Shanti Ariker: My Journey to CLO

We’re excited to introduce our Member Spotlight Series, which celebrates the leaders who make The L Suite community what it is. Through the series, we’ll highlight the journeys, perspectives, and hard-earned insights shaping today’s in-house legal landscape. This month, we’re featuring Shanti Ariker, CLO at JFrog, who reflects on stepping into greater responsibility before holding the title, building trust through listening, balancing risk with business objectives, and what aspiring GCs should understand about the realities of the role.

After deciding on a career in law, did you know you wanted to become a GC eventually?

After managing a team for a while, I took on a project that led to my first GC job. I was interested in more responsibility but not necessarily asking to become a GC. It kind of just happened, but I was ready for the leap. If I hadn’t asked for more responsibility, I wouldn’t have been given the opportunity.

In order to be an effective GC, you need to cultivate trust and build influence across the organization, with your CEO and board, with your peer ELT members, and through the broader team ranks. How have you done that over your career?

The best way to build trust is to be a good listener. As a GC, I have my own agenda and things that are priorities for the legal team. Those are always on my mind, but to be a good partner to the business and other executives, I need to understand their priorities and objectives. Being able to understand and work with them on these areas builds both trust and collaboration. That is the best way that I have found to build influence in an organization.

A big part of the GC’s job is to manage risk. What is your framework for that, and how has it evolved over the years?

The job of GC is to look at the business with a risk lens, but at the same time, it’s a balancing act between what the business needs to accomplish and what the risk is to the business. As a GC (or any in-house lawyer), you need to be pragmatic and think about how the decisions you make will affect the business. The first question is always - is it illegal? If not, what is the risk to the business and can it be quantified in terms of dollars and cents? Are there mitigations? Ways to get to the same business objective differently? I recently wrote about how to weigh risks in my biweekly newsletter.

What advice would you give to lawyers aspiring to become a GC or CLO?

Being GC/CLO has a lot of responsibility and authority. At the end of the day, you have to be very comfortable being the one who has to make the hard decisions. It’s not something that anyone impressed on me when I was looking at taking my first GC role. It can be a lot of pressure and stress. Be sure that you want that kind of job before you go for it. Once you have decided it is for you, then network with others, let people know you’re interested and learn a lot about the business you’re in or might move to one day, so that you can be both a legal and a business advisor.

How do you and your team leverage The L Suite to support your work today?

I love The L Suite dinners and conferences. My team also attends with their peers. I find it very useful to have other GCs as sounding boards and for benchmarking, and even commiserating with, since other GCs are really the only people that really understand the complexities and stresses of the job. It’s great to have such a broad network of GCs through organizations like The L Suite.