Bill Berry is General Counsel at Verkada, a physical security and smart building platform that has grown from under 1,000 employees to 2,300 across 17 offices worldwide in three years. Ariana Goodell is Senior Counsel for Privacy and Policy, and a former outside counsel associate of GC AI founder Cecilia Ziniti's from the pre-GDPR era who she describes as “one of the best privacy lawyers she has ever worked with.”
Together Bill and Ariana run one of the fastest-growing legal teams in tech, at a company whose products include cameras with facial recognition, biometric access control, air quality sensors, and an expanding suite of smart building tools.
When CZ visited Verkada's offices in San Mateo a few weeks before her conversation with Bill and Ariana, she noticed something unusual on the walk from the coffee shop to the conference room: the legal team got high fives in the hallway. Real ones.
“When we're interviewing folks, we look for someone who can have an authentic conversation,” said Bill. “This is why we were so enthralled with Ariana. You don't feel like you're talking to a lawyer. You feel like you're talking to a person that's in the boat with you making business decisions.”
What It Takes to Thrive in a Chaos-Friendly Legal Team
Bill's career path to GC was anything but straightforward. He started with an electrical engineering undergraduate degree, then joined the Navy, completed Business school and finally, attended Law school because his identical twin brother was going. He'd be the first to tell you none of it was intentional. What it did teach him was that he thrives in chaos.
Every company Bill has landed at (Google, Tesla, and Verkada, among others) has had one thing in common: a thousand things happening at once. Not one big quarter-long project to grind through, but dozens of things in motion simultaneously, all requiring judgment, all requiring speed.
"I thrived more when I had a lot of balls up in the air juggling rather than one big thing to work on. I am drawn to that chaos, I guess," he said.
Ariana's path has the same through line, albeit a little more direct. She started as a litigation associate at Reed Smith, taking on extra projects from partners with tech clients on top of her existing workload just to stay close to the work that excited her. She eventually made her way to fintech and then security tech, always following the work that fulfilled her, even when it meant a less prestigious title.
"I've always wanted to feed my curiosity about being a better lawyer, a better thinker, a better problem solver,” Ariana said. “Sometimes your linear career path from a role perspective doesn't line up with your personal fulfillment."
While neither Bill nor Ariana planned a neat path to where they are, they recognized the type of work that made them want to dig in.
Note from CZ: Ariana was my outside counsel associate on privacy before GDPR had even come out. She has always been the kind of lawyer who gravitates toward the hard problems, not away from them. That’s a critical skill for any great in-house lawyer.
How to Hire In-House Lawyers That Business People Like
Bill has a precise and somewhat unconventional hiring philosophy, and it was influenced by watching what he didn't want to do up close. At Google, the prevailing wisdom was to hire the big personality, the high ego, the person who would get things done through sheer force of will. It worked, in a way. Google is full of crazy smart people, and imposter syndrome still runs rampant.
The Google team accomplished a lot, but Bill walked away from that experience convinced that ego was not a prerequisite for ambition, and that treating it like one came with costs he wasn’t sure were worth paying.
At Tesla, this lesson was only reinforced. For a company with a famously outsized personality at the top, there was almost no room for ego below. Bill found it refreshing. When he got to Verkada and started building his own team, the anti-ego philosophy became part of the culture.
"I don't think you need an ego to be ambitious,” Bill said. “I don't think you need an ego to be driven. I don't think you need an ego to drive things to completion. You can do all that without an ego."
The key quality that made Ariana a standout from the first interview was her presence, humility, and her ability to engage in genuine conversation with anyone. Bill and Verkada's Chief Privacy Officer walked out of Ariana's interview in near-unanimous agreement before they'd finished seeing other candidates.
To Ariana’s credit, she was equally choosy about where she wanted to invest her time and talent. She asked Bill what kind of legal team he wanted to build ten years from now, and spoke to as many people on the team as she could. Ariana was looking for authenticity, for intentionality, and for a leader who was thoughtful about team culture and the law.
"When I was hiring candidates, I was always really struck by the ones that tried to ask questions that got to motivations,” Ariana said. “Those are the people really trying to find understanding in people, and that's ultimately what makes you successful."
Be in the Boat: The Verkada Philosophy for Product Counseling
The central theme of Bill and Ariana’s team is this: be in the boat. Legal shouldn’t be the checkpoint at the end of the product development process. Rather, your team should be a partner who is present from the beginning, understands the business objective, and helps find a path to launch successfully.
Ariana makes sure product managers understand legal's key considerations well enough to represent them in rooms where she isn't present. She fights to get into product planning and roadmap meetings because that's where the real decisions happen.
"Always verbalize the business objective for your internal client. It reminds them you're not just there to be a lawyer, you're doing it to help solve their problem," said Goodell.
Ariana's playbook for getting legal “in the boat”:
Start every new stakeholder relationship with a non-work question to make the first interaction human, instead of transactional.
Verbalize the business objective of any new project out loud before getting into the legal considerations.
Educate product managers on your key considerations so they can represent legal in rooms you're not in.
Get into roadmap planning meetings so you know what the business is working on, struggling with, and considering day-to-day.
Know the difference between conference ready and launch ready, and be flexible.
AI Literacy Is the New Legal Literacy
Verkada has been infusing automation into its products since before generative AI was a household term. The company’s core products: computer vision, machine learning, biometric access control, all run on artificial intelligence. For Ariana, understanding what engineers do to train and deploy models wasn't optional. It was part of the job.
Her solution was to use AI to learn AI, and she encourages other savvy in-house lawyers to do the same. AI tools have made technical education accessible in a way it simply wasn't before.
"I couldn't imagine trying to wrap my head around how engineers prepare data to train a model without having an LLM where I can just ask these baseline questions and really go through the reasoning process myself,” said Ariana. “It's been a godsend."
Bill's team has been equally deliberate about increasing internal adoption of AI. In an effort to be strategic with how they approached it, the team formed a working group focused on low-hanging fruit first: contract review and first drafting. Bill started by using Gemini to produce a workable first draft of a complex secondary transaction policy he'd never done before. It saved him two hours. That's where the compounding returns start.
“If you want to do great lawyering, there's a baseline AI literacy you're going to have to have,” said Ariana. “This is true for everybody at the company, but I feel like for lawyers especially, we're at a time right now where AI literacy is going to fill the gap where you can extend your skill set.”
The teams winning with AI right now are ones that started somewhere practical, built the habit of automating everything they could, and kept going.
GC AI is built for legal teams who want to move fast, skip the first draft, and spend their time on the creative lawyering that actually moves the business forward. Get started for free.
