Kattapuram integrates legal foresight with tech innovation and ethics
Rachel Kattapuram, director of product counsel at Atlassian, perches in the unusual intersection of legal strategy and product development. Speaking to Lexpert, she describes her position as one of collaborative engineering.
"Product counsel is legal's front door to the business," she says. "You have relationships with the business, you know the product inside out, and you come in at the early stages all the way to actually shipping your product or feature."
But the role isn’t without significant challenges – one of the core ones being stringent privacy regulations.
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"You have to break down what you mean by risk,” she says. “That's legal risk, risk to customer trust and broader reputational risk.”
The growing influence of emerging technologies, particularly AI, is slowly shifting the focus from purely legal risk to more holistic business risk. Understanding the risk appetite of both the business and the legal team is crucial.
“That really does vary across industries, and it really requires a very deep understanding of the business and what the business's priorities are," Kattapuram notes. "When we're working on innovative tech like AI, specifically generative AI, there's very little guidance and very little case law.”
Futureproofing is another essential strategy. Kattapuram compares this to product and engineering teams building features with future technology in mind.
"Do we see something coming down the pipe that isn't necessarily a law today, but in order to implement our control or safeguard that we think will be coming down the pike in the future?"
Addressing the challenges of AI and emerging technologies, Kattapuram points to a global patchwork of AI legislation and existing laws not designed for AI.
“We're also working with third-party large language models in order to provide generative AI,” adds Kattapuram. At Atlassian, she says they rely on their own responsible tech principles, aligning with company values and ethical standards.
“Given the absence of very clear rules, we're going to take an approach that aligns with our values and legal rules and ethical rules and be really transparent and open about that with customers," she says.
Within the legal team, product counsel serves as the bridge between the business and subject matter experts. This model ensures the business receives a unified legal position rather than fragmented advice from multiple experts. "We come in, provide the issue spotting, work with our stakeholders on legal separately, and bring it back to the business, sort of as a polished package that's easy to digest and action," Kattapuram says.
To maintain alignment with the company's strategic priorities, Atlassian's legal team employs objectives and key results (OKRs). This structured approach helps prioritize high-impact projects and ensures the legal team's efforts align with broader business goals.
“We create our OKRs at a legal team and a product counsel level that ladder up to the company's highest level OKRs," she notes.
In discussing the broader challenges of balancing compliance with innovation, Kattapuram emphasizes the importance of clear guiding principles.
"For me, I really look towards a North Star guiding principle as product counsel," she says. The proactive stance on futureproofing and benchmarking is evident in how Kattapuram approaches the evolving regulatory landscape.
“We think about futureproofing in the same way that a product or an engineering team thinks about how to build a feature with the technology that we have today, knowing that we have sort of a preview of what the technology that we'll need for tomorrow is.”
