#43 - Creating Buy-In and Driving Efficiency with Anna Richards

Hello everybody. I'm Mary o', Carroll, Chief Community Officer at Ironclad, and you're listening to Pearls on Gloves Off. Today our guest is Anna Richards. Anna is John Deere's Director of Global Legal Operations. In this role, she leads the legal operations team in its efforts to transform their organization into a truly modern, tech enabled, data driven function. As you'll learn in the episode, we're catching anna only about 90 to 100 days into her new role at Dear, but prior to that, Anna has over 15 years of experience in legal operations, including stints at Autodesk, Zendesk and Micron Technology. I find it's always nice to get perspective from people who've done the role in different settings because we all know that no two Legal Ops roles are the same and while they're always challenging, there are things that you can do differently to set them up for success. In my experience, every GC or CLO really wants to find and hire a Legal Ops person because they've heard of all the incredible impact that this role can have. They come in with high expectations, which is great, but then they don't necessarily invest in the role the way that they should. In order to reap the benefits of the Legal Ops function, you really have to scope the role correctly, hire it in at the right level, hire someone with true strategic and business acumen, and then be on top of all that, willing to invest in tech tools, support headcount vendors, and whatever else is needed to set up the function to become a department of the future. Here we talk about Dear, how they took their time in establishing this role correctly, and what you have to do to get this right. If you're out there considering hiring someone or creating this function, please do listen carefully to what I think is a masterclass in creating the role in the right way. Anna is primarily based out of her home office in the San Francisco Bay Area in California, while much of the rest of the Deer team is headquartered in Molina, Illinois. We talk about how she's able to still build real relationships and make progress despite being one of the few remote employees. I for one am really excited to watch what this team is capable of doing in the years to come and hope that we can all learn from them. With that, onto the episode. Hey Anna, how are you? It's good to see you.

Hey Mary. So good to see you too.

So fun to have you on the podcast. I know you and I chatted before. I consider you my granddaughter of Legal Ops because we have to share this story just as we Start because you started your Legal Ops career. Your first role in Legal Ops was at Autodesk and you reported to the head of Legal Ops who was someone that I had trained in Legal Ops at my team at Google. So by proxy you're kind of my granddaughter in Legal Ops.

Well, you were always this mythical sort of Legal Ops G like set standard like oh my gosh, if Mary has said it, it is now bible in our world and very important. And knew your name is one of the first things I learned. So it's really exciting to be in a position to be able to, you are in my career, have learned from you, be where I am, to be able to talk to you now and yeah, hopefully continue to grow that. But it's been so much fun and yes, it was a lot of passing on through the kind of not generations, but you know, the hiring, hiring, tenure.

Totally, totally. Well, your career has been quite magnificent. And so you've done now Legal Ops at four different companies. So it was Autodesk and then Micron, then Zendesk and now most recently at Deere, which is that what John Deere calls himself now?

It's just Deere, dear. We go by Deere. I think John Deere will always be. Yeah, standing. And Micron was actually where it was prior to Deere. So I stayed in tech for a little bit. So did the desks Autodesk send us which was great. And then moved into a space that you know, felt like a change of pace for me to operate at scale. So wanted to see what kind of big company life was like. And now at Deere have found this space that has a nice combination of sort of this tech minded, hungry for best in breed, continued innovation, but also the support of these mature systems and resourcing which has been really fun to start to get to know.

Yeah. And Deere is just another one. I feel like we've had this series of sort of old school companies that have reinvented themselves and you know, I always say every company nowadays is a tech company. Yeah. You know, Deere, we all think of like agricultural equipment, but I think it's come a long way since then, right?

Oh yeah, they're doing amazing things. I mean that was my initial reaction. Looking at this posting as well, I was like tractors. But what they're actually doing is incredibly cutting edge with autonomous vehicles, you know, AI crop identification and then all of the ways that we're mechanizing internally to support our customers. But it is really neat to be part of something that's very Close to an actual tangible output, both in terms of the machines we make, but the things that those machines do. So to move from sort of this imaginary world, at least to me, of tech into something that you can kind of hold in touch is really fun.

And what's been so cool in seeing companies like yours though, is that because they're modernizing their products and services, they're realizing that the entire company, which oftentimes is like 100 or plus years old, they've got to modernize their internal operations and such. And of course, legal is one of those areas that needs to be disrupted and modernized. And as you know, I was speaking with the Deere legal team quite a bit before they created this role and helping them scope it. And I was really excited when they landed on you, and you obviously started there recently. And what you said to me was that you were really excited about the way they set up the role and that you really felt, you know, you were set up for success. And that is so important. And I don't know, I kind of want to say rare, but maybe rare is not the right word, but, you know, it's hard to get it right. So if you don't mind sharing kind of what was it about the way the role was set up in I guess your recruiting process as you heard about it and then now that you're there, you know, has been validated to you?

