Dear Santa,

I’m pretty sure that the top of everyone’s wish list this year is for their friends and family to stay healthy and safe and for a safe, effective vaccine to be widely distributed as soon as possible.  But since life happens regardless, we do have some practical items to add to our wish list for the end of this crazy year.

Avila boys Christmas 2017To begin with, in this age of everyone working remotely, I fervently wish for the patience needed to deal with remote learning and everyone else working from home.  Since ALOE has always allowed Bigfork to be a 100% remote work environment, the shift there wasn’t very challenging. What has been challenging is that my home ‘work environment’ is now overrun with other, very loud, very demanding people (most of whom aren’t yet teenagers). Santa, I know this one is a stretch – so a wine of the month club might be an acceptable alternative.

Now that customer budgets are opening up again, my sales team is hoping Santa will bring some quick decisions on deals in the pipeline before the end of the year.  I’m hoping that those decisions don’t come all at once on December 24th with a December 31st due date.  On behalf of my CFO, we also ask that those inevitable last-minute deals don’t throw about language that throws our rev rec into chaos or add any additional tax complexities.

And while we’re on the topic of sales, at the top of my wish list is for them to all use the proper process for their contract requests. After all, we’ve built ALOE so that requests can be submitted a number of ways and reports are automatically sent.  So there really isn’t a need for emergency slack/zoom calls to talk about the status of the contract that would move much faster if I wasn’t spending half my day on emergency slack/zoom calls to talk about the status of the contract.

Most of all, I wish for a 2021 with less stress, less strife, more time to connect, and a little more happiness.  Happy Holidays everyone!

Signed,

In house lawyers everywhere.

Tanya Avila

Tanya Avila

Tanya has made a career of building legal departments in fast paced, fast growth environments. Having repeated the process at half a dozen different organizations, she is passionate about all things that bring efficiency and sanity to the internal legal process.