#50 - Career Transitions and The Keys to Team Building with Mick Cox from Procore Technologies

Welcome to Pearls on Gloves Off. I'm your host, Marielle Carroll. Today I'm joined by a very old friend and veteran of legal operations, Mick Cox. Mick is the VP of legal operations at Procore Technologies, a high growth SaaS company offering a global construction management platform. He was Procore's first full time Legal Ops hire and has built a Legal Ops team of all stars and in his three and a half years there, helping the legal, regulatory and compliance department continuously improve as the company and department continue to scale. Prior to Joining Procore in 2020, Mick was the only person to hold the Executive Director of Legal Ops role for the University of California system, which today I learned is the third largest employer in all of California. There he led the Legal Ops and practice support functions covering 10 campuses, five medical centers, three national research labs and the office of the President. Mick's introduction to Legal Ops and where we originally Met was in 2013 at Salesforce where he co founded the Legal Ops team. During his nearly 11 year tenure there, he actually started at Salesforce in their software engineering team, spending seven years as a leader while moonlighting with a solo law practice before spending his final four years at Salesforce creating some foundational building blocks for the Legal Ops team. And way before that he spent the first part of his career in a variety of software engineering, leadership and customer facing roles in the software industry at companies ranging from 40 to 40,000 employees. I was excited to get Mick on the podcast today because he has lived and breathed Legal Ops and built out teams in three very different environments at a public company high tech giant in Silicon Valley. During his time as Salesforce with the public sector, through his time at the University of California and of course most recently at a high growth smaller company like Procore, we talk about the different experiences he's had through these three different environments, what he's learned along the way, what has made them different and what is actually consistent across all Legal Ops roles. We talk about how to build a team out and what factors he's been looking for when he hires out new members of the team. Mick's background of course is also very unique. He grew up on a farm in Central Illinois, graduated from a high school class of 44 kids, got his BS from the university of Illinois with a dual major in math, Computer science and Econ, and later got his JD from Santa Clara University with a specialization in high tech law emphasizing ip. I am absolutely delighted to have him on the show today to share what he's learned over the years.

All right, how you doing Mick, doing great.

Thanks.

Thanks for coming all the way to San Francisco to meet me in person today.

Happy to.

All right, so we've known each other. We were just saying your kids are how old now?

10 and 8.

10 and 8. I remember when you were first having, like pregnant. Yeah, Having a baby and going on pat leave. So it's been a while that we've known each other. And that was when you were first at Salesforce, right?

Yeah. I had just made the transition from software engineering into legal ops. That's right in the middle of my time there.

All right, so let's go through your.

Background a little bit first because it's pretty unique. And I was excited to have you on the show today because you're probably the only person who has worked at a huge company in legal ops. A university in legal ops. And then now is it still considered a startup? I mean, pretty big company now.

We're growing up. Yeah.

Hypergrowth. Isn't that what we call it?

Yeah.

Great, great.

So let's go through your background also, because you have more of a technical background, but then you also have a jd, right?

I do, yeah. I'm a well rounded nerd.

Yeah, you've done it all. So tell me more about your background, how you got started into this world.

Yeah, absolutely. So my first few roles right out of undergrad were in the software engineering space. I didn't know what I wanted to do. To this day, still don't.

Yeah, I hear you.

And when the dot com craziness imploded, I needed a break. I was coming off of a hundred hour work weeks. And because again, I'm not right upstairs, I thought law school's a good break. So I got my JD from 02 to 05 after working for a little while.

Okay.

And then as a 31 year old, newly minted lawyer, realized no law firm wants a first year associate with an opinion. So I fell back into the tech industry and led software engineering teams a while longer. Found my way to Salesforce. And Moonlit is a solo attorney. Then in late 2012, Salesforce had decided they wanted to create a legal ops function. Never heard of it before. Yeah, knew nothing about it. Like, we think we want two people, one technologist and one lawyer, to do different parts of what it takes to run the business. I'm like, oh, well, I think parts of each of those are interesting. Like, what if we mash them together and use the leftover budget for another teammate?

Yeah.

And that's how I fell into legal ops.

And how did they Find you did. I mean, and like, how did they come up with that role? Because that was still pretty early. I mean, some of us in Silicon Valley were doing it, but it was still early.

