#27 - Building Community, Reporting to CEOs, and Choosing Vendors with Sarah Irwin, Head of Legal at Tines

Hi everyone, thanks for tuning in. I'm your host Mary o' Carroll and today on our show is Sarah Irwin, Head of Legal at Tynes, the Irish cybersecurity no code automation startup on the side. Sarah is also the founder and Chair of Irish Tech General Counsel, a new and independent community which she set up in 2022 to enable innovative legal professionals working at tech companies in Ireland to finally find a place to connect and share knowledge with each other. She then expanded this group in 2023 to include legal professionals working in any sector across Ireland. I thought Sarah sounded busy enough with just those two jobs, but as we get into this podcast episode she will tell you how she actually considers herself someone with three jobs. Sarah is a huge advocate of legal operations and legal technology and leverages both as part of her strategy and in building out her in house function from scratch. As a fellow community builder, it was no surprise to me that Sarah gets a lot of energy out of both bringing people together, but also sharing any knowledge and perspective that she has from her experience to make their jobs easier and better. As such, she's an avid content creator on LinkedIn. She shares all sorts of advice and knowledge and we get into a few of those topics here in this episode, including things like why the GC of a fast growing company absolutely needs to report to the CEO and how GCs can and need to be more strategic. We also dive into Sarah's CLM journey at Tines, where she looked at a ton of different contract lifecycle management providers and eventually chose one that she's had success with. But in the meantime she's been kind enough to create a scorecard or an RFP template to share with the world so that no one needs to be overwhelmed by this project and no one ever needs to start from scratch. We talk a bit about lawyer burnout, AI and a host of other topics during this conversation. It's definitely a fun one. She's got tons of energy and it's full of nuggets of advice, so I hope you enjoy.

How are things in Dublin and in the Irish tech community these days?

Yeah, they're great. It's so the kids are all back to school, so everyone's all kind of fired up with that full energy, just ready to kind of lash into the next quarter. So at times we're actually on the fiscal year, so we only. I feel like we've only just finished our last quarter. I think Ironclad is as well. Right, so you, you would have your last finish.

Our fiscal year is January, July Okay. You just finished? Yeah, so.

But yeah, it's good, it's good. A few Irish companies have just closed some Series A, Series B. So it's not too bad over here.

Yeah, great. Well, I think that you're a super interesting person and excited to talk to you because you wear many hats. In addition to being a gc, I know that you have this big community that you also run. Is that like almost a full time job on the side as well?

Yeah, I have three full time jobs, Mary, so I do think full time, yes.

Okay.

So we're an Irish cybersecurity automation startup. So that's my first job and then my second job is I founded Irish Tech General Council two years ago. When I joined Tynes, we didn't have a community like this in Ireland before. Right. So there were the very big global ones like acc and of course you have tech GC in the us but when I joined Tynes two years ago, we had five homegrown unicorns, which is a lot for a tiny little island in the Atlantic Ocean.

Fantastic.

We have seven now. But we didn't have any organized community or any community at all for all of this amazing in house talent that was working here. So I was obviously first legal hire post Series B. And that's fine, I have a lot of experience, but I still, you know, I didn't have a massive law firm and all the resources behind me to help. I had no one to bounce anything off. And there's only so many times you can ping your mates on WhatsApp that work in law firms and ask them for free advice and even at that they don't have, you know, so much of what we do is actually responding to questions as business leaders and commercial advice. Right. It's not always, it's largely, not strictly legal. Right. So they can't help that. Anyway.

So I decided to set up a group of GCs working in the tech space and I thought it would be maybe three or four of us going for a glass of wine every few weeks, you know, sharing war stories, that kind of thing. But actually, you know, something at the same time told me to maybe just take a pause, think about the mission, think about the marketing, think about who I wanted to target. I got a friend of mine to help me design the kind of branding guidelines. And so when I launched, I properly launched and as soon as I announced it on LinkedIn, I was inundated by loads of GCs working in tech, some kind of tech adjacent. So working in pharma. And so I Very quickly decided just given how small Ireland is or the in house community is compared to the U.S. for example, I thought, you know what, I'm not going to just limit it to gcs. I'll throw it open to anyone at any level.

