How To Use Legal Operations To Level-Up The Legal Department: Mary O'Carroll Chief Community Officer Ironclad (E23)

Hi, my name is Mario Carroll. I am currently the Chief Community Officer of a contracts lifecycle management software company called Ironclad. Prior to that, I spent most of my career at Google doing legal operations and leading an organization called clock. A fun fact About Me I have a pretty classic style, so most items in my closet are going to be 10 years old or more.

Welcome to the Legal Department, a podcast for lawyers who want to learn, connect and grow their careers. I'm Stacey Bratcher. I'm a general counsel and I'm excited to share these conversations to help you level up in house.

Good morning. On today's episode of the Legal Department, I have Mary o' Carroll who is the Chief Community Officer for Ironclad. Mary is a longtime legal operations professional and has a lot of passion for the area and I'm really excited to get to know her better and hear more about this. Hey Mary, how are you?

I'm well. Thanks Stacey. Thanks so much for having me.

Absolutely. I feel like Legal Ops has, I don't know what the time period is, but just in my recent awareness has really become kind of more of a force and more of a kind of essential element of a legal department. And I think for a long time it was just a nice to have and now I think it's more of an imperative. And like I said, you have a lot of passion for this area so I'm sure you're going to help us appreciate why it's a must have.

Yeah, it's really exciting to see the growth and the prevalence, the stature, the scope of the role change over time. So I actually started in legal ops in 2008 when I joined Google. I was at a law firm doing I guess Legal ops for a law firm before that, but really started the in house legal Ops role at Google and built out a team there over time, helped to build and lead an organization called clock. And yeah, as you mentioned back then when we were getting started, nobody knew what this function was, nobody had heard of it. We were kind of making up the role as we went along and it is really fun just to see all around the world in companies of every size and industry now thinking about the role, understanding the impact and trying to figure out how they can get started. So it's been a lot of fun.

So if it is broad and kind of a frontier, like I think when we talked before you said it could be as simple as billing guidelines and an invoice tracker and a contract management system, like what are kind of those, what you would say the core Elements of Legal Ops.

Yeah, I think ultimately Legal operations to me is about optimizing the delivery of legal services. It's really that simple. And I like to say it's sort of finding the right balance between the speed, the quality and the cost of that delivery. And when I often speak about legal operations, I'm talking about the in house corporate legal department function. It is still like, I mean, I started in 2008, but like you've said, people are just starting to think about it as a new role now. So it's still very much a nascent and emerging function and role. And so we at clock, the organization that I'd mentioned is the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium. We started that organization, I want to say like six or seven years ago now. And what we endeavored to do is really put together what is now known as the clock core 12. And that describes 12 function areas or areas of responsibility that could be part of the scope of the role. So important to know every department has some mix of these. Like you said, some just are dabbling in a piece here and there that is all considered legal operations. But not every department's going to be doing all these things. But they might be doing some mix of them and probably endeavor to do all of the. But these are the types of work that are considered under the umbrella of Legal Ops. So what are these things? I'll just rat lot of Those clock core 12, those are business intelligence, financial management, firm and vendor management, information governance, knowledge management, organizational optimization and health practice operations, project and program management, service delivery models, strategic planning, technology, and then training and development. So that's a lot of. I know, I was just going to.

Say I'm worn out just from the list.

You hear that and you go, wow, that's a lot. And every person who steps into the role and sees this is like, I have to do all this and how quickly.

Right.

It's very, it can be very overwhelming. But again, you don't have to do all these things, at least not off the bat.

Can I ask? Because I think that there is a bent or a preconceived notion that Legal Ops means technology. And as you're listing these clock core 12, like, I think people do this to various degrees, either manually analog or with technology, even if they're not realizing that they're doing it. Like for example, your law firm management, you may not have a slick system for that, but you're looking at those bills and I'm sure you're tracking your spend. Maybe it's on an Excel Spreadsheet, but these are functions that most of them, people are doing to various degrees.