Yeah, I mean, credit really goes to the then AGC there. Paul Luongo, who is originally a corporate securities lawyer, has made his way to be the chief of staff to their then CLO and was really starting to get a glimpse of what it takes to run the department at what was still a really fast growing company.

Yeah.

When I got to Salesforce in 07 on the engineering side, it was less than 2,000 employees. Wow. And when I moved from R and D into legal, it was still only about 10,000. So there was still a lot of Runway left.

Yeah, yeah. And how big is it now?

I think about 70. Wow.

Okay, so you raised your hand and how did you hear about the role? Were you seeking something new?

Yeah, so I had, I'd stepped off the treadmill of climbing the software engineering leadership ladder and had spent a year and a half creating the end of life process for how to sunset cloud features because we'd never done that before. So I was exposed to the legal team a little more and that was really where I started to cross paths with some of the folks in that department and so just got wind that they had something interesting afoot that wasn't a traditional sort of product council sort of role.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So then you raised your hand and of course then you got the role. And what was it like when you started, and what did you start with?

It was, it was a trip because I had no idea what I was in for. Yeah. I'd never been surrounded by lawyers, even though I was one. So it was culturally, it was like starting over. I'd been in this really fast paced engineering org where continuous improvement is the North Star. And then I walk into a legal department with silos and specialists and people who are used to being the smartest in the room at whatever it is they do well.

Right.

Which it turns out is actually not a, not a horribly in inapt comparison to software engineers who are also used to being the smartest person in the room. But it was, it was really a sort of a fresh start, learning exercise of okay, what do we need in the CLM world? What do we need in the. Where's our money going? You know, we were still getting paper invoices mailed to individual attorneys at the time. So it was really just the, the nuts and bolts of whatever it took to try to take friction out of the machine for the attorney community.

Right. And having come from the software engineering part of Salesforce and then moving into the legal department, did you notice? And maybe not. But were there big differences in the way that these teams were run, operated? Did anything take you by surprise?

I think one of the things that surprised me was how small the legal team was compared to the company. It was a little north of 100 people at an employee, sort of headcount size of about 10,000. So it was a very mean department.

Okay.

But the other piece was really how differently each practice area ran from each other. My engineering teams, regardless of which part of the product I worked on, there was a lot of commonality and approach and the legal teams really had a lot of individual autonomy in the way they ran their own practice areas. So it took a while to get used to figuring out I'm not dealing with a customer cohort. It's really a lot of separate, smaller communities that I'm interacting with.

Yeah. And did. So how did you get started? Trying to figure out what. What to do first was. Was that AGC or what your. Was your GC giving you direction?

Yeah. So when I first got there, because of my. My tech background, our CLM implementation was a mess. Shocking twist. They often are. And it was really figuring out how do we remediate the CLM implementation in a way that it can. It can work better for everyone. So that sort of bridge to it was really one of the first places I focused along with the bridge back to R and D because we were still doing wet signatures on patent applications, for example, so there was some low hanging fruit around things like E Signature too. Okay.

So really tech. And that was early to be in tech. And honestly the tech solutions back then weren't anywhere near what they are today. Right.

Yeah, that's what Paul might have said.

And were you building or just buying?

We were. We were mostly buying at the time. But we had a bias because of what the Salesforce platform could do.

Right, Right.

We had a bias towards building, you know, so we weren't religiously zealous about it, but whenever there was a chance to, we looked to extend the platform in our direction and down the road for things like reporting and analytics. We took a lot of advantage of Tableau as well as some of the native Salesforce tools at the time. Time.

And then how big was your team by the time you left? How many years were you there and how did that sort of expansion happen?

Yeah, so when I got there, I was there 2013 to 2017.

When I got there. We co founded the team with a group of three or four of us. When I left, the team was still only five.

Okay.

So when I talked to Leo Marguel, who's in that role now, to see what he's done with that team and sort of the processes that cross that cruise desk, it's amazing to see what it's turned into.

Yeah. Well, the team and the department and the company have grown significantly since you left as well. So all of that scale happens. Okay, so after Salesforce, then you moved into a very different legal ops role. So tell me what happened next.

