#48 - CLOC Presidents Roundtable, with Jenn McCarron and Mike Haven

Hi everyone, I'm Mary o', Carroll, Chief Community Officer at Ironclad, and you're listening to Pearls on Gloves Off. Today I'm joined by two old friends, Mike Haven and Jen McCarron, as we host, for the first time ever, a conversation with the three of us as past and current presidents of clock. I'm sure neither of them needs any introduction, but just in case, Jen McCarron is an innovative leader in legal technology known for her unique approach, a growth mindset that requires a deeply creative process. With a Creativity first lens, McCarran builds teams from the ground up that revolutionize major organizations and the industry at large. Most recently, McCarran served as director of Legal Operations and Technology at Netflix, where she led financial management, tech innovation, operations, knowledge management for Netflix's global legal function. In 2024, KLOC named Jen its new president of the board. McCarran also hosts the organization's podcast Clock Talk. Before joining Netflix in 2018, McCarran spearheaded legal technology at Spotify and previously served as a leader in Cisco's legal ops and tech department. Our other guest is Mike Haven, a business minded legal executive with substantial experience as inside and outside counsel, including team leadership in small and large organizations. His diverse background includes experience in corporate legal ops, dispute resolution, investigations, intellectual property, privacy, securities, employment and commercial transactions, and he lives by the philosophy that the legal function must be a business enabler. Currently Senior Director, Associate General Counsel and Head of Legal Operations at Intel Corporation, which is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer, Mike is the leader responsible for the law and policy operations across the global enterprise on the cutting edge of legal department management, creating, implementing and developing some of the most innovative policies, procedures and tools for better and more efficient client service. Prior to Intel, Mike served as a lawyer and legal ops leader at the Gap, at NetApp, and prior to that was outside counsel with K and L Gates. With so much transformation, disruption, fear and uncertainty in the legal operations ecosystem and around the future of the profession these days, I thought it would be worthwhile to get us all together to discuss what we're seeing, hearing and feeling across the industry. The good news is that it's just that. Really good news. Legal Ops is growing, thriving and evolving just as we would want it to. Sure, there will be ups and downs, but being adaptable and flexible is one of the most important qualities to success and to being a happy leader in the legal ops role. As you'll hear, we don't always agree on the details throughout this conversation, but I do think we align generally on the Positive direction of things. Bottom line, this is the most exciting time to be a change maker in this industry. So I hope you're all up for the challenge. Enjoy the show. I told one of the reporters that we were doing this call and she's like, can I sit in on it? And we're like, no.

Wow. Really?

You can listen to it after it's recorded? Yeah.

You should have seen what Jen did to the law 360 reporter at CGI in our EVASaur channel, throwing her things.

To say so that I could control the narrative. I'm like, put that in your article.

You put her on the spot in front of 300 people or whatever it was. You're like, oh, I was there.

That was in your second.

So I said, the AI is the gateway drug to legal tech.

It's hilarious. Yeah.

All right, guys, I have zero agenda because I know that you and I can Talk for like 10 hours with nothing planned, and it'll be so riveting. Yeah, we're just, we're just going to let this go.

Let it rip.

Mario, Carol, are you going to give us some general parameters around what we should talk about?

Parameters? Mary and I are over it.

This Gloves off. That's the name.

Okay.

Nothing is off limits.

I'm gainfully unemployed. I'm owned by no one at this moment. So the gloves are off. Let's let it rip.

I was gonna say, Mary and I still have jobs, so we have to be a little bit more careful than.

You, but I, I, I've never been careful, even though I have a job. So it's just you, Mike, you can censor yourself. Where we're gonna be uncensored here.

No, we can't be uncensored. There's a group called Uncensored. We're just going to be unfiltered. Legal ops. Unfilled. There you go.

Let it fly.

All right, well, I, so I wanted to bring you guys together. This is, Is this the first time we've done some sort of podcast or recording with the three of us? So this is like three generations of CLOCK leaders right Here it is.

It's so presidential.

Co presidential. So for everyone's background, I was president of CLOCK for some period of time. I handed the reins over to Mike Haven, who was president of CLOCK for some time, and then he most recently handed over the reins to Jen, who has been Clock president for just a few months now.

Six months.

So we've all seen it. We've all done the two jobs. How is it?

Well, I just Want to say, Mike, it is as much work as you told me it would be and then some. So thank you for the work. It's a lot of work, but it's the leadership call of a lifetime in this career. So I love it. And I love trying to put my spin or stamp on things and add value.

Yeah, it's an important responsibility because you're shepherding a movement that's still in the early days, and it's really important that it stays on track. And there are bumps in the road and you have to navigate those, and a zillion people want to partner with you to do that, which is the best problem to have ever. But you just don't have bandwidth to work with everyone on everything. So there are a lot of difficult decisions that have to be made on a daily basis in that role. And it's a heavy responsibility. And you feel that weight. You feel that weight on your shoulders. And in particular, like at cgi, I remember feeling that weight, and I was so much lighter on my feet this last year. You probably remember that experience, Mary.

