#24 - Digital Transformation in Legal Ops with Aine Lyons at VMware

Hi everyone and welcome to Pearls on Gloves Off. I'm your host, Marielle Carroll. Today my guest is the amazing Anya Lyons, Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel who leads the worldwide sales, operations and privacy legal teams at VMware and serves as the Chief of Staff to the General Counsel. She is a transformational leader that is passionate about increasing legal's impact to the business through operational excellence, digital innovation and investments in people development. Last year, the ft, the Financial Times named Anya the Change agent and in 2019 the legal entrepreneur of the Year for her transformation efforts. She's also been a long standing board member of CLOCK and was absolutely instrumental in building up the legal operations community in emea. I'm lucky to call her a dear friend. And in this conversation we touch on topics like the early days of building up the legal ops community in the UK and in Europe, how to build critical relationships across your organization, and how to pivot into being much more strategic in the legal ops role. Take note here. Anya is also a Senior vice president at VMware, a Fortune 500 tech company. Now, that is significant for all of us and we should take a moment to recognize the importance of pioneers like Anya who are really breaking through the glass ceiling of level and and title for the rest of the legal ops profession. We talk about that in the show. And just what does it take for Legal Ops to get the respect and recognition and that seat at the table at such a high leadership level? You can all get there, but only if you're willing to take some risks and really think about the impact that you have across the enterprise, not just within Legal.

This is a really fun conversation and.

Anya gives some great perspective on how to do just that.

Hey folks, do you Just a reminder that Ironclad Live is coming to Dallas on September 7th with a virtual premiere on September 14th. If you haven't been to one, it's kind of like David Letterman, but for contracts and legal ops featuring real conversations with people who are making waves at their orgs, new Ironclad feature announcements and a lot more fun stuff. Definitely, definitely. Come if you can to save your seat.

It's free visit.

Bit ly ironcladlive all right, let's get to the show.

Anya, thrilled to catch up. Always good to see you.

You too, Mary. Wow, so excited to have our chat at last.

Well, we've been through a lot together. I think we've known each other for probably over a decade now, and I know we've had this conversation. You'll always be one of those people who will always have a special place in my heart and be a friend forever. Because we've gone through a lot in building out CLOCK and building out legal ops as a profession. Actually, it's funny, we were in Vegas for Clock in May and we missed you because we took a photo of some of the original CLOCK founding group and you should have been there.

I know I really missed being there, but just personal reasons, I think sometimes we'll have to make hard decisions on the personal front, so. But I'm really looking forward to Clock London, where I know we're going to be together again. And you were really pivotal, I think, in just the strategy around let's expand CLOCK and let's go to Europe. And I think over the years had a lot of fun doing that as well.

Well, I was going to turn around and give you credit for that because I think you were very instrumental in building out legal ops in the Europe and the uk. And we were all kind of doing it before it was a thing, right? And we worked really hard to turn this into what a lot of people say, oh, now it's like a real profession and a highly impactful, really strategic one at that. And, you know, you were critical to creating that global movement and you were ceaseless in your efforts to make sure that there was growth in Europe, that was growth in the uk. Tell me the journey, though. Like, how did you first get involved in building out the community over there?

I think it even taking it back a little bit further. I remember a former GC at VMware asking me if I would take on legal operations. And I said, absolutely not. I have no idea what that is.

And when was that?

And that was probably 11 years ago, imagine. And I really didn't know anybody in legal operations. I didn't even know about the career. Kind of a comfortable EMEA GC job. And I thought, why would I leave this?

What is this?