And yeah, so people just kind of jumped on that and I had a launch party, I'd say about 70 people came to that. That's pretty good numbers for our.

That's great.

Yeah. And then as time went on I held all these events and people outside of tech, outside of kind of tech adjacent sectors were really interested. You know, financial services, everything really. So everything is tech. It kind of is. Right. GDPR is the glue that holds us all together. Whether or not you're, you know, based in the eu, we all share that pain. I mean love of privacy law. Yeah. So I decided to expand. So that was last year and then this year I decided to expand officially outside of tech. So we have members from all sectors now in Ireland, but also to expand outside of Dublin into the more regional parts of the country because we actually have loads of tech and pharma down in Cork. Right. So when Apple moved from Silicon valley in the 80s, they based themselves in Cork in the south of south and they're still there, alive and well. And so tech and pharma community has sprung up around them. So there's quite a lot of in house lawyers that work down there as well. And then we have a lot of med tech in the west of the country which is where my Irish family hail from. So I held launch parties for those regions and I have people in those areas helping me kind of nurture the community in those areas as well. So it's going really well. Mary, we have a Slack group with about nearly 200 people in it. Got the LinkedIn page, got lots of interest from that, including from people outside of Ireland as well, which is great that they're interested in what's kind of going on in the Irish tech scene. Yeah. So that's my second job and then my third job is content. So one of the things I realized early this year is that I've got a lot of advice to share because I feel like in many ways I kind of did a lot of things for the first time in the Irish sort of GC in house community and I have this really non linear background as well. So I've got loads of stuff I can talk about and I'm very passionate about Ireland anyway because I was born here even though I grew up in England.

So yeah, so I did A course and I decided to start posting on LinkedIn and that content has really gained traction as well from in house lawyers and vendors as well. Like Ironclad, Bright Flag, I've collaborated on Contact content with them Contract nerds, How to contract all of these amazing people that have wonderful communities that just share all their knowledge for free. So that's my three full time jobs.

What would you do with all that free time if you only had one job? Right. I had two jobs for over a decade and I was like, what, why would you want free time in your life anyway?

I know, absolutely. What are you going to do with it? You just sit there and start twitching and. Because you're not being productive.

But the stuff that you're doing on the side and I feel like is the same with me. It's such a passion that I didn't. That wasn't a job, like I would do that anyway. It was fun, right?

But it just happens 100%.

The energy kind of hits different right. When you're doing something. When you're doing something that's purely based on passion and you know, I love connecting people. I love networking and meeting people and then introducing them to other people. I love sharing my knowledge. I love helping people with their problems. I'm a problem solver.

And. Yeah. And it just, it, you know, when I sit down or I get an idea on a Saturday morning and I start creating content, it doesn't feel like work. It just feels like it's totally different energy. I can't really buzz off it. So yeah, it's very similar to what you do outside of Ironclad too.

Yeah, I totally agree. We're kindred spirits. I feel like I'm a problem solver and get so much energy out of community building and connecting people and sharing, you know, the knowledge that I, or not even the knowledge, it's like the perspective of I've gone through this and please don't recreate this and you know, if there's anything that I can do to help you get up to speed or get past the, the blank page. As I always say, never start with the blank page. Then. Yeah, then it's fun. It's totally fun.

Definitely. Yeah. You know, I've spent two years at times building out an in house legal function from scratch and if I can save someone two years. Yeah, exactly. Now, you know, within a week, just, you know, have a look at my content. Here's the heads up, like do all of these things, don't waste time, you know, then that, you know, that to me is, is the goal, the end goal.

Yeah. And you have created so much great content I'm seeing and following it on LinkedIn as well. And I do want to get into some of that because what great nuggets we can share with the audience here. But you do have a unique background. What brought you to. How did you get to your GC role? And then I'd love to hear a little bit about how your small but mighty department looks and feels.

Absolutely, yeah. So I have, I'm very proud to say I have a very kind of nonlinear background. And the more I meet in house these amazing in house lawyers everywhere globally, the more I'm kind of finding the. So do they, you know. So I originally trained as a barrister in London. I picked the bar over becoming a solicitor and working at a law firm because I like talking and I liked advocating on behalf of a client. You don't really get to do that when you're very junior in, you know, especially in the bigger law firms that are hidden over by the photocopier. So I trained as a barrister, but I was called to the bar about, around about the same week as Lehman Brothers collapsed 2008.