You're right, it's not all about technology. I will say the biggest catalyst right now today does seem to be in terms of bringing in a legal ops function does seem to be technology and digital transformation. And you're going to hear that drum beat quite a lot. AI obviously adding to the acceleration of the need for modernization of everyone's practices. But of course there are many, many other things and tech is not going to be the solution for everything that you do. And so yes, there's a lot that's just people and process. I think those are the three prongs that we have to work with. People, process and technology. And I mean I have countless examples of times in my life, even at Google, where someone said to me, Mary, we need a tool, we need a platform, we need a technology solution for xyz. And when you start to dig in there and ask, well, what is the problem we're actually trying to solve, what is the issue? What are you struggling with? And you get into it. It's often a process issue. It's often defining roles and responsibility. It's often things that have nothing to do with technology. And sure, maybe tech could play some role, but maybe it's not the major issue. And so you've already rattled off a few things. You know, there's metrics, there's reporting, there's invoices, your practice operations or templates. How do you make things more uniform and mitigate risk for the department? Those are all things that, yeah, tech is always helpful, but you don't need it to get started. For sure.

Yeah. So if you looking at the 12, are there certain that are kind of must have must dos? Like, are there like maybe three of those that are a couple of those that you think are like kind of core to any legal in house legal department.

I don't know if you could say two to three are the must haves because they are going to differ depending on what is important to you and your GC and your organization and kind of what stage of maturity you are in terms of legal operations. And even without knowingly establishing that function, some groups maybe have finance teams or IT teams that have gotten them partway there and they might be more mature than others in different parts. But certainly for a lot of companies that are spending a lot with outside counsel, financial management firm and vendor management is a big place to start. I mentioned digital transformation being the big place for most people to start today. So technology is Going to be a big part of that. And when you think about that, you can't do that in a silo. Right. A lot of these are interconnected, so you have to think about when you're putting in technology, what do the practice operations look like?

Oh, it totally triggers an examination of what your process is like. We are doing a document management system which is like I would say the foundation of a legal office. And just looking at your filing conventions, making decisions about what you're saving, how long you're saving it, how to organize. I mean, the tech is the tool, but the work is really the people.

Exactly. Right. Look, it's all about, at the end of the day, something called right sourcing. It's a term that I like to use where you're thinking about all the work that comes into your department and what's the best way to get it done and what's the right resource to be using? Is it in house counsel, outside counsel, different types of vendors, technology, flexible talent. So these are all the levers that we have to work with now as an in house team. And Legal Ops is all about balancing that.

I think it can be hard to get in an in house department, which is where I spent the most of my career. Like there's just the demands, the inbound requests are just so crushing. Just the need, that bottomless pit of need, as I say, for legal services. And it can be really hard even as a leader to pull your head up and say, wow, I need to take a pause and figure out what would work best for my department to maybe take some of this noise out of the system. So that would be my why. But I would bet, especially now in your role with Ironclad, you probably run into people, GCs that are saying like, well, what's the why? Why would I do this?

I mean, there's so many whys and I think there needs to be so much education in our industry. Which is why I'm very grateful that you've invited me here to try to reach some new audiences. And GCs are busy, legal departments are busy. We hear that all the time. But this is an investment. And those who have worked in, let's say, another department, another company that has had this function, when I see them move into a new GC role, it's the first thing they do. They're like, they look around, right? Think, we don't have anything, we don't have processes, we don't have systems, we don't have metrics. Where's my Legal Ops person? They Put that in place quickly. But because it's new. If you've been working in a law firm and you come in house, or if you've been in house for a long time or in the same place that doesn't have a legal ops function and you're hearing about this, it's very much like, yeah, what is this and why do I need it and how am I going to use it? Look, if you're a GC who is really busy and doesn't have the time and resources to think about this, you're actually probably the one who needs it the most.

Right.

Legal ops, it's a force multiplier. Adding that one person is going to allow you to get so much more out of every external dollar you spend and every attorney and every staff member that you have on your team. And I try to tell folks, go talk to other GCs and CLOs, because they will tell you the immediate impact that it's had. And I promise you it will pay for itself many fold, even within the first year.

So let's talk about maybe more in depth on the clock, Core 12. I'm going to ask you to pick a favorite child here. Is there one of those 12 that you feel or you've seen delivers the biggest bang for the buck?

