For the legal teams at Cohere Health and Identity Digital, every day is a little different, but the goal is always the same: helping manage risk, clarifying business decisions and supporting responsible growth.
For Navid Wheeler, deputy general counsel at healthtech company Cohere Health, this requires working closely alongside other departments early and often to help build trust.
“When trust is there, legal becomes a team people want to loop in early because we help them find the right path forward,” Wheeler said.
Omar Contreras, a senior corporate counsel at internet infrastructure company Identity Digital, said a typical day involves collaborating with other departments by being the go-to resource for understanding technical requirements and legal considerations that impact business strategy.
“Our team is embedded across our core registry and business divisions, which fuels our curiosity about company operations and shapes how we tailor our legal advice to the organization’s strategic needs,” Contreras said.
Built In spoke with Contreras and Wheeler about how each legal team collaborates across departments and contributes to their company’s bigger mission.
Cohere Health is a healthtech company that provides intelligent prior authorization. The company’s primary goal is to align physicians and payers on the patient’s entire care journey.
What’s it like to work on the legal team at your company?
Working in legal at a Series C healthcare AI company means the work never sits still. One day I’m negotiating a BAA with a health plan, the next I’m thinking through data governance for a new machine learning model and the next I’m structuring diligence for a potential deal. The pace forces you to develop real judgement and quickly. You can’t wait for the perfect answer when critical decisions need to be made. The best legal teams in this environment are those who can translate complexity into a clear “here’s what we can do and how” for the people without legal backgrounds.
“The best legal teams in this environment are those who can translate complexity into a clear ‘here’s what we can do and how’ for the people without legal backgrounds.”
How does your legal team help create clarity around business decisions, risk or compliance?
I love the idea of creating clarity, because our job isn’t to say “no,” it’s to add value to our business decisions. At Cohere Health, our team’s goal is to help our colleagues understand the tradeoffs so they can make informed decisions. That means getting specific. Instead of “this contract has risk,” it’s “here’s the exposure, the likelihood, how we dealt with this in the past and what happens if we do nothing.” Especially in healthcare AI, we add a lot of value from translating a fast-moving regulatory landscape into pragmatic guidance the company can actually build against.
What should candidates know about how legal teams partner with leadership and cross-functional teams?
Candidates should know that our goal is to be in the room early with product, engineering, sales, finance, etc. so that legal input actually shapes how decisions are made, but that kind of partnership takes intentional effort. The legal team needs to be able to see their work through the eyes of their business counterparts. That requires understanding the business well enough to anticipate issues and fostering trust across the company by showing you understand their pain points and want to help them find solutions. When trust is there, legal becomes a team people want to loop in early because we help them find the right path forward.
Identity Digital is an internet infrastructure company that makes sure web addresses work seamlessly.
What’s it like to work on the legal team at your company?
In one word — dynamic. Identity Digital operates at high-speed amidst a regulated environment with plenty of moving parts. The company's rapidly scaling global operations require our legal team to advise the company using a calm, collaborative approach that is always solutions-oriented.
We’re given autonomy to be trusted advisors to different parts of the organization, using our legal expertise and deep industry knowledge to lead on key company-initiatives. When the inevitable fire drills arise, we take an all-hands-on-deck approach, setting aside egos and focusing on execution for the business. To succeed as effective counsel, we must be collaborative and willing to tackle whatever comes across our desk.
“We’re given autonomy to be trusted advisors to different parts of the organization, using our legal expertise and deep industry knowledge to lead on key company-initiatives.”
Our team has also embraced new technologies, like AI and contract lifecycle management software, which allow us to be more efficient in advising our colleagues within the company. The legal team creates an environment where people can stretch their capabilities and feel supported.
How does your legal team help create clarity around business decisions, risk or compliance?
We pride ourselves on our collective ability to translate complex, ambiguous legal risks into actionable counsel that protects Identity Digital while sustaining financial growth. We look at compliance through a commercial lens by maximizing the value we get from compliance tech and external advisors. Instead of telling the business “no,” we focus on finding creative ways to execute while operating within applicable regulatory frameworks.
We create clarity by anchoring our advice to the broader market-driven factors that our senior leadership team and investors care about, like appropriate risk exposure and long-term value. Whether we are advising on complex corporate financing transactions, navigating evolving technology regulations, or managing the governance lifecycle of subsidiary business lines, our approach remains the same. Additionally, we treat operational efficiency as a legal priority, partnering with finance and technology teams to regularly audit and restructure our external vendor agreements and streamline compliance workflows, often resulting in significant cost savings.
What should candidates know about how legal teams partner with leadership and cross-functional teams?
Candidates joining Identity Digital must view themselves as active partners to our colleagues on other teams within the company. Our team is embedded across our core registry and business divisions, which fuels our curiosity about company operations and shapes how we tailor our legal advice to the organization’s strategic needs. True partnership here means taking hundreds of pages of complex technical requirements in a high-stakes request for proposals and working side-by-side with engineering, finance and registry services teams to win major commercial contracts. It also means leadership pulling us into cross-functional teams to work directly with business development leads on mapping out new revenue streams. Our legal team’s collaborations with the rest of the organization are fundamental to serving as trusted counsel on a wide range of projects, and it’s one of the more rewarding parts of our work.