I know it well.

Oh, yeah. So I wasn't, you know, it's notoriously poorly paid in the UK and Ireland. Right. Then that's fine. You know, money isn't the main priority. You know, experience is more important when you kind of graduate from college. Right. Not so much money.

And yeah, so I did that for a few years and it was excellent experience, you know, getting before all of those judges in court. It was all commercial work, some bankruptcies and debt related and things like that. So I did that for five years and that was wonderful. But then I wanted to, I didn't want to live in London anymore. I wanted to move back to Ireland and I decided I didn't want to be a barrister anymore either. So I ended up cross qualifying as a solicitor. I worked at a bunch of the big law firms here in corporate law and I worked with some amazing clients from, you know, spinning out of college, incubator the whole way through to exit. And I really enjoyed. So I found a lot of the skills as an, you know, as a barrister were actually very transferable. As a corporate lawyer, you have to be a good negotiator, you know, thick skin, you have to be able to kind of dip into a new industry or sector, you know, and business, you know, every other client is different. So I found that really kind of comfortable. And it was 2014. Right. So it was when we were kind of coming out of the back end of the awful credit crunch. So things are really picking up again. And the last firm I worked at, Maples, their corporate team really specializes in rapid scale, emerging, exciting tech companies. And so I loved working with them so much that I decided I wanted to move in house. So I finished up in private practice when the pandemic hit, which was a pure coincidence, and I took a few months off and then I did some consulting for a very small east coast based private equity firm. So that was really good experience in terms of there was only five people, including me. Right. So that was really good experience for two reasons. One, shaking off my private practice baggage as I describe it, you know, stopping every sentence saying, oh, but I'm not an employment lawyer, I don't know, you know, and two, learning how the US market works and what's kind of normal and typical over there. Because, you know, as it turns out, so many exciting Irish companies are gaining massive traction in the U.S. like times where I work, for example, 90% of our customers are in the U.S. so that was really good experience. And then I saw the job at times advertised and I jumped at it. And as soon as I did my interview with the CEO Owen Hinchey, we just really hit it off. He really got all of the value that I was going to bring to this role based on, you know, from my non linear background. Because what you really need with your first legal hire kind of post series B is someone that's not too proud to redline a 20k contract, but also has kind of leadership now and acumen and isn't afraid of C suite and, but actually, you know, chat to the AES about their problems and stuff like that. So that was perfect for me. So I did that for a while and then I, after about three months I said to Owen, we need to, we either need to hire someone full time or if we're not ready to do that, we need to outsource. We need to start outsourcing and automating, right? So we need to start outsourcing to an alternative legal solutions provider. There's a terrific one in Ireland, Johnson Hannah. It's kind of similar to Law trades in the US and Axiom and all of the, all of those big ones. So we ended up engaging them and they're very good at what they do. And you know, we had a contractor that was ramped within three or four weeks, so he was just able to really help with, you know, end of quarters and that was terrific. But there was still so much admin heavy work that we were doing, like manually typing in our registered office to an NDA. You know, like the ultimate low value, thankless, boring work even at the GC level.

Right. When you're at a small company, you're doing everything.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely everything. And you know what? Initially that's okay for, for the first three months because it's a good way to understand the business and what people prioritize, what their kind of playbook strategy is commercially, who everyone is. And also honestly, NDAs aren't difficult to review. You can kind of turn them, some of them in minutes, you know, and that's a quick, when you're starting and trying to make an impression with everyone, but it's not scalable. Yeah, that's so, you know, I, because I was so, I was so blessed having so many kind of our customers are in the US market and I was following, you know, avidly following all of these creators on LinkedIn and these amazing, you know, legal tech vendors like Ironclad and all of the, and Bright Flag of course as well, like big advocates of legal operations. And you know, it just made so much sense to me to get technology especially because I work at an automation company myself. Right. So yeah, it's the value proposition that we sell. It's like you have to free up time of people that are, you know, whose time costs far more money so they can work on more high value work and not be bored and you know, want to quit. And the other thing too, and this is something you talk about a lot, is you can't just default to hiring headcount. That's not the answer anymore. You know, you can't just hire five junior lawyers to redline the same stuff day in, day out because they all quit within a year and you're not really providing with a career. You know, that's all stuff that can and should be replaced by technology.