And she said, look, I think there's some people who are meeting. And I remember the first meeting, Mary, and what struck me was there was probably only 10 people in the room. We met in San Francisco and all of us were figuring it out. Some people had had the role for maybe a year or two others, but we were all just leaning on each other, helping each other. And it was a real safe space to say what now is so popular to say, which is, I am going to ask some dumb questions because I don't know everything I'm doing and I'm feeling vulnerable. And I think we were all really vulnerable and we really bonded over that. But we also accelerated each other's journey because we were able to share non competitive things that really helped each of us just get the work done faster and just build best practices. I remember it being a really exciting time. The kindness, the generosity of everybody. And that's the Clock spirit that I think when we talked about it at the board level in Clock, should we expand into Europe, I was up for the challenge and it's been amazing because we started our first event and I think we had 250 people. We were in that amazing hotel in London and we had a great reception afterwards and we all thought, yeah, let's continue to do this. And then we grew and I think we were up to like 4:50 with a waiting list for the last number of years. Obviously not for the pandemic, but we had a brief pause. But we're back. September, I really can't wait. And a lot of September actually is about agility and future proofing and thinking ahead. And I think that's something that all of our CLOCK community, they're very strategic, whether it's the vendors, the law firms and in our ecosystem or members being strategic like you said, like Clock being strategic about building the community globally. But I think this time in London we're going to really think about how do we future proof now with AI and everything that's happening and influencing legal departments, all the different headwinds and things that are also, I think, opportunities for us. So good topics, I think.

Do you still feel like, and I get asked this a lot, the European or the UK sort of legal operations market and maturity is just what, like a couple years behind what we're seeing in the US and you have a global role, so you probably see both sides.

Yeah, I think it really depends on the companies. I think there's a lot of large companies that are headquartered in Europe or the UK that are well ahead of many companies in the US and many teams. It depends on leadership team too. You've got the general counsel. If you have a general counsel that wants to build a modern legal department, then you tend to have more progression because they're going to really support that, try to influence with their legal ops person across the business to build the coalitions to get to that maturity, get the budgets, get the buy in the transformation that you need. I think it really depends. I think in some ways Europe is more focused still perhaps on cost saving, technology. I think across the board all of us are trying to lean into digital transformation and now generative AI and LLM But I think it's very much down to the company as well as the region and the leadership.

You know what's interesting, I was just in London what a month ago? Not even like a couple weeks ago. It's all blurred together.

I hope you had an afternoon tea, Mary.

Always, always.

That's one of our favorite things to do is have a London and afternoon tea. They go together.

But what I noticed was, you know, since we've known the same folks that have been doing legal ops in the London area for a very long time, you know, some of them like, like you and I over a decade have moved into consultant roles. A lot of them are now doing legal operations consulting, whether with a firm, big four or either on their own. What do you think is the catalyst for that or like any idea what's going on? Is there just a lot of education that needs to take place and people need help or what?

There's definitely a need for that type of skill set. And I think I've seen a lot of law firms in Europe hire chief transformation, offer legal operation transformation leads. And a lot of people who were in house just found those opportunities and they were looking for them because the in house folks in some cases had much more experience and they could bring that perspective into the law firms. And then I think as you said, a lot of the big four, we're hiring a lot of the consultants that we all know over the years, we're also looking for in house people because you're right, that community, that original group, even that helped me who were on my sort of strategy council for organizing our events and regional communities, they've all moved into bigger roles or they've moved across the ecosystem. But that I think that's exciting because then you're getting all the different perspectives from being in house is different from being in a law firm. And I think if more law firms could listen to the in house perspective, it's like vendors listening to the in house, a law firm perspective around implementations and challenges and getting budget. The more of that we do that sharing of perspectives, I think the better. Yeah, so it's positive. But you're right, a lot of movement on the employment front and the roles.

And scope, a lot of people have.

Added a lot of scope to their roles.

I mean the good news is there's so much more opportunity for folks who have this background than ever before, which is really incredible. And speaking of, I know we should mention that you have a senior vice president title which I always like to highlight because that's not just important to you, that is important to the entire profession. To see, you know, someone paving the way at a, you know, huge, big name company breaking through ceilings for all of us. And correct me if I'm wrong, you are the only SVP in legal at VMware. Is that correct?