Yeah, so I was getting that itch to figure out, okay, what's next? I. My role at Salesforce had gotten to a place where I certainly left it better than I found it. But, you know, it was. It was hard to crack through strategically. I'm. Part of why I left the engineering world was that I got bored and I felt like a shampoo bottle. Wash, rinse, repeat, and. And I get that itch every couple of years.

Yeah. Yeah.

So as I started to look around, I crossed paths with a couple of friends of mine in our line of work who were doing a consulting engagement for the University of California system. And. Well, if you want to change. And a hard thing to do next, A real challenge. And Ken slid me a hard copy piece of paper and it was a staple together. Job description for the role I ended up with at the University of California, where I led legal ops for the. For the whole system.

So they had brought in consultants to do legal ops, and then it became clear that they needed someone full time.

That's right. Yeah. So they, Ken and Steph Curry ended up looking under every rock, looking in the couch cushions. Came up with a list of, I think roughly 85 recommendations for the UC legal team. One of them was to create a dedicated chief of staff role. The other was to create an executive director of legal ops.

Okay.

And then Kelly and I inherited the rest of those recommendations.

And what, like, what does the University of California look like? That's pretty foreign to me as an organization size. How does legal work? Is it one centralized team for all the UCs?

Yeah. So the UC system is the third biggest employer in the state.

Yeah. Okay.

So huge. All the things you assume about bureaucracy.

Wow.

The third biggest employer in the state.

Yeah.

Okay. I had no idea.

Yeah, I didn't either until I got there. So things that you take for granted in the private sector about the ability to influence and change things aren't things you can assume There because there are people who have a pension at the end of the tunnel and they are hanging onto the status quo sometimes.

Interesting.

So you're looking for those like minded change agents.

Yeah.

And to his credit, the GC there, Charlie, when I was interviewing, he's like, if, if you're frustrated and the team around you is uncomfortable, then I know we're making progress. Oh, that's great. And so that we went. But yeah, in the office of the president, they have all of the practice area specialists.

Okay.

Which is in Oakland. And then each campus has a small legal team of generalists who are doing that sort of in the field triage of whatever issues come their way.

Okay.

And then when they need that depth of experience, they go to, to OP to get those practice area specialists. And then there's also another nine figures of outside counsel spend.

Wow.

Wow.

And how big is the department? I guess considered on the career employee.

Side at OP, we were roughly 200 employees in the legal team.

That's big.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then the campuses ranged from having one lawyer who did it all to teams like UCLA which were probably eight or nine. And then each med center had a small team. Okay.

And we'll get to your current role, but that's got to be a pretty big shift in difference from what you were seeing at like a Silicon Valley hypergrowth public company like Salesforce to then going to public sector.

It's the only time I haven't worked in the software industry my whole career.

Oh, interesting.

And it was a blast. Like, I learned a ton.

Yeah, I bet.

You know, even though my roots are in the tech space, when I was there, really, I learned a ton on the financial management management world because our budget came from the legislature in Sacramento. So it wasn't even something where you're making the typical pitch to a CFO CEO.

Right.

C suite committee. Like you're waiting on the legislature to tell you what you can do with your dollars. And some of those dollars have, have really firm earmarks on them, others are more flexible.

Yeah.

So it was, you know, it was a really great sort of master class and what it takes to, to run a more sophisticated financial management shop.

Interesting. And like what kind of issues or legal practice areas are the biggest the chunk of the work there?

Yeah. So the UC has its own captive insurance company. So that was where on the outside counsel front, most of their spend is really in the self insurance space. Okay. And then big litigation portfolio. Everything from first amendment cases to unfortunate bad actors on campuses and med centers. Huge patent portfolio, nearly Every strawberry we eat comes from UC Davis. A lot of more traditional tech coming from other places too. And then the typical spread with the one exception that surprised me. I didn't own clm. There was no contract management. So as a legal ops person walking in, like, we saw plenty of legal tech sort of topics today, but I, having spent a lot of time banging my head on the wall with CLM at Salesforce, it was a nice surprise to walk into UC and realize, oh, this, this isn't one of my problems to deal with at the moment.

Because it's a big problem.

Right.

Yeah. So who, who does own that then?

Yeah. So. So there's no traditional sort of sales motion because you have the college campuses, the med centers, the national research labs.

Right? Yeah.

And then you're interacting at the giving community. And then on the procurement side, that was something that was really run within the finance.