So, yeah, amen.

Felt good. Yeah.

Yeah. That. Those three, four days, whatever it is, it is a lot of work and a lot of pressure when you're president. And I think when you're president, you also have the responsibility to sort of like, speak for all your people.

Yeah.

And that's a lot of pressure. And I think times have changed, even. I mean, this is one of the things I want to talk to you guys about. The social media aspect of legal ops has just kicked up so many notches, and like, everything you say is so much more amplified than the early days when, when I was doing it and maybe like a few people listened and maybe some people saw that I posted something. Now it is. You say something and it's, it's just everywhere. And you get, you get trolls, you get haters, you get praise, you get, you know, people who are glad that you're speaking up for this profession. But it's. It's a lot of responsibility and it's a heavy weight.

It's a lot. And as you both know, I bring in a lot of social media, LinkedIn, specifically energy into this role. Probably. As I broke it down in my analysis, two thirds of my posts might be clock promoting clock, talking about events at clock, and then, you know, third or so are talking about topics I care about. Just I think about, I read about, I write about, I wonder about, and they're all related skill sets to being successful in these kinds of transformational roles. But yeah, it's fun with the. You should see the things we have to talk about now, Mary, in terms of like, as an org, how do we navigate even board members being on social media? We have, we're like, we never thought of that. Because, Mary, you were cranking out a little social media years ago and a lot of white papers. You were the white paper queen.

Yeah, I was doing the white papers, but we weren't doing like blogs and thought stuff until, until very like, until I joined Ironclad. Cause I actually didn't feel like I had the ability, I mean, to, to Mike's point, in the beginning, you know, having two jobs and what can you say?

Yeah, well, I confess to being among those who have to be educated by Jen in social media. And I'm not that good at it. I don't go on LinkedIn and post very often. When I do, you know, I hope it's something that people pay attention to because I just don't do it very often. But, you know, Jen's out there, you know, nudging me to do more on social media and I really appreciate that. But you know, my generation is not quite as good at it as, as you younger folks.

But she's not, she's not that much younger than us.

Mike thinks I'm Gen Z. Does my skin look Gen Z? You heard it here.

She looks way younger. She looks younger than us. But I have asked her her age and she's actually not that much younger than you and I.

Well, I was actually putting you in the younger folks bucket too, Mary.

So yeah, I think I'm closer to you.

We're more experienced. But no, Jen, you've got it all. I'm, you know, when, when it comes to succession, I nailed it. I hope, Yeah, I hope you can do the same because, you know, it's.

A fun new way, Mary, to express the strategy, the vision, the happenings of Clock. I, I just find it such an amazing canvas, social media and everyone's scrolling and reading and people read more than I even realize. They come up to me at live events and connect with me in a parasocial way. Like one guy's like, so what are you doing at the gym? And I'm like, and you are. And then we went into deep workouts as if we were best friends at a legal ops event. So it's cool and I love it as a connection and a conversation driver. It gets us there in new ways that we weren't getting there, maybe.

So one really important topic that I think has Been coming up on Social and at clock was something you raised, something we've all been raising for, for some time, which is the evolution of Legal Ops, the maturing of the role or the continued transformation of the role. You brought up something called Legal Ops 3.0. Let's dig into that a little because you know, I'll be honest, people ask me what, what is 3.0? And I don't think I can articulate it. So let's, let's talk.

Let's talk. Well, I didn't lay out 1 and 2 in heavily in writing and so some people missed it. Some, some got it. So 1.0 I consider the original clock founders group, which you're obviously a part of, Steve Harmon and several others, you guys were in these roles 2008, 2010, 2011 and as Mike, you coined this history lesson when we were at Harvard together a few months ago. There was this post 2008 financial crisis aftermath and corporations looking to trim budgets, manage budgets more effectively and they turn to folks like you, Mary and Steve Harmon and others and said you, you're smart, you're businessy, you know, the legal space help us optimize, spend. That was the time, that was the era. And you all came in and did a great job doing that and you're all smart and you went, well, how about those projects? How about this knowledge management thing? How about project management? Okay, I'll partner with it. It started kitchen sinking and it evolved to what I call Legal Ops 2.0. It's just the next iteration of that which was financial plus all the kitchen sink core areas that we nailed down in the clock core 12 together and people executed there for a number of years and I think I'd call you an executor also through 2.0. Mike, you really came into the fold in the 2.0 era. And what I'm calling out in this blog post in this concept is that ERA is over. It's over and we can't solve today the way you solved when you went into Google or Steve into Cisco. And I don't even know if those cores are all still as relevant. I don't even know if financial management, it's so important it's not to go anywhere but do we even need to talk about it? It should just be a built in cog in the machine, in the legal department. And so my 3.0 was an attempt to call out like we can't kitchen sink all of this. Don't just copy paste everything we've heard for years. Let's dial it in to data and making stories of data. And the tech almost doesn't even matter. It's the driver, but it's not the end destination. So what do you think of that? Does any of that resonate with you guys?

