Ep 130: Legal Ops Pioneer Mary Shen O’Carroll On Moving From Google To Ironclad

I define innovation in a very simple way, which is simply looking at something differently. And so I know a lot of folks will focus on technology and such, but really so much of it is about people and process, and if you just take something in the way it is and look at it with a different lens, I think that is how I would define innovation.

Today on Lawnext. Mary Shen O' Carroll pioneered the field of legal operations during her 13 years as Director of operations, technology and Strategy at Google. She was also instrumental in forming clock, the corporate legal operations consortium, and was elected as president in 2019. In April, she left both of those roles, leaving Google and stepping down as Clock president to join the contract lifecycle management company Ironclad as Chief Community Officer. Mary o' Carroll joins me today to talk about her new role. This is Bob Ambrogi and you're listening to lawnext, the podcast that features the innovators and entrepreneurs who are driving what's next in law.

We'll get to today's conversation in just a moment. But first, this.

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Now on to today's show. Mary welcome to the show.

Hey Bob, thanks so much for having me.

I'm so thrilled to finally be able to talk to you. I was first trying to talk to you just before all hell broke loose back when you were at ABA Tech show and we weren't able to talk then. And then you kindly told me the next time I was out in San Francisco I could look you up and come by your office and record an interview. And I haven't been back. I haven't been on an airplane since then, so I haven't been back in San Francisco either. So this is great to be able to finally catch up with you. But a lot has changed in the world and for you personally during that time.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. It is funny how the last time we connected we were trying to see each other in person and oh yes, the world has changed and yeah, a lot of changes in my life as well.

Yeah. So you were, as I said in the introduction, a pioneer in legal ops, starting the legal operations function at Google 13 years ago and then helping to start Clock and later becoming its president. And in April, you stepped away from both of those roles in order to join the contract lifecycle management company Ironclad as its Chief Community Officer. Why did you want to do that? What motivated you to make that move?

Yeah, I think a lot of it is a continuation of the journey of pioneering legal ops and to pushing the envelope in this industry. I will say it wasn't like I was looking or unhappy. I was very, very happy to be with an amazing company and team at Google and of course at Clock as well. I'm just someone who believes that you constantly want to challenge yourself and get out of your comfort zone. I also encourage people all the time to know what your options are, even if you are completely happy and have no intention of leaving your current role. I think I was there. I was at the top of where I wanted to be for legal operations professionals and was always thinking kind of, what else can I do with my passion and my skills in this area, as I'm definitely not anywhere near done sort of trying to progress the business of law. Ironclad was a company that I had always been watching from the sidelines. I think I met the founders, Jason and kai, probably around 2015, 2016, when they were just getting Ironclad off the ground and been watching with great interest over the years because I think they had an amazing vision from the start and continued to build and grow a great company and great product. I was also really impressed over the years by their avid followers and fans. This was really important in particular with the role that I ended up taking because we all know that there's a lot of frustration for corporate legal departments when it comes to vendors and software companies and implementation is hard. So you usually have a lot of frustration about your software companies. And Ironclad unusually had this huge following of people who just loved the product and would rave about it sort of unprompted. That stood out to me. Then over the last year, as Google was looking at Ironclad and we looked at the demos and saw the features that were coming out, it just continued to wow me with the talent of the team and the product that they had. When the opportunity came to me to join as a Chief Community Officer, I will admit it is not a role that I would have thought of for myself, but combine the company that I was a big fan of with this role that seemed so perfect for me, that would allow me to leverage my.

Passion for the business of law and.

The desire to Continue to grow communities, to progress the industry. It was almost like a perfect match. And so with that first conversation, I think the ball moved very, very quickly and very, very difficult decision, both to leave Google and Clock, but I think the absolute right thing for me.

Yeah, I'm sure those were tough decisions. In announcing your move, you wrote a post in which you said, contracting is the most exciting sector in legal tech today. Why do you say that? What excites you about contracting space?

Yeah, and I think I'm definitely not alone in this thought.