So yeah, those are the two things that very quickly occurred to me. But the timing has to be right. Of course, especially with legal tech because you can't manage all that by yourself. Right. You have to have the people, processes, then the tech. You have to make sure you have the right people to support implementation and selection and rollout. So around about that time we were also hiring a junior lawyer who was two years qualified. She's three years qualified now, so a big part of her job and me, you know, together with me and the contractor that we used was ironclad implementation. So we, you know, we went to market, did load of demos the lot, lots of C CLM vendors.

And yeah, so the short the TLDR is I had a lot of support and help with selection and implementation. So it's been super successful. We're really cross functional, we're really into cross functional collaboration at times. So we have a really terrific commops team and deal desk and they were very heavily involved in the selection process as well and our finance team as well. So I was very lucky. But yeah, those are kind of the two things that immediately sprung to mind pretty much as soon as I started working here and was by myself and realized there had to be another way to scale this, this tiny bit mighty team without hiring people.

Yeah, I mean one of the reasons why I joined a CLM company is because I think that the impact that CLM can have is tremendous and probably more than any other legal tech solution. And that's why it's.

Yeah.

Oftentimes the place that people start and hearing more and more of like solo gcs who putting CLM in just to scale themselves. And that's, that's pretty incredible. You know you mentioned you, you have to be at the right stage where you can have support or have a team or teammates to help with all the work involved in both selection and implementation and then you know, getting it up and running and maintaining. Great to hear that you use contractors. I, you know, just want to put a plug in for the ecosystem. I just think this did not exist, you know, when I was starting out legal and the idea now that if you want to buy tech, if you want to implement tech, if you want to maintain it, administer it, you can actually get, you know, outside providers, companies flexible talent to come in and do that for you and for like a long time, I mean they can stick around and like be your system maintenance person, you know, kind of forever if you need them to be. So I think that's another great option that that exists.

Yeah.

One of the things you do talk about in some of your content is the kind of the tech roadmap, the CLM evaluation. And this is, you know where again I think you're fantastic because you went through it and you're like, well that was a lot of work and why don't I share what I've done with the world? And so I know you recently put out kind of your scorecard, your RFP template or what have you. Where can people find that? What is it? You know, how can people use it? And like what did you do to.

Create that yeah, absolutely. So the first thing you absolutely have to do before you even think about, you know, getting in touch with vendors to set up demos is sit down and figure out, do an audit, what is working, what's working well, what's not working at all whatsoever. What are the things that are really causing the business pain. Yeah, so I had, you know, kind of an internal tiger team and we very quickly. There were two things that were really obvious to me, right. One was order forms. So we were previously using Xero and the AES were generating their own order forms in Xero and you know, had free rein to kind of type whatever they wanted in those. And Xero, it's not really appropriate for that. It's an accounting system. So that was a pain point for Legal, for Deal Desk and for finance. And you know, this well, you know, the order form integration with your CRM is actually very nuanced because a lot of, you know, around all the pricing and anything bespoke it, it, you know, a lot of work goes into those. So that was kind of the heavier lift that was going to solve the most business pain points that we had across several functions. And then something that I thought what was kind of low, not a heavy lift, but high volume, was MNDAs. So I thought those are definitely the two workflows we need to kind of, you know, automate and build workflows in and get that done and dusted. But that all formed part of, you know, the business pain points. And those I would say were kind of two non negotiables as well. So that's kind of just on the straight sort of workflow pain points. Then you've got things like we really needed a backend repository. And I think that's especially important in rapid scale when you possibly have another funding round coming down the tracks very soon. You need to know where all your contracts are, you need them digitized, you need to track all those key obligations so that you can keep up with them from renewal dates to whether you've agreed to uncapped indemnities, you know, and potentially all this stuff you have to disclose on your next funding round. So that's really important as well in terms of managing risk and just being organized.

