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Profile
Eleanor Lacey is the General Counsel at Asana. Eleanor oversees Asana’s legal department including all areas of privacy, compliance, IP, and commercial. Prior to joining Asana, Eleanor served as Chief Legal Officer for cyber security software company Sophos. Before her time at Sophos, Eleanor led the legal teams for a number of leading B2B and B2C companies including SurveyMonkey, Corel Corporation and Niku Corporation. Eleanor received her JD from Yale Law School and B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in addition to studying Mandarin at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Tunghai University in Taiwan.
Eleanor’s proven track record of building scalable, business-focused teams is a tremendous asset for Asana and exemplifies her strong leadership abilities. Her deep passion for Asana’s mission and pioneering vision for the future of work, coupled with her extensive global legal experience, makes her an outstanding leader. Eleanor oversees Asana’s legal department, which addresses areas including privacy, compliance, IP, and commercial. Prior to joining Asana, she served as Chief Legal Officer for global cybersecurity software company Sophos; prior to that, she led the legal teams for a number of leading B2B and B2C companies including SurveyMonkey, Corel Corporation and Niku Corporation. She was also included in the Top 25 Women Leaders in Cybersecurity 2019 and SFBT Women of Influence 2017. With a strong commitment to fostering professional development opportunities for women in both legal and non-legal fields, Eleanor is an executive member of Hipower and is a member of and serves on the Advisory Council of the Women’s General Counsel Network. With that commitment to fostering professional development opportunities for her team, Eleanor regularly hires attorneys and non-attorneys with non-traditional backgrounds and non-traditional paths. As a hiring manager, she focuses on candidates’ hunger for growth, demonstrated efforts to move themselves and the legal community forward, as well as legal acumen. Eleanor is passionate about supporting a fast-moving tech company like Asana. Asana recently filed their S-1 paperwork with the SEC for a direct listing and Eleanor continues to play a key role in this process, leading the team in coordination with various stakeholders. She applies common-sense human relations to her management style that many managers and attorneys overlook. She believes her education as a company leader is never completed — it’s continuous. She is emphatic about the importance of being truly immersed in Asana so that the legal function is in-sync with operations and the bottom line. Doing so successfully means asking questions, which Eleanor loves to do; in order to avoid being too intimidating in her style, she also seeks to establish trust and gather information in a way that indicates authentic curiosity, rather than a challenge of authority.