Like I said, they're so interconnected. So I do think financial and vendor management are closely connected. That's often a big place to start. And then I'd say the other place that most people start is going to be with contracts, because that's something that every, you know, every department.

It's a pain point. It's a pain point.

Yeah, we all have it. It's high volume. It's coming in and doesn't stop. And so that is going to fall under practice operations. So that sliver of the clock, core 12, that's called practice operations, that can be contract operations, IP operations, litigation operations. That's what that is about. And then of course, technology is going to play a part in that, too.

Yeah, for sure. Well, let's talk again. Since you are with a contract management provider, I'm wondering. You shouldn't need a burning platform, but again, if you're busy with a lot of inbounds and requests and all that, and implementing a CLM is not an overnight. You don't just go to Best Buy and like, plug it in. Like, it's as we were talking about before. Like, it's the process taking the time. So can you talk about some of the benefits or what are the special shiny things that a CLM can deliver that folks may not be aware of.

Yeah, a lot of folks will look at their contract process and say it's not great, it's slow. What I hate about it is that it's the way that we as a legal department are going to interact with all of our internal clients. And that's where you get the big reputation of legal. You know, when people go so slow, gotta deal with them, they're so slow. Exactly. And if we can fix that, of course that accelerates all parts of the business because contracts are integral to your sales team, your procurement team, your HR team. So it's how you buy, it's how you sell, it's how you hire. You can't really do anything without that. And is there a way that we can accelerate that? So what we have today is called Contracts Lifecycle management or clm. This is term I'm sure everyone's hearing all the time now. And CLM is everything in the life cycle from intake to assignment to redlining and back and forth negotiations, signature, storage, so your repository, reporting and metrics, obligations, management AI across that whole life cycle. So what can that do? Well, you might have a process right now and a lot of people will tell me we've been doing it this way for so long, it's not really broken. We use email, we use spreadsheets. We might have a management System or a SharePoint to store these things. It's very hard for people to find things when they need it. There's very hard for people to know what's in those contracts, what have you agreed to, what's up for renewal, what's auto renewing without your awareness? And then what's more exciting to me is the whole automating of the workflows. Like you said, it's a constant stream of stuff coming in. Well, can we give our internal stakeholders some sort of self service where they can get stuff done themselves? Can they get the NDA signed? Can they get their MSA can to get some sales done?

Where is the value for the legal department? You said this before, like optimizing delivery of services. And I don't need to do an NDA for you. Like I don't.

Get it off your plate. Yeah, get it off your plate. And that makes everyone happy because nobody wants to quote, unquote, deal with legal.

And wait for it where.

And it's like, where is it priority anyway and. Exactly. And even for like a bigger deal, it's still that where is it? Who is assigned to did the other Side look at it yet, did they sign yet? You know, and that just asking, going back and forth, you can eliminate that by having a system that shows where things are and transparency. So there's a lot that it can do. And you're right, it's a big undertaking because it's cross functional. But there are a lot of ways that you can start quickly and small and expand over time.

Yeah, it is. Again, I think I keep going back to the why and getting. I think it's important for legal leaders, general counsel to really take a pause and I think your suggestion to network with other people in your role and find out how this has made their life better. Because I think you get your head down in doing the work and there's all these demands and you're like, I don't know if we can block out six months to think through our process for contract management. We've got too many in the queue already. So it can be really hard just to create that burning platform for you to take action.

Yeah. So I'd recommend again starting small, picking something that nobody wants to deal with that's not controversial, that you don't have to worry about 20 people trying to get in a room to agree on the language or the process and just get that done and show the benefit of it.

So one of my favorite of the Core 12 is the business intelligence because I think other parts of the business, any business use this, but I don't know that it is instinctive for legal service providers to do it. So can you talk about what business intelligence means for legal departments?

It's data, it's reporting, it's metrics, it's knowing. Again, that right source saying, how do you make decisions about how you're going to staff, how you're going to invest, how are you going to spend your time if you don't know what's coming into your department? If you don't know how long things are taking, how can you improve? So there is such a need for this and it might be one of the harder to be honest ones. And from my own experience, there's definitely ways that you can get started. Your finance team has some business intelligence about the spend that is taking place in legal. Yeah.