And then beyond that, you know, I kind of manually put together a scorecard with Deal Desk, you know, things like does it have out of the box integrations with the tech stack that we use, you know, with Salesforce with re signature platform and so on. Right. Does it have approvals workflows, does it have, you Know, can you use third party paper? That's a really obvious one. And isn't it incredible how things have moved on even since I started looking at CLM two and a half years ago that some vendors back then, you couldn't even use third party paper in the CLM system. So stuff like that. So we just, we built out this scorecard which, the one that I posted last week, I kind of have. It's a, it's more refined and developed than the one I used in. Or you know, it's a sort of a shorter version but. And I built it out since. But yeah, you, you have to really think about all these things and beyond that and something else I really want to do as my next bit of content is all of the questions you should be asking vendors during demos. Because it's all very well, looking at my scorecard and seeing does it have SSO or saml, you know, what does that mean? Question you need to ask. And yeah, so that's kind of where I started with the order, getting the buy in from the right internal stakeholders, figuring out budget, figuring out pain points and then going to market with all these amazing vendors that are out there.

So many, so many. Which is why I think what you're putting out there is so helpful to everyone who's like, where do I even start? What do I need to do? I also love that when you said you went to your stakeholders, you said what is causing them the pain versus what are your pain points? Right. Because we want to get to the root cause and change the process, not just automate what's already broken, but things have changed quite a bit and it is overwhelming. Did you do a sandbox at all or how did you just use kind of your scorecard? How did you.

Yeah, there is so much. And you know, we did put a few of the vendors through their paces. We did follow up demos with a couple of them. We did two or three. Well, one demo and what, maybe two demos and then two follow up conversations to ask the questions. Um, so what we found was it's a very time consuming process and obviously, especially in small legal teams, you only have minimum, you know, limited amount of time to commit to that. So we did the initial scorecard, we put through two vendors, through to the sort of final, and then did follow up demos with them and then kind of had additional things that we considered and then from there just bit the bullet and made a decision because time was kind of really, you know, I mean you have for months. Eventually, to the extent that there Are there is any, there's, you know, better next steps than that. I'd love to hear them. But we just that, you know, we kind of, we did sort of two rounds, the kind, the main one and then put through two vendors to the very last round. Yeah. And actually the other vendor that we didn't select, and I should call this out, one of the things that I down marked them on was everyone I spoke to during the process was a man. And they also made the assumption, even though I was on calls with me and you know, our head of commops, they sort of kept assuming that he was in charge of the budget and I wasn't.

Yeah.

You know, and so those things are also really important to me in vendors, you know.

Yeah, so that was one of the things that was just a big markdown. But also they were so fixated on this really sort of flashy part of their repository. And I kept asking, I was like, that's great, but I need to also see how the, you know, the kind of the contract redlining, all of that and collaboration works. And they kind of, they kept ignoring that question because, you know, to sort of focus on the flashy repository functionality. But yeah, so there's, it's not just about the tick box and all of those things. Sometimes there's the more nuanced stuff as well, like that. So.

Yeah, interesting. Yeah.

So actually maybe I did have a kind of a third set of criteria that I didn't put in the scorecard.

Yeah. And kind of relatedly, another thing you post a lot of content about is how important it is to report to the CEO. And kind of my next question was going to be about getting the buy in, getting the budget. How do you get people to, you know, to not just hire five more lawyers to say, you know, let's do this differently and to go along with your vision. Did you have trouble kind of selling your vision or was it always aligned and you know, what advice can you give to others and why. And I guess why is it important to report to the CEO at your stage?

Yeah. So I, because we work so cross functionally and because I was by myself for a long time when I was first hired, my pain points and the utter extent of low value manual needless work that I was doing was really obvious. And the strain that I was being put under to have to do that on top of the kind of proper legal work. So everyone was pretty very bought into.

Leveraging automation and technology.

In the right way at the right price point. And then, you know, Once I started kind of looking into the prices that, you know, they were very difficult to argue with versus hiring even one, you know, junior lawyer to redline contracts. So the value prop was especially obvious because we're also a no code automation platform. But I was, you know, I do report to the CEO. You know, we have a weekly one to one. It was something regular that was coming up in our one to ones. Sort of the ridiculous amount of time I was wasting on low value work.

