The real value an in-house lawyer brings today is not just technical expertise, but the ability to “speak more than just the law” and build systems that keep pace with an ever-accelerating commercial and regulatory tempo, Teodora Niculae says.
From her home base in Montreal, Niculae is a commercial and marketing lawyer at Mastercard, supporting the head of legal & regulatory and the vice president and senior managing counsel in Canada. She advises on commercial affairs with Mastercard’s customers, sponsorship deals, and every marketing campaign the company runs in Canada, while also supporting special projects, such as litigation and targeted regulatory work, as part of what she calls a “small and mighty” legal team. “The complexity of commercial agreements [is] getting more and more intense in a space that’s getting increasingly global,” she says, and global developments are reshaping local contracts just as Canadian rules tighten.
Born in Romania and the first lawyer in her family, she graduated from the University of Ottawa’s law school with a focus on technology, contracts and global issues, then immersed herself in Montreal’s start-up scene instead of chasing a job at a law firm. Those choices left her feeling like an outlier in a profession that still treats one path as the norm. Rather than using private practice as an unavoidable rite of passage, she stitched together in-house internships, a brief stint at a boutique firm founded by friends, volunteer legal clinics for entrepreneurs, and in-house counsel roles in e-commerce, music streaming, and video games, which embedded her directly in the businesses she advised.
It was in the gaming sector, as the company grew from hundreds of employees to more than a thousand across several countries, that she seized the chance to rewire how legal worked. She led the creation of an automated NDA intake and tracking system and a broader request workflow that captured who was asking for help, what they needed and how quickly the team responded. “We had so many NDAs, contracts, and legal support requests as a small in-house department that it just made sense to have a process,” she says. Rather than buying new software, she worked with internal developers to adapt existing tools such as Jira, showing that legal operations is “not about going out and buying everything,” but rather about rethinking what is already on the shelf.
That experience now underpins her approach at Mastercard, which she describes as a payments technology company operating across many areas, including cybersecurity, data, and a wide range of digital products and services, rather than a card issuer. Because the business spans so many areas, many of which are advancing faster than the law, she and the legal team work at the leading edge of novel issues.
Niculae’s operations mindset also shapes how she thinks about generative AI. She has been “a power user from the beginning” of the main tools Mastercard's legal teams are testing. She now teaches lawyers around the world how to weave AI into their workflows, yet she refuses to join either camp that treats AI as a magic bullet or an existential threat. “I’m not of the clan that thinks it’s going to take over and replace us, but I am of the clan that thinks that we need to understand how it works and leverage it,” she says, arguing that the goal is to free up time for “the judgment, the critical thinking, the human aspect, the empathy” that actually differentiates in house counsel from AI. She expects that distinction to become a hard line in hiring and warns that lawyers who refuse to engage with AI will find themselves left behind while those who use it critically and transparently will be in demand; “It doesn’t have to be that you use it every day for every task, but at least understand it and understand both sides of the coin,” she says.
That expectation does not stop at the law department door. More broadly, Niculae has been reflecting on how technology, especially AI, is reshaping the practice of law and what “value” looks like in a world where information can be generated more quickly than ever. She wonders how these tools might influence the way legal work is delivered and how lawyers can continue to provide targeted, practical guidance in an environment where technology often outpaces the law. Behind that questioning is the same insistence on practicality that guided her marked interest in legal ops: “At the end of the day, what I appreciate… [is] really practical advice that is very targeted,” she says.
For younger lawyers who want to follow her into in house tech roles, Niculae returns to the question that has shaped her own career, whether they can hold onto what makes them different while navigating conservative institutions; “Keep the things that make you unique. Don’t mould yourself to the path that you are told is the only right one,” she says, explaining that the traits that once made her feel on the margins now drive her. That philosophy extends to how she builds her networks: “You tend to make a lot more of a community and a lot more of an impact when those things are made out of authenticity.”