Liberty Mutual Insurance chief legal officer Damon Hart said while he enjoyed working with law firms, the real focus of his transition in-house was a broader value proposition that positioned him to have a bigger sphere of influence.

Hart, who played football and basketball before going into law, said athletics were an important part of his development as a human being and lawyer.

"On different teams, you play different roles. Sometimes you're the leader or the best player—sometimes you're not," Hart said. "Sometimes you're in a support role and you have to be OK with that. It's learning to relate to other people that are different from you and have different skill sets and creating that harmony. Every team has an essence and there's a harmony that's created within a team."

He said those experiences as well as learning how to push when it's needed has taught him that you have to bring your best when your best is necessary. Additionally, you have to get in the right mindset to bring your best and deal with success and failure.

"When I was a freshman in college, we won our league and went to the [National Collegiate Athletic Association] tournament. It was a great experience. My very last competitive game as a senior was in the championship game and we lost, and the thing that's beautiful about it is that both times—right after losing and after winning—the sun came up the next day and I had to keep moving," he said.

Hart joined Liberty Mutual Insurance as vice president and assistant general counsel in 2014 and worked his way up to chief legal officer, a role he's been in since January. Before Liberty Mutual, he spent 15 years in private practice, including more than a decade at Miami-based Holland & Knight and stints at Littler Mendelson and Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart.

Hart spoke with Corporate Counsel about his passion for working on Liberty Mutual's Employee Resource Group (ERG) initiatives, as well as goals he seeks to accomplish as a legal leader.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Corporate Counsel: Before Liberty Mutual Insurance, you worked in private practice. What inspired your transition to the in-house space?

Damon Hart: Coming in-house, the real focus for me was a broader value proposition. A law firm's value proposition is really around a production metric—how much you bill, how much you generate. Coming to Liberty for an executive-level job, it was about my results, my clients' results, helping my clients reach their goals, developing people, and DE&I—the full spectrum of what I bring as a professional and as an individual. I felt like there was a better alignment coming in-house.

CC: How has the legal department contributed to Liberty Mutual's diversity, equity and inclusion journey, and why is it important for legal to be involved?

DH: Fundamentally, legal departments should be thinking about and should care about justice, and a lot of DE&I is about justice. It's marrying up a business imperative with the moral imperative of DE&I. It's good for business and it's the right thing to do.

Liberty Mutual is a very values-based organization. Part of the legal department's role is helping the company exhibit and keep its values as a company. So, we operate in that space. The legal department has been an innovator and when it comes to DE&I, we are a leader in this space. We still have work to do, but we've come a long way.

I'm very proud of the work that the legal department has done—which predated me. Long before I got here, there had been a very active DE&I committee. And they've been doing a lot of things to make it a great workplace for legal professionals and also to have influence on the legal industry because we employ and work with a lot of different law firms and service providers. We've been good at balancing—asking firms to do better, partnering with them to do better without being a big stick saying, "You must do this," and dictating, "If you don't do this, we're going to take all the business away."

For me, it's like treating the lack of a pipeline and the dearth of diversity within the legal field like any other business problem. How do we deal with it? We partner with our firms, and we attack it, and we address it and there's accountability and there's partnership, and there are good ideas, and there's innovation. So that's our approach and I'm very proud of the progress that we've made.

CC: You're an active participant in Liberty Mutual's Employee Resource Group. Talk about what you do, specifically, and how you find the time to do that in your already-busy schedule.

DH: It's a broad value proposition. When you get Damon Hart, you get all of me. As a Black lawyer who's come up the ranks and has really defied the odds, to be totally honest, I had a better chance to go into the NFL than I did of becoming a legal leader. So for me, I feel a tremendous responsibility to pay that forward, to open doors, to shine a light on talent, to bring my good ideas and push on this issue.

Liberty has a very well-developed number of ERGs. I've been very proud to work with them, to speak on panels, to contribute in a lot of different ways, including mentoring across the organization. It's another way that Liberty shows me that there's an alignment in what I value and what the organization values. A few years ago, I wanted to get all the people that I mentor together for a lunch around the holidays, and when I sat down, I was just so proud when I looked around the table and saw the level of diversity of people that I've invested in and who've invested in me. It just made me feel like I'm in the right place and that I'm doing work that matters.

CC: What are the two main goals you aim to accomplish as head of legal?

DH: No. 1 is don't break it. I was given a great department that was very well run and very much a leader, not only in DE&I but also in getting our business results using technology and efficiency … and, most importantly, having a seat at the table with our clients.

Forward-looking though, everything is changing. The way we do business is different. Data is different. The threats are different. The external business environment is different. The political environment is different. [Environment, social and governance] is an important issue. What the marketplace wants from us and from business as a whole has changed. And then meanwhile, the everyday blocking and tackling of lawsuits and contracts haven't gone away either. So, as I look forward, I'm really pressing and I've written and spoken a lot about how we need to change and iterate and innovate to serve this new organization and to help the organization navigate through murky waters to get to a bright future, which I think the company has. It's honoring the past and what we've done and what we've done well, while at the same time iterating and evolving toward the future.

CC: What is the biggest lesson you've learned over the past two years?

DH: I've learned that we're all resilient. We've had to deal with huge life-changing things in succession and we've been able to do that together. Liberty has done a great job of leaning toward its values and one of our values is "put people first."

The other major thing is that my authenticity is part of my value proposition—so being authentic and caring about people and being able to actually authentically talk about what we're all living through honestly. There's been a lot of things that have happened that are really difficult to handle, and I sit with people in that. Times are really difficult and it's important to recognize that difficulty. So I've learned that you can actually be your complete authentic self and you can be vulnerable and, in fact, people gravitate to that in their leaders.

CC: What advice would you give to lawyers looking to move in-house?

DH: It's a different game. As I mentioned before, the value proposition is different. When you're in a law firm, you are the product. You are the thing that is being sold. You are the thing that helps the business make money. When you're in-house, you're not the product. You're a support function for the product. Sometimes you're a support of a support that supports the product—understanding that you come to the table a little bit differently.

Also, in a law firm, what the lawyers say goes—as far as running the business, and in a business setting in-house, you're just one voice of many. There's going to be marketing and HR and CFO and all these different perspectives to help a company make the decision. So understanding where you sit, understanding your role, playing that role as a support function and being a really good team player is really important.

The last thing is be careful about what you say no to. You can't be the "Office of No." Obviously, we have to be kind of a governance function and we can't let things go off the rails. But it's a give and take. I think that sometimes clients have a goal in mind and the way that they want to get there is fraught with risk. So the lawyer's job is to present some alternatives to help get them to where they want to go in a less risky fashion.