And you know, that was, these were shared pain points as well with our VP of sales too. So I brought that person in, especially at the very front end of the conversations because they were completely aligned about what, how much time we were wasting and what a great idea CLM was. And some of our A's, especially the more experienced ones had come from large tech companies where they had used, you know, a clm, you know, vendor and they could use with their eyes closed and they were all bought into it. So. But that's definitely something you have to have multiple conversations with. And it comes down to that, that principle of communication that sometimes the message doesn't get through. We're all busy people. The message doesn't get through until you've repeated the same thing about six times with the same person. So you have to keep having those conversations. And then I think if you can show over a period of weeks and months that the same issues that are wasting money, you know, you're just throwing money down the toilet are happening. It's straightforward to get buy in. But you do have to put that business message that regularly put that business case together and speak to the right people.

What are some of the other reasons why you believe that the GC should have this direct line to the CEO and where else have they been reporting into?

So a lot of the time I hear they report into the CFO or the coo.

Oh yeah, I guess I have heard that too.

Yeah. And I guess I get the logic of that in the sense that certainly with CFOs were both sort of regulated professions, we've got similar goals and objectives. But I think that can actually turn you into the classic silo department of no. And you just fixated on compliance and going by the book, Whereas great modern GCs are throwing out the rule book. They're doing things very differently, especially in rapid scale where fast, you know, you have to deliver fast solutions and people just want business solutions.

So for me there are many reasons why GCs should report to CEOs. From a pure business perspective, it makes complete Sense you've got that direct line in to the ultimate decision maker in the business who oversees everything. And you can get in there and get out ahead of, you know, pure legal risk with that person if you have to. But also it does enable you professionally elevates you. You're reporting to the ultimate decision maker. They can really give you a seat at the table. They can.

You know, they make you see how they operate. Right. And it does, you kind of buzz off that energy and the way they do things. It does make you a much better business partner. You're a far more commercial reporting to the CEO than the CFO or CEO.

I couldn't agree more. I feel like the old sort of the old fashioned or the GC of yesterday that is more reactive. That is just the department of no, as you saw, you know, said and just taking kind of orders and doing the work as it comes in, it's less important. But the modern gc, what we're speaking about, the more strategic one, and there are very little roles, if not any other role better suited to see across the entire organization. I mean legal touches, the go to market side, the administrative sides, the finance sides, you know, all parts of the organization. And you're able to kind of, if you're doing your job well, know what's important to the leadership suite and the CEO and what's coming down for, for the rest of the company, externally, internally, wherever, and then be able to advise on that or even put yourself in a position to help achieve the goals of the CEO or their company. Yeah. In a way that you can't do if you're not like you said at the leadership table. And your voice is, you know, amplified.

Yeah. And I think also, you know, some CEOs don't realize how we can help them on the kind of legal business partner side unless we have that conversation with them. So one question I asked my CEO is like, what's keeping you up at night? What are you worried about? Be amazed. And I'm frequently astounded at the response to that question about something I had no idea that was going on, but that maybe is an easy fix for me or something. I can, you know, start messaging and start working on improving on the process end or you know, so it's really important for that reason too. But because they kind of helicopter over everything, it helps you want to do that as well. So yeah, it's just, it just makes the most sense to me. And I do think that you do just end up being more siloed if you don't have that kind of direct line into the ultimate decision maker in the business.

Yeah, well, and it changes the work that is done by you as well as your department. If again, if you're not getting visibility into the strategic direction of the company and you're only being reactive. And that goes to another topic you talk a lot about, which is burnout and you know, just the routine doing things over and over that add little value and have little impact. I mean, nobody wants to do that.

No. And look, you know, lawyers are, you know, we're all very hard on ourselves. We're used to kind of working long hours, the work being thankless a lot of the time. No. And you suddenly, when you're in this in house environment, of course it happens in law firms as well, but you have just practically virtually no resources compared to a big law firm when you're working in house.

And that, that can really catch up with you fast if you don't manage it. But yeah, so that's like, that's a topic I love talking about. And I'm starting to, since I started posting about it, I'm starting to see so many other in house lawyers and companies going out there and doing podcasts and webinars about this very topic. So, you know, we've all been there, we've all burnt out. And it's especially easy when you're in house because you're, you know, you've got virtually no resources, people don't really get your job. And that's mostly wonderful. I love working in house because I love working with non lawyers and innovators and creative people. I really buzz off that energy. But the downside is when you're under extreme pressure, particularly working with the sales team and you know, they're just trying to get their deals closed, but they don't really realize how much you've got on your plate and how fast you are, especially if you have like amazing service levels and you know, you turn things fast.