I see. It totally resonates with me because I see the Core 12 in many ways blending together. They aren't going to be siloed functionalities or siloed skill sets or competencies or whatever word you want to use. It's all going to be part of the same system, and it's going to essentially be data in repositories. And how we interact with that data and how we get outputs from that data is changing extremely rapidly right now before our eyes. And so we don't know what legal ops 3.0 exactly looks like. Right? It's.

It's emerging.

It's that we know that it's happening, and we are here to work together to usher that new era in and do the best we can with it for our organizations and for the industry. So it's exciting. I just think it's. It's exciting.

I've heard some people a little fearful in that, you know, the. The calling out that maybe the clock, core 12, or these skill sets or these responsibilities no longer matter. I don't think that's what anyone here is saying. Those are always going to be around. And just for the record, there's a lot of folks who are saying there's too many. We're trying to simplify the framework for what Legal Ops is, which I think is great. Go ahead and simplify it. There is a reason we had 12. It's a clock, you see. So there's 12 parts of the dial. It was very intentional. Clever. It was very clever. So that. That was. That was the point of why there were 12. So, yes, you can simplify it to four, five, whatever it is that makes sense, but just wanted to explain the original intent. I do think those functionalities, responsibilities still will always exist. You're always going to need to hire people with those skill sets. But what the focus is, and the North Star perhaps does change into. Into leveraging data. And like what I have always said for the last 20 years is the bottom line on what Legal Ops is to me, is right sourcing and the constant need to be right sourcing and optimizing the organization. And you can't do that without data, without financial management, without practice management, without tech and tooling and flex talent and all those things. So it's Just I think we're all saying the same things. There's just different ways to frame where this is all going.

Yeah, everything on the core 12s still needs to get done. All that work has to get done. All those things are important and always will be. It's how that work gets done that's changing. And so it's definitely not reducing the importance of the Core 12. And it's still a great framework, it's a great visual to compartmentalize the different areas of work that need focus in an organization. But how that work is going to be done is dramatically changing dramatically.

And I wrote another blog post recently on breadth versus depth. And then I think we need to get back to depth because there's something about that beautiful visual that tells newer people in our field, oh, do all of this and you too can be Mario Carroll or Jen McCarron. No, do 1.2 of this and master it and then maybe you'll move on to the next 1.2 things. But I am seeing a lot of younger folks come or younger in career or flipping over into this field and they're trying to do it all for a legal department. And I said, you can't do all of this. You can't be really amazing if you're like a one woman show financial management, outside council management and really technical with tech. I'm sorry, you can't. Mary, you could fight me on this, but I don't think you can and get tremendous amounts of impact on the desk of your leadership. You, you have to pick the 1.2 things and do it and then work your way to others. And I've been seeing a lot of people trying to do breadth and then they're spinning their wheels and I, I worry for them. So I wrote some of that from a place of like, it's okay to do fewer things and do them to depth. Mary's mad. I pissed.

Mary's like, no, I think you said a couple things there. So the reason I hesitate is because I get a lot of calls from folks who are like, I want to get into legal ops. How do I get into it and where should I apply? And I said, there's, there's really two paths if you want to get trained. There's the figure it out on your own, which is, I think, what a lot of us did. Right. You got thrown into the role. You own all of it. You're the first hire. Maybe it's a small company, a small legal department. You have to do all of it. Your tech, your tooling your, your financial management, outside counsel, your everything. So you do need the breadth there. Now what you said was try not to do it all at once and maybe you go fix one thing and then move on to the other. I don't disagree with that because I think that's basically the path that I took. I started with outside counsel management, got that under control, expanded into systems and tools, got that under control, moved on to strategic planning and practice management and you kind of grew from there. The other path that I tell, tell folks that they can take is go to a big company, go to an intel, go to a Google, go to a Netflix and learn from, you know, the larger team. But in that case you do have to pick a lane because you don't get to just go in and be like a legal ops generalist. You've got to pick one of the sub teams, data analytics, you know, AI, outside counsel to join and then you get good at that and then maybe you can move on to try something else.

I completely agree with all of that.

I like people who express interest in learning various areas of legal operations. But, but you're right, Jen. Like it's important to gain deep expertise so that you can add as much value as possible to the organization. But people who go the extra mile to learn other areas in their spare time, they want to take on other roles, they want to take on other responsibilities like just, you know, here and there projects that help them learn about other areas because they're ultimately trying to be a head of Legal Ops. That warms my heart.

Yeah. So, yeah, well, Mike's heart is warmed. What else should we talk, what else should we talk about?

Mary, the head of Legal Ops thing, that's, that's like, how do you get there? And what does that mean now? So what Mike just touched on is yes, you do need breath. I think you do need breath, Jen, to be the head of legal office.

You can't get to breath without Depp. I mean, I just don't believe it.

I mean, it's just a really long road.