No, you're not.

Yeah. There's so much. It's all you hear about. Right. It's all the buzz right now. And I do think it is exciting. And it is the sector or the area that I think has the biggest need for change and for digitization. And that's what makes it exciting to me. As we all know, every single company has contracts, whereas not every company is going to have privacy issues or litigation issues or IP issues. Every single company of every size and everywhere in the world is going to have contracts. I've often said that contracting is a process that has sort of lost its way. It's a little bit broken, or it's very much broken. And therefore, we like to refer to it, or I like to refer to it as the 80% problem, because if you can fix contracting, you can fix 80% of the challenges that every legal department around the world has. And it is just the time is now and it's very ripe.

The reasons that I'm excited about the opportunity here is because of the information that is currently trapped inside business contracts. We sort of lost the purpose of contracts. They've become this administrative tool that we now kind of get it over with as soon as we can put it into a box or a virtual box, never to look at it again. But if you can unlock, if you can change contracting and turn it into a strategic asset again, you're really unlocking a lot of value, not just for legal, but now it starts to transform the entire business and the way the business operates or executes or generates revenue. And I think that is just really, really full of potential and super exciting. And so that's why I think it's really exciting.

Back in April, Ironclad CEO Jason Baymig was on this show, which was not long after ironclad raised a $100 million Series D at a reported valuation of $1 billion, making it one of the few unicorns in legal tech. And a question I asked Jason about when he was on the show, he had made a reference at the time of the announcing the series D to. Well, he said, I will quote him. He said, with this financing, we aim to solve the most important unsolved problem of modern business, the problem of business contracting. So what do you see as that problem and what needs to be done to solve it?

Well, I think we have to digitize the contracts, and that allows us to get the information and the data out of the contracts. And what I think is the most exciting part of that is the opportunity for the legal department and the general counsel to be seen as a business partner. And that seems to be the theme that we're talking about so much Right. In the legal industry right now, is how do we become a better partner to the business? How do we be more strategic in the C suite? Contracting has been a big problem for us to date because honestly, that is what's giving legal a bad reputation. The whole office of no. Or that's where things slow down. That whole reputation is coming from the business's interaction with legal, which often, most of the time is in the form of contracting. So we know that process is broken. It's not an enjoyable way to get things done around the company. We have the opportunity to speed it up, to make it faster, to make it easier. And I think that is what most CLMs, or contract lifecycle management companies are focused on. And that's really important. But the other piece of it that I think, like we talked about earlier, that is the more exciting piece, is after you've sort of improved the process, after you've gotten adoption, and after you've gotten the data into a contract management system, what can you do with that? And that is where I think you can truly start to change the way legal is viewed in the company. If you are empowering legal to now have the knowledge of all that information, of all that data, which is so, so rich and not being used at all right now in any organization, if you can have the general counsel be empowered with that when he or she has a meeting with the CFO or the head of sales or the head of procurement, or the head of product, all of a sudden you are empowering them to come with information and data about the way the business is being run, about the trends that are happening right now, about the revenue streams, and that starts to get really, really interesting. And they're going to want you to have a seat at the table when you have that information that nobody else has.

Yeah. You said earlier that chief community officer might not have been the role you had envisioned for yourself back a year or two ago. What is the role? What does it mean specifically? And maybe you could talk a little bit of what you see as the connection between community building and legal innovation.

Yeah. So community has been at the center of Ironclad's company and culture since the beginning. And I give Jason and the leadership team a lot of credit for really understanding the value that community can bring. What I'm here to do is really just double down on customer success and community and sort of relaunch it and put more investment into it to take it to the next level. So our goal is really to create the world's largest community of innovators who are passionate about redefining contracting. By doing this, we are creating a community that is going to invest in our customers, the experts, everyone else who kind of works on Ironclad and knows a bit or cares anything about digital contracting. And this is so important. The community is so important as an aspect, because digital contracting is just. It's new.

Right.