Yes. And I think it's important first of all for legal teams to get more and more senior roles within the company to influence and have an impact. But for our legal ops community, I think there was certainly when I started out, there wasn't many people doing the role. There was a lot of skepticism about the value of the role and could the role be impactful. And I think the more that we can demonstrate that, the better it is for everybody in our legal ops community because I think it provides pathways for them to get to the different levels. And there's no question that if you're sitting with other senior leaders and your CEO and you have ideas about how you can help, how the legal team can help transform what the company is doing at an enterprise level, you're going to find it easier to make that happen. And the impact is not just for the legal team then it's really much more, I think business aligned and that helps with budgets as well and that helps with transformation. And you're really plugging into the company's transformation, not operating in your own sort of legal transformation silo. And I think in the early days I absolutely fell into that trap of sort of following my own path on legal transformation only when what I really needed to do was work across the company and think how can we co elevate together and deliver something that's even in the contract space. Mary, I think you and I talked about like lead to cash at any company. They're all looking to transform that. They'll now be looking to layer on, you know, AI and gen AI capabilities there, plugging in your contracting piece and all the information that you have there. Legal has and should have a big seat at the table, if not help to lead that part of the lead to cash effort. So yeah, I think I really feel strongly and almost feel this is the biggest message I could impart from my learnings is think way outside the legal department when you're in these legal ops roles. When I started I was a team of one and I really found believing that hard. But it is actually easier. The more you work cross functionally, the easier your job becomes and you build a lot of relationships and coalitions there.

You know, I've talked about the maturity from serving the Legal department getting processes and procedures in place because you have to set the foundation before you can actually have an impact on the. You got to fix legal. Right. Before you can actually have legal impact.

The rest.

So it takes some time. So I think you and I, we were trying to figure that piece out for a lot of the beginning of our career here, and that when that was mature, that you could start to think, okay, well, now that we're functioning, you know, high functioning legal department, how can we actually add to the rest of the company?

Yeah. No. And I think you and I both have kids and I'm always saying to my kids, and they're now very tired of hearing the mantra of you've got to make your bed every day. And I do think that in legal, we had a lot to fix. Even if you think still.

Still a lot to fix.

Yeah. I was talking about like a sales bot and a pilot to use Genai on a sales bottle. I was thinking, how much legal content do we have out there for sales across the company, much of which might be old, need to be refreshed. And before we think about these tools, cleaning up and creating our own just really good data, cleaning up our templates, simplifying them, our playbooks, any of our policies, our guidance that's out there, and just knowing, getting our arms around what is our legal data. Because that's digital transformation and leveraging these new exciting tools that are coming. All of that you and I know just from bitter experience, it's not going to be successful unless first you do that work. And it's not the sexy work that people want to do initially, but that's the gold that if you mind that and you get that done, then any of your transformation efforts, particularly with technology, I think are far more successful than if you just go towards the bright shiny object first of just tech only.

That's right. That's right. Although I try to tell people not to get too intimidated by trying to make everything perfect and buttoned up before you dive into the tech. I think there's ways to pilot experiments, start small and learn from what the tech can do and help you with such that it can actually affect and change the way you work and change your processes.

Right, Yeah, I agree. Even our NDA portal, and we've done that for many years now, but it's still, it was such a small, low effort and we still have four or five thousand NDAs of no legal touch that never reach us.

Amazing.

And you're right, that was not a huge effort. There's A lot of no touch legal initiatives. You can also start to drive rather than the huge, very large implementations around. Going after all your templates initially, I think start small, iterate, get some learnings and then keep going. Because you're right, you don't want people to feel like they have to do it all before they dip their toe in the water. You're better to dip your toe in the water and learn and keep going.

Yes. And especially as we're talking about large scale enterprise impact, trying to get every team and every stakeholder and every template cleaned up and every playbook, it's just not going to happen. And you're going to learn a lot from doing the first one and getting out there and just making an impact small.

Absolutely. And over the last probably 24 months we just took one template, but it was our core revenue template. And even to do that, just core template now it is the core of everything we do. It's embedded in our entire life cycle. But doing that and our order form, our new order form just took a lot of enterprise effort. So you do really need to plan and prepare and take on what you have the bandwidth for. And if you don't have bandwid, bring on the right experts or vendors to help you, to guide you through that. But there are smaller things you can do as well that can also I think still get that impact that you want. For example, we did a one contract center where just everything and it's just essentially built on source at one site where all of sales can go and all our customers can go to learn everything they need to know about how we contract. That was the starter of something that we built on. But it didn't have to be perfect, it just had to have better information. So rather than going to 10 sites, they could go to one that's a smaller project you can start rather than having to break up the whole lead to cash operations of the company initially. It's so true.