And then they wag their finger at you about it. How are you going to cut this next year? Right.

Yeah. And so what are you going to do about that? How do you get actionable metrics? And that takes some time of looking at your current processes. How do you gather the data? How do you figure out what Questions you want to answer, answer. And then build in those processes to, you know, eventually have some sort of automation and to get the data out. Data is this big word. It's kind of like liquid gold. Everybody wants a piece of it, everybody wants to get inside it. And that's another reason why I think contracts management, CLM is so valuable to Legal. Because if you own all that data, what is going on in your contracts where the company is spending money, where they're investing so much rich information within your contracts that you're going to be able to, if you've organized it, report back on it, see insights of it, and come to the rest of your leadership team with really strategic decision making.

That strategic partner. It's a nice way to tie those things together. When we talked before, I'm curious about tactics for this. We talked about metrics for success and how can you show reducing cost is kind of the. Probably the easiest one, but cost avoided. How many hours demonstrating efficiency or what the legal department does? What are some tactics for that?

Yeah, so I have six sort of go to metrics that I think, if you want to think about, how do you demonstrate the value of the legal department? These are the buckets of metrics that I like to look at. One is revenue accelerated. That's turnaround time. That's speed to close. What have we done to make sure that we can help our internal stakeholders get more revenue in the door faster?

Oh, I love that. So how would I show that?

Well, I don't want to keep talking about conscious management. Right.

Go to ironclad.

But yeah, I put that as my number one too, because in terms of making legal look good and having the company leadership care.

Yeah. Right.

I mean, there's a lot. The other things that are going to be about that I'll talk about are about saving money and being more efficient and that's being a good corporate citizen. And that's great. And you'll get a small pat on the back. But when you're like, we actually helped the company close deal faster and got millions of dollars in the door this much faster, that's when people start to notice and go, wow, you guys did that? That's great. So someone should get promoted.

I like that. Yeah. Okay. Revenue accelerated. Love that.

The second would be costs reduced. So let's say we're looking at outside counsel and we've changed our billing guidelines or we've done an RFP or we've done some sort of rate negotiation. Those are alternative fees that, for example, on the outside counsel piece might be where you're able to say here's dollars that we had saved. There's also costs or expenses avoided altogether. I think that's kind of one of my hard one.

It's a hard one to nail though.

That is hard. And I think it's synonymous with risk management or risk avoided. And there are ways that you can kind of look at what this would have cost us in the past and what it would have cost if we hadn't done this or look at some experience that we have for our internal clients. And now it's much more consistent and it's got guardrails. Well, you can kind of extrapolate what are the percentage of something would have gone wrong, what would the value of that have been, what are the chances and kind of report. And look, some of these are going to be more data driven, some of these are going to be softer. But the point is you want to tell a story about what you're doing to demonstrate the value. And some of this is just going to be directional, you know, and people are going to want to see that you've done that next one. It would be hours saved. That's going to be. We've automated some stuff. We don't look at NDAs anymore. We've changed the risk profile or whatever it is. We've automated signatures and routing that. We've just taken time out of the system.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is great. Means you can start working on more important things and that makes people happier. So then we go to quality of life, quality of life improvement. And that's again working on the right things, making people feel like they're having an impact versus just churning through the day to day. And quality of work improvement, again, a soft one. But are your clients getting more consistent experiences? Are our templates cleaned up? Are we not using things from the past? How many is that?

That was six. That was six. So I'm. Yeah, I'm trying to think. I feel like cost of cost reduced is going to be my easiest metric to show. And maybe expenses avoided, I feel like those are somewhat related. But as you said, expenses is kind of a risk thing. And I don't know, I've only worked in nonprofits and I feel like I've gotten a lot of grace from leadership and from my CFOs. They understand the nature of the legal department is you are taking inbounds. You can strategic plan all you want and have your goals for the year, but then you can get walloped with a bunch of class action work or There could be a scandal or big employment matter, like you really are at the service and behest of the company. So it is somewhat hard to predict where you're going to go. But my past, I've done a lot of kind of annual reporting just to kind of like make the case, hey, we are providing value. And I do want to talk about ways to. If there's technology or recommendations you have for tracking and being aware of what you're doing through the year. Because it was always hard for me to be like, what did we do? Oh, yeah, we did that deal and we saved this money. But is there a way to kind of set that up ahead of time so that you're tracking what you're doing throughout the year?