It's big. Okay, I gotcha.

Okay.

Okay. So then what comes next for you?

So I did that for a few years. Three and a half years was at the time the second longest I'd worked anywhere. Eleven years at Salesforce, three and a half at uc. And that point I realized if I want to go back to tech, my hair was turning gray from an ageism standpoint, like, if I'm going to go back, I better go back soon. And. And I happened to cross paths with procore. Didn't know anything about the place other than they were doing software as a service for the construction industry and.

Well, tell us a little bit about what Procore is for the people who don't know.

Absolutely. Yeah. So Procore is a cloud solution that's really focused on the construction vertical. And the goal is to connect everyone on a project, the owner developer, the general contractor, the specialty contractors, so that everyone has a unified system of truth. And there's an easier way to collaborate so you can reduce rework, so you can have an easier time staying on budget or on time, monitor sort of the quality and safety aspects of a project in a better way. But it's all delivered through the cloud. The company is 20 years old, but it really wasn't until 3G networks and the iPhone that really the growth really ratcheted up.

Okay. I didn't realize they were that old because you hear a lot about them these days and it sounds like it had just started, but it is, it sounds like it's taking off and doing very, very well.

Yeah. Our CEO used to go out to job site to install WI fi.

Okay.

You know, just to try to make the. The sales motion more straightforward for folks and get better value out of the solution.

So how big was legal by the time that they. And when did they decide that they needed legal apps? I assume you're the first.

Yeah, So I was. I was talking to my CLO right before the COVID lockdown started in early 2020. At the time, the team was roughly four or five people. The whole legal team.

Yep.

You know, then Covid happened. We all hit the big red pause button. Companies weren't hiring employees, were reluctant to make big changes until we saw what came next. So I ended up joining in November, that year of 2020.

Okay.

First full time legal ops hire. 10th person in the department. Company was roughly 2,000 employees, a little smaller, which was about the same size Salesforce was when I got there.

Yeah.

But I had never seen this stage of growth in the back office. I was an engineering leader at Salesforce, so I was used to getting product out the door and hiring hand over fist to look for engineering and technical talent. But it was a very new experience to figure out how do you grow a gene, a function?

Yeah. Okay. So they were growing very quickly and you were the first hire and what were they struggling with? What was keeping them up such that they needed. I also want to get to what's the right size to add that first full time hire. And Some would argue 10 is late. Some would argue it's the right time. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, thankfully we had a great. A great generalist who was doing a lot of traditional legal ops things on her desk while she was putting herself through law school.

Oh, okay.

So she's now on her go to market legal team as an attorney. But at the time, like, she was really our Jane of all trades.

I bet she's a good attorney.

She's amazing. So there was a lot of that groundwork that had been laid. But our Cielo, he never worked with folks like you and me before, but was. Was just a religious zealot about it. He's like, this is a force multiplier. We need to grow. The company's growing quickly. We have to keep up in the service we provide. Not so much as lawyers doing legal things, but as trusted business advisors who happen to carry bar numbers. And it was really about trying to amplify how do we take a lean by design team that's always going to be lean by design relative to the company size and. And really amplify the way we provide our service.

Yeah. I'm always so curious because I hear a lot about GCs who have worked elsewhere, like, have come from a Salesforce or some big company where they have seen Legal Ops, and when they get to be gc, they're like, I need that function. Sounds like he had not worked with Legal Ops before. Do you know where he had heard about it or where he got the idea, even educated himself, that this was a role?

Yeah. So I know he had worked with Legal Ops folks in his past.

Okay.

But really hadn't. Hadn't really seen what we were capable of pulling off. And I think that some of that is. Is whatever situation you're in, whether it's growth, high growth or slow, whether it's a line of work that lends itself to innovation as a sort of company, sort of cultural norm.

Yeah.

Or not. But, yeah, he was. He was very focused on how do we take what is a precious amount of bandwidth that we have to deliver and make that focus on the highest impact.

Okay. And this is the third time, then, that you're building the team from scratch and building the function from scratch, which I think must be a blessing. Like, you take everything you learned from the first time, you do it a little better. Yeah. Yeah. And now you're like, oh, if I could start over, here's how I would do it differently. And have you. Have you done that in each role and taken your learnings from the past?