Yeah, 100%. And I think I would echo the rare. I certainly don't have, you know, the largest breadth of experience, but my sort of, in a nutshell was joining a team where, you know, it was effective but maybe not incredibly impactful without a lot of screw turning and sort of internal politicking being a kind of army of one, which was amazing, but, you know, kind of fighting my own way forward, joining a team that wasn't empowered by leadership and had to sort of score scrimp for every like, bit of like ground to gain. And now to walk into this role where the team has done everything from, you know. Well, let me give you the breakdown, right? They partnered with a consultant to figure out where are opportunities. We think we want this thing called legal ops. What does that mean? Where would that impact the team? So they went and they did a survey across the department to say, what efficiencies could we gain? Came back with, I think a hundred thousand hours identified of just these can either be, you know, right size with process technology, automation. So that's a business case to start putting together right there. They also have some huge initiatives that are tied to company objectives. So again working to be this tech company which I think enables some sort of SaaS model. And we have a goal to be 10% recurring revenue by 2030. So in order to do that we need things like CLM and these very legal driven but cross functional and enterprise wide impactful project. So who's going to lead that? And I will say that my colleagues at this company are the kindest and smartest people I've ever had the pleasure to work with. And that combination is amazing and it's empowered so much. And that said, they put in the sweat equity to get this position created and this team created. So right they had this survey output with the sort of business case with the savings and the efficiencies that were coming in as well as, you know, these things like what are we going to do with technology? How do we prepare ourselves to be the legal department of the future? Who's thinking about these things? How are we organizing it? They went on a sort of roadshow not only within legal, which is about 300 folks globally. So it's a big team to wrangle and sort of get pointed in the right direction, but all the way up to the C suite. The CEO signed off on this plan and this program and to champions within the business. And so we had people who were coming up to me, you know, I, I barely was connected to like understanding the whole background and the genesis of this role and excited about the responsibility that this team would be taking on. The other thing that I'll say was a really key input was a business transformation that had happened a little bit prior to my arrival, but which had enabled the formation of this team which is really in alignment with it to this agile transformation. And so as groups have functions like operations to align to SCRUM teams, you get these resources in a way that you never would have been able to partner with it before. And I think, you know, my experience and a lot of my colleagues experience has been fighting for any sort of time on an IT team's calendar, let alone roadmaping. And at this point I have a product manager who is first of all I will always ask for a product manager from now until forever never have had the privilege to work with someone who's dedicated in that way in ops and legal ops. And she's amazing both with experience at dear but also the work that she does. And through her we're aligned to a five person SCRUM team called the Justice League that that supports legal tech stack and the initiatives that we want to get done. We still have to partner with the enterprise resources for road mapping and the larger scale implementations or new APIs or things like that. But our skillset is deep with this team and it's really neat to have those resources aligned.

That tech team, that whole partnership already existed before your role obviously in legal ops was formalized.

It did but only barely. So it's brand new. You know I met with RIT leader as part of the interview process talk to her to make sure that there was alignment in the way that we were thinking about legal tech stack and tech generally and where the enterprise is going and where we call legal GLSG Global Law Services Group at dear so if I switch up acronyms that's what that means. But yeah wanted to make sure that technology partnership was clear and effective and is something where product manager has daily standups with their scrum team. They're working on different sprints. We're closely aligned on what we're working on but it really has matured the function in terms of our roadmaping thinking where I'm now hiring for process and automation specialist who we already have tech kind of like nuts bolts and major initiatives covered. Let's go do the new innovative stuff and somebody who's purely focused on bringing that into the team. So I've skipped over some steps Mary but that's so I've got the interview process I think you'd asked me about but hearing how well the team had kind of set this up and tell my manager all the time So I report into our corporate secretary head of corporate so not the GC which was an interesting sort of positioning. I was something that you know was a bit of a flag wanting to make sure that I was impactful in the work that I was going to be able to do and having seen that been roadblocked with reporting structure before but because my manager was the one who sort of led the charge on this innovative new team and because there was such a close relationship with our general counsel and because she was so bought into legal operations it felt very comfortable to come in and you know take it knowing that there was a growth path for me and that the impact that I wanted to have at this point in my career was there and to be working at the scale of the company it ended up making sense for me and the reason that I moved forward with it. But I tell him all the time how spoiled I feel in this role. Like the team is excited. I think there's always change management but they're change Adept and excited about it. There's buy in across my business partners and stakeholders. We got walked onto two really sexy projects. So we're doing CLM implementation enterprise wide and we're doing this efficiency kind of recapture. Our slogan is on our way to 50K. So we've committed to 50,000 hours of savings by 2026. Wow. And we're getting to lead the charge on brand new stuff. My function is brand new here. We had a whole kickoff in January to launch globally. I told you. We have our product manager who's here. She sits in Moline, so she's a visible presence for the team, which is great. I'm working from San Francisco, Sausalito, but San Francisco area. My other team member at the moment is our kind of data and metrics guru who's in charge of all of our dashboarding. I've just made a hire for an outside counsel, strategy and spend manager. So that'll be a new function to bring into the team which they are like drooling for. And I think I'm super excited because that's going to be a role that not only informs how our partnerships go with our kind of like biggest levers to pull with spending, but really talks about how are we going to move work through the department. How we think about our LSP is how we think about roles and responsibilities internally, who does what, when, why. It's going to really mature our business acumen to be able to tell our story so much better. And then this final role that I have for FY24, which ours ends in October, is going to be for this process and automation specialists. So again, looking for somebody to come in and sort of really take over the really cool advanced technology arm and strategy within the team. So excited to partner with that and see what comes of it.

