How to Work With Lawyers When Building a Financial Product with Patrick Liptak (MYLE)

If you are building a financial product inside a non-financial brand, the legal question tends to show up late. The product is designed, the provider is picked, the first customer conversations are underway, and then somebody asks whether you can actually launch it as you have built it. Patrick Liptak is a partner at MYLE, a Berlin law firm whose name stands for Making Your Life Easier. MYLE advises clients across the full spectrum, from early-stage startups through to listed companies, on IT law, data protection and digitalisation projects. Patrick has sat on both sides of this conversation, first building and leading in-house legal teams and now advising from the outside, and his view is that most of the pain comes from when legal gets involved rather than from the law itself. He is also the first lawyer to join me on this podcast, and we recorded this one in person in a studio in Berlin. In this episode we cover: Why companies actually reach out to a lawyer, which is far more often a customer or investor requirement than a founder discovering they need a licence What Patrick wants a product team to send him before the first conversation, and why a recorded demo beats an explanation How to pick the right kind of legal advisor for your stage Why short contracts are harder to write than long ones, and how contract length feeds directly into deal velocity What has happened to document quality since teams started drafting contracts and compliance documentation with AI Where companies waste money on compliance platforms that deliver compliance on paper and little else Why some startups are now inviting their lawyer onto the cap table Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-liptak/ Embedded Finance Review is a newsletter, podcast, and event series covering the European embedded finance ecosystem. If you're working on an embedded finance project and want a free intro call to get feedback and meet the right providers and partners, head to embeddedfinancereview.com. This episode was produced by https://orama.tv/ (0:00) Intro(02:18) Meet Patrick Liptak(04:07) Why Companies Call Lawyers(06:51) Legal As Deal Enabler(09:52) Show Demos Not Decks(12:40) From Strategy To Contracts(15:25) Risk Based Decisions(19:02) AI Docs And Fake Compliance(26:58) Trends And Final Advice