Yeah, I probably tripped a little bit transition from Salesforce to the uc. Like, just very different thinking. I could just translate really fluidly, like, everything I was bringing with me. So I had some. Some new learning to do in that line of work, but was also able to bring with me a lot of what the private sector and the tech industry both were doing. Yeah. Because I had the luxury of meeting you and the rest of the clock folks when we were taking turns hosting meetings in our conference room.

That's right.

And that peer cohort, I think, was really, really important for me individually as I transitioned both of those times from Salesforce to UC and then from UC to Procore, because I had folks I trusted that I could bounce ideas off of and ask questions like, what's it like to go to this size of a place as the lone person when there isn't necessarily a prospect of hiring in your future? And thankfully, I've grown the team a little bit since. But when I got to Procore, it was also about applying. My 11 years from Salesforce, I'd seen what growth in a cloud computing company looked like. Granted, I was in a very different chair for a Lot of that time at salesforce. But besides my legal ops learnings, I also had what it takes to grow this kind of company. So I think it's made me a better partner, particularly for our go to market legal team.

Yeah, I'm sure it has. I mean, I know some of the folks in your team. You've got some tremendous talent on your team. How have you thought about growing the teams? I guess each three times. I can speak for myself. When I built the team, we changed, we reorged. The scope of our roles were changing, at least in the beginning when we didn't even know what legal ops was at the time. So it was growing all the time. Now that you're doing procore and legal ops is much more established, did you approach it in a much more deliberate way versus the first time around?

Yeah, I'm a simple guy, Mary. So for me it's still like where's the money going? Yeah. So I knew there was a ton of process maturity to go through. Basic things like how does the legal team handle intake or how do we as a legal ops function handle intake within the department?

Yeah.

I still always started with the budget and sometimes that. At salesforce and at UC that was really outside counsel, centric. When I got to procore, it was really org design. It was how are we putting our dollars to work in a way that's going to put us in the best place to be ready when the engineering team, the sales team are really firing on all cylinders so that we're not on our heels.

Yeah.

It was still like focus on the money first. And I have the tech side as sort of like my safety blanket. But it wasn't a place where I felt like I had to focus quickly. Except that we didn't have a CLM tool on the sales side. We did, oddly on the procurement side, thanks to that same generalist who, who was there sort of laying the groundwork ahead of me.

Yeah.

Who was also negotiating a lot of procurement deals.

Yeah.

So in a very wise but sort of self, self interest move, she had deployed ironclad for procurement deals years ago. And then that was one of the things we decided we wanted to focus on in the sales motion. We were doing a big transformation for the price book and quoting process for our sales reps. And at the same time really thought, you know, chronologically this is the moment when we really need to mature the commercial contracting space on the sales side as well. But other than clm, like it's really my focus has been a lot more on sort of the process side and org design and sort of trying to stay a step ahead of our client communities.

Gotcha on the CLM piece. Just cause you mentioned it. So many Companies have multiple CLMs, right? The big companies we're all familiar with, they have different systems for buying and procuring and hiring. So when I came into the CLM world I was actually pretty surprised. I always thought the best practice was just to have everything in one system. Like why would you not want all your contracts in one place, all your compliance, all your obligations so that you can track everything. Is that your sense too? And why do you think that it has been owned and separated into multiple parts in each company?

Yeah, it's a great question. I had the same assumption when I joined the Salesforce legal team. You had a CLM tool for the sell side. We didn't yet have one on the buy side and we actually bought the exact same tool but by design implemented a separate instance of it.

Yeah.

Why?

And in that case it was because we had over engineered the sell side. We wanted to be able to lean more on the vendor for things like support and feature upgrades and things. But yeah, and then it's always one of those strange moments where if you're doing strategically important deals. Deals.

Yep.

Buy or sell side, it's a lot of dollars at stake. And if you get a chance to put that relationship to work in a more holistic way, it seems like it's been a historically missed opportunity. But it's also I think a side effect of how do those different teams get resources. And it's always easier to justify focusing on the sales motion. It's dollars in and the revenue engine in that the fuel in the machine always makes it a little easier for that side of the house to go get what they need. And I think they're often sourcing and procurement teams who are trying to play a little bit of catch up in that regard.