That's amazing. There's so many things I want to touch on and go back to. Okay, let me organize my thoughts. But number one, I wanted to comment on the fact that you are not reporting to the general counsel, which you know, I know we always tell everyone the best practice is that this role is created to report to the general counsel. Now I've also said publicly that's best practice. That doesn't mean it always makes sense for every single organization. And I'm a big believer that it still can work as long as you set it up correctly. So in larger organizations, I think if it's a small organization, you've got to be with the GC because you can't be too far. I mean if small. But in a larger enterprise organization such as the one you're in, the GC or the CLO already has a ton of responsibilities. And if there is somebody who is passionate, who is excited, has been thinking about this for a long time. As the deputy, I think it makes great sense for the legal ops leader to report into that role. But that's because there is an intention, there is an understanding. What I don't like to see is when it just gets shoved under a miscellaneous person because that person doesn't have as much report. So that person has bandwidth or, you know, doesn't have as much scope as the other deputies. So let's just shove legal ops in there. That is where I don't think it is set up for success. And you know, oftentimes we see them just kind of flailing because they don't have. They're not set up properly to get into the leadership suite. So I think the way that you're set up is great. And you've already said that it's working well for you.

Yeah, it's working very well. And to your point, the intentionality was very much there. Also, the passion that I have from my manager about the work that we are doing is what will drive this. I have full confidence so huge that he is representing everything that we care about at every level that he's interacting with. He's been key in introducing me to business partners. I have the buy in and honestly that's a big part of my job too, is to continue to build on the momentum that he's started me on, is continue to build those bridges across the business, continue to show the value. You know, he's teed me up and it's my turn to sink the basket. I'm probably mixing sports metaphors, but you know what I'm trying to say.

But that means that person is exactly the perfect person for you to be reporting to because he or she is introducing you, getting stuff out of the way, you know, making sure everyone knows how important it is. So that's fantastic. The other thing I wanted to touch on is the idea of the product manager. And you said, from now on, you know, I'm going to insist that I have a product manager. Tell us a little bit more about what that means in the context of legal ops.

Yeah, well, I have always, you know, technology is inextricably linked to the operations space and it's something we need to understand, have a good handle on, be working to manage the care and feeding of it is sort of, you Know, it depends on who's on your team. Like maybe it's something we own internally, maybe it's something that's outsourced to it, maybe it's something you make. I've been in roles where I make a point to make sure that it owns it because my team doesn't have the skill set or resources of like hours available to manage it. So to have somebody who's in our tech stack intimately acquainted with not only the sort of require the technical requirements but also interfacing with the people who are doing the work to keep it up and running and now working through RFPs and thinking about, you know, long term strategy around build, you know, her job is to understand the mechanics of what it takes to get it in running. If it makes sense given where the industry is going, given where that kind of space and tech is going, how, you know, it might fit in against other things that the enterprise already has and we could just make better use of, you know, certainly the trimming and streamlining. But really this optimization effort, which, you know, we're coming in slowly, we've got, I'm not sure everybody would agree with my statement on that. I feel like we're moving fairly conservatively. We're like sort of finding opportunities in E Billing, for example, which isn't directly under me quite yet, but we're working on getting the bits and pieces there and I think that we'll move in that direction as we kind of continue at least for the technology, seeing the opportunities for optimization, getting involved with the vendor partnerships and a way that, you know, might not have happened otherwise, making sure that the troubleshooting is happening. So we service our customers well. You know, our global team is set up to Elliot's not our only point of contact, but through her we've got somebody who could answer the question whether it be on the Scrum team, the vendor or her, she helps to raise the issues that we're seeing and be the canary in the coal mine. And it's just been absolutely indispensable as we're getting into this enterprise wide CLM effort, as we're thinking about roles, requirements, what we should be looking at. And she brings just such a breadth and depth of experience in using tools, herself tools and technology that she can be sort of that first pass.

So what is her background if people want to hire someone like this? Where did she come from?

Oh my gosh. Elliot's a magical, sparkly unicorn. I don't even know what to say. Like she, she has been all over and Everything from like sort of customer service to it, to like different kind of roles within deer particularly. I think people move around in deer for they can be for their whole career. But she has a background in like film and some of them were kind of creative work and I'm going to butcher it. When she listens to this, she's like, you totally left things out. But yeah, so I.

But not legal. And that's legal.

