Maintaining the company's reputation is key to Abiscott's work
When Alexa Abiscott joined ApplyBoard as the company’s inaugural general counsel just over two years ago, she was no stranger to starting a legal department from scratch, having previously built the legal department at Sheridan College. Abiscott has since worked to grow the legal team at ApplyBoard, where she now leads a team of 11 legal, privacy and risk professionals in her role as general counsel and secretary.
Abiscott takes the lead on all legal compliance, risk, and corporate governance matters, as well as privacy and data governance. Trust is key to the work that Abiscott and her team do at ApplyBoard – a technology company that connects students, partner schools and recruitment partners to educational opportunities around the world.
“It’s really important to us to have trust from the students and schools and thousands of recruitment partners that use us, because our reputation in the market is one of our differentiators as a business,” says Abiscott.
2021 marked the third consecutive year that Deloitte recognized ApplyBoard as one of Canada’s fastest growing companies. Abiscott has seen the company scale from 400 employees when she joined in 2020 to over 1600 today, with operations in Canada, the US, Australia, the UK and India.
“Relative to the size of the company, we are a fairly small, nimble team, servicing a 1600-person company, and servicing all of those needs to enable the business,” says Abiscott. As part of a three-year strategic plan, she has added a legal operations person to her team, and she is now working to ensure global corporate governance as the company continues to scale.
“We have taken a really agile, and so far, very successful approach of mobilizing our sales teams so that they can do much of the contractual negotiations, with us supporting in the background,” says Abiscott. “We enable them through what we call our partner relations contract playbook.” The sales team uses this robust tool to negotiate contracts which creates efficiencies and speeds up processes with school contract negotiations. Abiscott says the initiative has been a huge success as it allows sales teams to be in the driver’s seat, while legal still provides support.
“We haver a much quicker turnaround time for contracting as a result,” she says.
Although the now remote-first company has grown so rapidly since it was founded in 2015, it still has the culture of a start-up, so Abiscott created an on-boarding module to help new employees assimilate into the company. It introduces the legal department and outlines employee obligations and other important matters such as confidentiality.
Abiscott’s approach to develop the strengths within the legal department is to empower individuals to make their own decisions, without having to come to her for approvals on every matter. Legal team members attend cross-functional team meetings to integrate into all aspects of the business and contribute to major decisions. Abiscott wants the team to be seen as creative problem solvers and business enablers. The team also seeks support from external counsel partners that have a genuine curiosity in understanding the business.
Last year the legal department launched both an ESG and diversity and inclusion committee and an enterprise risk management committee, so they are also focused on supporting and driving those committees forward.
Looking ahead, Abiscott wants to continue serving her team and encouraging them to think about their stretch goals and development opportunities, while continuing to enable the business as it grows.
“We are striving to drive our operating principles and hold ourselves accountable to make sure we’re an example of embodying the company’s core values,” she says.
Abiscott is also a co-founder and current president of Women General Counsel Canada.
