Day in the Life: Andrea Peters

Name: Andrea Peters 

Title: Senior Counsel and Global Head of Compliance 

Company: Interface, Inc. 

Location: Atlanta, GA 

6:30 am:

Alarm goes off — I hit snooze one or two times (a bad habit I learned in college), quickly check my phone for overnight emails (another bad habit I need to break), and hop in the shower to get ready for work. Listen to my flash briefing on Amazon’s Alexa, then CNN radio, while I’m getting ready. 

7:30 am:

Log onto the laptop and triage emails, catching up on news and legal developments, and deleting and filing as much as I can, with the goal of leaving in my in-box only those emails that need to be dealt with. Make sure my daughter is up, ready for school, and has everything she needs. COFFEE! (I don’t know what I’d do without my Nespresso Vertuo — it makes excellent coffee.) 

8:30 am:

Say goodbye to my daughter as she leaves for the bus stop, while taking an 8:30 am internal call with colleagues in the United States and Europe regarding sanctions screening protocols and exploring a new AI tool for low-risk screening. I maaaay be multitasking while on the call (bad habit #3 for those keeping track), continuing to try to clear my inbox of overnight emails. 

9:30 am:

Leave home to head into the office. I usually wait until about 9 am or 9:30 am, for rush hour traffic to die down, before heading out. I try to set as many calls as I can for during my commute time; however, since I need to be in-front-of-screen for most of my calls, this usually doesn’t work out too well. On this day, I listen to the audiobook, Educated, on Audible.   

10:15 am:

Arrive at the office, check my phone to see which desk I booked for the day, since I pretty much always forget, head to my locker to pick up my stuff (I’m addicted to my ergonomic keyboard and wireless mouse) and get myself set up at a desk. 

10:30 am:

Monthly touchpoint with the director of HR operations. I find that these regular touchpoints (at different intervals for different colleagues) can be very helpful. It gives participants time for brainstorming, following up on open items, and asking the “stupid” questions — not that there are any; but having time with no set agenda allows these questions to be asked without worry about wasting anyone’s time or feeling silly. 

11:00 am:

Teams meeting with research and development colleagues in the United States and Germany about planned innovations in production. Part of my job is helping the business obtain patent protection for important innovations and making sure that others aren’t infringing on the company’s intellectual property. 

12:00 pm:

Lunch at the Round Table. In our office cafeteria area, there’s one large, round table and it’s open to anyone who wants to sit there (although “newbies” to the Round Table are subjected to important initiation questions around favorite foods and other random topics before they can join; no one has ever been turned away). This is a great time for me to catch up on office goings-on and learn what’s on other peoples’ minds. It’s also a good time to just be social with colleagues. Often, we joke about which happenings at the office will make it to our fictional TV sitcom, creatively entitled “Interface.” I think we’re up to Season 5, Episode 3 these days. We’ve even discussed casting. Emma Stone will play me. 😊 

1:00 pm:

Meeting with the global communications team to create a tentative 2025 compliance training calendar for our global compliance program. Quarterly compliance trainings, delivered electronically through our workday LMS, are an important part of our compliance program. Our global communications calendar for a given year is jam-packed with things like product launch communications, annual cybersecurity training from the IT team, annual anti-harassment training from the HR team, global leadership team updates, sales meetings, and other important communications; so it’s important to coordinate with the global communications team (early and often!) to secure our places on the calendar. 

1:30 pm:

Weekly one-on-one meeting with the director of contracts administration on my team. We typically use this time for him to tell me what he and his team are working on and for me to see how I can help him be more efficient and/or effective. This time, he mentions that he’s received some inquiries about the Davis-Bacon Act and its implications, so I send him some materials I find in Thomson Reuters Practical Law and the ACC Resource Library that might be helpful. 

2:00 pm:

Teams meeting with representatives from procurement and IT to discuss my comments and questions about a proposed SaaS contract. These have become tricky in the last few years because, in addition to worrying about security, confidentiality, and intellectual property, we now have to consider the extent to which personal information will be processed such that a CCPA addendum and/or data processing agreement will be required. We also need to consider the extent to which the vendor may want to use our data to train an AI algorithm (and the extent to which that’s OK with the company!). 

3:00 pm: 

I finally have a bit of unscheduled time! I’ve taken to blocking off every Wednesday (my “No Meeting Wednesdays”) so that I can actually get some work done instead of going from meeting to meeting; but today is not a Wednesday. I start working on a set of draft minutes from the last meeting of the audit committee of our board of directors. I try our new GC AI tool to use generative AI to help me turn my notes into minutes (don’t worry — it’s a closed system; no breach of confidentiality here!) and I find that it’s actually a great time-saver! I use the tool to create first drafts of two more sets of minutes. I set these first drafts aside to look at them with fresh eyes later, since:

1. While AI may be a great start to a legal document, it’s rarely also the finish, and
2. I’m a better editor when I haven’t been staring at a document for the last hour. 

3:50 pm:

Get in my car to head home before the afternoon rush hour starts in earnest (although, let’s be honest, it’s pretty much always rush hour in Atlanta!). On the way, I call our corporate paralegal to ask about the status of an immigration-related matter we are working on for one of our employees and then call my sister in Philadelphia to catch up on what’s been going on with her.  

4:35 pm:

Arrive at home just in time to greet my daughter as she’s walking home from the bus stop. We chat, briefly, about her day at school. I make sure she gets started on her homework, and then I turn my computer back on at my desk. I review the 27 emails that arrived while I was driving home. 

5:00 pm:

Teams call with an HR business partner and a manager to review a potential functional team reorganization. 

5:30 pm:

Review a proposed contract for the purchase of some production equipment. These contracts can require more work than it first seems because I need to work with the team to understand what, exactly, we’re asking of our vendor, including whether there are any deliverables (other than the equipment, of course) and any IP that we need to own or license as a result of the vendor’s work. We also need to make sure that the equipment will meet our specifications and that delivery timing and acceptance protocols work for the business. 

6:00 pm:

Finish work for the day. I need a mental (and physical!) break between work-life and home-life; otherwise, I’m exhausted by 7:30 pm, having felt like I’ve been going non-stop all day. I go upstairs and listen to music while I work on unpacking the few boxes left in my bedroom from when we moved to our current house back in June. No wonder they say that moving is one of life’s top five stressors — it’s the pits! 

6:30 pm:

Dinner with the family — consisting of my 12-year-old daughter and our au pair, Joana, from Brazil. I don’t know what I’d do without her. Tonight, Jo is trying a new recipe for turkey meatloaf “muffins,” and they are delicious! After dinner, my daughter plays Roblox with a friend online from the old neighborhood and I watch a little TV (“Slow Horses” on Apple TV+) while I try to put together a stand for one of our TV sets since the movers lost one in the move (did I mention that I hate moving?). 

8:30 pm:

Hang out with my daughter while she gets ready for bed; we play with our cat, Minnie, for a bit. We love teasing her with a laser toy and a furry, stuffed octopus on a stick. It’s amazing how high Minnie can jump! I leave her room after about an hour. This is really the only time she’ll really, really talk to me, so I listen as long as she has something to say. After that, I get myself ready for bed, scroll through emails and messages one last time, do a little “retail therapy,” buying things I don’t need on Amazon (I once heard this referred to as “revenge bedtime procrastination” and I think that’s an accurate moniker), and then listen to 20 minutes of my audiobook, on a sleep timer — thanks, Alexa — before putting on my beloved, weighted eye mask and falling asleep to brown noise.