Yeah. And sometimes, you know, being micromanaged and pestered and if people don't follow processes that you've kind of carefully designed that are designed to make everything easier for everyone, that can all really get in on you quickly. So it's important to talk about it. It's important to try and, you know, tune into yourself, be self aware and try and know when you're starting to snap and when it's coming. But yeah, it's something that can just happen very easily in house if it's not managed. But there's just so many reasons why it happens. I could talk about this for about four hours.

Yeah, I agree. And is this something like. So you have this community, I mean we talked about. You have a ton of content that you're creating and I mean even LinkedIn is kind of a community. People talk and I feel like we have a community there. You have this other community with this lock channel and events that you do. The type of stuff that, that I guess it's not a GC community anymore, sort of in house community is talking about. What are some of the topics? Is it stuff like burnout, Is it tech roadmaps? Is it substantive GDPR type stuff? Or like what are people.

Yeah, it's a mix really. So people like to do the stuff that they need to. They like to hear about the stuff they need to hear about for CLE purposes. Right. And then beyond that, they love the more soft skills, business oriented topics like how to be a great business partner, how to market yourself internally, how to market yourself externally.

Yeah. And then things like how to run legal, like a business leveraging tech, leveraging legal operations, all of that kind of thing. So, so I say I've just listed it in the reverse order. It's probably first and foremost like how do I run legal like a business? And then after that, how do you know the business related personal topics and soft skills like how do I market myself internally? And then at the end it's the kind of the traditional stuff like what's happening with the AI act and what are the latest, what's the new acts happening? And you know, so those are the kind of, those are the things that people really want to learn about and get sort of free advice and help with.

Yeah. Are you finding, since they're all lawyers, are they willing to share and be open and vulnerable or is everyone kind of. I found it's, you know, it's Legal ops has done really well because we're all first timers making it up as we go along. So we really need each other. I have found sometimes the or communities that I've been a part of that are more lawyer heavy. People feel like they have to be experts on everything and there's a little bit of, you know, being nervous about showing vulnerability or the fact that you don't know what you're doing anyway. That was a lot. Again, I asked really long questions. Long winded questions. No, I know what I mean, Mary. Yes.

Yeah, it takes time. I do find at in person events where we say it's kind of all confidential, feel free to speak freely then people do speak freely. Especially if it's an evening event with a glass of wine, you know, slack group and that kind of thing. Yeah, people do. So, you know, sort of qualified lawyers as opposed to legal ops professionals do find it hard to open up, I think because like you said, we're all, it's all ingrained in us to be perfectionists and know everything off the top of our head when of course the reality, the job is the complete opposite. And I do think maybe a lot of in house lawyers are a little bit shy or have become shy just because of the way we've been. You know, we were conditioned in private practice and when we're training and so on, you know, it's like keep your mouth shut until you're told you're allowed to open your mouth, you know.

Exactly. Right. That the training. That's right, absolutely.

Yeah. Then listen, it's just all part of the system. But yeah, people are getting there. But, but you're absolutely right. They, there is a shyness or reluctance to just open up. And maybe it's also coming from feeling like they've got this duty of confidentiality to whoever they're working for, you know, and they have to be respectful of that. So provided the kind of the said that the, the, the setup is right, so you know, when it's in person and it's, it's a private sort of confidential discussion group, you know, Chatham House rules or whatever, then people are okay to open up. But yeah, I think that's an evolution too though. I think, you know, as time goes on, people will just feel like they can be more vulnerable or discuss things a little bit more without worrying that they're going to be disbarred.

Yeah, well, I think that's a tribute to the success of the community that you've built because it is knowing the audience and knowing the culture and knowing the right environment in which to foster, you know, real conversations and collaboration. So. So good for you. You also mentioned AI as a topic that's out there. I'm always curious, you know, what is the sentiment in Ireland? I know what it is in the US very well. But how are, is it Hot topic? Is everyone talking about it and how are people feeling?