This is her first standing job in legal, which is interesting and worth calling out. So it's really the adeptness, the attitude and the she comes with just such a deep skill set in all of our kind of enterprise tools and suites and then knows how agile methodology works and partners very well with our Scrum team. So that's a huge asset as well.

And how do you think. Because I think it is this role that you're describing as a product manager is different from what is traditionally called a project manager, or even what I often think is really important on teams is a program manager. Are these different in your.

Yeah, it's a great question. And honestly in my head I've had another title with that, which is just sort of legal technologist. And like somebody who's going to kind of come in and own this. I think the project manager, yes, is definitely discreet from a product manager. Owning a project is going to have a beginning and an end and there's going to be materials created along the way that are hopefully organized and usable and stored appropriately. And there's lots of stakeholder management. Change management is different than project management, but that is a piece of it that's considered. And there's a communication arm which again is woven in, but could be a whole separate thing. But thinking about these discrete beginning and endings versus a product manager, where there is a tie to a particular tool or tool set, where it's about how do we bring in the right thing, make sure that it continues to be the right thing, optimize it for what we have, understand the use cases, know when to say no. A big part of what we're facing right now is the frankensteining we've done of our own technologies. So now it's something that vendors can't even support support us with, where, you know, we've customized it too much so we when it breaks, it's on us. And which is not a good space to be, especially with best practices with our, you know, IT counterparts. So working to make sure there's alignment across the business. I don't know that I can speak eloquently to Program manager. That to me I think is another level above where a product manager might be something where there's multiple product managers under that program manager is how I've kind of seen it, but not something I've interacted with super intimately.

Yeah. Okay, interesting. Okay, next question. I had given your. How many, how long have you been there now at Deer? Not very long.

Just over 90 days. I think I'm into my like three digit day count at this point. Yeah. Okay.

That's crazy because we're gonna get into kind of the first 90 days, but you're already adding headcount and you're already building more of a team and that is really hard. I mean, you just said, you know, previously you've been party of one for, you know, how long. We've, we all started as party of one for a really long time. And then getting additional headcount, the first one, the second one, the third one is hard, sometimes impossible, you know, and we end up relying on vendors. If we can get the budget, if we can get the headcount, great. What was that journey like for you? Were you already told when you showed up that you would have a bucket of headcount or did you have to fight for it? Like, how does this happen so quickly?

Tell us your secret. I wish I had a secret. My secret is I picked an awesome team to join. Honestly, this is what I mean when I say I'm spoiled. I walked in and they had made a business case not only for the function and for my role, but to say for this person to succeed as a head of legal ops at Deer, these are the resources that they need. And they had gone to that. And we had the allocation set aside for the headcount salaries for these other roles. So I'll have two, two net new roles plus Elliot came out of that, my product manager plus me. So this team that was non existent at the beginning of the year, we're going to have a legal ops week in June with all five of us hopefully in seat and hired. And that's all thanks to how they set up the business case and where they were able to get the buy in. I will also say that business case, yeah, it was a multi year process and you know, it wasn't super fast. But you know this because they brought you in and they talked to lots of people. They did their homework. Like I said, kind smart, super smart. But it's so wonderful to really see people. And even as we've had, you know, deers going, you know, out into the economy like everything else everybody's looking at, like, how do you save money? How are we being conservative with things where we need to be? And I think that there's always a risk of, yeah, you can say you get headcount, but are those dollars guaranteed? And again, to the credit of my leader, who's going into meetings and saying, we, we know this hasn't been filled yet, and if we really are going to do what we got approval to do, that we need to stick to the plan and we're not willing to sacrifice these allocated headcounts. So, yeah, that's still moving fast, though. I'm not going to guarantee it.

But yeah, you got to move fast when you have headcount because you never know when someone's going to take it away. So I always tell people, as soon as you get it higher, higher, fast.

Exactly right.

This gives me so much hope and thank you for being here and telling the story, because one of my missions in life is to make sure that we continue to educate general counsels and closing about what this profession is, what this role is and how to set it up properly. And the fact that there's a company out there that thoughtfully, for a long time, you know, thought about what they wanted out of this role, what the impact they wanted out of it to be, and setting it up such that, you know, this person could come in, hire the right person first of all, but also set them up so that they could have the resources to run quickly and to have an impact quickly versus, you know, oh, we're gonna dip our toe in it, figure out how it goes for the first year, see if there, you know, anything good comes out of it. And we all know some of these projects, like CLM at a company of your size takes a very long time and there's a lot of stakeholders and you can't expect someone to come in and in 90 days, you know, be able to show some value unless they're given resources and Runway and the ability to make decisions and to learn and do all that. So just a huge pat on the back to the folks at Deer for doing this correctly. And I hope that this is a model for others and other GCs CLOs. If you're thinking about this and wanting to do it correctly, please look at Deere as a model for this. You know, I'm going to volunteer you to speak with Anna.

Happy to. Yeah.