I would say focus in every department is different. There's going to be large departments with many, many practice areas, smaller departments where there's a handful of players. You want to think about, how do you measure, let's say 80% of the work? Don't worry about that long tail. There's always going to be that advice and counsel that goes on and on in trying to figure out a system to report on it and to measure it is probably not worth the amount of effort needed. The metrics and the data, as I mentioned earlier, should be directional. So let's look at the current state and see what is coming in. What is the demand? What are the resources we have again, going back to. Right. Sourcing. How can we start to think about what the volume is, the complexity is, and who we're tasking or what we're tasking to get that work done? So it depends on your department. So obviously, contracts, you can use a contract system, ip, you can use an IP tracking system to see how many patents were filed this year. If it's M and A, how many deals, how large were they? So there isn't a one size fits all, unfortunately. But you can certainly start to think about buckets of work. And how can you capture those? How do you capture both the volume of it, the complexity of it, and then what you want to start to report back on is how do we show that we're getting better over time?

Yeah, that feels hard.

That's the job of your legal Ops person. And that's another reason to go back and learn.

Let's talk about that. Yeah, as you're talking. Because there is so much different, you know, with the 12 even, there's so many different things you could spend time on. And as the GC or even a deputy gc, you May not have a ton of time for this work. So talk about the legal operations professional and what those. I'm sure if you've seen one, you've seen one. But what are some models for an in house legal department to have a dedicated resource for that.

So I'll say the ideal situation is to have a dedicated resource, a person in the role to focus on the efficiency, the effectiveness, the professional development, all those things, the technology. But the nice thing about where we are as an industry is that you don't have to do it that way anymore. There's a lot of other resources. You can hire a flex talent person who basically can come in and do it part time. You can do a hybrid role where you can have a lawyer who's really interested in technology, let's say dabble in it and start to think about, let's do some pilots, let's try different things. There are plenty of consulting and managed services providers that will come in and do an assessment and do a project and even implement.

Oh, I like that.

I like that process for you. Right. And there are managed services who will, after that, let's say the technology or the process is stood up, they can even help build and maintain the system and stick around at a low cost and ongoing, let's say, I don't know, four hours a month or whatever, you're going to need to make sure that it stays up to date and then you have continuity. While I love the idea of a single person dedicated to the role, there are some things in the role that are going to be more tactical, more day to day blocking and tackling existing processes, getting recording data and that sort of ongoing day to day stuff you could outsource. There's different ways to do it now, which adds a lot of flexibility depending on what you need and.

Yeah. And how much you want to spend. You're certainly demonstrating value. But another reason to have data is to get support for more resources.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

We need headcount, we need a system. You piqued my interest with the mention of getting an assessment, just an assessment of your department's efficiency. Like what kind of assessments could be available.

Yeah, it's certainly all those time time studies. You could do a very high level. So one of the first things I tell folks who are, let's say starting in a new legal ops role and they're trying to figure out where should I start, what should I work, what should I prioritize? And as you saw, we've got this wheel of 12 things that can be very overwhelming. And what I also tell general counsel is you want to hire for this role. But they often say, oh God, but I don't have time to manage it. I don't know what, I don't know what to tell them to start on. I don't know what to work on. That's why I'm hiring them. And I think that's exactly the point. You want to hire someone who can tell you what needs to get done, tell you what their priorities are and do that assessment and get things going. So yes, you can hire an outside consultancy, you can hire an internal person. There's different ways to do it. So what does that assessment look like? So what I often say is let's take the clock, Core 12 as a perfect starting point and let's go through each one of them with my new GC and say, okay, on a scale of let's say 1 to 5, 1 to 10, whatever you want to do is for each one, we'll start with financial management. How important, you know, on a scale of 1 to 5, is this to you for us to excel and optimize and do well? You rate that and then the next question would be, okay, we're sticking with financial management. On a scale of 1 to 5, how well do you think we're currently doing in this area? And you'll start to see where those gaps are between how important it is and how we're currently doing are going to be places where you want to dig in and start. There might be things like, oh, training and development, we're doing well and it's somewhat important or we're not doing that well. But it's not a burning platform for me right now. So you start to see what's important at least to your GC to get you started. Now when you get to be more strategic, you know, after you've kind of gotten the day to day trains running on time, the low hanging fruit under control, you've put in some processes, maybe you've put in some systems. Then I want the legal Ops person to start being much more strategic in thinking about the direction of the company. How can I help my GC demonstrate value? How can I help the GC tell the story about what legal's doing, how we're getting better as we just talked about, and then also, how do we help our legal department align ourselves better with the rest of the organization, which seems to be everyone's goal these days.

