Introduction\n
\nMy name is Mary O'Carroll. I'm the chief community officer and part of the executive team at Ironclad, a contracts lifecycle management company. Prior to joining Ironclad, I spent most of my career, 13 years, at Google, where I built and led the legal operations and technology function. During the time that I was at Google, we grew the department quite a bit, from 200 people in the department to over 1,500; and legal operations was just me when I started, and of course, by the time we left, we had over 60, so definitely one of the larger, more mature functions out there.
I am a legal operations champion at heart and also spent over a decade building and leading an organisation called CLOC, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, which continues to be the largest and fastest-growing community of legal ops professionals around the world today.
\nPart 1: My Journey into LegalOps\n
\nPrior to starting at Google, I actually spent a few years at a law firm called Orrick, where I was doing legal operations at the time. It wasn't actually called legal operations then, but I joined Google in 2008. And my time there was brought on to really help to grow and scale the organisation. There wasn't a lot of job description at the time.
There weren't a lot of other people in the world doing legal operations. So, we started out by asking my general counsel, What is keeping you up at night? What is important to you?
\nAnd what he told me was a whole bunch of questions like, Are we getting good value out of the money we're spending with outside counsel? How do I know how much money to budget for a litigation matter? How do I know when to add a headcount? People tell me they're busy, are they working on the right things? And what I realised is we couldn't answer any of those questions. So the journey began in sort of building the foundation, putting in processes and systems in place to measure things, to be able to use data to make better decisions and to act sort of as a strategic advisor to the organisation.
\nPart 2: The birth of CLOC\n
\nWhen I started at Google, we had no idea what legal operations was. A lot of us were out there kind of building it from scratch, figuring it out as we went along. Well, what we found was that a few of us in Silicon Valley had the same sort of role and we started to get together very casually to share best practices and talk to each other about what are you seeing in your organisations? What are you struggling with? What vendors are you using? What's working for you? That group grew and grew over time until eventually there were too many people to fit in a conference room and that was the birth of what eventually became CLOC, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium. So it was really built on a culture of sharing and being transparent and open with each other.
We ended up putting on a first conference to bring people physically together. This was put together in 12 weeks with zero marketing. We didn't even have a website or emails, and somehow we drew 500 people in that first year, which showed us that there was real demand for learning, sharing and growth in this area.
\nWe really endeavored to try to define the profession, what the role entailed when you're doing legal operations, what does that mean? So we built out what is now known as the CLOC Core 12, the scope of role of all the sort of tasks and skill sets and responsibilities that could fall within a legal operations professional's purview.
\nAnd we continue to grow the organisation, and it's been a big driver for change and transformation in the legal space, both in legal operations as a profession to see more growth in the scope of the role, the prevalence of the role, and even the levelling of the role.
\nPart 3: How do we define LegalOps?\n
\nWhat is LegalOps really? And to me the shortest way to explain is it is a function that is multidisciplinary but really focuses on balancing speed, quality, and cost in the delivery of legal services.
Another way I sometimes describe it is by using a term I call right-sourcing. If we look across the legal department, there's a ton of work that is coming in. What is that demand and how do we match it to all of the resources that we have at our disposal? And internally, we have inside counsel, externally, we have outside counsel, but now we have an explosion of a whole bunch of other resources. There's flexible talent, there's law companies or alternative service providers, there's certainly technology and automation. So figuring out what can be automated, what can be sent outside, what should be done inside and kind of continuing to watch what the company is doing, where the legal department needs to go and being able to be that person who helps change and optimise constantly according to kind of what's going on both internally and externally within the company is a big part of what we do.
\nI also think as the role evolves though, you start to become much more of a strategic asset and right hand to your general counsel or your CLO. So the initial days of legal operations in an organisation is going to be really focused on setting up systems, tools, metrics, how do you collect data? How do you make sure the trains are running on time in your organisation?
\nAnd once that's set up LegalOps really has to step out of that comfort zone and start to think, okay, I have now serviced my legal clients, how do we think about our stakeholders within my organisation. So the clients to the legal department, what self-service tools can we provide? What information can we give them? How can we make it easier for them to get their job done as they're interacting with legal?
\nAnd as we move on to get more strategic even yet, is using data and insights to help make better decisions, not just for legal, but for the top-line leadership of our company, how do you enable and drive towards the goals of the company?
\nPart 4: Hiring for LegalOps\n
\nInterestingly, when I started doing legal operations, you know, 20 years ago or so, we really only saw it in large legal departments. We used to say 50 people or more, but now that's completely changed and in fact it started changing a long time ago where we had emerging legal departments, companies where we had departments of, you know, one to 15 people started having legal operations as a function.
Now I often recommend within your first 3 hires of building a legal team, you should have a dedicated legal operations function. And the reason is because the role is much more better defined now. There is scope. You know what the value that they can bring is and you know what the impact is. And bringing it in early on really helps you organise what the future of your department is going to look like and putting in some of the fundamental technologies and processes in place to grow and scale.
\nAs you build your legal operations function in your department, I strongly believe that this person should report to the general counsel, or the CLO, as you have it in your place, and they should really have a seat at the leadership table. I have seen it work different ways in larger organisations where sometimes this rolls into a deputy general counsel, and I'm not saying that can never work, but truly, ideally, you want this person to be listening in on the strategic, high level conversations of your leadership team, knowing what's keeping people up at night, knowing where the hot spots are, because your LegalOps professional is going to help you prepare and adapt and change what the organisation looks like to get you to that.