It just has to be better. Right. And everything in a poor state that small wins make a big difference.

And also there's this thing about some people maybe don't understand sort of the skill set. You see other functions are really good at marketing what they do. And I think in legal sometimes we do things that are really improvements but we don't know how to connect that into the company narrative or get that out there. So the company and everybody in the company learns about what those things are. I remember for this mission that we had around a one customer contract, thinking about in lockdown, watching The Formula one series on Netflix with my family and saying okay, how could I engage the sales teams and even our worldwide sales leader. And Formula one was something that I used as just a marketing tool. So we need to market a little bit more. It was like a no touch fast lane for our orders with customers and a smooth track and just these sort of things that creating that storytelling around what we do in Legal. I think we could be better at that. And a lot of functions at the company are willing to help us if we ask for help as well.

Absolutely. And related to that and I always.

Tell people we've got to manage up.

And that's something I don't think Legal Ops professionals, they're just so busy and they want to get to the next thing like we sometimes have to showcase the impact that we've had upward to our leadership team within legal too. And I want to kind of get back to your point about the most important message that we want to instill today is kind of about this enterprise impact and being more strategic and what that means and how to get there. And that's a big part is like selling yourself, right?

Yeah. And I think just even simpler tips. Learning to make sure that if in your department there's a chief of staff or if you have a relationship with your GC or even if you're not reporting directly to the gc, Ask for skip level one on ones on a certain cadence. Ask just for time on the agenda to talk about what you're doing on a transformation level, but also network. Do a list at the start of every year I still do a list of stakeholders that for the year at the company I want to build a relationship with whether they're in legal or whether they're across the company. And I make sure that I have them built into my calendar. Because you don't know when you're going to need that relationship. What you're doing is trying to listen and understand what their business priorities are and then see if there's any connection nodes into what you will be doing, how you could help them, number one, that professional generosity and just be kind to other professionals and help rather than competing with other functions, just lean in and help other functions. And then it becomes this thing where people repay that by saying, you know what? I need to bring in that Legal Ops person or that person in legal who might be doing so you're just educating, building relationships. But that stakeholder list is just something that I still do. And then I go back and see does it change and if there Are new people coming to the company? Be the person who welcomes them and says, hey, let me just educate you about Legal ops and legal. In the very early days, I used to do that with finance and tried to get once a quarter with our CFO even to say, and people are really kind, actually, they'll say, yeah, you know what, I will give you some mentoring. Even a one hour mentoring session. I remember asking the chief of staff of our CEO, would you mind mentoring me? I said, I know you're super busy, but would you mind mentoring me just for half an hour? I have a draft presentation that I've got to do for our CEO and our cfo and I'm, you know, I'm a little bit nervous. I haven't presented to them before. She was amazing. She was like, of course. She gave me three half hour calls and probably the best advice I could have gotten going in there. So I think just ask. Just don't be afraid to ask for help. I think people like to help.

Well, I love the way that you positioned your ask. It wasn't just, hi, can I come meet you? Without much of an agenda. You had a point there. And I'd love just to give the advice to other people. When you're reaching out to say someone you know within your company or within legal, who you don't already know, you don't have a relationship with and you want to get to know, what is your approach? Like, how do you try to get them to sit down with you? Chat for 30 minutes?

