Building Compliance Consensus in Complex Systems with Justin Martin (Ep. 20)

Liisa Thomas: Mm. Welcome to Compliance Chronicles, where we learn from professionals shaping the world of compliance. I'm your host, Liisa Thomas, Outside Privacy and Compliance counsel an adjunct professor at Northwestern Law School, and a lifelong learner of organizational change. From personal journeys to hard-earned lessons, these are the chronicles that inspire and guide. So welcome back to another episode of Compliance Chronicles. And this time I am thrilled to welcome Justin Martin. ⁓ Justin, you and I have known each other for a long time, and I will turn it over to you to introduce yourself and your current role.

Justin Martin: Sure. I call myself an in-house technical executive. I straddle between doing general counsel level work and sort of COO level work at a technical level in a electrical engineering organization, working primarily with the Department of Defense, where I was previously an intergovernmental personnel employee at the Defense Innovation Unit. And so I I simply like to say I build

Liisa Thomas: I love it. So tell us how you got here. What was your personal journey to get to this role?

Justin Martin: Well, I was an in-house counsel, associate general counsel at EPRI which is an electric power research institute. For that I was in a law firm. ⁓ was a partner, but ⁓ energy called to me and so did ⁓ a societal mission. So I ended up getting into privacy and compliance as a function of being corporate counsel. I was ⁓ basically an ⁓ and A slash business transactions person and every day I read the New York Times and every day the first thing and the last thing I read was something to do with energy, environment, or electricity. And it just occurred to me that you probably should be doing that. You're not gonna want to do commercial paper your whole life. I think the through line is how do you do a vertical in vertically integrated product in commercial paper is how do you take something and make it bondable, right? How do you make it transactable on the market? And then being able to borrow from that and say the same thing for technology in energy and electricity through utilities to me probably helped me out a lot. ⁓

Liisa Thomas: And you were used to sitting with the business teams and figuring out what are you trying to accomplish, how do we accomplish those things. So sort of moves us to our next conversation, which is the challenges that you faced along the way in your career and how you've overcome them, whether they are business focused or personal focused, or both.

Justin Martin: Yeah. Well, okay. So I think what I found w and it reminds me of this proceeding in New York called New York Rev. and there's also the clean climate law in New York, but there was this there are all these studies across all these different systems, ⁓ from transmission and ⁓ utilities that do transmission to distribution to generation to end use and retail. And that was when it hit me on like what it is we were doing and how to explain that to like board and officers as well as lawyers. ⁓ you know, James Baldwin lived in New York and he ⁓ wrote some things that were inspiring to me, understand complexity is in its full complexity. You can't reduce it down until you really get it. And there are a lot of people saying it's not that hard, it doesn't have to be that complicated, but it it does To understand how to distill it and then to distill it and hand over and operationalize it into tools ⁓ without distorting the technical tradecraft underneath that.

Liisa Thomas: What lessons have you learned from all of these challenges? And it it sounds like one.

Justin Martin: A friend of mine who's general counsel ⁓ for a Berkshire company once said if he could tattoo a word across in house for in house counsel's forehead it would be abogado, which ⁓ is a Portuguese word for ⁓ attorney, but it really is synonymous with ⁓ like helper or or or you know, obligy, like you're obliged to help. And I always took that to just mean you get in and you grab an oar and if you start paddling with your team They will believe you want to help them. One. The second thing I would add to what you said is showing them like here's a practical response and agreeing that that's the first LEGO block and saying we can build from this block a couple more blocks if we can agree on this. That's where they go, okay, and then I can operationalize that block and the next block. Yes, that's why we're doing that. And then you can make the shapes and sizes you want. And that really seems to create agreement as opposed to, hey, I'm gonna foist this Rick off on you risk off on you and your corporate VP or whatever the risk steward is, and we have to follow this Byzantine organizational chart and we have to get these releases. And then it only gets worse if you have, you know, like multi-level corporate engagement, you know, across parent subsidiary type stuff. It it only gets worse. And that can build resentment as opposed to building consensus. And I really think that in addition to what you're saying about interpretation is Consensus building

Liisa Thomas: So that I think leads us to our parting advice. parting advice that we haven't already covered that you would share with either someone who's brand new to this area, has never done this before, or someone who's been doing this for a really long time and is just looking for like a little bit of inspiration.

Justin Martin: my parting advice is really understanding again, you know, are we talking about a bank or a library? And in the in the bank goes the the crown jewels. And in ⁓ you know, or in the and in the library goes what's appropriate for lending and leasing. And once you've got that in your head, I think that that tells you how to also build, right? If you need to build a moat between the the LEGO blocks, because there could be IP in one side and there could be common products and services on the other side. That helps people just understand what it is that ⁓ we're trying to sort for and we're not trying to make everything have to have the you know, double ring fence or triple ring fence or whatever.

Liisa Thomas: So understanding what the what is the data and what are you doing?

Justin Martin: Mm. Yeah. Right.

Liisa Thomas: So thank you again, Justin, for making the time to have this conversation. I really appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Compliance Chronicles, where we look for guidance and inspiration from the personal journeys of compliance professionals.