It's, I believe it's a long road. I can't, you can't walk into a management position on this and know what you're doing. You've had to die a million deaths in two and a half of those cores, like a million deaths. And, and then had some successes in there as well. And that's where people, people were fighting me in the LinkedIn comments. I was like, oh, it's working, we're having a debate. And look, this is Someone's like, what about general counsels? I'm like, no, dude, nobody care. I don't care about general counsels. Like, they could be breadth people. They're GCs. I'm talking about us, like non lawyer, air quote. People who are legal professionals who are trying to make a career here, master something and conquer and have impact. And then your leadership goes, whoa, what else can you do? And then you get to take on more. And I think the breadth comes from depth of experience.

As long as you don't go so deep that you can't crawl out of that hole and you're pigeonholed into a very specific area, that is a risk and you have to navigate that. But I agree with you that if you show your, your expertise and ability to lead in a specific area, you will have, you'll be given more opportunities to lead and you'll be given more opportunities to broaden your capacity and lead on a broader scale.

Can I confess something edgy here? Some of this writing I'm doing, Mary, is based on the feedback I was getting and big feedback culture at Netflix, their perception of the function. And it was so fascinating. Someone said to me recently, I don't understand why and how financial management is in legal ops. And I said, oh my God. Well, you don't know the history of it. Obviously that's where it started, but you wouldn't know that you're working in a practice area as a lawyer and a leader. I said, it actually started there, but then it evolved to this tech thing. And I get why you think that. You, you see me and you see new tech people, me and two thirds of the team who are focused on tech. And she went, yeah, that's legal ops to me. And the financial management piece, very important to this person, but they didn't see it at all as something that was part of legal ops. And, and I didn't debate them or ratify them. I just heard the feedback and looked at me through their eyes and went, whoa, okay. Does financial management belong in finance? Like, I, I started going big questions because that's what I was asked it by my peers at Netflix. And I fought to keep it in legal, but I could see this down the road future where there's these masters of the domain of legal finance and they go and park inside a finance function because they've got it. And that finance wakes up and goes, we need these domain experts. I'm not trying to boot anyone, please stay in Legal forever. But this is real data. I was encountering real perception.

So I agree with the perception, I disagree with the fact that it's. Or the idea that it's less of a focus or less important. I actually think financial management, outside council management is and will always be one of the key pillars of Legal Ops. Now, when we talk about impact and moving up into the head role and working on things that GCs and the lawyers care about, you've heard me say this, they don't care about you saving money because that doesn't help them do their job better. Is it important to the company? Is it important to the cfo? Absolutely. Is there a place for it? Absolutely. And it should be done. But it's not going to get you the huge pat on the back of like, you and your team have really changed my life and we need more of you. That's why I love tech. That's why I love contracts management. You're like accelerating deals. You're making things, the client, the internal client, the lawyers, and you get the pat on the back and people notice. So in order to establish, you know, what legal Ops is and does and demonstrate the impact, you want those big impact projects, but you still have to do some of the running of the trains in the back of the house stuff. That is really important, but, you know, may not get you as many public kudos, Mike.

Well, you know, the money's always going to be important. Legal has to work in partnership with finance to manage that money. That is what makes the business run. So it's always going to be a critical pillar. And even if you're not focused on generating savings every year, year over year, it's really important to show that financial data to the people that need to see it in a way that they understand it on a regular basis and help them have that foundation of knowledge they need to run their part of the business. Totally. And that is a component of financial management. It's not just about savings, it's about the data and visualizing that data for the people in each segment and more generally and however your GC wants to see it, so that if she reaches out to you on a Friday afternoon and needs some financial information right now, it's there and you can point her to it.

This is happening right now. Mike, are you, are you looking at your.

All the time. All the time, yeah, all the time, yeah. So honestly, like, there are various aspects to financial management. It's never going away. It's. It's critical. Yes.

I just put up my post it and it's all backwards but storytelling, I mean, that's what you're saying, Mike, is like, it's not just about managing the finances. It's about being able to tell the so what Story in a way that your stakeholders care. And that's. I, that's Jen's whole platform storytelling.

Right.

And that drives decision making in other areas of the Core 12 as well. The. It's, it's foundational.

Loaded gun to my head though. I'm taking a tech role over financial management. Thank you. I'll see myself out of this podcast.

We couldn't have guessed. Yeah, but we did not know that, Jen.

It's, it's.

I just wanted to. Everyone's sometimes thinking they have to be super generalist in all of this and you don't. Like, I'm a tech person. When I went into Netflix, I was like, wait, you're doing nothing, Nothing without council management? And they're like, just do tech, just do tech. I'm like, I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you guys that we can build a financial management program that makes the trains run, can save money and optimize how that piece of the budget gets managed. And they went, okay, show, show us. And we showed them and they liked it. And it, it went really well. It wasn't crazy impact, it was rounding error numbers. It wasn't billions. Right. But it was quicker savings. It was, it was immediate and apparent because it was the lowest hanging fruit. Tech takes a while. Tech takes an investment. Tech takes change management.