Or anyone at Deere, because I think that the thoughtfulness behind it really is going to pay off in the long run. And look, everyone's going through a tough economy and everyone's thinking about how to transform. And the easiest thing to do is just cut. But what is really the right thing to do is to be smart about where you're investing because of, like you said, the fifty thousand, the hundred thousand hours that can be saved. That is a huge impact for a very small investment of, you know, of this team's time. And that's just what you can do. You know, before, what did you say, 20, 25 or 26 or whatever?

26, yeah.

Yeah, the year is right. And then it doesn't stop there. There's more value to be gained. So just. It's great. And I want to now go back to. You've only. You've just told us a million things that you're working on, kind of all the scope of the role. And you've only been there, you know, 95, a hundred days or so. Yeah, most people start their 90 days going in and listening and learning, which I'm sure was a big part of what you did. But again, you're able to start running A, because of your background, you know, because they hired the right person who has experience, but B, because they get it, you know, they set it up successfully. They're introducing you to the right people, helping everyone understand the importance of what's. What's happening. So, yeah, I guess walk us through the first 90 days. How did you prioritize? Did they come in with, here are the things that we want you to work on, or was it Anna, come in and tell us what you think?

Yeah, a little bit of both. You know, it's. Yes, listen, learn huge piece of my life. And I don't think I've had a blank spot on my calendar for three months. Right. Like it's been intros and just asking questions and everybody always tells you to do this, but we. Why do we do it that way? And so it's been really interesting to sort of figure out the landscape here. I will say Deere has been doing legal ops. They've just been doing it via committee. So for me coming in, I have these sort of discrete areas to look to, to say, okay, how far have you been able to take the ball down the court? Does it make sense to continue to engage? Should we. I mean, my function is here to centralize this. This work. So you get efficiencies of scale. That way we have a ability to disperse it globally. We have ability to standardize, we have ability to pull data, and that data is power. And all of this good stuff with it, but sort of figuring out how far things had gotten, where opportunities existed and then being really vocal. I mean I sit remotely in a company that's gone back to the office four days a week and it's a very tight knit community where people might be there their entire career. Right. So I have to be pretty loud, I have to be pretty engaged.

Luckily it's hard.

Well, yeah, luckily this is just sort of my personality for. And that's helpful in this scenario.

But it is a lot of, it's.

A lot of on time and then, yeah, then you have to start maybe deciding where you want to pull some like levers to move things around and it's start doing things differently. You know, enough and you've seen enough at this stage in your career to say I, I know there's a better way to do this. Let's look at, let's look at it a little bit differently. And some of it was seeded like we knew the CLM project was happening. I got brought in to, you know, put some focused effort on it and to direct that to move forward because it's been, oh gosh, it's just been so much work for so many people for so long and it's now at a point where it's becoming very critical to complete. And so my team gets to focus on that like pretty solely versus having everybody do that in addition to their massive day jobs. Right. So I knew that was there and I knew there was this 50,000 hour goal. There was no prescription on how we would get there and you know, there were all these people to meet. So those things were sort of what I knew walking in. We also, and I've done this in different ways and you know, Mary, I'm curious as to your thoughts, but you need to somehow understand what the department, department cares about, where they see the opportunity. It's well and good to hear that there's all of this time that they've identified to save. But what exactly is that comprised of? How do we start actioning that? How do you compile a list of it? What are you doing to recapture and like document those savings along the way? So my team launched and again credit to the team that set us up. This was in process before I came in, but launched something they called the idea Funnel, which is a SharePoint form that brings in kind of crowdsourced ideas from the global GLSG team to my team to then say these are where we think we see opportunities for improvement. Can you please help? Basically, which it's wonderful and we get insight and we learn things and it facilitates conversation. And now we have to triage it and manage it and assign it and close it out and make sure communication is happening and all of that good stuff. It's great to be working with ideas that are kind of coming in naturally and through that finding things like, oh, we are thinking about doing a global rollout of E Billing, but nobody's had conversations with AP about forgoing pos. I'm going to volunteer really hard for that because I think it's super important and would add a lot of value to the way that people do work in our systems. You know, finding those things, identifying our priorities, in addition to the kind of big rocks I knew we had to move on has been a lot of juggling. We set our okrs, my team for the first, they do it quarterly here. I set mine for the next two because we needed a little bit more Runway on the stuff that's in flight. And then we're working through the quick wins. And honestly that's what this next couple hires are going to get us moving on is show the value. I already, I know it's only been 100 days and I mean this in a great way. It feels much longer than that. And I am very acutely aware of the need to start demonstrating value. Like what's in it for me? We heard all this hoopla and we've met you and apparently we're investing and growing your team. So like how is this impacting me in a real way? And you know, the money and the technology are generally the places that you follow to find the like impactful items, at least for like shorter term probably generally. But yeah. So my spend manager and my process and automation catalyst will augment the work my other team and myself are already doing to to start showing the value quickly. But working through our kind of seated team suggestions, finding our own along the way that, you know, I'm making the case to put on our kind of big rock bucket and then the big chunky okrs around CLM Enterprise support hiring. We're also doing a lot of work with AI and advanced technology internally. We don't use like external stuff. We have our own, we have deer AI and we have a team internally that's running sort of the AI ideation and application workstream for the company. And so that is very much top of mind, something the team is very curious about. So facilitating workshops around that too. Oh, I guess the other thing I would mention and just get on soapbox about this, you can do all this. And again I sit remote. I'm not like in the office with people. It maybe doesn't touch everybody's day to day. So how the heck are they going to know what we're doing? We have to tell them. And so coming up with some sort of communication mechanism has been huge. I came up with two that we're using for my team. It's, it's pretty simple. I have an allergic reaction to newsletters. Again, it's just, you know, an intake system. You now have to deal with it and keep it updated and maybe people look at it or not. So you want to be careful about what you commit to. But we have an executive summary slide that we send out that's just sort of the quick hits of information and we do one for clm. So we have a project update slide and then we have a team update slide that shows like this is what's Ops been up to. This is where we're going in terms of our savings. These are some of the ideas we have. This is how you can get in touch with us. This is our SharePoint page. We built our SharePoint page too. That was another thing for the communications mechanism. So people know where to find us, they know what's going on. We're sending that out, we're establishing our brand. We've got a tone that's different than maybe the rest of the department. I don't know. I think we're like the super fun cool team, but I'm biased.