Ooh, I'm like really excited about, I'm going to Have a conversation with my CFO about this after we get off. I just wanted to shift a little bit to your personal background a little bit. And you start off by sharing about your role at Google. You started legal ops at Google, is that right?

Yes.

I mean, do tell like that. That sounds like. That sounds like quite an undertaking. Did they know they needed it? How did you get into that spot? And like, I don't know, pretty major.

I think that they did have some foresight. So I at the time was doing, I guess, what is now known as legal operations at a law firm. I was at oric and I figured it would be very similar to doing legal operations at a in house legal department. Little did I know. So Google had called and said, look, we're growing really fast. There's currently 200 people in the legal department. We have no processes. We have flying by the seat of our pants and we're growing so quickly, we need someone to help put things in place. So that was kind of the job description.

Put things in place.

Yeah. There weren't people with the title of legal operations. It was like, okay, well make it up. Where should I start? Yeah. And it really started with me going around asking people, what's going well in your team? How are you currently doing things? What could be better? What are people spending their time on that they shouldn't be? And looking for both big and small problems to tackle and then just taking them on one by one. And eventually grew the team to over 60 people by the time.

Which is also a mind blower.

Yeah.

How big was the legal department by the time you were a team of 60?

By the time I left, it was about 1500 plus.

Holy moly.

I mean that's like what Amla? Like 30 or something. It was enormous. Enormous.

Yeah.

And I thought 200 was huge when I started.

Yeah, yeah.

Little did I know it was going to grow so quickly. So absolute hyper growth. And we were a department that was pioneering Internet law for everyone. So it was a really exciting time. Really, really bright people. But definitely people were flying by to see their pants and we.

So were you bringing order to chaos?

It was complete chaos, Stacy.

Like.

There were no outside council guidelines. There was no whatever. We got money, piles of money around here. Piles of money. No budgets, no systems, no metrics, no visibility into the spend. Was that a culture change?

Was that hard for you to put some order to the chaos?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I was brought in to do that and at first it was like, oh, we don't want to slow down. Are you going to come in and bring bureaucracy? Are you going to tell us what to do? And so big part of my role when I first started was earning that trust and like demonstrating. I'm actually here to make your job better, not worse. I'm actually going to take stuff you hate to do and make it go away. And it's threatening at first. Nobody wants their cheese moved. And my whole job was to make change. So it was definitely scary. People liked the way they were working but. But when you start to put order to that chaos, people very quickly go, oh, thank God you're here. You know, thank God you're here.

Yeah. Once they see did were you able to deliver quick wins that helped derive momentum?

Definitely. Definitely a lot of quick wins. Look, I started with outside counsel as my issue and nobody wants to play there you go back cop. Nobody wants to have those tough conversations.

But that not. You didn't mind, you didn't mind, Right, I didn't mind.

Right. And so there was a little good cop, bad cop putting process in place there.

That was fun actually. I would enjoy, enjoy that.

Yeah. And I came from the law firm side and so I knew where all the bodies were buried and I knew what to negotiate with them. And then over time bringing in tech and tooling. I mean this was a team that was craving tech and tooling and there wasn't, to be honest, a lot that was available off the shelf back then. And so that took.

But an experimental culture though too, like they were willing to try things probably.

