Stephanie Dominy joins with a wealth of commercial experience garnered from her in-house General Counsel stints at the coal face of fast growth tech companies and is everything we look for in a Seven Legal lawyer – excellent technical skills, incredibly commercial and overall a fantastic colleague to clients and team members alike.
With Stephanie’s help, Seven Legal will be building on its Fractional GC offering to new and existing clients. If you are running a fast growth company and building your legal function, you need Stephanie in your corner. Read on to find out more about Stephanie, as she shares some of her expertise and passion with us.
What draws you to working with early-stage businesses?
I’ve been working with early stage companies since 2016 and I was excited to be involved in innovative and disruptive businesses where there was an ability to shape the direction of the company and make a meaningful impact on its success. Advising tech, especially deep-tech companies, has been a huge learning experience for me, as one is surrounded by super-smart domain experts who are solving problems in intelligent ways, and sometimes creating a whole new market or category that challenges incumbent markets.
Early stage companies are going through a period of rapid growth where they are constantly iterating their strategy, their teams and their products. I enjoy the shifting landscape and the scrappy, roll-your-sleeves up culture. I am constantly challenged as I help these companies to grow and scale as we focus on legal issues in a rapidly changing world. The culture, speed and intensity of the start-up and scale-up world is addictive, and once you’ve experienced it, everything else seems a little dry and staid!
What got you into law in the first place?
I wasn’t very intentional in my career choice when I started studying law at King’s College. My early years as a corporate lawyer in a City firm convinced me that I wanted to work closely with businesses. A long in-house career has cemented my identity as a “business lawyer”, one who stands on the intersection of commercial and legal interests. Back in my student days, I could never have imagined where my career would take me. The types of companies and technologies I work with now didn’t exist back in the mid-90s.
Why did you decide to work with Seven Legal?
I position myself as a consultant GC for early-stage companies. After talking to many groups of consultant lawyers and Alternative Legal Service Providers, as well as Bill Cogan, I could see that my experience and client base fitted very well within Seven Legal’s offering. Seven Legal is very clear in its proposition and is targeting exactly the type of client I want to work with. The other consultants are all highly experienced with different disciplines and skill sets which will allow us to offer a diverse range of services to our clients. My broad commercial background and particular expertise in cloud and enterprise software will add to the range of services. With my GC experience at high growth companies, I can offer clients an “outsourced-inhouse” model of legal support, ideal for early stage companies who need advice on tap but are not quite ready to hire a full-time in-house lawyer.
I am a committed champion of women, doing what I can to speak up for their rights in the workplace, in their homes, and for their bodily autonomy. I am an active volunteer at a debt advice charity, giving financial education on how to manage personal finances through this period of economic shocks. I am also a NED and advisor at a number of organisations.
