Sarah Niyogi on scaling a collaborative in-house legal team

Dropbox lawyer Sarah Niyogi found her dream job on a legal team that builds great relationships.

At Dropbox, it’s important that everyone is able to collaborate smoothly, especially with the legal team. Sarah talks about how at Dropbox, other departments embrace legal — and vice versa — and how that makes for a great working environment.

What did you do before Dropbox?

I worked for a senior federal judge on intellectual property, antitrust, and securities litigation. I also worked at a San Francisco law firm, Morrison & Foerster, with technology clients.

What got you interested in the technology?

I’ve always loved computers, ever since my dad bought me a Tandy computer when I was 5 years old and I took my first programming class in second grade (Logo Writer!). In college I majored in computer science, then got really interested in technology policy, especially copyright and patent policy. Eventually I decided to go to law school instead of becoming a software engineer.

Why did you decide to join Dropbox?

Working at Dropbox is a dream job for a product and commercial lawyer. We have a consumer business, an enterprise business, a developer platform, a strong partner ecosystem — there are so many interesting legal issues. It’s like being a kid in a candy store!

What do you do at Dropbox?

I’m on the product and commercial legal team. On the commercial side, I help Dropbox document and negotiate its relationships with customers, partners, and vendors. On the product side, I help counsel the product and engineering teams on legal issues related to our product — especially privacy and security, which we take very seriously.

What surprised you about Dropbox when you joined?

How collaborative everyone is with the legal department. You hear horror stories at other companies where everyone hates the legal team. The opposite is true here — all of our business partners are constantly reaching out to us for legal and business advice. In the early days, there were few people working with our partnerships team so I even provided feedback on financial models for our deals with partners like Samsung! It’s been tremendously fun to contribute on both the legal and business side.

What’s unique about being a part of the legal team at Dropbox?

The caliber of people on our team is really exceptional. I’ve never worked on a team before where people are uniformly and outstandingly smart, but also are so low ego and willing to collaborate. Everyone treats each other as an equal and with respect, and collaboration ends up being really seamless. It’s a pretty amazing way to work.

You’ve been at Dropbox for a while. What’s changed over the years? What’s stayed the same?

In the early days, it felt like our ambitions were totally out of reach given the size team we had. Now it really feels like we’re able to execute against our big ambitions. What hasn’t changed is that the ambitions are always getting bigger!

As the legal team grows, what’s been challenging? What’s been exciting?

Recruiting and scaling our team’s culture has been a challenge, because it can be hard to find people who are both incredibly smart and incredibly collaborative. So when we do find people that we want to add to the team, it’s really exciting to bring them into the fold.

One of the most exciting things about growing the legal team is not just helping people make business decisions on a day-to-day basis, but thinking about the big picture of how the legal team should be thinking about issues holistically. You’re making decisions, but also building out the framework for how we should be making those decisions in the future. It’s fun to be involved at both levels.

As a manager, what do you consider important in leading people?

I think a lot about initial onboarding and training, and then giving people the opportunity and room to grow. We hire people that are so amazing. Once we get them up to speed on the processes we’ve already built, and the legal questions we’ve advised on before, we really set people free to work on the processes we haven’t built yet and the novel legal questions. I want everyone on my team to own something important — that’s when you have an opportunity to do your best work.

What are you looking forward to next, for yourself and for Dropbox?

I’m looking forward to our international expansion. As a lawyer, it is really fascinating to learn about different legal systems, and how certain legal issues play out differently in other countries. And for Dropbox, it’s a big opportunity for us to grow the business.

What’s something that most people don’t know about you?

I am addicted to travel. When I graduated from college, I traveled around the world with a friend. We hitchhiked in Africa, slept on rooftops of hostels, met amazing people, and learned so much about local cultures. There’s so much beauty in the world — I want to see (and eat!) it all.

What are the top things you have learned at Dropbox?

Communication is everything as an in-house lawyer. As a lawyer, you can get in a rut of mostly communicating with other lawyers, which can result in a lot of shortcuts and groupthink. But when working with non-lawyers, you have to lay out the facts, your analysis, and really communicate something from first principles. It gives you the opportunity to challenge assumptions, understand the facts at a deeper level, and often get to a much better place with your analysis and recommendations. It’s so important for legal advice not to be a “black box” for our internal clients. When you communicate openly, and really get into a dialogue about legal issues, not only do you get better outcomes, but you make it interesting and engaging for people to work with you. We want to communicate openly with our internal Dropbox teams so that they will communicate openly with us. It’s a two-way street.

What have been some of your favorite moments at Dropbox so far?

I absolutely love Hack Week. It’s a great opportunity to do something that’s very high impact in a short period of time. My first Hack Week, I worked with a team to create our open source policy along with some other internal resources on how to use open source. It’s still the basis of what we use today, even though our open source program is much more developed.

If you weren’t a lawyer, what would you be?

I think it would be fun to be a product manager, since I enjoy work that has a lot of complexity. Especially in a product like ours, I think its interesting to build something new, but also have to manage all the interactions with what already exists, and think about all of the edge cases. There are definitely some similarities to legal practice. Plus, it would be another way to leverage my technical background.

How would you describe Dropbox in three words?

Security — Because it’s top of mind for everyone who works here, and something that we all care deeply about.

Simplicity — Because our product is so elegant and intuitive, and I think it’s what makes us special.

Audacity — Because its really important that both as a company and as individuals we’re acting boldly.