But if you're gonna be a leader though, I, I'm like agreeing and disagreeing at the same time with so many things that you're saying because yes, you can be deep in one thing like tech, but if you're gonna head it up, you still have to have financial management. You still got practice management, you still have got professional development. Maybe those are not areas that you are great in and, or interested in, but you have the self awareness to know that it's important. That's not for me. I'm going to hire someone who's really, really good at that, better than me at that, and empower them. Right. And then you can lead and watch over and send direction and get, you know, make sure that things are out of their way to get their job done. But that's, that's part of being the head, part of being the leader is knowing yourself and your own strengths.

Spot on, Mary. Have you, have you guys ever seen the nine box? Are you familiar with the nine box? You know, so that like, if you're placed in A certain number. I can't remember exactly the way the numbers go. Yeah, yeah. You are just very deep in your subject matter expertise, but you don't have a broader capacity to lead and you don't want to be labeled that. So you want. It's really important to leadership and for leadership that you have the ability to lead across multiple capacities.

Yeah.

So. But that doesn't mean you can't have deep expertise in one area. It just means that you also have to have the capacity to lead across multiple other areas if that's what you want. And that's another thing. Like, some people would rather just stay in their lane all the time, let other people want to venture out and lead across more areas. And it just depends on what your goals are and what your skill sets are and what your capacities are.

That's a really important message because again, I feel like there's a lot of fear out there as a reaction to some of the things that maybe the three of us and others have been talking about. The. The future of the head of Legal Ops and what that looks like is it's becoming more strategic. Is it becoming more part of general operations and that like the C. Louis, where there's compliance and privacy ops and all sorts of other responsibilities. And folks are starting to say, well, does Legal Ops go away? You know, do I. Do I not have a role anymore? And the answer is like, absolutely not. All those roles are still right. Really important, the roles. And not everybody needs to be the head. Not everyone needs to go do all that.

The roles will prevail, especially if you started doing the work improving the value. But the shape of these teams will not. It will change. It will not. It will not prevail. It has to change. We didn't nail it in Legal Ops 2.0. It's not like you're the head and you have all 12 of the clock cores and each one's a team. It's not that. That's simplistic. And I know this because I was receiving the recipient of friction and tension pulling at the shape of my team based on what they saw in the nine box of what they wanted out of the team. And it was. There was an opportunity for me to go to engineering inside Netflix and. And maybe bring some of the team there and then try out for a role there. Like there were. The thinking was just the shape was so not simple. And I done and it's not done and not done. And I love that and I love the tension and the friction. And so I'm putting that out in some of the writing because I wouldn't be surprised if other legal departments had similar thoughts and perceptions as Netflix Legal and were like, well, I don't know why we put finance with tech. If you guys have to remember too, the tech that I was doing with the Netflix team I just led was very technical. It was it enterprise, it grade deep. It wasn't going to partner with it and like hope for the best. It was, we are doing it. And so there was a lot of depth there. So know that that's a caveat in all of this. If you have that partnership going and it's out over there, okay, maybe the breadth thing comes back into play and. But this is just the data I was experiencing live.

So what do we do about the fact that you've worked at several companies in this role? Mike's worked at several companies in this role. I've only worked at one company in this role, but I've talked to a lot of people. It looks different in every single company still, right? And to your point, it's still evolving. What the structure looks like. My own team's changed structure a million times to evolve with the needs, the changing roles that we had, but it's not done and it's not set in stone and it's, it's a struggle, I think, for the whole industry. It is struggle for GCs who are trying to establish this role or dysfunction for the first time and knowing, like, what do you all do? Because everyone you talk to is going to give you a slightly different story. Now, is that our responsibility as part of clock leadership to establish that or is that are we okay with it just still evolving and looking different everywhere?

I think we need to accept the fact that our role inherently needs to be adaptable and flexible and that our teams need to be adaptable and flexible and that not every legal ops team is going to look the same, not every legal ops team is going to have the same structure and roles and functions because every company's different, every legal team is different, and we need to do what is right for them in our respective organizations. And a good legal ops leader will have very high aq, very high adaptability quotient and the ability to change things as the need arises. And that includes the various pillars, the various functions of your, of your legal ops organization. You know, you might be doing focused on one thing one year, and then all of a sudden the leadership decides to pivot and do something different and then you need to change that pillar to something else and you have to be comfortable with that, or at least as comfortable as you can be, because it's never fun. You get something set up, you think really nicely, things are going smooth and then something in the business changes and you've got to make a big change and that's always hard. And so you're never, we're never going to get to a point where it's just like everything's standardized, everything's normal. It's this way across the entire industry, in all the legal organizations, that's never happening. So we just have to accept that.