So the communication is really key. I'm curious as you've defined yourself, so as you've already mentioned, all the stuff that you're focused on is really big, meaty, high priority, move the needle type stuff. You're not, and I don't know what's coming into your request list that, you know, maybe that has like little stuff. And I know that the plight of legal ops, we're always like, that's not what we do. You know, we're trying to work up here. We're trying to be more bigger impact projects. When you have written up your communications of. Here's our exec summary. Here's the stuff we do work on, here's when to get in touch with us. Are you consciously kind of putting that out there? If we're here to solve big meaty problems, we're not just, you know how I always say the back office to the back office.

Yeah, it's a great question. And yes, same so aligned on that and so conscious of this. We're not administrative we're not sort of like, we're skilled strategic partners with the team. And, yeah, that's a hundred percent in mind with the way that we're communicating out. The things that we're highlighting are the highly strategic objectives. Again, I'm walking onto a team that is so excited to have this partnership at this level. This morning we had a strategic team meeting, you know, with the standing strategy team. We have a new Cielo, who just started. We're going to have a meeting to present with her, and I'm leading that. So I'm taking over the strategy team, which is their conscious effort to position legal operations in a way that is going to feed the vision that we have for where this department is going with the team. So that's really, again, that just speaks to those type of people that I've hitched my wagon to, which I'm feeling very happy about.

Yeah, that's so good. It's so good.

Yeah. And the comms, you know, making sure that those are highlighted. And also, it's good to have this little bit outside in perspective. I. It's not that I assume everybody knows what Legal Ops is, but once you have your title and your people in place and you've sort of done your announcement, you sort of think people get it. And we really need to do a definition of. This is Anna. This is her job title. This is the things she's responsible for. And these are the rules for my whole team. I'm building that as a deck, as part of. It's nice to kind of have the timing with the new Cielo right now. I've got enough to be dangerous, and I know the questions that are coming in, and she's going to like. Her getting onboarded is going to prompt me to do some of this good, hygienic. Get your team's roles, responsibilities, and leveling defined. So that'll be a piece of it. That'll be up front and center on our SharePoint page when it's there.

That's so important. I mean, I always say, define yourself before they define you for you. You know, you don't want them. Them to tell you what they expect from your team. Your situation. Sounds great. Now there's your whole team that's brand new. You've got a clo who's brand new. You've got this big, loud. I don't know what you would call it. Goal that's, you know, save 50,000 man hours. These are really exciting things for someone like you or me, who really loves change and Transformation. These are very terrifying things for someone who's been enrolled for, let's say, 20, 20 years. I guess the tough question is, it sounds like you've walked into a perfect, you know, utopia for Legal Ops. But I think every situation in Legal Ops is really hard, is really challenging. And you know, a company like Gear probably has attorneys who have been enrolled for 20 plus years and are happy in the way that they do things. Is any of this threatening to folks? I'm sure the answer is yes, but I would like to hear that from you. And you know, is there resistance, pushback, or is everyone really that happy and excited to see change? Someone comes and tells you they're going to save 50,000 man hours. I mean, that begs the question of either great, what fun work do we get to do when we free up all our time? Or does that mean cutbacks?

Totally. Yeah, totally. Well, I'm sure it's not quite as utopian as the picture I'm painting. This is again, I think a personality trait is a dish. No, no, I think you're walking in.

You'Re walking into an amazing setup.

I agree.

The job is never going to be easy. I mean, you can be set up for success. It's still going to be hard.