Yeah, I make sure first that I research a little bit about what is their strategy, what is their function. And I see if there's some connection, there'll be somebody within Legal that supports them or their mind. I mean, look, most of the functions that we support, it's either sales or HR or IT or finance or the business units. There's always some connection you can make. But just even very simply saying, I work in legal, this is my role and my mission. I've seen what yours is. I'm really interested in connecting to just learn more. Would you have 20 minutes? And as you say, don't take up their time. I think without some purpose. And your purpose may be as simple as I want to learn more about what you're doing as a leader and how you lead your people. Another thing we started to do was ask some of our business leaders to come to legal sessions to just share what their function we're doing. Or smaller teams like license compliance team. What are you doing? What's your mission? This year it or the AI team, I think we did a series of, for the legal team, get to know the business better. Because companies can grow so quickly and suddenly you don't really know what all these teams do. And it's harder to make the connection points of how you could be impactful or relevant to them. But I think keep it simple, keep it targeted and don't waste people's time. I think Mary, you may have had these requests where people say I'd love you to mentor me. And that's a very open ended thing. It's so much easier if they say I want to learn how to do strategy or build a vision. Could you give me half an hour? And I think if you approach it like that, they're more receptive.

Yeah, it's easier for that person on the receiving end to understand how they can be helpful because they don't want to go into this and realize I can't help you at all. Right. And sometimes when I was in Google reaching out to people in other organizations, it was a lot of the same approach that you're talking about, but also offering. I'm actually trying to help everyone in their role and I want to hear more about how your function works and how we might able to collaborate and or assist you or help you and make your lives better. So just offering something back to them too.

I don't know when you first took the role at Google in legal ops at VMware I would reach out to people who were doing the role somewhere else in another company. So many people just based on a two line email would agree to talk to me and say, here's my experience, here's some of the pitfalls. So now when people ask me, I always return because I always remember how vulnerable I was at that stage and how that advice was like gold. That was the value of clock, which then of course morphed into a much bigger community now that we can connect with and share knowledge. But even doing that, I think every time you move into a new role, connecting with other people who might now have some of the additional scope that you have is important. Privacy was an area I took over a couple of years ago at VMware and realizing there's an operational side to privacy, operationalizing privacy by design, same with esg and that the same skills are really relevant. But those teams who are operations folks in compliance and privacy in these areas are now part of legal teams too. But when I did that, I remember calling lots of people who led privacy teams and just asking you know what are the things that think of how did you build your strategy? So I think insightful to learn from other people and necessary And a lot of people have said to me, but that means that I don't know what my job is. I feel they will think I don't know what my job is. And I said, I don't think anyone really feels like that. I think it's the opposite. I think they think you're thinking ahead and wanting to just benchmark and look at what others have done. And it's like looking at the competition as well. It's like at the end where we're always looking at what our competitors are doing as well as trying to learn from what we're seeing out in the market trends.

I still think one of my favorite conversations and people who reach out to me via LinkedIn and I encourage folks listening whenever someone says, hey, I just got my first legal ops role. It's my first month, I just started. I have no idea what I'm doing. I'd love to chat with you about your experience. Those are my favorite conversations because a I feel like yes, I might have some wisdom to impart from all the missteps that I have, but I also want to hear and learn from you about how has the role changed since we're doing it? How is your GC thinking about it? I mean, I learn a ton just hearing about how it's organized in other organizations as well. So we all learn from each other.

Yeah. And transformation is hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it. And really, ultimately legal operations and all of the law firms and the vendors in this space who are at the top of their game and really trying to help be transformative and tapping into the company strategy around transformation. It's a difficult role and you have to, I think, have a community or have a support system around you because the change management piece that we talk about, and it's still the hardest piece, is changing how people's mindsets and how they approach and how they want to work. And that's why although there are some risks around this, the advent of Gen AI and there's a lot of hype around that and we need to be conscious of the risks. But at the same time, this could be the catalyst we need Mary for more focus on digital transformation and perhaps there will be more funding at the company levels within enterprises for it if legal ops folks can tap into it and align to what the company is doing, but show that there's a unique business case for legal as well, yeah.

We'Re definitely seeing that and hearing that. Going back for a second, you mentioned privacy esg. I know that you have a pretty unique role in that you're not pure play legal operations. You actually have a very large function. What does your team look like and what's within the scope of your role at VMware?

Yeah, right now I have worldwide sales and revenue support in all the regions privacy, globally legal operations. But also we built a global legal shared services team in house, a fantastic team of contract managers. And we also have an offshore team as well. So that's the remit. So it's really support strategy, operations. Yeah. So there's about 120 people, and then we have. And then we have our offshore team, which is about another 40, 45 people. Yeah.