And I think people want that. We crave the structure, we want to put things in a box. But I agree, Mike, we have to normalize a bit of fluidity here, that it's still being drawn and it's okay. You're not winning or losing if you're head of. But litops is over there and someone else is running it. And I used to say to my peers at Netflix, like, I'm trying to avoid eDiscovery. I've never done that in my career. And I want to conquer contracts because that seems to be a higher volume problem to solve for and potentially more impact. And I didn't want to learn Ediscovery. And you know, eDiscovery people came in at Netflix and they were like, I've never been not been in Legal Ops. And I was like, interesting. I've never been in a Legal ops group that had E Discovery, that is practice area Ops. But had I been someone with that history, and that's where I cut my teeth and mastered something in my youth, I might have made an early play to build lit ops and, and be proactive about that. And I would have had that right. So to Mike's point, it depends on you, your background, your skill and the business and all the shape and how it's emerging. And it's different everywhere.

Yeah, it's, it's a great point. And you know, as people who are listening are thinking about Legal Ops and do I go in it? Is it for me, one of the things I used to interview for at Google was this adaptability quotient. And I would tell people like the folks who are successful on this team or who are happiest on this team are the people who are okay with ambiguity and to not have. If you're asking from like the what is my job description and I need all the bullets and what am I working on this year? I can't tell you that. I can tell you what I want you to work on. Today and maybe for the next four weeks. But your, your objectives, your goals, the focus for our team in January might look completely different in June. And that's, that's normal. That's not a weird year. That's just normal. And that's because we had a whole bunch of patent litigation or we regulatory changes or you know, whatever the environment for the legal department changed or the focus for Google as a company changed. So then we had to change as a department and that's, that's just the way it is. And there's so much progress that needs to be made and change that needs to happen in a legal department to modernize it step by step that once you get to the next status quo, it needs to change again. Right. And so it, it, you're right, it's never ending and you can't get too comfortable. In fact, you have to be comfortable with it constantly moving or with the being uncomfortable.

And that's the ambiguity is Google of that time. Netflix of a time was all ambiguity. When I first started at Netflix, someone asked someone else in the product group what's your two year or three year roadmap for that product? And the product manager started laughing and said what? Come again? It was just so adapting to the business needs so fast that they we only did six month roadmaps. It was crazy. It's something I hadn't seen before. I saw it a little bit at Spotify but not at Cisco.

Yeah, that's why I don't believe in this whole like five year tech roadmap or tech map stuff because you don't. The tech is different in six months. So what, what are you mapping out five years for?

It has to be conceptual. If you're going out that far, it has to be purely conceptual. Like this is what I expect, my vision for what we'll be doing at that point and whatever tools we can build or buy that help us do that at that time.

Completely agree. Yeah.

Mary, otherwise you're lucky to get three years. You know the year. A year can be tough.

A year.

A year is plenty. In terms of the roadmap.

Yeah, I started getting it, but you're right. Towards my latter half of Netflix we were doing one, two years and the company changed a lot. It was going through intentional maturing and so people were willing to. Oh yeah. This was my wise advice to my team. All we need are two bad quarters and then we'll start behaving like every other corporation and every company will have that at some point. And that is actually beautiful. When it happens for people like us because just give us a constraint, a budget constraint, time. And that's where I think that these functions can really thrive and rise to the occasion.

We definitely shine in tough times. But you know, I like that in good times we keep the trains moving very smoothly and it's okay if we don't have as much attention on us at those times, but definitely we are appreciated when. When the company needs us most.

What are you guys seeing out there for the times right now? So you know the times up and down. When it's down, you see people cutting. Cutting legal ops as the first thing and you also see them adding legal ops as the first thing. What. What are you guys seeing right now? Because again I'm touching on like I want to touch on all these things that people are fearful of right now. And this is another thing that I'm hearing, you know. Oh God, all these big companies cutting these legal ops jobs. Is that true or were there just a couple where it happened and it just got loud?

I. Exactly what you just said at the end there is. What I was going to say is that, you know, it's very noticeable when it happens. It's fairly rare. You saw a couple recently and you know, we'll see how those play out. But my guess is that they are not going to be leading a charge away from the concept of sound business principles in legal organizations. That does make no sense. And the vast majority, I don't have data or specific numbers but the vast majority of GCs that I know and that I encounter are strong supporters of what we do. And I just see it getting more and more important and more and more integrated into the organization and the company. I think that's also part of Your legal ops 3.0, isn't it Jen? Is the expansion of the operations principles that, that we espouse into and throughout the entire company. And we're just going to see more of that. So yeah, we can't let a couple of negative situations in the industry bring us down as a whole. We have to keep charging and I think we continue to gain steam.

Yeah. And I think the line forward on this industry and these career paths, it's jagged. I think it's a jagged line. It's not this smooth sure curve and you're going to have some departments, a few here and there that may be over invested or selected the wrong candidate or the candidates way wasn't where the company was because most of these companies don't even know what they want when they brought Me in the Netflix, they're like, show us what we don't know. And I thought that was cool. They never knew what they wanted. So the whole thing was a proof theorem and I proved it. And when I left There, you know, 16 to 30 people had new career lines because of the work we brought online and the workflows and the work streams. So just because I left and the role hasn't been reposted yet to be backfilled, I, I don't know if my role is in the data here. I'm just as an example. It doesn't mean anything because Plus 29 came online. And so we all have to hang in there and be patient while legal leadership still learns what this is about, how to get this thing to be strategic. That takes time, it takes years and the right match. And luck, a little bit of luck too. And I think we're just going to have those jagged moments where, yeah, we hear of some, but there's still a lot of roles out there.

