Real Talk with Mary O'Carroll

Welcome to the Corporate Legal Apps Consortium podcast, where we dive deep into conversations with technology and legal ops thought leaders from across the ecosystem. This is Clock Talk. I'm your host, Jen McCarron. I'm on the board of directors at Clock and I lead the Netflix legal operations and technology team. On this episode, I sit down with my friend and industry pioneer Mary o', Carroll, chief Community Officer at Ironclad, and quite possibly the legal office for those still catching up. Goat is short for greatest of all time. In this conversation, we get real on some of our favorite topics, like how we balance passion with practicality in our professional roles, the growth of automated solutions in the legal ops sector, and the importance of continued education as legal ops leaders. Finally, we share our strategies for time management as we chase down that elusive work life balance, and we even debate if that's a real thing. It's real talk. It's right now.

Enjoy. We're live on Clock Talk, but not live from Los Altos, California, home of Mario Carroll from Ironclad.

Thanks for making the trip up this time.

Yes. Chief community officer, Clock founder, former president. Here we are. Just wrapped up our Ironclad webinar. How do you feel?

That was fun. It always is fun to have our conversations. And then you and I forget that anyone's watching. And then we say stuff that we're like, shoot. Should I.

Yes. Should we roll it? No.

All good. All good.

I love that. We were cycling through the question cards and I saw you go right past the Taylor Swift card, and I said, can you pull that one back, please? Because you were afraid of dissing.

The Swifties are.

Swifties get mad.

Oh, they get mad. They can destroy you.

But I thought you answered everything. You just made a constructive feedback request to Taylor Swift.

That's right.

Do a little more dancing. Because you come from the school of Britney and Madonna and you think she dances.

So let's be clear. She doesn't dance.

She doesn't. She doesn't. Her backup dancers are dancing.

What she does is she stomps to the beat and then she'll stop and do this whole thing like this. But it's only dancing in place. I had this argument with my daughters, and then they tried to find video of her dancing and they couldn't. But it's always dancing in place.

It's dancing in place.

How awful am I?

No, it's actually really fair. Taylor Swift's thing. I figured it out. Is she songwrites. Yeah.

She's not a dancer. And that's okay.

The way a Bruce Springsteen songwrites. When you experience. I'm not even a huge Bruce fan, but shout out New Jersey. When you watch him, you feel like something's going on here because he's channeling just the muses and everything and the human experience. And that's what she does. Because when I heard her at the ERAS tour, I was thinking my life back, like in little movies on her lyrics. And that's her. Her lyrics are brilliant. That's her gift.

It's poetry. Yeah, I'll give her that.

She wrote it all. And no offense to your girl Brittany. We love Britney for what she's given us. She didn't put a single word of that together. But she can dance it, she can wear the snake, she can look hot.

She can sometimes lip sync.

So we love our Britney, and there's a place in the world for everyone.

That's right.

Okay, so we didn't get in too bad of a fight, but we had some other disagreements. So this episode of Clock Talk is about working through our disagreements.

Some are disagreements, some are just different perspectives and different experiences. So we ended on the webinar where someone had asked, I don't know. We got on the topic of what is legal ops work versus substantive legal work. What I was saying is my definition has always been legal Ops doesn't do work that is touching the substantive legal matter. So you can project, manage a litigation with all the moving parts, but you're not actually doing any of the support.

Of the legal work unless perhaps your legal ops functions scoped in practice area Ops.

Practice area operations is absolutely one of the clock. Yes, Core 12. And so that's IP Operations, Commercial Operations, litigation operations. It could be any practice, any of the practice area. But that is about changing the way or improving the way the lawyers work. The metrics, the processes, the tools, not necessarily doing the work. So it's like for contracts, creating the templates and the playbooks and the tools and the CLM management, but you're not actually redlining and negotiating contracts necessarily. Some teams do that, though.

But they do. And it's interesting, a lot of the webinar we were tackling hybrid role questions more than I thought we would, which is a real signal to me of the market that a lot of people are in hybrid roles or lean teams where they don't have all the headcount to build out the pure ops function. And a CLO or a leader is looking at this person that has a JD and they go, can you just redline this on the side? Or do Some of that. So I think in reality some of that might bleed. But I think you're absolutely right that definitionally we're changing how they were.

For me, in 2024, it feels like my focus might be on educating the GCs and the close more. I've spent a lot of my platform kind of advocating for legal ops and how they should be doing their roles and how to get into the role. But there's so much GC education that needs to take place so much. I think they're willing to dip their toe in the water. Hence, like the hybrid role. But my God, you're able to advocate for any other head. Legal Hop should be the easiest head to advocate for to your cfo.