It's a lot like legal ops was when we sort of started clock. Right. It's simply we don't have established patterns, we don't have conventional wisdom yet. And so a lot of folks that are coming into these roles who are now in charge of rolling out a CLM don't have a lot of support or places to go to for ideas, best practices, how are other people doing this? And so having a way for folks to learn from and connect with each other on how it's actually being done is vital to being successful. So we want to create a place where members can come and share, learn from, connect with one another, and more tactically, they can exchange workflows or templates or come together to understand how to solve a common problem. That's really the idea, is empowering folks to be more successful, but then also creating best practices and progressing this digital contracting movement.

Is community another word for customer here, or are you talking about something broader than that?

It's broader than that. I think for a lot of companies, they're starting with user communities or customer communities. And frankly, I do believe that's where we'll have the most engagement, because I think folks really need each other and want to talk to one another, and we hear that a lot day to day. But we are a unique company in that we, like I mentioned earlier, we have this huge following and fan base of people who are interested in the idea of progressing contracts and digital contracting. And so we are absolutely going to embrace all the folks that are interested in it or have a part in it and to be part of our community. They have been in the past and they will continue to be an important part.

Yeah. Not to make this a complete commercial on behalf of Ironclad, but I'm curious what it is that you think has driven that interest in the product. How does Ironclad, I mean, this is such a hot market, there are so many products on the market. What do you think it is about Ironclad's product or approach that makes it different to those who are part of that community?

It's really centered on the users and I think it shows. I mean, I know as a buyer in the past I had seen a lot of vendor and software demonstrations and used a lot of them hands on myself. Adoption is such an important and such a challenging part of success. We've often said you can launch a new product into your legal department or a new software and you can have the carrot or the stick, put the hammer down and say, everyone must use this on Monday. But if it's not user friendly, if it's difficult, if it's clunky, if it's harder than it was doing it the old way, you're not going to get adoption. And if you don't get adoption, you're not going to get the data and you can't unlock the value.

Oftentimes we talk about companies that can do everything for us that have all the features and that's great, but sometimes it's over engineered and over complicated so that when the users or the end users are working with it, it's too many clicks, it's hard to figure out. You need a ton of training to make it work. What I have loved about Ironclad is the fact that it is walk up usable, meaning you don't need to be trained. You can kind of figure it out. When you walk up to it, it does what it should, really clean and easy. The other principle that I always used to have at Google, which I think Ironclad fits well, is that the new way has to be markedly better than the old way. That just means it can't be clunky, it can't be difficult. Change management is the hardest part of the legal ops job. And we've said that over and over. You need a software that is going to do all the talking for you. You want to show your stakeholders, you want to show your end users how easy it can be and how much better their life can be if they use it. And that's got to be really clear from the start when you have something that does that, you surprise and delight people and then they want to use it. You shouldn't have to, as many of us have learned the hard way. Feel like you have to force it down your users throats and kind of train them to enforce them to use it kicking and screaming because you want to get adoption and data.

I wonder if I could turn to your prior role and to your work in legal Ops. I had read somewhere that when you joined Google to lead legal operations, you weren't even sure what legal operations meant and you're not sure that Google knew what it meant when they were filling the position. So what was it about that role that attracted you to want to take it?

Yeah, so prior to Google I was at a law firm called Oreck, which was a really innovative forward thinking law firm and really enjoyed the fact that.

Ralph Baxter's been on the show a couple of times too.

Yeah, yeah, of course. And Ralph is a forward thinker and I think part of what I loved about that firm was being in a place that was willing to take risks and do things differently. And so when Google had approached me about the role, I often thought that, I honestly thought it was going to be a lot like doing operations at a law firm, but just in house. And what really attracted me to the position at the end of the day was the people. Once I went in and interviewed with the team there and kind of understood what was happening and the growth, it just, it was a no brainer.

Yeah. But at that point, given that this was still early in the development of, I guess the concept anyway of legal operations and the role was new at Google, how did you kind of go about putting, you know, flesh on the bones of that function? How did you sort out what it should be, what it should look like? How did you build it up?