Okay, got it. Let me go back to just. I'd love to spend more time just comparing the three different organizations that you've been with. Just I think it's so unique, your perspective that you can bring how big a factor is culture, but when I say culture it's how do people work, how do things get done. I hate to use the word politics, but really this has a lot to do with how do you get people to buy into initiatives, how do decisions get made, how does budget get allocated, how do you get headcount? Like how does that differ? And you don't have to get specific about Each that you've worked, but I imagine when you walk in, it's a very different environment in all three.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And it's one of the big reasons I stayed at Salesforce for as long as I did. Like, I really loved, no matter what role I was in or what team I was interacting with, customer success was always the tiebreaker in a disagreement. And I loved that North Star. That was the place where even though I was on the engineering side, something I brought with me to the legal team is, you know, that, that focus on continuous improvement and, you know, trust as currency, which takes a long time to build but not very long to lose.

That's right.

And I think those things have applied pretty well when I was at uc, finding that that like minded community of change agents sometimes took longer than I wished it would have. But they're, they're there in a place that big, they're there. They're not always raising their hand and wearing it on their sleeve. But I think culture is hugely important. Like I've had the luxury of working in the legal team in three amazingly nice places. Like I like the people at all three legal shops I've been in part. Part of. I can't imagine still being in this line of work if I didn't have that experience.

Yeah, yeah. And like the pace, the pace at which things move and decisions are made, I'm sure is very different.

Yeah.

And what about like the general counsel and the leadership? How much of a factor is that in your success, your team's morale, I guess, how close you are with the gc, how involved they are and I guess their mindset about innovation and legal operations.

Yeah, I think it's had a huge impact on my morale. I try to be a really effective translator and in some cases buffer for my crew though. And I was that way on the engineering side of the house as well. I want to give them the freedom and the air cover to go make smart choices yet to go do the things that make sense with whatever our priorities of the day happen to be. But I also, I personally always crave influence.

Yeah.

I don't have to get my way, but I want to know that my voice is part of the decision making process. That's been a really important sort of factor for me as I've chosen where to land next. That I've had GCs and CMOs who really, who really wanted to figure out how do we make life better for our paralegals, for our analysts, for our attorneys so that they can be more effective Business partners of whoever they're internal and external clients happen to be.

Yeah. And they've been supportive in you growing your team and getting headcount after establishing. You started all three as party of one, I assume, Right.

Salesforce. There are a few of us who joined all at the same time. Walked in the door simultaneously looking around like now what?

Yeah, that's good. You have a support system.

Absolutely. So that team really didn't take off until after I left.

Okay.

We added a person each on the E, billing and tech sides of the house while I was there, but it really blossomed once. Once I transitioned out at the UC system, I inherited a team. And then one of the early things we did as part of that same sort of implementation of the consultants recommendations was centralize our practice support folks, which I'd always been biased the other direction on thinking that leaving them embedded with the domain experts was the way to play it. So my team went from 9 to 42 at UC once I got the practice support folks. But we were able to add a couple of folks, particularly in the legal tech space once we were able to see process improvement pays off. And thankfully in all three places I've been, we didn't really lead with legal tech as our roadmap. It was really process improvements prioritized and technology was a means to an end.

Right.

And I think that landed in a easier to consume way for the returning community in particular, that it's not us just trying to show off cool innovation for its own sake. Like we actually want to reclaim your time for you.

So important.

And maybe you deploy that for work, maybe you don't, but either way, you've gotten time back and you get some, you know, some agency there, some discretion on how to put that to work.

Fantastic. Okay. So you had the support, you had teams, but you did grow all three of the teams. I know at Procore you built that team from scratch.

Yeah, I've got an all star team. I've got an amazing group.

Yeah. So talk to me about. Everybody wants to get into this field. They all want to know what skill sets are important. As you've hired out that all star team, what did you look for? How much is legal Ops experience important? Not important. How much do you think about tech skills versus financial acumen versus business acumen versus legal experience?

