If you are building a financial product inside a non-financial brand, the legal question tends to show up late. The product is designed, the provider is picked, the first customer conversations are underway, and then somebody asks whether you can actually launch it as you have built it.
Most of the conversation on this podcast is usually about providers, products and business models. This one sits a layer to the side of that: the working relationship between a product team and the legal advice they buy, which a lot of embedders are figuring out for the first time.
In this Embedded Finance Review Podcast episode, I speak with Patrick Liptak, partner at MYLE, a Berlin law firm whose name stands for Making Your Life Easier.
MYLE advises clients across the full spectrum, from early-stage startups through to listed companies, on IT law, data protection and digitalisation projects. Patrick built and led in-house legal teams before moving to the advisory side, which shapes how he works with product teams today. He is also the first lawyer to join me on this podcast, and we recorded this one in person in a studio in Berlin rather than over the usual video call.
Key Takeaways:
- Why companies actually reach out to a lawyer, which is far more often a customer or investor requirement than a founder discovering they need a licence
- What Patrick wants a product team to send him before the first conversation, and why a recorded demo beats an explanation
- How to pick the right kind of legal advisor for your stage, from a generalist who helps you navigate to a specialist opinion on a single question
- Why short contracts are harder to write than long ones, and how contract length feeds directly into deal velocity
- What has happened to document quality since teams started drafting contracts and compliance documentation with AI
- Where companies waste money on compliance platforms that deliver compliance on paper and little else
- Why some startups are now inviting their lawyer onto the cap table