Reed Smith alum Doug Sayranian shares his journey from M&A senior associate in New York to his current role in-house as general counsel at cyber threat intelligence company Intel 471.  ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast, Career Footprints. In each episode of Career Footprints, we'll ask our guests, a Reed Smith alum, to share their career story, how their time at Reed Smith set them up for success, and their advice for early career lawyers. Our goal is to surface insights from inspiring professionals' careers that will help you find your professional success, however you define that.  Lauren: Greetings, and welcome to another episode of Reed Smith's Alumni Career Footprints podcast. This is Lauren Hakala, Reed Smith's Global Director of Learning and Development. Today, I'm excited to be speaking with Reed Smith alum Douglas Sayranian. Doug is currently the general counsel of cybercrime intelligence company Intel 471. He joined Intel 471 from Reed Smith's New York office, where he was a senior M&A associate. Doug's career has included roles at three other global law firms, where, as we're about to hear, he built significant chops in public, private, and private equity M&A. Doug, welcome.  Doug: Hi, Lauren. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here.  Lauren: So I would love to start our conversation by hearing a little bit about Intel 471. What does your company focus on, and what is your role over there?  Doug: Absolutely. Intel 471 is a cyber threat intelligence company, and our specialty is focusing on gathering and reporting hard to get information about what's happening in the criminal underworld when it comes to cybersecurity threats, vulnerabilities, and tactics. A good example might be the solar winds breach or government investigations into Telegram or trying to help protect hospitals and businesses from ransomware. My role at the company as the head of legal covers the normal everyday contractual matters, but also things like risk, privacy, compliance, HR, and strategic positioning of the corporation.  Lauren: Wow. So it sounds like you're really, or at least your company in the business is working on some things that are in the headlines that we're all seeing every day. So exciting. So as someone who spent most of your career so far at law firms, what's been the best thing about making the jump to in-house? It was a really difficult decision for me when I was considering whether to continue pursuing partnership at a large law firm, specifically at Reed Smith, or to leave for Intel 471, which was actually one of my clients when I was in private practice. The best thing about being in-house is the ability to really put my skills to use and solve problems for the business outside of a narrow legal channel being able to have an impact and an influence in a variety of different aspects of the organization has been really rewarding and it's also allowed me to learn entirely new skills and develop different aspects of existing skills to be a better practitioner and a business leader.  Lauren: Great. No, thanks for that. So you mentioned developing new skills in your new role, and I want to ask you more about that. So in what areas have you had to do the most learning? Like where was the biggest learning curve? And how was that for you coming from being, you know, quite a successful senior associate?  Doug: I think that there are probably two areas that I would identify as the low-hanging fruit or the steepest learning curves for me when I first went in-house. One is practical, and that is reframing an analysis of any situation or a solution to a problem or a strategy to tackle a certain obstacle. In terms of practicality, the fact that the world is in an imperfect place. In private practice, obviously, attorneys seek to be experts on a wide variety of topics, but understand both the perfectly impossible and imperfectly possible solutions to a client's problem.