Innovation Starts with Legal: How In House Lawyers can serve a Company beyond a Traditional Legal Role

Nishat Ruiter, VP & Associate General Counsel, CA Technologies, USA

Have you ever had a project that involved business issues, challenged the status quo and pushed your legal skills to the limit? You are not alone. In fact, there are at least five lawyers at CA Technologies from around the world that have something to say about just this situation. You will hear the role of In House Counsel stretched and compared with terms such as lawyer, advisor, business leader, arbitor, confidante, collaborator and innovator. You will hear about methods such as collaboration, advocacy, communication, organization and listening. Moreover, you’ll see how values such as teamwork, innovation, trust, respect and loyalty played a large part in getting the challenge resolved. These are some of the themes that a team of lawyers share. This paper describes a journey consisting of at least 200 man hours each person, multiple conference calls, video conferences and intense drafting sessions resulting overall in an innovative solution that is more valuable as a whole and much more than the sum of each part. A group of lawyers at CA Technologies were placed in a unique position to recommend and drive changes in the company with respect to its contract between itself and its customers across the globe. CA Technologies reinvented its model agreements for its customers worldwide based on multi-faceted research, analysis and review of negotiations with customers across the globe. Using a task force made up of lawyers around the world with very different challenges and legal systems, the team challenged itself and other groups in the company to find innovative ways to improve its model agreements, with the aim to create agreements that were even handed, fair and addressed many customer concerns. The innovative solution finally developed was rolled out across the company in 2011 and continues to gather pace as the best customer agreement in CA Technologies’ three and a half decade history.

Nishat Ruiter is Vice President and Associate General Counsel at CA Technologies and manages the North American Sales legal team covering all licensing transactions for software, services, SaaS, support and complex transactions for three regions of the United States including Canada. Her work includes advising the senior business executives of sales legal risk, assisting with integrations of acquisitions into the field for Mergers & Acquisitions team, and managing a team of lawyers and contract managers including training, certification and negotiation programs. Prior to CA Technologies, her career included IP licensing and regulatory analysis for Chubb Group of Insurance Companies; Senior US Counsel for a multinational professional services firm Capco; General Counsel of Binary Tree.Com.; and litigation in NY. Nishat lives in Hillsborough, New Jersey, is married with two children and finds passion as a global citizen, in music, work, and life

CA, Inc. is a large computer software company. More information can be found at CA.com