Well, what I think is promising is where we are seeing new roles. So there's always new roles created, right? And you see new roles at, you know, tech companies and you're like, okay, great, that makes sense. We're now seeing a lot of new roles at companies that have been around for 100, 200 years, right? They have big legal departments, they have no tech and tooling. They've been in the dark. Their companies have not been tech for generally because they're, you know, been around for that long. And these old school, whether it's manufacturing or services, like companies that you, you and I, we all know these names that have been a long time are starting to modernize and with that comes legal ops.

It's exciting.

That's, that's new.

I'm getting a lot of calls and I, I know I'm, I'm good talent in the industry, so I'm not that whimsically. But to your point, there are some old names in there. And I'm like, huh? No way would I go. And then I talked to the recruiter and they're like, we're transforming. Like there is an edict inside to hire 1800 people from Silicon Valley into this older industry that's been around a hundred years. And, and I was compelled by the call.

Yeah, yeah. So we had Anna Richard recently, sorry, from John Deere, which is an example of an old school art agricultural company. And she says to me, no, we're a tech company. I was like, okay, that watch out.

For the we work trap you guys, they have filed for bankruptcy. Don't call yourself.

Sorry, I hear you.

I was just going to say, you know, like, the economy is cyclical. We're on sort of a downward trend in the economy. Things are going to happen as a result of that. But if you look at it at. On a broader level, we are in a time where ChatGPT has spurred a. A revolution of sorts, where people who used to have no interest whatsoever in process and technology suddenly are interested in it and they're playing with it and they're finding ways to make their personal lives and their work lives more efficient using these tools. And these are people who have had an aversion to technology even in the past. And so we have this revolution of sorts happening before our eyes, and people are paying attention to the need for process and technology experts. And I think on a broader level, despite this economic downturn we're in, there is a heightened focus on the importance of operations in legal organizations. And I think new roles are going.

To be formed through this downturn. This is where our industry was born, out of downturns.

Yes.

So, yeah, something big and huge is coming. And pop quiz for you guys. Do you have a GPT window open now on your desktop all the time? I do.

I do most of the time.

Yeah. I'm running Gemini since I'm. I'm subscribed to that. And I threw a spreadsheet in. I was like, pivot, table this. Give me the percentage of that, this, that, the other, the other, the other. And I'm not even. My analyst is working for me. So the future, there's so much new is coming. I. I just want to be a part of it.

Yeah. I think it's just. It's bigger than the downturn, and so that's the, you know, where this role is only going up and people shouldn't be concerned over a couple of hiccups out there.

Yeah. And not. Not only is it going up, and thanks for pivoting it, pivoting us into the AI conversation, because how could we not go there? But this is, my God, the most exciting time to be part of, you know, in legal transformation ever. I mean, I know I feel like we've been saying that every year for, like, 20 years, but, like, this time, this time, I really mean it. Yeah, I think it is. How quickly do you guys think things will change? Because. And I say this because some of the feedback from Clock this year was, okay, it's probably been like, 18 months since ChatGPT came on the scene. Gen, gen AI. The feedback from this clock was oh, I kind of expected things to look different already this year. But it feels like people are still figuring it out and no one has totally transformed their firm, their departments, the way they do their work now. I agree with that. I don't think that that means it's not going to happen. And very quickly, what are your guys thoughts?

I think the smart approach is and has been to learn about this technology, to experiment with this technology, to start to gain comfort and capability with the technology. It was never going to be flip a switch and all of a sudden everybody's using it all the time for everything. It was never going to be that way. But there is a lot of experimentation going on out there, there is a lot of learning and you know, over time you're going to see people using it constantly. They already are. It's funny, my 19 year old son uses it all the time for, for a variety of things and you know, he's like, he's super comfortable with it and I think that's how it's going to be with this younger generation and even our generations are getting more comfortable and capable with it as well. So it's just going to be inherent though in the younger generations and we're just going to see it become ubiquitous. But that was never going to happen overnight. And so the point of what we're doing now is to make sure that when it's everywhere, when it's, when it's part of the infrastructure of how law departments are managed and how law practices are managed, that we're part of those who are on the right side of history and know how to use it and are comfortable with it and are able to make ourselves more efficient with it rather than the people who are clueless and there are going to be plenty of those as well. I agree.

And, and Mary, my answer to this is it depends on the use case, how fast it'll go. If your company's 200 policies are baked out into policy documents and you want to feed them in to a GPT and then answer questions, redline or generate language against it, it's ready to go. You just have to feed it in and do some training of the model.