Yeah, so I kind of loved the idea that it was unchartered territory. Right. So I had a bit of a business and consulting background and so I kind of viewed myself like an internal consultant and talking to the leadership team about what was going well, what could be better, kind of understanding the current processes and pain points and then going about and trying to figure out if there were ways that we could improve those. And that's really the heart of what legal operations is, making things better. And so I loved that idea just in the way that we put flesh on the bones was really just finding problems and executing.

Is that why the same post that I quoted earlier, you wrote in that post, I am obsessed with legal operations Is that why you're obsessed with legal operations?

Yeah.

You know, and since I started at.

A law firm and, you know, the.

Story is that in my first week, I kind of understood the business of the law firm and how the structure worked and was surprised and kind of asked myself and asked others, are we really getting away with this? And so I think that's where the obsession began. There were so many things that seemed broken with the industry, both at law firms and then later in house in legal departments, that it was sort of, I can't unsee this. You know, now that I've seen all this, I have to go after it and fix it. And that's, yes, it's sort of been my obsession or, you know, my passion, maybe is a better way to put it. For the last, you know, decade and a half or so, maybe two decades by now.

Mary o' Carroll was one of the true trailblazers in the field of legal operations. Not only did she found the legal operations function within Google's legal department in 2008, but she was also a founder and later president of clock, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, an organization that has come to take a leading role in advancing the field of legal operations. When we return, we'll talk more about the legal operations profession and Clock's role in advancing that profession. But first, let's hear from one of the sponsors who makes this show possible.

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Mary, I wanted to ask you a question that you're probably sick of answering because you've probably asked it so many times over the years. But how do you define legal operations for those who maybe aren't that familiar with the concept.

Yeah, it's actually quite simple. And I think in the simplest terms, it's we just try to make things better.

Right.

But more formally, it describes a set of business processes, activities, and the professionals who help legal organizations serve their clients more effectively by applying business and technical practices to the delivery of legal services. So the legalOps function itself will include things like strategic planning, financial management, project management, tech expertise, and a variety of other things. That clock has actually very well defined in its clock core 12, that describes the scope of the role and things that help enable legal professionals to really focus on providing legal advice.

Yeah, I'm trying to think of who it was. Somebody I talked to years ago in the earlier days of Legal Ops, defined it as cto, coo, cfo, and pretty much every other C suite title, except maybe CEO.

I think that sounds about right.

Yeah.

Something else I always like to ask people is about the word innovation. And I know you talk a lot about innovation, you write a lot about innovation, and you've also talked about your interest in innovation, but what does that word mean to you? When you think about a company that's innovative or a legal department innovating in some way, what does that count?

Yeah, I define innovation in a very simple way, which is simply looking at something differently. And so I know a lot of folks will focus on technology and such, but really so much of it is about people and process. And if you just take something in the way it is and look at it with a different lens, I think that is how I would define innovation.

Yeah. And what do you see as the key competencies of a Legal Ops professional? What does it take to be somebody who can excel in this field?

Yeah, so it's really a business operations role that just happens to sit in the legal department. And so for me, and I've done a lot of thinking about this recently because I talked to so many folks that are trying to hire for this or try to get trained on this, and what are the skills that are needed are simply business skills. So I often tell folks an MBA or a shorter version of an MBA are all the skills that are going to help you in this role. And that's broad. Right. So it's things like business acumen, it's influencing, it's change management, it's financial management, project management, strategic thinking, prioritization, data analytics, communication. You know, all the courses that you would take in an MBA program kind of mushed into one. Like you said, it's the see everything for A legal department or a law firm.

A lot of this has become centered. A lot of the training and education and programming around this area has become centered in clock, the corporate Legal Operations consortium, which you played a role in founding and also served as its president back in the days when CLOCK was just getting started. Why was it important to create this organization? What was the need for it within the industry?

