelligence platform, which Marshall was using to develop a chatbot that could answer legal questions from the company's sales reps. 

"Hopefully, people can self-service more," Marshall said. 

In-house hiring 'discussions have stopped'

Earlier this year, when Diana Young interviewed for a senior legal counsel position at Abstract, a Silicon Valley tech startup, there was discussion about building out the legal team, getting a paralegal, possibly a junior lawyer. She started the job in March, just before the wave of coronavirus stay-at-home orders.  

"Since then, the discussions have stopped," she said, referring to the possibility of in-house hires. "But I have managed to get traction on a contract management system. And I was able to do that because I have cross-collaboration support. So this was not only to assist legal, but it would be of value to sales, the finance team." 

When Aceable Inc., a drivers' education software company in Austin, Texas, hired Thuy Nguyen as the firm's first in-house counsel, the company had 90 employees. The staff has since grown to about 150, but Nguyen remains a one-woman legal department.  

"I don't think we'll be expanding our legal team for another couple years," she said, adding that she's fielded a lot more human resources and employment-related questions related to COVID-19. 

"I've been working very closely with our HR department to figure out the guidelines that we'd want to put into place for returning to work," she added. 

At Abstract, Young also has been collaborating with different departments during the pandemic to prioritize her work. She stressed that working with other teams helps her keep her sights on where the company is headed. 

"It's been super helpful to kind of lean on the folks who have already been there to keep some direction about what is the focus right now," she said. 

'Resting is not easy'

While most hear the word more often than they'd like, general counsel rarely, if ever, can say, 'No,' when asked to do too much with too little. 

"It's not really about saying, 'No,'" Young said. "It's just a matter of, 'I've got this ahead of you but that's on my to-do list. And it might be next week.' And folks have to be in agreement with that or you're having to have further discussions, if necessary." 

As for Kozu, the only in-house lawyer at Panopto, she had a "challenging discussion" with the company's CEO about building her legal team shortly after she joined the firm. While the "rest of the executive team could really see the benefit of my work, especially sales, the CEO is a technology person first and foremost," she said. 

"He, at one point, told me to consider him very binary—yes or no—which is always tough for the law," she said. "So getting him to agree to increase head count entailed a lot of data collection."

By creating a workflow system that requires employees to enter legal requests into Salesforce software, Kozu was able to keep track of her legal requests in prioritized order. She also had staff include pertinent background information, such as past related contracts, when they logged requests. 

"I'm hopeful now that the discussion [about expanding the legal department] will change," she said, "because, for example, in the last quarter there were 167 transactions that took 671 legal hours." 

Throwing money at tech rather than hiring more in-house lawyers isn't always the best solution, Kozu noted. She had to teach herself how to use Salesforce, which she said was "probably not the best use of a senior general counsel-level person."

She added, "If you get the money to get a CLM [contact life cycle management software], that takes a lot of time to set up, implement and get integrated with other systems of record. I feel like that is almost putting more weight on your shoulders." 

While Kozu hasn't been able to hire another in-house lawyer, for the past few years she's turned to a friend and former co-worker who works with Panopto as a contract consultant and quasi-paralegal.

"She's like this unicorn," Kozu said. "She would triage the legal requests and walk me through what she thought she needed my input on and anything really important that was a bit beyond her, I would do those. That's how we managed during the worst three weeks of the sickness." 

The worst of the coronavirus appears to be behind her, Kozu said, but she continues to grapple with lingering symptoms, usually in the afternoon, when she's hit with "incredibly bad fatigue, brain fog, headaches." 

"I'm still technically feeling the effects of it because I still have not taken time off yet," she said. "I have a job. I have two children. Resting is not easy."