So here, here's my hypothesis and we're going to give big thoughts here on this podcast. I actually think the switch will flip overnight in legal once we figure out this, who owns the data? Data privacy. I can't upload stuff security. If we could just sort that out and say, let's just say that whole issue didn't exist and we could just upload anything we wanted Today everyone would be using it. If that security and the data and the client's data at a law firm was not an issue. Every associate would just be like pumping stuff in there and playing around with it and coming up with like magical use cases. And then it would just spread like wildfire because they would everyone be talking and it would happen. We can't experiment in the way that we need to experiment because we're all hindered by security. Well, we can't upload. We can't upload. We can't upload stuff. Right? Yeah, security, we gotta figure that out.

Some red tape on the generative piece in my last few weeks months at Netflix raising security concerns over the data going to some other model. And it's fair, it's a fair concern.

It is. We've got to figure it out. Like how do we use it and, and stay safe?

Well, you can if it's in your tenant and it's trained on your data mostly versus just going out to a public one or GPT. And I think where I think it's going to be slow is generating contract language because I don't think every company has playbooks really well baked out. Like I saw at Cisco when this great lawyer Lynn Easterling, I think who did this, she was out on parental leave but bored halfway through and wrote up playbooks like do this, go left, go right, go left. When you have your fallbacks and the legal department bought into those standards and fallbacks, if you could feed that in, then it'll generate. But until we're there, lawyers are going to look at the output and go well and want to edit it. And I respect their want to edit it. This is what they're trained to do.

See, I predict that playbooks go by the wayside and you don't need them anymore because of how fast the generative AI is evolving. And I say that Jen, because if you're able to, if you're able to hook up like Ironclad's got an AI, if you can hook up all your contracts to it and can't do this right now, but if you're able to feed it all in, couldn't you, couldn't you say just negotiate and redline this new third party paper based on the positions that my company usually takes, you.

Can, and I don't know, instead of having the fallback.

Yeah, this is the. Well, you can't put the data in there.

We'll gain comfort More and more comfort with that as well over time. It's like the cloud, right? There was a time where nobody wanted to put anything in the cloud, and now that's laughable, right? Yeah, it'll be the same thing. Yeah, that'll take a little bit of time.

Exciting.

What else is. What else is disrupting our space? What else is a big driver?

What else is going on?

Well, you know, now all of a sudden, along those same lines, all of a sudden, blockchain has become relevant in legal.

What is blockchain back?

Blockchain is back. And here's why. Because there is no cleaner data than a contract with a digital blockchain stamp on it. You know that that is the contract that is being referenced, right? So if there are two parties with a contract and they want to self execute based on the treasure trove of data that you referred to a minute ago, Mary, in order for them to make sure that they are referencing the correct agreement, the correct data, it's super helpful to have them in the blockchain. And it's really cheap and it's really easy to do and it makes the data pristine. So we are currently experimenting with leveraging the blockchain so that we can eventually have a third party source of truth that each party can refer to with their AI when self executing agreements. It's just an experiment we're running.

Wow. Mike, you are in. Mike is in the future. I am not in the.

Yeah, you heard.

You.

You heard it here first. Mike calling. The blockchain is. Here it is. I might be skeptical because I'm still getting people sending me PDFs of NDAs that I need to download and print out and sign on Witpedia that prevailed at Netflix may. Maybe people are ready for the blockchain and I'm not aware. I don't know.

Yeah, somebody's got a lead, right? Somebody's got to get out front and get it. We got to get away from. From fax machines and PDFs, so.

Well, you heard it.

You heard it here first. And I, and I did. I did just have to fax something to our pediatrician to get some school forms. It's absurd. Yeah. And I said, well, how are you going to get it back to me? Do you fax back? They're like, no, you have to physically come pick it up. It is absurd.

I would have.

I would have slipped into a rage.

Someone asked me if they faxed something.

So much transformation. Health care needs much more transformation than.

Legal health care needs more. You know, sometimes health care. I was just going to say, when they don't do direct deposit for your insurance reimbursement, I, I slip into a rage. I'm like, you can. You just refuse not to, and you put a check in the mail. But lately my insurance companies have done direct deposit, and that's awesome.

Every time I go to the doctor and they make me fill out those forms and paper and I turn in the clipboard, I, I, I can't help myself. Like, what do you do with this? What do you do with this piece of paper? You get like, dozens of these a day. Are you scanning? Why are you not using Ironclad? Why are you not using.

Should we switch from the second most hard, the most difficult group to innovate, lawyers and go to doctors? Let's just go meta.

And I think I could get really passionate. Yeah, I could get really passionate about that pretty quickly too, but my work is not done here.

Okay, good. So we're sticking around on, on that.

Yeah, we're, we're sticking around. And on that note, I think we are. We are at time. Guys, this is. I told you this would go by so fast. We could keep going. So maybe we'll do it again someday.

Please. Anytime.

Wow. Yeah. It says almost 55 minutes. I hope it was. It's as fun for everybody else to listen to as it was for us to, to do so.

Absolutely. Thank you guys for being here and to the listeners, thanks for tuning in.