And is part of your role still practice of law or your teams doing practice of law as well?

Yes. So when I was doing the legal operations role, I was also chief of staff for two of the general counsels at VMware and still Amy Olis, chief of staff, who's our amazing gc. And although people think when sometimes there's many different types of backgrounds of people who do legal ops, Mary, as we've often discussed, there's people who have MBAs and business backgrounds, people have operation finance backgrounds, and there's people who are lawyers who are put into the roles and do that. I was always doing organizational structure and how we support the business and our strategy and the operation and the budget and all of that. But more recently in the last couple of years, it's been legal practice and that, and it's actually been fantastic because now I also bring. That's why I think everybody who is a lawyer should at some point get the exposure to that operational DNA. Because the way you look at legal work is just very different in calibrating risk thinking, how you scale the support, and then what is really the complex business, that legal work, that you want to make sure that you have as much of your bandwidth as possible focused on that work, and that the other work, which can drain your people and drain their time and bandwidth, that's taken away and finding ways to manage that work so that they have as much focus as possible on the strategic and helping a business and being really impactful and relevant. It's been, I think, for me, a huge privilege to have done legal ops. Only have the ability to do that for a number of years and then now combine it because it's helped me see the practice of law as well in a different way. And I know that's Clark's vision is how can we help companies and law firms transform the business and the practice of law.

And I have long thought that your background and your journey has made you uniquely suited to be an incredible general counsel one day because of what you've. You know how to build, you know how to scale, you need to know how to make an impact across the company. And you've had an amazing journey as an attorney and you have dealt with all the issues of privacy, et cetera. Tough question for you. Do you think that one can make it to the SVP level purely as a legal operations person without having being an attorney as well?

I do. And this is again the skill sets that I see on my team. Many of my team members who started doing legal operations have progressed to very senior levels over time because they're managing large scale initiatives at the company and they're interacting with lots of very senior. I do think that being legal operations only, expanding that and operations more broadly. But I think we should also look at the role of legal operations expanding over time, like the operationalization of how do you operationalize compliance across the company, which is global initiatives, esg, privacy. And now if you think of AI and LLM and everything that's going to have to be built there, operational people have a really great role, I think to play in that. But many operations people can also go on to be CEOs in different companies because I think if you can transform the mindset of lawyers, there's probably nothing that you can't do.

Amen, sister.

And if you can make legal relevant in many companies, that is a challenge in itself because I think sometimes we're relegated to some sort of back office support. And the thing is, legal teams have this unique view across the company of everything that's happening. And we need to talk about that more because it's really, I think, a very interesting place. And the data that you can extract from some of the work the legal teams do can be very useful to CEOs and to senior leaders. And we don't leverage it in that way or think about it in terms of how they could use it to make strategic decisions at that senior table. But the answer is yes, I think anything is possible and I think we should always be looking to expand the role in different ways. I look at DEI and how and ESG has now become a board topic, it's become an audit committee topic. So many legal operations folks are actually helping not just the legal team, but cross functionally to try to figure out how we do that, how we pull that data together. So the sky's the limit, in my opinion.

Okay. And then the other question I wanted to dig into, because we get asked this a lot, is you mentioned you used to have the chief of staff role as well. And I think that a lot of what Legal Operations does is like a COO role. How do you see and define differently in every company? How do you see the difference between a chief of staff and, let's say, a COO of legal? Or are they the same?

