By Michael Fisch
innovation
Wondering which direction in-house lawyering might head in the future? Dean Andrew Perlman gathered with students and faculty in October to pick the brain of TikTok’s Head of Legal (Americas), Matt Penarczyk, JD ’95. Before taking on the role at TikTok, Penarczyk served as Microsoft’s deputy general counsel.
Dean Perlman set the stage by noting that TikTok was visited last year more often than Google, according to the Washington Post article “How TikTok Ate the Internet.” Two-thirds of American teens use the app, and 1 in 6 say they watch it “almost constantly,” a Pew Research Center survey reported. Penarczyk was asked about the challenges he faces when overseeing legal issues for a company that has such a broad reach and is growing so rapidly.
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Photograph by Michael J. Clarke
winter 2023
Lawyering at scale
“Modern legal practice needs to marry people, process, and technology to be able to scale and meet the demands of the volume of work that a modern practice sees,” Penarczyk told the crowd gathered in the Law School’s moot court room. Recent graduates “able to work at [that] intersection are already in high demand, and that will increasingly be the case,” he said.
During his jam-packed day at the Law School, Penarczyk visited with students from the Legal Innovation & Technology (LIT) Lab. The Lab’s students are building innovative ways to deliver legal services to the public, and they are learning skills that “every modern legal practice is going to need,” Penarczyk said. “I love the focus the Law School has on legal tech and on giving back to the community.”
Another growth area is the ethics of new technologies, Penarczyk told the students. As the world continues to rely on advanced forms of artificial intelligence and machine learning, “the ethical considerations pertaining to these technologies are going to be top of mind for every important regulator, for every important business executive, for every important customer,” he added. “I don’t think you could go wrong if you were to take a liking to the study of responsible, ethical AI.”
Penarczyk said that when he recruits lawyers, he’s looking for individuals with good judgment, because a lot of his job isn’t demarcated by “a strictly legal swim lane.” You can’t crisply separate issues that span legal, PR, and geopolitical matters, he said. “That’s not how issues present themselves, and it’s not how issues need to be attended to. Almost always, we have to bring together a number of people cross-functionally and talk about what we’re going to do.” It’s not sensible to say to colleagues with, for example, deep geopolitical or communications knowledge, to “stay in their lane,” he said.
During the discussion, Dean Perlman noticed a pattern in Penarczyk’s climb to the leadership ranks at Microsoft and TikTok: a willingness, repeatedly, to raise his hand when company leaders asked for a volunteer to try out an area of the law that was new or unfamiliar—and growing quickly.
Back in the days when the TikTok leader was working at Holland & Knight’s Boston office in the tax law group, junior attorneys were asked if anyone would be willing to work with a team in Florida to serve a rapidly growing list of tech clients.
“Opportunities are seldom perfect,” Penarczyk advised the students. “They seldom present themselves with a bow. This one didn’t. It was like, ‘Hey, we need some help in Florida. Is anybody in Boston open to doing that? You might have to get on more planes than you’d prefer.’… I raised my hand with some trepidation.”
The risk paid off, providing Penarczyk with specialized knowledge of the open-source software development community. “I didn’t know much about tech at the time, but I developed that niche expertise, which ended up becoming valuable, and led to my recruitment by Microsoft in 2002.”
The pattern repeated itself a few more times at Microsoft, where Penarczyk regularly ventured into the unknown, from government regulatory negotiation to software patents. One of those forays led to a role in major intellectual property deals and a chance to work closely with his mentor Horacio Gutierrez, now the general counsel of Disney.
The “people aspect” of his work at TikTok is a challenge, he says. Penarczyk is undaunted by that challenge. As with the others that have preceded it throughout his career, he continues to raise his hand.
A pattern that paid off