Totally still hard. Oh yeah. And that, don't mistake my enthusiasm and positivity for it being easy. By no means am I saying that. And you know, to your point, yeah, change is hard and scary always. I have put my foot in it a couple times already actually. And what I'm finding is that at least in terms of how I've been interacting with people, this culture, one, it's not like the tech world where they pull the lever of layoffs every single time headwinds happen. So that I think is just an underlying sort of difference. And you know, two, people really will listen to you. And if you can explain why you're doing something and you're willing to sort of take the time to break it down and to share transparently, like the reasoning, it has gone miles for me. I think there was a, an assumption on my end that roles and responsibilities were understood at offset of a project and they understood their roles to be much more in the decision making seat than I did. And so when I made a decision without consulting them, it was something that I think was hard to understand. Like why have you come in and why wasn't I consulted? And you know, I'm gonna escalate this and I, and I, it's all coming from a place of, I'm I clearly care about this. Right. And so I want to have a say in it. And you know, I also care about it and the scope of my role is to action on this item. And so it's just been a lot of face to face, like talking, explaining, like making sure that I can justify why I'm doing what I'm doing and then learning from that and commitment to applying those learnings. Right. Like never again will I assume that roles and responsibilities are clear mid flight on a project. That's something to make sure that we're checking and talking to people about. There are things that we can proactively get ahead on. There's preciseness in language that I can use that, you know, if I'm just kind of speaking casually, which is much more. The way that I interact with people gets misinterpreted and I need to be. It's not just people not liking me, it's people who want to make sure that they're clear on what we're talking about. And so my as the sort of speaker and share of information is to make sure that's presented in a way that can be well received and digested. It's headwinds, but it's not headwinds that I've experienced in other roles where it's been like we are actively going to resist interacting with you and become a barrier to your forward momentum. I'm sure there are people like that. I have not yet encountered them in this role and I feel so supported by the right people, meaning those that I need in order to move the important things that I see as our opportunities forward that I'm willing to have all the hard conversations all day. I think that's a huge part of being a leader, especially in change oriented function. And again back to the if we need to just make sure that the buy in is there and that we know why we're doing it. Just standing behind your decisions at the end of the day with that piece.

Yeah. And change leadership, I'm trying to call it more instead of change management. Cause I think it really is about more change leadership and being change. Being a change agent is hard enough. So much of it is building relationships, building trust, getting to know people, getting aligned with them, influencing them. And that is hard to do remotely. I believe that your role when it was created was meant to be in person in Molina. Right? I think.

I think so. And then I think that they didn't quite find what they needed. It is a new function for dear. You know, they. People move around in the company, which is awesome. I've heard companies talk about, oh, yeah, people come here and you can do all the things you ever dreamed of within the company. Like, people really do lead all kinds of different professional lives at Deer. And I think that this was such a specific kind of like expertise that was required. They expanded it out to be much more broad reaching. So I am an anomaly in my remoteness.

Yeah. Which is great. And, you know, I always tell people when they're applying for roles, if you see a perfect role and it says it's in a geography, apply anyway. Because every manager is going to want to hire the right person. And if the right person isn't here, you're still going to prefer them over, you know, the second best that is local. So that is point one. Like, you can make it happen. But it's also, I think, another challenge. And you touched on it already. You have a personality that, you know, you connect with people really well. You're going to be extroverted and out there and building those relationships, whether it's remote or in person. I think it is harder to do it remote, you know, than to build those relationships from seeing someone in the hallway and having coffee with them. Are you traveling a lot in your first 90 days? Have you spent a lot of time in person or are you able to do a lot of this relationship building over zoom?

Yeah, it's a great question. And honestly, it was a huge part of the interview process. I think that the team, you know, was nervous about bringing someone in, especially a leader in, especially for a new function, in for someone that wasn't sitting there. I know that I'm missing out on some of the, like, coffee talk and the lunches. Yeah, I do travel. I have been out three times. I mean, I think one was for, we'll count it as the interview. So two weeks, essentially in my first 90 days. And then we have more travel coming up. I think I would be out there more if we weren't in a little bit of a T and E sort of reduction effort right now. That was the plan when I'd sort of signed on. And I think it's working the way that we're doing it. I also am privileged to have, you know, people on the ground that, you know, Elliot is sitting there, my product manager in meetings, being like, all right, the tone of the room when this demo happened was this and things that I can't see. You know, it's partnership within the team of this mixed geography. But the culture is also interesting insofar as you know, when you get into meeting rooms and you're the only remote person and it's really difficult to be heard or to hear anything because there's so much clamor.

Yeah.

People at Dear tend to sit in their meetings during meetings even if they're co located and so I don't feel any different on a Zoom from California than if I were in a meeting room in Moline but you know, on my own dial into a call.

So you mean all of them are, all of them are on their laptops. So they.

Yeah, there's not been many meetings where it's been, you know, conference room against Zoom. So interesting. Whatever reason that culture still exists there, that's frankly facilitating a really nice like equalizing environment for me. And yeah, when I'm on site all I'm doing is talking to people. It's really hard to get work done during those weeks when I'm there.

