Lauren Viscariello is a legal leader who has leveraged her expertise to balance legal risks with the business objectives to help her startups succeed. As the Associate General Counsel at Candex, she is helping to build the legal & operations infrastructure for a software platform that takes the complexity out of tail spend purchasing & procurement.
Lauren grew up near Worcester, where her mom was a guidance counselor and her step dad served as an Air Force JAG attorney before becoming a public defender after retiring from the Air Force. She knew what she wanted to do since she was really young because, well, she was a Law & Order fanatic. From K > JD, Lauren was determined to become a lawyer. A criminal prosecutor, to be exact. And she took basically no time off in between until she achieved her goal.
During her undergrad studies at UConn, she participated in Model UN and rounded out her coursework to prepare herself to be a prosecutor. She loved the big school experience, exploring many programs across a bunch of different disciplines. She mixed & matched her course load and got involved with Greek life too.
After UConn, she went to Suffolk for law school because she wanted to choose a program for what they could offer her outside of the classroom. Suffolk had phenomenal internships and clinicals that Lauren took advantage of, while leaning heavily into mock trial as she was determined to pursue trial work after school. She landed a role at the fast paced, in-your face Suffolk County DA’s office. It was admittedly a constant grind but she really felt like she was part of something bigger there.
Through her work, she made tangible differences in the lives of people with her degree. She wanted that for her career. It felt good to not have to explain what you did to anyone, either. People know what a DA does! Lauren loved trial work, but after a couple years, she began to feel like she wanted to do something different over the longer term.
Through her litigation experience, she learned she was good at coming to compromises and working collaboratively with other people. In an adversarial litigation perspective, where wins & losses are part of your quantifiable record, that didn’t always fit perfectly with her own personality and goals.
The next logical step was to go to a firm. She took a role in civil litigation, living the billable hour mindset. After a few months though, she realized it wasn’t the career path meant for her. It felt like time to take a step back.
Lauren took a few months off and pursued a mindfulness practice, seeking to become more aware of her approach to her career and maintaining a “get to” instead of a “have to” attitude. Through this work she was able to get better alignment with her goals and start to rebuild some momentum. Mindfulness has helped her better uncover how her professional goals align with the person she wants to be outside of the office. Something she admits lawyers don’t often ask themselves! It’s not exactly in their legal training.
Ready to pivot and refocus, she went in house with the Mass Teachers Retirement System. It was a great fit at a state agency, a mix of public service work helping to serve the “greater good” with an in-house flavor.
Just nine months later, Lauren was presented with an opportunity to join fintech startup Forward Financing. She was blown away by their pace and had a real awakening for someone used to the system of public service. Forward Financing was very culture conscious and the chance to join the Boston tech scene was too enticing to pass up!
At Forward, she was primarily focused on litigation & casework that covered customer dispute resolution through arbitration, mediation, and some litigation. Through that work she was able to build processes around each vertical.
After 2+ years, through a recruiter, she found Salary Finance. They were looking for someone to support their General Counsel and it gave Lauren an awesome opportunity to acquire more generalist experience on her path to understanding the scope of a GC role. She wasn’t actively looking, but pursued the hiring process via video through COVID (it was a weird time, ok!) and Megan McCarthy did a phenomenal job helping her get to know everyone.
In her new role at Salary Finance, she took on a broad range of responsibilities as a Corporate Counsel. Her General Counsel, Lisa LoGerfo, made her feel comfortable and helped her grow in the role. Salary Finance partnered with employers to offer a financial wellness suite and she worked alongside large scale employers and employees, supporting a regulatory component around lending to keep her busy too.
Between her and Lisa, the duo handled all the legal work and oversight for the U.S. operations of Salary Finance (with their HQ in London) as the global team grew to over 200 team members. The American subsidiary was then acquired, capping a truly transformative career experience, and when Lisa departed Lauren found a new role at Candex.
Candex, a software platform that handles long tail spend (purchasing & procurement) for large enterprises, gave Lauren the opportunity to work in true Enterprise SaaS for the first time.
In her role at Candex, Lauren handles commercial contracting, from large scale MSAs (master services agreements), NDAs, and a host of other responsibilities. She loves working directly with their General Counsel, Erin Leslie, on “whatever needs to be done” from a legal perspective. They make a great team, if she does say so herself!
Balancing Legal Risk & Business Objectives
Giving advice and balancing risk management is a constant tug of war for attorneys at growing startups. One area in which Lauren has spent her time better understanding is the needs of the business, both short and long term, fitting into a legal framework that will fit the appropriate stage and level of risk the company can shoulder.
For example, the risk management framework of a public company is not going to be the same as a Series B startup. Taking calculated (potential) legal risks by asking the right questions to keep the company safe at each stage is paramount to protect the company and show good faith to keep driving business forward.
Common sense dictates that you’ll just have to make some compromises to land important clients. In order to make sure the needs of the business are upheld and the GTM team is happy, Lauren tries to be proactive in asking questions of the sales team and their executives about “what are the most important things” (clauses) in a given contract or deal. What is the payoff to bring the client in at this current moment?
When needed, Lauren will work with her team to use another company’s legal paper in order to get a deal done. She’ll do the additional legwork to fit Candex’s terms on the client’s paper to find a middle ground and speak their language. It shows good faith that you’ll work alongside your customers and, even if it causes some additional cycles, it’s worth the extra effort to close deals and drive growth forward.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Success is Not Linear – “Sometimes you need to take a step back in title or comp or need to make a pivot. You can’t think about those things as one step forward or one step back. Sometimes you need to take a step aside to pull that slingshot back to get you where you need to go”
Teamwork – “I approach teamwork with an abundance mindset. Rising tides lift all boats. Something good happening to someone else, you can always find a way to make that good for you. That is a critical teamwork mentality, everyone’s success is your own success”
Hard Work – “There is truly no substitute for hard work, especially for in house counsel. You’re never going to be a great one if you only have a cursory knowledge of what your business does, how your industry works, or who your competitors are. You really need to ask why and dig deep. That takes a lot of hard work to get there as a lawyer without a business background to determine what are the most important things going on in the business.”
Eventually, Lauren would love to be a General Counsel at a growing tech company. She’d also love to get more involved in the Boston non-profit space by lending her legal expertise to causes she’s passionate about.
If you’d like to learn more about Lauren, you can find her raising her newborn just outside of Boston, crafting the future business risk frameworks at Candex, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the teams, contracts, and business deals you help close at Candex & startups beyond in the years ahead!