It's a really interesting space because I don't think there's a playbook for us as a high growth software company. I definitely needed someone who could take things off of my desk individually as that first Hire or two. And thankfully on the financial side, that happened really quickly. On the tech side, we've grown into that. But what I'm looking for more than anything else tend to be translators. I have the luxury of having been at the intersection of legal and technology. My roots are blue collar, not white collar. When I go back home, I'm also saying, oh, you're the computer guy. Right. So even even that sort of just socially being comfortable with different audiences and being comfortable talking to them about their own journey, their own plight, their own frustration, that's probably that service orientation and being comfortable being part of a team, these roles can sometimes feel a little lonely. So also being sure that there's a sense of community there, whether it's within your company or whether it's in the Legal Ops community at large, so that you have folks to lean on for that. But I don't necessarily look at like years of experience in Legal Ops, but I do tend to look for folks who've had to create something and who have a really disdain for the status quo.

Right.

I want folks who get frustrated with the way things are and want to make them better, but who also have the sense of end user empathy to figure out that you need that. What's in it for you hook to get buy in?

Absolutely. Is that part of the salesforce culture of customer experience that you've brought with you?

I think that's where I personally picked it up. I think there are lots of people who didn't work there who also bring that to the table. But for me personally, yeah, that's really where I sharpened.

And I'm sure you convey that culturally to your team as well. So did you start with generalists or specialists when it came to building out your team? And did you do it like one by one? Did you hire a whole bunch of people at the same time?

Yeah. So my first teammate in Legal Ops was a shared ea. So our CLO got a new EA and I ended up putting his former EA to work doing like emailing coordinator types of activities.

Okay, so you're training this person?

Yeah, yeah. And then thankfully the paramedical and the corporate securities practice who took us public had always wanted to move into Legal Ops. You know, at her previous employer she owned both. I don't know which I suspect Legal Ops was her edge of desk and her day job was corporate and securities. But thankfully she'd run their E billing program and really seamlessly stepped into ours. And now since has really expanded her portfolio to own all things with dollar signs on Them she's hired our first project manager for the legal department. So that really financial centric teammate was a really important sort of next hire for me with a fast follow on the tech side because we knew CLM was coming.

Yeah.

And we needed to be ready for that.

Okay. So first couple hires were internal hires which, which sometimes is really beneficial because that culture piece, that figuring out how to get things done, the who's who, the politics of the organization, they come ready with that. All right, and then you expanded to tech specialists.

Yeah, we just hired someone to be our business owner for clm. But before this most recent hire, everyone I've hired on the tech side have been generalists. Got it. Because even though CLM takes a lot of oxygen in the room, it's not the only thing. And you never know where the next process improvement need is going to be. Especially cross functionally because we, we take a lot of pride in trying to be a business department that happens to include lawyers rather than the special sort of snowflakes that legal teams can sometimes rightly or wrongly paint themselves to be. So I wanted to be sure we could engage with it, with finance, with our cross functional stakeholders on any topic of the day. And until really recently, my technologists have all been folks. They're pretty versatile.

And how like what, what are your big rocks this year, next year, how far do you plan out? How do you get your priorities?

Yeah, so I, I try not to plan more than a year out.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah. We have, we have a multi year company strategy and I'm thinking about that multi year journey when it comes to things like org design, do we have the right ALSP stakeholders, vendors in place but for the actual tactics of which things do we focus on as a legal ops team then I try to bring that sort of focus chronologically a little closer to where we're at because I don't assume that we're going to get it right the first time. I think iterative deployments, taking those incremental steps forward matter.

Definitely.

And that the feedback you get can sometimes influence. How many of those steps do you need to take before you can hit pause and move to the next thing?

And are you like rolling things out across the department? Are you experimenting with little teams and I don't know, like let's AI is something that's come up and everyone's kind of trying to experiment with. How do you even think about that? Do you put that into your strategy for the whole department or do you kind of just try and experiment first yeah.

In general, when it's a novel technology, I tend to look for a sandbox team or two to play with. When it's something that's obvious. Like when I was at UC and we, we didn't have any signature product, for me, that was an obvious let's do this everywhere.

Okay.

But in general, for something like AI, I think places like knowledge management, computers read way faster than people do. For things like contract management, I think there's a ton of specific use cases. And like anything else, like I want the pain points in the field or the value prop that something can bring to the table to be what drives this rather than innovation for its own sake. I still think. I don't know how apt the analogy is, but I've been using it, so I'm curious to see how it lands.

Let's hear it.