Yeah, it's a great question. And looking back and being in a role now that's focused 100% on building communities, I think we sort of stumbled on community when we created clock. And it was the idea that a few of us who were in these legal operations role we talked about earlier, it was undefined. We didn't know what the problems were that we were looking for and how to solve them. And when you found others, you felt really alone in that world trying to solve and find problems and there is no sort of best practices and you didn't know anyone else who had these jobs. And so when we reached out and we found one another, it was such this immediate sense of belonging, this sense of community, that we needed each other. But it also helped us in our own jobs and our roles and our success because we could talk to each other and not recreate the wheel every time. And so that was really meaningful to each of us. And we wanted to create this organization because there were just more and more people in these roles every day. And we knew that how helpful it was to many of us in the beginning. And so we wanted to give back and help the next generation and, you know, the people after that. And then the role that we've seen and the impact that we've seen CLOCK have in the industry was something that we didn't expect. You know, when we became a bigger organization, it was just that we just had so many people that were entering the world of legal ops that we didn't, you know, fit in a small room where we were formally known as almost like a book club that got together for lunch. When we became clock in 2016 as a full blown organization and association, we realized that this was here to stay, that there was a lot of need in the industry for this role, both at law firms and in legal departments. But then we also had sort of a responsibility to help define the role, to grow it in its scope, to grow it in its stature. And sort of realizing that we wanted to be the ones that defined the roles for all of us before it was defined for us by somebody else. And so by putting together one of our first steps was putting together that clock core 12, which is the scope of role of things that might sit within the legal operations function. And then a large part of this organization is about spreading the word and letting folks around the world know the impact that a legal operations professional can bring into the organization and really elevating that role to more senior and strategic levels.

Yeah. I mean, from an outsider's perspective, it looked to me around that time that KLOC kind of accelerated the growth of the legal operations role as a profession, as an independent profession, and that that really is kind of what brought it into its own in a sense. I don't know if you agree with that at all.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that that was part of the goal and that's kind of what happened.

Right, yeah. One of those missions that KLOC talks about is, is to improve the delivery of legal services. And I'm wondering just generally, what, what you think. The rise of legal ops as a profession, the growth of CLOCK as an organization, in what ways have those brought positive change to the delivery of legal services?

It's been quite dramatic, actually. And I think that corporate legal operations and CLOCK collectively have been the biggest driver of change and innovation in our industry that we've seen probably in the last 150 years or so. And I say that because prior to that you really had law firms that were where most of the legal industry took place. And because of the business model and some of the other structural challenges of law firms, there just wasn't a lot of demand or reasons to change. And so that wasn't going to be a big innovation. Driver. Corporate legal departments started growing and the general counsel still relied heavily on the law firms and they were all trained in law firms and that was the status quo. Things were working fine. It wasn't really until legal operations came onto the scene and exploded. In the last decade or so, maybe decade and a half or so, now that we had people in legal departments whose full time jobs were suddenly focused on how can we do things better? How can we do things more efficiently, more effectively? How can we reuse information that we have? Are there other options we should be looking at? Or is the status quo the only way to get things done? And when you suddenly had all these people who were making demands on the industry and saying, there's got to be a better way, there must be other professionals who can deliver these types of services. Does it always have to be a lawyer? What about technology's role? Shouldn't technology play a bigger role in automation and knowledge and data in this field where, you know, all those things have disrupted every other corporate vertical, whether it be marketing, finance, you know, IT sales. Every other corporate vertical has been completely changed through technology and data and innovation and just the need to become more efficient and effective. And legal was simply the last to fall because there wasn't a driver until truly legal operations. And I think Clock had a large part in kind of accelerating the collective voice of the legal departments.

Yeah, it strikes me again as somebody who is a bit of an outsider in that I've never worked in a legal department, although I am married to somebody who has, so I have that perspective. But the 13 years that you spent working at Google's legal department were 13 years that happened to overlap with what struck me as a period of really dramatic change in the roles and responsibilities of legal departments in a broad sense. And I'm just wondering from the vantage point you had within Google, whether you agree with that. And what kinds of changes did you see? I mean, even apart from the legal ops role, how did the role of the legal department or the function of the legal department change over those years?