They can be. And again, it depends on the makeup of each department. Sometimes there's a separate chief of staff is just tasked with a lot of maybe the strategy, the leadership meetings, the agendas of what the legal team leadership team should be looking at. And you can sort of craft the role yourself and the general counsel, if you're in that role, in whatever way you would like. But what I will say, and many GCs ask me this, if I hire a legal ops person, what's the level? I should have them like a lead and should I give them my chief of staff responsibilities? I'm saying, well, if you don't already have achieved staff, really consider doing that. Because then the transformation agenda of the legal department, of where you want the legal department to be in the next three to five years, that person can help the leadership team build that and curate that together and then make it part of everybody's goals. Because the whole leadership team is locking arms on, we're going to transform, we're going to digitize, we're going to build new competencies for our lawyers, for our people. We're going to invest in these skill sets for the future, like now, engineers or analysts for whatever it is, you're doing it as a leadership team. Having a legal ops person that's not connected into that leadership team and that doesn't have the influence or the budget sort of oversight to help develop that strategy. I think it's a really, it's just a much harder role to drive the change. And so if possible, I think combining them, it's not for every organization, but I think that would be the sweet spot in giving them the influence that they need to really deliver and making it a one team effort. That's what we call it. VMware transformation is not a lone wolf role. It's everyone's in and we're all in it together. And that's, I think that's the secret sauce that then can help make sure that it's top of mind. It's discussed at every single juncture. It's part of the way you talk about the future and that people see that future and want to be part of it. So they're going to help.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think that's the best practice, is having it combined. Unless of course, the Chief of Staff has a very sort of agenda comms type role that is separate from strategy and execution.

Yeah. And there are no hard and fast rules. I think you define for the department you have and what you can, but you want them to be able to, I think, accelerate their progress and use their skills to their fullest capabilities. Giving them that extra influence will help.

You just reminded me of something else that I picked up on the last trip that I was in London. And it was this idea, this trend that I feel like I'm seeing. And maybe it's not really a trend, but let's just talk about it for a sec. Which is the idea that the legal ops or modernization and transformation mindset is something that is a responsibility of everybody in the department, which I totally agree with. But there seemed to be an idea that because of that, legal operations is not one person's job or a team's job. And instead of creating that function or that role, it should be the responsibility of all of our lawyers or all of our team members to look at technology, to think about processes. I have an opinion on this, but I'm curious if that's what you're hearing and seeing and your thoughts on responsibility of the whole team as a mindset versus let's centralize, let's make this someone's job to make sure that they can focus on it. Thoughts?

The problem is when everyone owns it, no one owns it. So I think you need to be careful. I think what it is, everyone knows what the vision is, everyone sees the path forward, but then very specifically who's executing. And I think one of the things that I needed to do because there was just a lot. The transformation agenda was quite ambitious. At VMware, we've always really pushed ourselves and challenged ourselves was to co lead different initiatives with other members of the leadership team where I really need some of their team members on tiger teams to brainstorm certain things or on aspects of the transformation. And many legal ops teams didn't have the luxury to, and I didn't in many instances over the years have the luxury of having a lot of people on my team. So you are looking to ask for other people's bandwidth to sort of join strategic projects or initiatives around the transformation, but you do need to have somebody leading in terms of what is this? Okay, we get the vision and the strategy, but what are we going to execute on this year? Specifically this quarter, next quarter, and then who's accountable for which pieces? And I think actually having a chief of staff and that operations piece together, then you also need to know what are the resources and the budget we need to execute on these. But some of the senior leaders need also to, I think, be part of that. So it's having an owner and someone who's responsible for the transformation, but they're going to, I think, get cooperation and also co ownership of some of the goals or objectives from other of the senior leaders. But I think it can fall apart a little bit around everyone owns legal operations and transformation, but really, who's accountable? So I think it's just down to accountability.

Yeah. And I always think, you know, you definitely want everyone to embrace the mindset, but you also don't want 15 lawyers running out and getting demos and coming up with their own processes, which are then different from the person next to them doing their processes. Right.

You. Yeah. And that's why I centralized our technology budget, actually, after a couple of years in legal operations, because for that very reason, the strategy then is splintered and it's not aligned. It's not. There isn't a unified way of thinking and approaching these things, but also standards that you want to go through of vetting vendors and making sure it and security and firewalls and all these things that we need to consider are done in a consistent way. So centralizing from that perspective is really important.

Yeah. And particularly I was talking to someone about the difference in working in this role in a small company versus a big company. And as a big company, you're always trying to figure out what everyone is doing, what everyone is thinking and bringing it all together. You do need really much more centralization in a large organization.

Yeah. And it's a delicate balance because you don't want to dampen down innovative thinking either. But at the same time, you want to bring everybody together so that you're going to deliver something that is a unified vision for the department, particularly on digital and tools. I think that's critical.