Yeah. And we built some of our own tools that were janky but got us some part of the way there. We had some third party tools that we tried to use a lot of piecing together data on the back end to try to make reports and all work. It took time. And I credit a lot of the work that Clock did to bring the field of legal operations to the forefront.

And then was Clock in place by the time you were at Google or you started that at this because you were a founder of Clock, Right?

I was one of the original sort of people who came together to put that organization in place. So Clock did not exist when I saw started. But very shortly thereafter we few of us found each other.

And you needed like a little coffee clutch to help you.

We needed therapy.

Big reason I do the show is because I want to encourage people to build those relationships and build a network. And so this is just another example of you have a really challenging but fun job, but you are a unicorn and you need to meet other Unicorns. So you know how to do the job right.

Exactly right. In a job where there's no established playbook. Yeah, you're making it up next. Yeah. You want to talk to other people who've. Who are working on the same things because you want to learn from them instead of making the same mistakes. And it's such a great community. People are so willing to share and this is not an area that is competitive amongst competitors.

Right, right, right.

Yeah, companies were competitors, but we were all sharing absolutely all of our work and what we learned. And here's who's really good at this and here's a vendor that you should try and just really, really helpful.

It sounds great. It sounds great. I've been on the website and really impressed with the tools and the format. So great job building that while you were trying to wrestle the dragons at Google. Anything just professional development related outside of that kind of networking bent that you had, you've obviously had a really great career there and now you're in a new role and you have your own podcast, which I want you to talk about too. So any professional development tips for our audience?

I mean, yes, definitely. Leverage your community. Never start from scratch. I was blessed to grow up at Google, which was really a playground for professional and personal development courses and offerings. They had tactical skills like project management and Six Sigma. We had soft skill courses like public speaking and presentations and communications. Things like how to have a difficult conversation or how to lead without authority, how to do change management. And then of course tons of management and leadership and Myers Briggs and what's your color and all these types of things. We had training just nonstop, which was great. So I think I didn't realize how much I got out of that until I sort of left.

Not everywhere has it, especially for lawyers like that is kind of, I would say a mission I have is to convince lawyers that it is worth investing time in those things.

I think you're absolutely right. Those are the skills that the lawyers of tomorrow are going to need. And they don't teach that at law firms. They don't teach that in law schools. That's what you learn at business school, it's what you learn in MBAs and stuff. But all these are critical to success and creativity and flexibility and adaptability. All these things are going to be really important for the lawyers of tomorrow. And, and we should really focus on that in our legal departments because our professional development focus is so much about cles.

Right? Yeah.

Technical, ongoing legal training, which is important too. But I really, this is so much more important now.

Yeah. So just real quickly because you've got. Your passion is infectious. So I'm interested in more legal Ops conversations. You want to just give a couple minutes about your podcast?

Yeah. So I also have a podcast for those who don't know me. It's called Pearls on Gloves off. And it's a little bit of a play on the fact that I wear pearls every single day and have for 30 years or so. And it's just a thing that I've always done. Yeah, I guess not intentionally, just laziness factor, but it's a thing. So it's called Pearls on Gloves Off. Gloves off because it's very honest. We try to really get transparent about the struggles, the challenges, the wins, the losses of doing this job and transformation, I think, generally in legal as an industry. So that's what the podcast is about. We have GCS and clos on, we have legal ops professionals, we have tech companies, we have legal psychologists, We've had someone on change management. I've had my executive coach on there. So a lot of different people who are going to help us progress the modernization of legal.

That's awesome. All right, last question. I ask everyone the same question. I listened to a pump up song this morning before the show. What is your pump up song?

So my bump up song is really anything by Linkin park, which people are always really surprised about. But I do like a good screaming music.

I bet. Like, ah, contract management.

Yeah, there you go. Awesome.

Mary, thanks so much for being on the show. I really enjoyed the conversation.

I so appreciate the opportunity. Thanks so much, Stacy.

Hey, thanks for joining me today in the legal department. If you like the show, would you please follow, like and subscribe. That helps other listeners to find the show. And if you're really inspired, you can rate and review on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you get podcasts. For more information about the show, check out our website, legaldepartmentpod.com Thanks.