Oh, yeah, absolutely dramatically. And as we talked about earlier, it's continuing to change and, you know, as we try to become a more strategic partner to the business. But what I saw over those years was a move from, from a specialist model where the legal department sort of operated in these silos, to a much more integrated and collaborative model. So there, you know, things finally started changing. And, you know, even in the last year and a half or so with the pandemic, there was obviously a lot of acceleration in this area where GCs are now held to account and asked to play very distinct roles from what they had traditionally. So no longer are they just kind of that lawyer in chief, best lawyer in the room. And they had previously focused on legal matters only with specific and limited issues, but now they're managing things like compliance. And they have to be strategic leaders and they have to help guide and support the CEO and be part of that C suite and guide the company across many different challenges in a much more regulated and sort of international world that we're dealing with. And so they have to be change leaders, they have to adapt and incorporate new technologies, they have to adapt new processes, they have to think about the different roles in the departments. You know, it's not just lawyers anymore and what's the professional development look like for everyone. So it is, it is a lot of change and it's a very different world, I think, than it was, you know, 13 years ago.

And it all comes back to contracts again because, I mean, one of the. One that's certainly been one of the most significant areas that's been affected in terms of use of technology, probably over the last decade, especially over the last five years.

Right, Absolutely, yeah.

So what are your thoughts on to what extent the events of the past 15 months will impact the legal industry? I know it's become kind of de rigueur to ask that question, ask about the impact on the pandemic. And there are a lot of commentators who will say that there have been perhaps silver linings in pushing some change in legal. What are your thoughts or observations on the events of the past 15 months might bring change or not in legal?

Yeah, I think it's already brought change, and that change will stick and we'll see what other things happen. But it's been fascinating to watch just the initial move to the work from home. You saw a lot more pressure on legal departments and law firms to be able to collaborate better. A lot more movement towards the cloud adoption of virtual technologies, things that allowed us to meet with each other, to collaborate, to get work done in remote environments. And that's something that I think would have taken a lot longer if it wasn't that we were forced to do so. The themes or the trends that I saw sort of emerge over the last 15 months was collaboration, as I mentioned, contracting, which, again, is really important because it accelerates business operations and getting things done. And coming out of the pandemic, there was. Well, in the beginning, people had to go through their contracts to figure out what the force majeure was and what was going to happen and what they were required to do. And, like, what do we do in these. In these instances that are completely unprecedented? And what I found really interesting in chatting with some folks is that I talked about the contracting process being broken, and you put the contracts in a box, never to look at them again. And in this case, we actually all had to dig into those boxes and see what the obligations were, what those contracts said. And what I heard from so many people was that they ended up relying on personal relationships and conversations and not digging into the contract to kind of resolve these issues. And what that tells me, again, is, you know, contracting as a process has sort of lost its way, and the purpose of these contracts are not being served anymore. And so I think there's just more and more companies that are realizing that they need to fix this process, that they need to put more controls and more compliance around what we can do with our contracts. And again, the potential there is huge because we're not just putting technology behind a process to make it faster. We're actually thinking about how do we go back to the purpose of contracts and really unlock the value of them and make them an asset to the business again. And that's something that I think more companies are focused now coming out of the pandemic and realizing how important that is in just trying to get business done faster as well.

Yeah, I hear a lot of companies talk about that, and I realize that a lot of companies now appreciate that more than they ever did before. But it still seems to me that there is a slow pace of adoption, even among legal departments for some of these technologies. What do you think the obstacles are to legal departments adopting more innovative technologies such as CLM Technology or any others out there?