No, it is a hard balance. Right. Because you still want people interested and curious and experimenting, but then if they come onto something good, you want to make sure that it goes along with the entire strategy and the direction that you're going.

But I mean, we've used a lot of people for even our sandboxes and reviewing vendors from different parts of the legal department because we want to, as you said, get them interested and get their buy in early, but also their expertise of thinking of things that we may not think of because we're not doing that particular piece of work every day. And we used to do. We still do red teaming where we will build something or we will have an ideation session, but then we'll bring in a group of people to red team and really constructively ask us why we haven't thought of different things and it's been brilliant. And then everybody feels like they get their say and are involved in some way. And there's a lot of excitement because people are reading about it all the time, about new tools and technology for legal. So you've got many people working in legal departments who also want to feel part of it and that they're not going to feel left behind. So I think that series, we're just running a talk series now on Gen AI and testing tools and building use cases. And we want. Our goal is to make sure that everybody on the legal team has some knowledge and can be conversant about it and can be involved in some way. To feel like all this negativity around x percent of legal jobs going away is not going to become this fear around the future versus the opportunity that is there for people's careers and that we don't give way to that sort of negativity that is also out there. I think there's a lot of hype.

Yeah. And as you're out there, what is your sentiment? What is your feeling that the sentiment is for line lawyers about Is it fear, is it skepticism or is it an embracing of this is coming. This is so exciting. Let me get my hands on it. What are you seeing?

Yeah, it's probably a roller coaster. I think when you have like the publicity around Gen AI just aced the bar exam, you had different reports from Gartner and others about how many legal jobs. And there's no question that there is some repetitive tasks and questions that we do that are repetitive questions that the business asks us every day, that these kinds of tools that will be developed. And I think the next 24 months we'll see really an acceleration of the legal gen AI tools and testing those over the next 24 months. But being ready and the education is the key. But I do think some people think, wow, this is just one other thing that's now coming to erode our profession. I see it as the opposite. I think the complexity around the regulatory issues, the privacy the ip, the confidentiality, all of that, legal teams are going to be needed more than ever because the legislation that's going to come from this is going to be huge and really difficult, complex problems for legal teams to solve. I think legal teams should embrace it to augment what we do as soon as we can and be experts in it. So start educating ourselves now about and future proof our roles in people's competencies. Because I was talking to Arik recently and this summer, all of their interns, I think it's prompt engineering training that they're doing. So I think starting to train people so they start to understand more about this area. Because I do think after the next sort of 24 months where we'll see a lot more development of those tools, we could see for certain use cases it being very impactful pretty quickly. So I don't want to delay. And that's why actually September in London is all about Gen AI actually, and agility and future proofing and just a lot of also obviously the risk piece of it. But what's the opportunity and being opportunistic about what legal teams can use because we don't want the big four to come in and tell our CFOs there's gen AI tools that can eliminate legal teams. We want to say we're already embracing it. We're already part of the company's Gen AI program and we already have five use cases ready and here's what we're doing about it. So let's not be blindsided as a community. Let's get ahead of it and embrace it and understand the risks and be the ones that are conversant. I don't think there's any community better than legal operations to do that. That's what we do in our day to day. So we're ideally positioned to be those, I think, guides for the rest of the legal department and sort of lead the way and make everybody understand we don't need to be afraid of this. This is an opportunity for us ultimately to be really relevant in this new era. So yeah, I'm excited about it, just to learn something new.

We've said for a long time this is such an exciting time to be in this industry and making change and it just keeps getting better in my view. So this is a great note to end on. Anya. Always such a great time to catch up with you and of course we'll do a final plug for Clock London taking place. When is it? September?

Yes, September. It's on our website. Really excited to see the community there. And I know people from all over Europe come. Many people from outside Europe actually come. So I will see you there, Mary. And we will have to. Our tradition of having afternoon tea will need to continue, so.

Absolutely. Every year. Okay. Looking forward to seeing you then. And to everyone who's listening, thank you for listening.

To see you too.

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