Gone are the days when in-house legal teams worked solely behind the scenes. Today, they are embedded in the heart of decision-making and innovation.

AdaCore Senior Corporate Counsel, Sarah Wallace, explains why partnership and collaboration are integral to her role practicing in-house law in a technology company, and how computer science and the law complement each other, inspiring growth and innovation.

What's your educational background?

I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies from Louisiana State University. My concentrations were Global Diplomacy, Middle Eastern geopolitics, and Political Science.

I also hold a Juris Doctor with a concentration in Civil Law from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. The university’s Ignatian Law Scholars Program, which recognizes students with a commitment to academic excellence and service to others, awarded me a fully funded merit scholarship.

Throughout law school, I worked in the field of legal aid, helping marginalized and vulnerable people navigate the legal system.

In the State of Louisiana, I am licensed to practice law in all state and federal courts. I am also admitted to practice as in-house counsel in the State of New York.

How has your career progressed at AdaCore?

I started at AdaCore as a full-time Sales Contract Administrator in April 2022. In January 2024, I was promoted to Corporate Counsel, and then in March 2025, I was promoted to my current position as Senior Corporate Counsel. In my new role, I co-manage our expanding legal team.

Beyond the operational practicalities of managing a growing team, my primary philosophy is to lead by example. This aligns with my personal experience and with US researcher Brené Brown’s findings on leadership in the workplace. When we treat people with trust and respect, we empower them to perform at their peak. We all fall short of our aspirations sometimes, but I try to embody behaviors that encourage feelings of mutual respect, including: clearly communicating expectations, giving and accepting feedback, active listening, vulnerability, and sincerity.

Creating spaces where these behaviors are modeled immediately reduces the natural anxieties that come with working in high-stakes situations. Instead, people feel free to focus energy on producing quality work, which in turn increases productivity and results-driven achievements.

Can you tell us more about your current role and how the scope of your work has evolved over the years?

In some ways, the focus of my role is similar to at the beginning of my career with AdaCore, but over time, the scope of my work has deepened. I work closely with both colleagues and external stakeholders on commercial transactions, intellectual property law, and regulatory compliance in privacy, data security, export control, and government procurement in safety-critical industries like aviation, aerospace, and defense.

Because AdaCore is an integrated global company, our legal questions are multinational, covering local, national, supranational, and international regulations. More recently, my work has expanded into areas such as regulating artificial intelligence adoption.

Given the breadth of my work and the many different topics my role touches, I collaborate often with colleagues based globally, including the Procurement, HR, and IT teams based in Paris, our engineers worldwide, and our Sales team in the US and EU.

What is it like to work in a Legal function in an engineering company in the fast-moving technology sector?

As an in-house legal counsel at AdaCore, I ensure we observe the written word of the law and also apply its meaning in a real-world business context.

While I’m constantly attuned to the regulatory landscape in many different fields, I also strive to be a trusted partner, working behind the scenes to help the team achieve AdaCore’s goals.

As an attorney working for an engineering company, I have found interesting parallels between computer science and the law. Both aspire to rational, evidence-based decision-making and rely on language frameworks to achieve specific results. Software languages are sets of rules organized purposefully to create a computational outcome. Similarly, the law is a set of rules that uses language, organized by syntax, semantics, and specific legal structures to achieve a particular legal result.

That said, technology and the law can also diverge quite dramatically. The legal system is inherently risk-averse and is often criticized for evolving too slowly. By contrast, technology is viewed as constantly bending the edges of possibility. Finding the right balance of coexistence is essential for a successful enterprise, but there also has to be space for the two disciplines to inspire mutual innovation. Remaining open to possibilities while staying grounded in the respective rules is the sweet spot we should aim for.

What does your typical day look like at AdaCore? How do you find it working with colleagues across different time zones / departments?

The AdaCore legal team has four members. Three are based in the US, and the fourth is in France. Since we all work remotely at different times of the day, it is critical that we communicate clearly and consistently to meet our goals successfully.

We meet weekly to collaborate on day-to-day legal operations and ongoing legal projects. Because of AdaCore’s structure, we can work closely together, sharing responsibility for the team’s collective outcomes. This dynamic positively reinforces personal accountability as well as teamwork.

Since many of my colleagues are based in Europe, I tend to start my working day early, so I can respond to any developments from colleagues in the UK, Germany, Estonia, or Paris. Next, I have meetings, typically covering updates across subjects like commercial sales, privacy, IT security, and company procurement, as well as ad-hoc discussions on customer negotiations. In the afternoon, I focus on independent work such as document review, legal drafting, or research while also fielding messages from my US colleagues.

What would you say to someone interested in joining AdaCore?

If you are intellectually curious and open to collaboration, you will fit in well here. At AdaCore, we really value the ability to be creative and flexible and strive for excellence, whatever the task may be.

What do you value most about working at AdaCore?

Professionally, I enjoy the complex problem-solving required to answer the legal questions that arise in a software engineering business like AdaCore. This allows me to protect AdaCore’s interests while achieving our business mission of helping people build software that matters in the industries we serve, and the areas of the world where we do business.

I feel fortunate to work with so many individuals from different cultural backgrounds and areas of professional expertise, all working together towards the company’s goals. Collaborating across different borders and cultures emphasizes our universality while acknowledging and respecting the characteristics that make each of us unique.

It is important to me to always recognize the humanity in every relationship. During the years I have spent at AdaCore, my day-to-day interactions, regardless of the context, have truly enriched my life intellectually, professionally, and personally.