Karen Kerrigan is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Moneybox. Moneybox is a savings and investment platform with more than 700 000 customers. She recently spoke to Ben White for Crafty Counsel’s podcast, The Crafty Show, to share how she went from a legal role into operations.
Prior to working for Moneybox, Karen was the Chief Legal Officer and then COO at Seedrs, an equity crowdfunding platform.
She studied English at Oxford University before commencing her legal training. Karen worked in private practice at Simmons & Simmons before moving in-house.
Dreams of being an entrepreneur
Karen was inspired by her mum and friends who were entrepreneurs. Ultimately, she wanted to start her own company too.
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She approached being a lawyer as a short-term endeavour hoping to head up her own company one day. Starting out in financial litigation, Karen did a lot of work during the financial crisis with the crash of Lehman brothers.
Her first move in-house was to Seedrs as the company’s legal and finance director. Karen saw it as an opportunity to learn how businesses and funding rounds worked. Something that would be useful if she had her own start-up idea. She was at Seedrs for seven years before moving to Moneybox.
Moving from lawyer to COO
Working at a start-up gave Karen the opportunity to exercise her skills in different areas of the business. She says anything related to contracts whether in HR, finance, building operations or compliance would fall to the legal department.
As one of the directors she realised she needed to consciously help to build out different departments. For instance, she helped build out the HR and finance functions. She had effectively started working more in the business side of things in an operational role.
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She became the Chief Legal Officer before she took the final step into operations to don the COO hat. This was after a conversation with the CEO who said her title needed to reflect the work she was doing.
Karen says the first six months of taking on the COO title brought on an identity crisis. She wasn’t sure what the remit of her role as COO was.
But a walk with a friend made all the difference. After talking it through she realised she wasn’t doing anything different to what she did before. She had been the de facto COO even before taking on the title formally.
Shedding the lawyer title
Karen is the acting General Counsel at Moneybox and still maintains her practising certificate with the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Although she says doesn’t practice a lot of law these days.
She says that the lawyer title holds a lot of weight. It comes with years of studying and training, so it can be difficult to let that go.
Karen says part of resolving her identity crisis when she took on the COO was to be “comfortable with the fact that the area is ambiguous.”
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From lawyer to COO: Karen’s advice to other lawyers
Karen advises people to embrace the opportunity to acquire new functions if they want to move from lawyer to COO. “If things come up, you’re interested in and fall peripherally in your remit, jump at them. Don’t draw the line around them.”
Start-ups and scale-ups offer a wealth of opportunities for lawyers to better understand different parts of the business. She advise that legal teams “lean into those opportunities rather than leaning away from them”.
Karen Kerrigan joined us for an episode of The Crafty Show – a podcast exploring the careers of in-house lawyers.