I analogize AI and legal teams for folks who are worried like, oh, is it going to take my job if I'm a paralegal or a frontline lawyer? And I think back to when we were taking legal research online, there were folks that lived in the stacks in libraries and they would write their brief really well. Well reasoned, well researched. But as Lexus and Westlaw came online, you could accomplish the same thing without losing any quality in a faster pace. And then it started to become a differentiator whether you were in house or whether you were at a law firm.

Arguably better quality, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that's where, where I see AI taking us. For those frontline folks who are like, well, is AI the boogeyman that's out to get me? I think it's really an accelerant. We have to figure out which use cases matter most. So you prioritize the trains leaving the station in that regard, but I think at the end of the day it's going to be as, as assumed as a, as a tool in your toolbox, as what the Internet has been.

Yeah. Or E Discovery or research. And how quickly or slowly do you think this is going to happen? I feel like people are frustrated that it's happening so slowly. And then there's people who are frustrated that it's happening so quickly. Like, where are we? What's actually going to happen?

I am of both of those minds at the same time. Me too. To see how rapidly things have gone since the original sort of chatgpt announcement not too long ago to where we are. It's been really cool to see those brisk turns, but at the same time I think there's still that Pragmatic, like, how does this help me to wait and see moment. And I've heard you talk to other guests here about getting comfortable with where's my data going, who owns the work product. I think there's still some infosec rules of the game that we're figuring out along the way. But I think once we get some of those things out of the way, those potholes paved over, I think it's going to be really interesting. Use case by use case. I don't think it's going to be flipping a switch the way that going from client server to the web was for every tool everywhere. But I think for the places where, where computers have a huge advantage, I think it's gonna, it's gonna pick up really brisk. I think it's going to be more like a hockey stick approach rather than this sort of slow and steady climb up into the right.

Yeah, I agree with you. I've been saying it feels like a tsunami that we know is coming and then when it comes, it's going to come really fast. But we have this short window of time to get ready and figure it out.

You've seen the water leave?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Get ready.

Do you have any tips for people knowing that the water is leaving right now? Like what should they be doing to get ready?

Yeah, I think, and for me, I'm always a curious person. I think just continuing to look around and see what people you trust or look up to are either experimenting with or where their own energy is going is always a good thing. As a consumer, we've been using AI for ages, in email, in ride sharing apps, you name it. AI isn't new to us as consumers. So I think continuing to experiment there, like, okay, if I need a theme for my 8 year old's birthday party, computers are going to have way more ideas than the limited synapses. That fire between my ears are going to love it.

Love it.

So I think just experimenting as a consumer of AI as well is a place where I try to poke around.

Yeah, Great advice as we wrap up, Mick. Advice that you might have for general counsels and legal office people as they're thinking about creating this function, elevating this function, doing more with it, getting into it.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things I've loved about my current role and the rapport I've got with my, with my boss is that there are moments where we're like, well, should there be a chief of staff role and a legal ops role? And then he and I both in unison. Like we. We just do whatever the business needs. And for us at this size and scale moment in time, I've really loved that I get to do anything it takes to run the business of the legal department. And I think for a GC or a CMO out there, I think looking for that person you can trust to take all that collection of stuff like what's it take to run a business of a C suites department? And that could be very finance centric. It could be very tech centric. Process improvement, HR and org design, any of those facets of the space. Wherever you need to reclaim time. I think there's a ton of value that folks like us don't often get to show. I've seen and experienced frustration like anyone else and feeling like the role is more tactical than what I'm capable of helping with. And that's not a space where I feel like I'm at now. And it's been wonderful. Yeah.

And how do we get to that? How should people get to that?

I've heard some past guests of yours talk about it. It's really demonstrating value.

Yeah.

If you're showing impact on higher and higher stakes kinds of activities or your advice, even if it's only in private, one on one, you know, resonates with someone. You could be an effective sounding board. You can remain objective even if you have subjective interests in a topic. Right. Then that's gonna engender more trust. Again, that trust as a currency goes a long way. Even privately with your GC or clo.

It's so true. Cause you're probably one of the only people in the department who are not working on one team. You're actually working across the whole department. So right things. And you're a great sounding board to that gc. Mick, Fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for making the trip to San Francisco. It's great to see you as always.

Absolutely. This was a blast.

This was a lot of fun. And everyone, thanks for tuning in. We'll see. See you on the next episode.