Super hot topic for two reasons. Firstly, because of the enormous potential and how exciting generative AI in particular is moving forward. And two, because we have this AI act coming down the tracks from the EU, so that'll be in force, the start 2025 that everyone just needs to start getting prepared for. Now, you know, GDPR already has a suite of regulations and rules around AI. Fine. But this, you know, newly categorized as generative AI, it's very sort of risk based. It's all about what, what AI are you using or providing and what level of risk, you know, does it have and just to get compliant and be ready for that. So. But mostly, in fact, the last ITGC session we did was on AI, generative AI. And yeah, the general sentiment is excitement. You know, if you can replace all of that sort of low value work with tech, including AI, go for it. Why not? I don't think it's come to steal our souls or our brains.

We can, you know, we don't have to let the tail wag the dog. But yeah, absolutely. Ireland is as excited as the US and any other country when it comes to the power of AI. Absolutely.

Yeah. It's still early days too. I mean, are you hearing any. There's definitely excitement. Are you hearing any when actually using it from the legal side yet?

So, yeah, I think so. For example, legal Intake Solutions and also the likes of. Of what else? Yeah, mostly kind of for stuff like that. But I think the sense I'm getting is still, it's like most people are waiting for someone else to move first before they leverage it. So I think that will just play out pretty fast soon. But people are still generally being quite hesitant.

Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Well, the U.S. there's definitely, you know, the first movers who are adopting and finding really good results. So I think that'll just trickle over as it takes time to usually do.

Yes, exactly. And you're like, you've built it into your product too, right?

Yeah.

Generative AI. Yeah.

ChatGPT. Yeah, yeah. Front end, back end, all over the place. So yeah, yeah, it's a lot of fun. Anything else you want to share before we sort of wrap up over here?

I don't think so. I've shared a lot. I feel like I did all the talking.

I'm sorry, you have so many jobs. I mean, of course we have to hear from all aspects of what's going on with you. I have to get to Ireland at some point. I've actually never been there and I know that the tech community is growing. The legal tech interest and the legal operations world is growing there is that you're feeling that as well?

Yeah, absolutely. And I attend GC conferences in Europe, you know, so GC's from France and Spain and Italy and we're still a little behind the US in terms of being the kind of early adopters of Legal ops. Now, I know it's very nascent, you know, generally globally, everywhere.

Yeah.

Obviously the US is a lot more ahead of the curve than anywhere else, as far as I can tell. So there's still a bit of educating around what it is, why it's critical regardless of legal team size and just kind of challenging some of the assumptions about it. Like, for example, the. It's something that only very large companies with very large legal teams can afford. You know, just stuff like that. And. Yeah, but no, you absolutely have to come over to Ireland. We have an amazing tech scene here. We've got great corporation tax rates, we have a ton of talent. All of the kind of big tech firms and social media giants have their immediate headquarters here. Yeah, the. The area that I live in is kind of dubbed the sort of mini Silicon Docks. And it's honestly, it's a melting pot. You know, just so many kind of. You go into coffee shops, people speak in so many different languages. It's wonderful. Yeah. So, and I'm sorry I'm missing clock Amia, I want to try and make it over to the big one in Las Vegas next, next May, hopefully. May.

Yeah, we'd love to have you. Yeah, no, I've been meaning to get over there. We, Google had a huge presence obviously in Dublin as well, and I had a lot of colleagues I worked with a bit and with a name like Mario Carol, which is probably the most Irish name that exists out there. Yeah, I used to confuse a lot of folks when we got on the video conference where they're like, I think I'm in the wrong room. I'm like, nope, that's me. Very Irish.

I mean, I have to say I do feel like I've only scratched the surface with, you know, Legal Ops and legal Tech and that kind of. I did an event last summer on it and really we've only. We're only. It's only the tip of the iceberg here for Ireland. So I just feel like there's going to be so much scope to do bigger events and so much appetite for that as well. So we'd love to have you anytime.

Well, I'd love to do it. Like you said earlier, it's so fun to get out there and educate and share the knowledge so that everyone can get up to speed faster. So would love to do that. Well, thank you, Sarah, for your time and for being here. That was such a fun conversation.

Yeah, it was great to chat to you and tell you all about my three jobs.

Awesome. Well, to all the folks out there. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Thank you, everyone. Thanks, Mary. Bye.

Thanks.