\nPart 5: The maturing LegalOps department\n
\nSo what should legal operations look like in a short, medium, or long term? And I think what we're really talking about there is the maturity of the legal operations function. Well, if you have nothing, you definitely want to spend the short-term kind of understanding your current state. What are the processes that you need to put in place? What are some of the systems and tools that you need? And you can kind of work backwards to figure out what are the questions I want to answer? What is the data that I need to gather to answer those questions? And then what are the processes and systems and tools to put in place to then gather that data?
You want to start getting insights. You want to start thinking about how do I service the rest of the company? How do we improve their experience as they work with the legal department? A lot of times that means getting out of their way. What things can we automate and self-service for them? And then finally, as you get to be much more mature, you really want to start helping the top line of your organisation achieve the company goals, not just the legal department's goals. That means not being a reactive department, but looking forward to what are the goals of the company and how can we as a legal department help not just support, but achieve some of those goals.
\nI think it's a tremendous time to be part of the LegalOps community right now in driving change because everything we do in our jobs right now is actually affecting the way that people are going to be working and interacting within the legal space in the future.
\nPart 6: There is a better way\n
\nLegal as an industry, as we all know, has been sort of stuck in time for decades, if not longer, with people doing the same work in the same way without much change. Well, what we see around us in any organisation is that all other parts of our organisations have transformed, whether it's leveraging data or technology or just changing processes to move faster.
And if legal doesn't keep up, we end up being the bottleneck to the rest of the organisation, so it's really important that legal starts to change. Now we're feeling that much more than ever with the pandemic and moving to remote work and the increased need for collaboration and much more tooling and automation. And of course, AI is really driving a lot of conversations. We're now feeling much more pressure to use technology in our organisations and to keep up with everybody else.
\nThe biggest challenge we face when it comes to enabling or adopting technology is always going to be this mindset shift, this change management thing. So many people that I talk to in their organisations right now will tell me, “It's not really broken, we've been doing it this way for decades and I don't really think we need anything.” Well, the sad state is that we really do need to change and it is broken. You think about the rest of your organisation that is moving much, much faster, legal can't be the only holdout. And when it is, it becomes a bottleneck for your organisation. So, if we can get people to understand there is a better way, and it's not threatening, and it is not going to take away jobs, and it is not going to change the way you work in a negative way, I think it's all very positive.
\nAnd once people can touch the technology and experience it and kind of open their eyes, I do think, again, that it can be a driver for change to get people to come around and want to use it.\nUnderstand that it's not threatening. Understand that it actually frees up their time to do the things that they really want to be working on.
\nPart 7: What does the future look like?\n
\nThroughout my career and journey, I've been able to see the transformation and kind of what's needed across the ecosystem through three different lenses. And I truly believe that it's going to take all parts of the ecosystem to drive the real transformation in the way that we work. It's super exciting to be a part of this industry right now because it's changing right now, as we're doing things.
And that's going to define what the future of the industry and what the profession looks like. There's going to be an emergence of new roles, new technologies, new ways of working, but it's really important to understand how the ecosystem also works together. We're always going to need law firms. They're going to have a very important place in our ecosystem.
\nAnd of course, technology has played a huge part in changing the way that we collaborate and leverage data, and there's been a huge transformation. The reason why I'm really excited to be about, to be at a technology company today is because the time has sort of come. You know, the industry is ripe for it. There is demand for it.
\nAnd there's new technology that is a lot easier to use, easier to implement, and easier to get adoption from. And people are starting to want to leverage tools and not to be doing a lot of the mundane sort of manual work that we're very used to seeing in legal departments.
\nPart 8: Technology’s role in legal innovation\n
\nGenerative AI is all everyone's talking about these days. To me, it's super exciting because if nothing else, it's opening up a ton of conversation. What generative AI has done, and this is different than our previous generation of AI, generative AI has brought a lot of substance to what it can do, and it's become sort of a tabletop conversation. And there's a lot of pressure and a lot of question about what generative AI can do for legal.
Why legal? Well, what is generative AI good at? Reading, writing, and reasoning, and that those are the three skills or qualities that we need from our lawyers. So of course it's gonna be really good at helping our lawyers do their job better.
\nSo what I love about generative AI is it's bringing people to the table. They're being very curious about what technology can do for them and whether it is generative AI or just regular legal technology, I think we've opened up the door and opened up some minds to a lot of open conversation about how we can do things differently.
\nThe way that legal works today is going to look completely different in the next five or ten years, or maybe even sooner, and I encourage people to learn as much as they can about it and to start experimenting with it. It's still the early days, we don't know what the future will look like, but we are starting to see people getting a lot of impact from it.
\nIt is not just two, three, four-fold, which is maybe what I would have expected. We're seeing 20 times the speed of execution than if they were to do it without these tools. So it's really, really a game changer. And again, I don't think we even know how big of an impact it's gonna have, but really excited to see what the future brings.
\nPart 9: Why LawAdvisor\n\nI was first introduced to the folks at LawAdvisor through a mutual friend of ours who is an advisor to the company but was also the former managing partner at Orrick, where I started my legal career, and someone who I've always believed was a great visionary.
\nWhen I met Brennan, the founder and CEO of LawAdvisor, I was instantly impressed. He has more passion and more drive for what he's building here than anyone I've met in the legal technology space.
\nThe vision that he has for what he can do with LawAdvisor is really second to none. There has been a gap in our field with the way that our law firms and our legal departments operate, how they collaborate, how they can share information better. How do we leverage and get more value from our law firms? How can our law firms market to us better? How do we talk to each other and know who to be working with? There is so much out there that is not addressed well. Technology is one part of that, and I think that the LawAdvisor team is really doing a good job of solving that.
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