Hi, it's Jim Delkousis and welcome to The PERSUIT, a bi-weekly newsletter dedicated to helping enterprise legal leaders advance in the new marketplace for legal. If you're not already a subscriber, you can click here to join 4,700+ senior legal leaders who get The PERSUIT delivered to their inbox every other Friday.  

Hi there,  

Forget holiday greetings. 🎅🏽👎🏼

Today I want to talk about weddings. 💍

Or one wedding in particular — the nuptials I celebrated alongside several other PERSUITers just a few weeks ago for our head of U.S. sales, Josh Kalmus (wedding season is in full force in Australia 🦘 ). 

The photographer captured this not-so-flattering picture of me in awe of the bride being trampolined into flight by the crowd (here’s lookin’ at you, Gabi) — one of those fun celebratory traditions that really should mandate a helmet. 😲

Clear proof that some weddings are almost as fun as pitching PERSUIT. 😆

In truth, at the time, I was — and still am — struck by the depth of emotion and connection surrounding that moment. It’s not often that you find yourself in a place where the lines between work and family are so comfortably and completely blurred.

As you get to my point in life, you start thinking about the limited number of moments you’ve got left to make a real impact, the ones you’ve wasted, and if you’re lucky, the few that you’ve really been able to make good on. 

Six years ago, I called Josh into one of the rooms in our windowless 300 square-foot Melbourne office and told him this was a crossroads moment for him (and PERSUIT).  Having failed miserably in the Australian market, we had to change our strategy. 

I told Josh: “Go home, pack your bags, move to New York, and land our first customer” (incidentally, only a few weeks after he’d met Gabi). And that’s exactly what he did — and then some.

Today, PERSUIT has united a community of 80+ enterprise legal teams who believe that they can make more impact than what’s traditionally been accepted in the industry. 

And that the way to do that is in finding a new way to manage how value is delivered to and by the in-house legal team. 💡

It is the promise of making an impact that continues to draw world-class talent to our PERSUIT team.

It is the promise of making an impact that continues to bring top in-house and firm talent into our community of customers and advocates.

It is the promise of making an impact together that causes our clients time and again to tell us:

“PERSUIT is unlike any other tech vendor we work with. PERSUIT is like family.” 

And I am proud that PERSUIT is helping make the promise of impact a reality for every one of us who is bound together on this journey.

So that in moments like this — the wedding of your sales lead to the bride you naively suggested he should forget about for a fresh start in New York (oopsie 🤷), the associate that you see grow into the next department head, the CEO pointing to your team as the example of how it should be done — you’ll look back on the choices that led you to that moment and know you made good on your promise.

Happy holidays to you and yours from the entire PERSUIT team. 🎄🕎☮

Take time to reflect on the impact you’ve made and celebrate a job well done. 👏🏼

And then rest up. 

Because we’re just getting started. 😉

Cheers,

Jim

Jim Delkousis

Founder and CEO  

PERSUIT