It's an education and I think we need to tell people that more. And they forget. And I've been guilty of this. You walk in and you just assume that a senior legal leader is gonna know because they're so bright. They're in this big role. But turns out they're focused on legal issues for the company. Most of the time. I think everything is like a two to three year educational campaign.

Yeah. And if they haven't worked with this role before. So it's great when there's a new GC and they've come from another company that had legal ops and they're like, first thing I'm going to do is put in my legal ops because they know the impact, they know how it works. But if you've never done that and you've been practicing as a GC for a long time and I need this person to do what I've never needed this before and all of a sudden it's super important. But what is it? Maybe I'll just have someone dabble in it part time and see if I like it.

Fair. But be prepared. We're also in the education business in the beginning in these new roles. Cool. So we didn't super disagree as bad as I thought we were starting to. I'm always looking for a good fight.

I know. I know.

I'm still looking at the cameras. If we're webbing.

You know what I mean? Out there. Ironclad community.

Do you like a camera more or a microphone more?

Microphone. The camera's fine. I like it. But I am really taken by the voice and the power of it. Someone once told me, like a past life psychic. I live in LA now and there's crystals on me. Don't judge me. Mary's giving me the eyes. If you could see her face. Right. And I'm queer, so go with me on this. But they said in another life, I led towns and villages and cities of people. And voice is very important to me. It really is. And I love finding it and I love helping people find their voice. So I'm obsessed with audio.

Could totally see that.

Yeah. And it's why, like, I get close to the mic and I practice on it a lot. I design my vocal chain, things I do on the weekends. And scientifically, people are more likely to engage with really good audio more than really good video. That's what the YouTube literature is saying.

So if you have both.

If you have both, great.

And if it's.

If you had to compromise on one, compromise on video. Because if this isn't good, audio is not good. People won't listen.

Interesting.

I brought my mic.

Yeah. Good to know.

Yes. How about you? Vocals, camera? Neither.

Neither. So we were chatting earlier. I'm not. I. I'm more into this and I don't know, maybe it's. I don't know myself. When we started clock, I was very much. I wanted to be the back of the house. I was doing all the work and I didn't want to be on the stage. I didn't even have a social media account, actually, to be honest. They were trying to tell me that I had to accept people that wanted to link in with me. And I was like, who are these people and why? No, I don't want to connect with them. So I was pushed into the leadership role and pushed to be on stage and had to learn how to be a public speaker and do all that. Now, don't get me wrong, I love to give everyone my opinion. And you put a mic in front of me on a conference. I'll go for an hour telling you my opinions about how things should go. But I never had a desire to be the face or, like, to be the center of attention. I do think it's been really good for me, career wise.

And was it uncomfortable for you to.

Do that in the beginning? Absolutely. And I'm a Leo, so, like, I'm an extrovert. I don't shy away from it. But, yeah, I didn't want people looking at me all the time.

I would have never known that. I saw all your CLOCK keynotes. I would have never known that you were forced up there by the leadership that.

And now it's different if I say that now people are like, do you really even know yourself? Because I do. I love having a platform now. And for me, it's whether it's LinkedIn or webinars or being on a stage, if I can just get to more people and them walk away going, oh, I learned something or that's super helpful. Or now I can implement legal ops. That gives me so much energy. Like I love if someone's. Do you want to come speak in Brazil? Absolutely. I have people there don't know what's going on. Like I want to go tell them stuff. Like I'm on the first plane. So yeah, that's what gives me excitement.

We talked about going to Brazil together.

I'm going to Brazil in a couple days.

Oh, you are?

Yeah.

Is it for one of those. The big legal conferences?

No. So there was enough people reaching out saying we want education, we want someone to come tell us more about legal ops. And then of course you guys know Clock Brazil recently just launched. And so I said yes, I'll come and tell. We'll do a community roundtable, bring people together for Ironclad and tell you about legal ops and do some education. And then the Clock Brazil group was like, wait, you're coming. We'll just do a clock day. So there's going to be a bit of a clock regional event while I'm there.

Amazing, Amazing. We worked really hard to.

It's great.

Socialize and making up words. The Brazilian community because they were gathering their show together. So I love that you're going.

There's so many, so many people in the ecosystem. The law firms are really engaged in this. Even the law schools. I did not realize how far the flight was.

Brazil's no joke. That's why when you and I talked about going together last year to one of the big events they wanted us at, I was looking at going this is a 12 hour flight from the States and from the west coast.

It's okay, Jen. I'm going for one night.

What?

One Mary night.

Get ready for single digit whoop scores. I know she'll send me the wound for these one night turnaround.