Well that, that is work.

That is work and the most important kind. And then yeah, taking, you know, I, I'm getting to a point where it needs to be like what is, what does sustainability look like? Because you can't just say yes to everything all the time. Especially you know, I joke that I work Midwest farmers hours now. Like I have 5am meetings all the time at this point which is, you know, we're going to start being a little more selective about that and it's just like part of what I signed up for to an extent but needing to know what at first it'd say yes to everything. Meet everybody, ask who else you can meet, Fill your funnel. And now it's like where do I need to be really focused and intentional about the time that I have both on site as well as you know, meetings or even the sort of like casual catch up like virtual things people still do and is well received. So it's an interesting developing story. I'll keep you posted on it. But I think so far it's not been a barrier and frankly we're a global team team. We work with people everywhere. Everybody is on their laptop. I view it as sort of this unofficial responsibility of mine in this role to show that virtual and remote work can be completely fine and functional at all levels of the organization. So I'm really sensitive to the global minded piece of our department. No matter how big it is, it's still very like us centric and it's hard to be outside of the headquarters. So try and be inclusive with everyone.

Yeah, yeah. That's huge that you're thinking about that. Okay. And what's on deck for the next hundred days?

Well, we have to meet and greet our new Cielo. Kelly Walker has started as a John Deere's new chief legal officer today. So very excited to get her onboarded and up to speed.

Do you have a GC and a Cielo or is she the.

She's. She's the functioning head of both. Yeah. And we should talk about titling at sort of C suite level because that was like, I think, a piece of a change that we've got. We're going from a GC to a clo, but it's. She will be, I'm sure, drinking from the fire hose. And I'm hopeful that our team will be instrumental in getting her up to speed quickly. Right, let's talk about what data would be helpful for making decisions. Let's corral the sort of, like, information that you need. Let's present this in a way that's digestible. I sit, you know, cross functionally in legal. So let's pull all these threads together. Very excited to be. I also, as part of this and, you know, having done a chief of staff role in past, there's pieces of that that I hope can come in handy and into play. Facilitating leadership meetings, which means I get to sit in the direct report group leadership meetings, which is important, as well as some of the interactions that I have with her supporting staff and, you know, the leader supporting staff across the business to get insight into where those overlapping projects are happening, what she might care about. So, yeah, that'll be a big thing is making sure that both Kelly's up to speed as well as my leadership team feels supported in getting her what she needs because they're going to need reports, they're going to need information on things. Their priorities are going to change. They're going to need to facilitate different kinds of, like, strategic meetings, thinking around OKR updates. So supporting and enabling all of that effort, getting my new team members up to speed. So we're going to be on site in June. I want to do kind of a deep dive mission vision setting for legal ops. This is in preparation of a global summit that we're going to have in September. So we're presenting there, which I'm super excited about. We have big strides we need to make on clm and in the next hundred days, I hope we have a contract signed. That might be wishful thinking, but at least close to something like that. And, you know, really trying to think about the application of AI. So we have these ideation Workshops happening at the end of May where we will be coming back after doing this design thinking effort which I think is going to be very uncomfortable for a lot of people, but very interesting to have really like applicable ideas that we can use in glsg. And it will be supported not only through the sort of like citizen development that our team has done, but our partners in IT who are leading these workshops. So again, yeah, the idea is great, but if you actually have the resources to action it, that's where the power comes. So really excited to start seeing the output of that.

That's amazing. I think when you've moved from the GC to the CLO role within your company. Not you, but you know that that role has changed.

Yeah.

Does it have more responsibility beyond legal? That's usually what I see is at the CLO level, there's compliance, there's privacy, there's. I mean communication, sometimes pr, like other things.

Interesting. This is a discussion this morning too. I think that there is a. I don't think right now there's a change in responsibility. I do think that there is a component, a perception component that this is somebody who's on C staff with a CLO title and so influence is potentially top of mind with some of this. So we'll see kind of where things go.

We're seeing a lot of that. So it'll be curious to see how it all unfolds and how it affects your role in supporting that person. Listen, Anna, this has been fascinating, amazing and like I said in the beginning, so glad that you were here and willing to share the story of, you know, everything that Deere has done kind of prior to you joining and then what you've already been able to do in such a short amount of time I think is a testimony to making sure that the role is brought in and the right person's brought in. So just thank you. It's really gives me hope.

Thanks, Mary. It's such an absolute privilege to be here and speaking with you and yeah, happy to talk to if there are any questions that come from this. But the difference in being able to actually action the investment of a legal ops group versus just the lip service to it. I can't. I feel lucky every day. I'm having the most fun I've ever had professionally in this role. I think that's a. It's all, it's all credit to how the team set this up. So watch us go.

Yeah, that's great. I was gonna say we're. We're all gonna watch you and watch the team and watch the success. So we're gonna be checking back in with you and can't wait to see what you're able to do there.

Thanks so much, Mary. All right.

Thank you so much for listening, and thanks for being here, Anna.