Well, I think one of the biggest challenges is even convincing folks that there is a problem to start with. Right. In a lot of legal departments, you will ask around and, you know, from an outsider's perspective, I can look in and say, gosh, things don't really look optimized. They look quite broken. And many of the people who are working in it day to day will say, no, this is the way we've been doing it for the last decade. And it's. It's fine. There's nothing wrong with it, and it may be fine for what you're getting out of it today, but I don't think folks are necessarily seeing the potential. Right. It's not that it needs to be improved from the way you're currently doing it. It's how can we think about it completely differently? It's, again, that. How do we define innovation? It's looking at it completely differently. So that's identifying that there is a problem to solve in the first place and agreeing upon that is challenge number one. And that actually is very common, where you'll even have folks from companies who are excited to put in a new CLM and say, yeah, we want to adopt this technology. We hear everyone's doing it, so we want to do it, too. And the first question we will ask is, what challenges do you currently have and what problems do you want to solve? And you might sometimes get some blank stares. So I think that is one of the problems. And CLM in particular is a challenging problem because of all the stakeholders involved. It's not a legal software. It is truly an enterprise or business software system. Right. That you have to get stakeholders from procurement and sales and finance and others to kind of Buy in and come along the ride with you. So it is a complicated project to go after.

Yeah. And I wonder to what extent just time is a factor. I mean, I know there are a lot of legal departments that are still overwhelmed with work to do all the time. And the idea of sitting down and thinking about.

They can think about technology, but to actually sit down and try and evaluate products and pick a product and then deploy a product is a challenge in and of itself, I would think for a lot of legal departments.

Absolutely. I mean, all of this in legal operations generally, even it's an investment. Right. There is time that needs to be put in to invest in creating a solution to a problem or to making things better or to allowing you to scale. And sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. And that is just a fact of life. But if you believe in the potential or that your company is growing and you're going to need to solve this sooner than later, then that investment absolutely needs to take place.

Yeah, I know that. CLOCK recently published its 2021 State of the Industry report. I'm wondering if you had a chance to look at that and if there was anything that jumped out at you as significant in the findings this year.

Yes, I did have a part in putting it together and looking at it, so am familiar with it. I would say a couple things that stood out to me, but nothing really surprised me. I think as I see more and more of these industry reports come out over the years, they more confirm what I would expect. Right. That the trends are happening, the change is continuing to happen. I do think this last year and a half, more change has been accelerated than we've seen in all the recent years. And I think that we will continue to see that accelerated pace and hopefully it won't slow down just because we're emerging. But I don't think there was anything surprising. I did note that Ironclad was the cited most frequently used clm, which was exciting.

All right, so I have one other question for you, which is again, in that same post that you wrote, I'll have to put this up in the show notes, but about your move to Ironclad, you wrote that your bedside table is covered in legal innovation nerd books. So I wanted to ask if there's a title or two that you would recommend.

Yeah.

And you know, oftentimes they are innovation books or business books that are not necessarily about the legal industry. And so the one I always recommend to folks is the Checklist Manifesto. And I read that several, several years ago with my GC over at Google had recommended it. And it's just a fantastic book that reminds us all that there can be processes and procedures that apply to things, even legal, where it seems like everything is bespoke and there's not a sort of standard way of approaching a challenge. There are ways to put process behind it. So I always think that's a really good one.

Good recommendation. Thanks. Well, Mary, I've been asking you lots of questions. Anything else that you'd like to say about your new role or about anything else that we've talked about or anything else that's on your mind before we wrap up?

Nothing specific. Just really appreciate you taking the time to have me here and to continue the journey on innovating in the business of law.

Well, I appreciate your taking the time to do it, and it's been a real pleasure to finally get this chance to catch up with you.

After a year of trying or so. And congratulations on your new role and I will be following your progress carefully as you get into it.

Great. Thank you so much.

I've been speaking with Mary Shen o', Carroll, chief community officer at contract lifecycle management company Ironclad. My thanks to Mary for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed today's show. Another show to check out is Contract Teardown, presented by our sponsor, Law Insider on YouTube. Each week they analyze contracts ranging from Y Combinator Safe agreement to Robinhood Financial's terms of service. Find them@lawinsider.com Resources Lawnext is produced, engineered and edited by Populous Radio. I'm your host, Bob Ambrogi. I hope you'll join us again next time for another episode of lawnext.