I land in the morning, I have an event all day recovery night, clock the whole day. You had 2% and get on the plane. I had 1%.

You had one. You had the 1%. But she's the 1%.

Bad.

That's really bad. That basically means your heart stopped and no sleep and your nervous system is on overdrive because you're under slapped and in three times.

It's not good for you. I know I can do it so I can pull through. But then you need two days to collapse.

I don't know if you Know this, but I traveled so much last year, I made Delta Diamonds amazing.

I know I'm jealous, but to your.

Point, you pay for it. Wrecks you. And from November 2nd to December 19th, I just slept in LA every day. LA, which I call my country home because it's suburban and so quiet and really chill. And I caught up and I got my first 30 days in a row green whoop ever.

30.

30 in a row. 30 in a row.

That might be a whoop world record. I don't think anyone has done that.

Yeah. Oh, wait, no, I'm sorry. It's the first time I had 30 days without a red.

Oh, that's good. That's.

Yeah, that's really. Which I've never had. That would be bionic. If I have 30 in a row.

I think that's a Brian Johnson level.

Yeah. Are you into Brian Johnson? And I follow Brian Johnson. He is like CEO of Biohack.

Yeah. So we drink his olive oil. We have all his stuff.

If you had the means, if you prioritize the means, would you do his anti aging program?

I think it's really hard. I already do everything that I can. I don't cold plunge as much as I'd like to. The new thing, actually, if anyone's listening, I want advice on red light therapy. That's the new thing that I want to try. Yeah, but you've got to research all the different types of home machines. So if anyone's already done the research, let me know.

I had a friend of mine in L. A who is a backup dancer and she said that she got accidentally in a dance rehearsal, poked in the eye so hard that it was like it messed up her eye medically for a minute. And that she went into a red light bed as part of the healing and it accelerated healing. 3 to 4x.

People think it sounds like the crystals and chakras too, but really there are studies, like JAMA studies. So. Yeah, for real.

I would do it if my cold plunge room had a red light. They have a red light sauna, but that's different.

That's infrared, which is different.

Yeah, it's a different beam, but. But if there was a red light, I would just hop across all three.

If someone makes a red light sauna so I could be efficient and do two at once, I would buy that. Yes.

Now she's legal ops saying if I could be in a cold plunge, but my head is in the sauna.

Oh, there we go.

And my hands are in the red light. I could be a hand model. In no time. So fun. I love biohacking stuff. What else did we disagree on? Passion. I thought I was really being slick with my one word answer. Passion is the answer to influence the culture, to kind of change and follow.

To get into tech and be excited about.

In your legal department to get excited about tech if you share the passion. And then you said you did that.

Yeah, because I can't hold back. So I have no poker face. There's no. You never need to wonder what I'm thinking. And if I go into a room and I am so excited about the potential of this tech product that we demoed and yeah, I think I scared everyone. So the feedback I got was, got to tone it down a little. And that was me being very vulnerable in that moment on our webinar because that was like the hardest feedback I ever got. I'm a people person. Like, I wanted to be liked and.

To go in and almost sharing my 360 feedback on that webinar because it's a wonderful tool to get as a leader, as a person. And you reflect on it for months and it's humbling to hear these things and so helpful.

But it is helpful. Like, it made me better and it made me more aware. But God, hearing that in real time was like, like, ah, stab me in the heart.

To rein in my passion, I have to do this a lot too. I have a lot of energy and I don't want to point it too much at people. I play this game where I'm like, okay, pretend I'm presenting to engineering. Because if you do passion to engineering folks, tech, product folks, they can't, they just, they can't register it. And they start very keenly putting you in a box that it's like, like too much label, too much. So I've learned a lot from having to context shift across audiences.

Yeah.

On how, what levels you can do and where. And when I'm in front of the IP team, I can go crazy because they're fun and they'll go with you there, but engineering won't. So I make myself a little more like zeros and ones. And I get. Yeah, I learned that you got to.

Know your audience at Spotify.

I learned that I was in a breakout group with all Swedish engineers and we're interview practicing. And the Swedish engineer colleague of mine says to the moderator, I had a hard time knowing what was performance and what was truth. And I was like, crap. And talk about having to then relate across a culture and not be a total kook and try to meet my Swedish colleague, where they were. Turns out all you have to do is be conservative during the day, go to karaoke at night, once with them, and when it gets to Bohemian Rhapsody, you belt and then you unlock the key to the heart of the Swedish colleague.

All relationship building.

It's all relationship building. I love that.

