Shari Piré, CLO of Plume Design. Courtesy photo

An avid water skier, Shari Piré is no stranger to risk. She thrives on taking on challenges.

For the last 15 months, the cross-border mergers and acquisitions lawyer has been chief legal and sustainability officer at Palo Alto, California-based Plume Design, which improves home Wi-Fi and provides internet-connected smart home services.

Before that, she was chief legal officer and global head of sustainability at Cognate BioServices. She started out spending more than a decade in private practice, in both the U.S. and Paris.

"Plume is actually an incredibly diverse company and has global operations that implicates a multitude of legal issues, jurisdictional or otherwise," she said. "I feel like everything I did before led me to where I am today. I'm super grateful that I chose cross-border M&A as my path. Not only was it exceptionally interesting as a path forward, it also is incredibly complex."

Piré shared with Corporate Counsel her strategies for building an effective team and the ambitious goals she has for her legal department. 

The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Corporate Counsel: You worked at a biotech company for more than six years. What drew you to Plume?

Shari Piré: I saw an exceptionally exciting opportunity. First, to work with a company that has novel technology, a seemingly endless well of innovation, and a huge set of proprietary data. I saw Plume as being in a league of its own and super well-positioned to deliver unparalleled service to its clients in terms of its product offering.

It was also an exceptional opportunity for me to set up the very first internal legal team, one that would fully embrace compliance, which obviously as a lawyer is of primordial importance, but that would also embrace the very ambitious personal goals I had for this next chapter—which were to address environmental, social and governance objectives with very action-oriented initiatives.

CC: Having represented global companies, you have extensive experience advising clients on cross-border deals as well as knowledge of cross-border regulations. What advice would you give to GCs working in that capacity?

SP: There are numerous competing objectives, as well as interests and issues that you have to try to resolve. Being a cross-border M&A lawyer requires the ability to navigate a fluid situation, which can include these competing objectives.

Depending on the regulations implicated, different strategies may be required. Many transactions have political considerations. You also need to think about whether certain regulatory or government approvals are necessary and be thinking strategically about what it's going to take to ensure that you secure that approval.

And then, ultimately, even though there are regulations and these competing regulations have established guidelines and guideposts that must be upheld and followed, they also sometimes create opportunities. You have to try to look for where the opportunities are.

The other thing that's important when dealing with regulations is to remember that you may need to interact with a regulatory authority. Being sensitive to cultural distinctions is critical in my view. There are things that you would do in the United States that are not appropriate if you go, for example, to Asia. 

The way you present yourself, the way you introduce yourself, the way you hand out your business card, I think it's important to be sensitive to these cultural distinctions, including in terms of how you frame an issue for discussion, to how you're perceived.

Ultimately, being sensitive to those issues can make a difference to the success of your transactions. 

CC: What are the biggest lessons you've learned the last two years?

SP: I've learned how much a lawyer can innovate. If you think outside the box, and you look at things with fresh eyes, then you can continuously innovate and continuously improve.

I am also at a point in my career where I understand not just how I listen, but how other people listen. I find that, oftentimes, you're confronted with people who listen without really hearing.

And it's an important skill to try to figure out how to get your message through. People are looking at you. They're listening—you can tell they're actively trying to listen but they're not hearing the message you're trying to deliver. That was a super important lesson for me to learn because it then required me to think through how I deliver the message and the information I need to deliver.

CC: What are the big issues or topics you are currently focused on in your department?

SP: I have these ambitious environmental, social and governance goals and they are super important to me. I felt like this was really the next step in my career. Our CEO really embraced my vision, [which includes] implementing all kinds of new tools and systems to address ESG.

So I've tackled it in a few different arenas. The first one is to measure our carbon footprint and to more accurately understand what Plume's impact is on the environment. The data that we're going to collect is going to give us powerful knowledge to be able to drive towards ambitious carbon-neutrality goals.

The path to achieving carbon neutrality is also an opportunity to continue to team-build throughout Plume with initiatives such as planting trees together and cleaning up community gardens. This, in connection with the data we're collecting about our impact, will allow us not only to reduce our carbon footprint but to report about our efforts and our progress toward achieving carbon neutrality. 

Telling our story and making the information available is part of the governance aspect. Lawyers often think of governance as really just compliance, and I'm looking at it from a standpoint of data integrity and data transparency.

Putting that together with intentional education to make sure that data is handled responsibly, building educational programs around what it means to have good documentation practices and what it means to have data integrity. This philosophy of data transparency that we're embracing is going to further educate the entire public on our sustainability ambitions and how we're working towards meeting our objectives.

In addition, we're also pursuing economic and social sustainability. We're building programs around digital equality, to be sure that there's sufficient access to Wi-Fi in different regions. For example, without proper Wi-Fi, children don't have enough access to the tools they need to get a proper education or to get the best possible education. So we're bringing Wi-Fi into areas that are underdeveloped and underprivileged.

Plume also brought Wi-Fi to Ukrainian refugee camps, so that when the refugees were first arriving in Poland, they had access to Wi-Fi. They could call their loved ones to let them know that they were OK.

CC: GCs are expected to lead and mentor the legal team while being a strategic business partner. What are the most important things you focus on to ensure you have a cohesive and effective team?

SP: I view my team the way I view languages. I think to really be able to communicate with other human beings you need to speak the same language. To be effective and efficient and to deliver the best advice, you need to be "fluent" in all the different legal disciplines.

And so I believe in a team of generalists and not a team of specialists that are focusing on one niche area. I think we can learn so much from each other by sharing and swapping projects back-and-forth. This is one form of knowledge management.

I educate my team to be culturally sensitive and I'm also educating them to make sure they understand where they might have biases that are ingrained in them because they grew up in a particular place that made them view the world in a particular manner.