Trusting Her Team: Commvault’s Chief Legal Officer

There’s a clipping from the July 25, 2011, edition of Newsweek tacked up next to Danielle Sheer’s computer monitor. The headline: “Marissa Mayer on the day she ‘broke’ the Internet.”

“If Marissa, the former CEO of Yahoo!, can break Google and own it, I can certainly accept and learn from my mistakes,” Sheer says.

Her favorite mistakes all center around a theme: underestimating a person, a project, or a purpose.

Person: Megan Cavanaugh

About 13 years ago, Sheer underestimated a young woman named Megan Cavanaugh. She met Meg as she was putting herself through law school at night in Massachusetts, born and raised in Worcester, she had paid her own way through college and law school, working every job imaginable since high school.

Sheer interviewed her for an internship at Carbonite, a newly public company at the time. She knew they had plenty of training to offer but zero budget to hire a first-year lawyer. At the end of the interview, she offered Meg the internship and was completely honest: there would be no full-time job offer at the end. Meg graciously accepted.

Making Her Own Desk

At first, Meg didn’t even have a desk; she made one by laying a hard piece of cardboard between two cubicles. Without being asked, she set her sights on learning the product inside and out. She test-drove the solution and tinkered with it until she understood it. That inspired her to make suggestions to help close commercial deals. She learned what finance needed, respected their guidance, and celebrated wins with the sales team.

Within a year, commercial activity exploded. Meg partnered with IT to build a home-grown contracts management solution that helped cross-functional teams communicate in real time. She built trust with the movers and shakers in IT, sales, and finance, and got them all to buy into her new process.

By the time she reached law school graduation, the business demanded they hire her full-time.

“It has been more than 13 years now, and Meg has grown from intern to my deputy general counsel at Commvault,” Sheer says. “Through it all, there has been one absolute constant: She is trustworthy and kind, and her success is rooted in enabling the success of others.”

It’s a lesson Sheer still carries when it comes to recruiting legal talents: sometimes the best hire is the one who shows up with no desk, no budget, and no promises, and builds all three herself.

Project: Bringing Immigration In-House

When Sheer joined Commvault, one-third of the organization lived and worked in India. The company had a robust immigration program where employees could win a lottery to live, work, and train in the U.S. for a period of time before returning home. It was popular, but exorbitantly expensive in legal fees.

“The cost to run this program, from a legal perspective, was crippling,” Sheer recalls.

The Vision

With a vision but not yet a plan, Sheer knew the end of the story first: they would no longer work with immigration outside counsel. She phoned a friend who founded a startup called Formally, which was building a proprietary platform to demystify the U.S. immigration process for businesses. Next, she phoned one of her leaders in India, Reshma Raja, and asked her to take responsibility for the new in-house immigration program, leveraging the new legal tech tool. She asked Reshma to go to management in a week.

Sheer did not underestimate Reshma’s ability to build it, but underestimated the project’s scope. Cutover didn’t happen in a week; it took a few months. Reshma had to assess all current matters, the variety of law firms involved, the new platform’s capability, and put a plan in place to take all current and future work in-house, including hiring a brand-new team in India.

The Result

Reshma and her team pulled off a total transition to in-house immigration management in a few months. They saved 99 percent in outside counsel fees.

“A huge thanks to the team for the lightning-fast visa amendment and extension process completed in just 20 days; the quickest in my 10-year U.S. immigration journey,” one engineer shared.

“We cut a significant amount of cost, which was my initial intent, and we also made the process for our employees a simple and delightful experience,” Sheer says.

Purpose: Lifting Your Head Up

Sheer enjoys making lists and crossing things off, sometimes so much that she forgets to look up and remember that the work has a greater purpose.

Her head of compliance, Leah Flynne, reminds her of this.

Building a Compliance Culture

Commvault’s global compliance team tracks every privacy, cybersecurity, and AI regulation where the company does business, cross-referencing requirements to manage a compliance playbook. It’s complicated, tedious work. But the crucial input is people, their motivation and inspiration to do this work, and understand why it matters.

“The tech industry has been living in an era of ‘ship, then fix,’ but with an influx of regulations around secure software development and cybersecurity, company leaders must now be actively involved in cybersecurity risk management efforts,” Sheer says.

To truly mitigate risks, all executives and board directors, even those without a technical background, must understand the tech and its development process.

“Just because a director or a member of management isn’t a trained engineer or developer does not give them a pass from understanding what the product is, what risks are inherent in how it’s built, and what harm can come from using it. You must know your business. Whether that’s making ice cream, building planes, or developing software.”

Why It Matters

Businesses and governments face constant ransomware and cybersecurity attacks. When those events occur, companies must navigate a web of hundreds of different regulatory obligations worldwide, regulations aimed at minimizing the impact of data loss, identity theft, and destroyed critical systems.

Companies like BreachRx, an intelligent incident management and response platform that Commvault partners with closely, enhance their ability to adapt quickly to new regulatory requirements.

“With this myriad of global details and rules, compliance work is critically important to each of our lives, not merely a ‘check the box’ exercise,” Sheer says. “That means we all need to lift our heads up from the details of work, remember why we’re doing it, and engage in cross-functional coordination across the entire organization.”