So I have a question for you then. This came up when they first announced that you were going to be president of Clock and someone posted a comment on your LinkedIn, which is a question that I used to get a lot, which is Jen and I know you, you have a passion for music, you prioritize that in your life. You are very health conscious. So you're working out, you're doing all the things, you're married, so you have family, you have a full time big time job at Netflix and now you're going to take on this full time leadership role at Clock. Like how does one do this and fly that many Delta sky miles in between? How's this possible?

It's possible. This is a game of Trident Method on your calendar, which I'll get into and knowing where to make trade offs in your life because like you, me and Beyonce have the same number of hours in a day. So what are you not doing in order to enable this? I'm not watching TV unintentionally. The TV doesn't go on just to go on. And I run the back to the Trident method. I run the calendar like 15 minute slots, hour slots and my wellness goes in there. My reading time, my to dos and my work time. And in my Netflix role I get better and better at learning to delegate because now I have a team. That was some of my feedback I got, which is use your team. They're amazing and they're ready. And my team and my peers at Netflix saw me go. And you saw this too. I went through a big health thing last year, which is why I flew so much because I did all my treatment in New York. And this year I said I don't want to have a surgery or Covid to have the greatest rest and recovery ever. I want that with positive ends. I need my team more. And so there's the trade offs, being able to share the work and I'm working smartly, not harder. And there was a third thing I wrote in there. I think it was around self care, winding my mind down and taking these breaks so that you can come out and be really concentrated and impactful in the work. And so I'm always context switching and sometimes I need a Lot of extra sleep like we were talking about earlier to get it. But it's possible. Look, I didn't see my family as much over the holiday break. I went into the music studio and those are the trade offs. It is.

It's trade offs. There's no balance. People always say, how do you balance? There's no such thing.

That's what I responded to. Angela Mendenhall, if you're listening, I responded to you and said, there's no such thing as balance. Get rid of the word. So you're not striving for some unattainable thing. You're doing your two to three things a day. You're being true to your responsibilities. Netflix is my primary gig and I care so much about having an impactful story to write there. And so they get my best energy and then. But I need to feed those creative mills. And so the songwriting and the health and the fitness. I work a lot out in the gym so I can come in and feel strong. And lastly, on the Clock note, I've been podcasting for CLOCK for a long time and last year we did weekly episodes. 48 episodes. And this year I won't do 48.

Yeah, that's a lot.

And content weekly. Maybe I'll do a half dozen to a dozen. We're bringing another co hosts. A board is going to each host an episode with a clock core 12. Sharing and delegating that work around, shining the spotlight on others is going to give me some of that time back to be president and do presidential things.

Yeah. I think someone very wise once told me it's all about trade offs, but it's also all about choices. And you can do a lot of things. And I was the same. I had the two jobs. I did Clock. I did my full time gig. I have three kids.

I don't know how you did that because Clock didn't have a staff when you were president.

That's the first thing I did was put that in place.

Yes. Thank you for doing that. And we have a staff now and they're amazing. So I'm not an employee. I'm not working in that capacity. I'm serving in a board advisory.

That's right.

So I don't know how you even.

Slept, but for me it was fun. Like I realized from CLOCK and why I knew that I would love Ironclad. Like I'm a builder. I love to be in that kind of putting together an organization and seeing it grow.

It's very creative work, actually entrepreneurial. What you're talking about and what you did. And I think we should allow ourselves to have something outside of the main gig where we make our livelihood to build. Yeah, that's what you build. You built community. I'm working in the community you built and I help do additional builds. But I didn't start this. You did. And your peers.

But you're also here. And it doesn't. Like for me, clock didn't feel like work work. It was an outlet. It was fun. Like it was energizing and fun. So it wasn't like sucking my soul. But you have the trade offs, right? You got to figure out what parts in your life that you're going to give time to. Because I also, I can trade off. Like my family. I still got to do that. And so I have very little social life. I say that all the time. I think I will have it back. And I was a very social person before I had family and multiple jobs. And I think I'll go back to that. But there's this point in my life right now where I'm focusing.

Social gets hit. For me, it's minimal. However, I wind up socializing more with work, through work, through our community. You find out becoming friends. I'm in another 30 for 30 fitness challenge with 10 legal ops folks and Mary, I don't know what it is with the magic of this 10 of us. We're all having incredible, I don't know, accountability and health.

So fun from it.

Like people are talking about losing weight and getting new gear and we all report in what we do every day.

That's awesome.

And in addition to being shot at the gym today, I was taking selfies for the group so I can let them know I got my 30 minutes of movement in and I don't know. So I make new friends where I am.

Yeah.

So that we're always glowing and getting our needs met.

That's right.

Trade Offs predictions 2024 legal ops. Is anything going to steal the moment or is it more of the same?

It's a lot of AI stuff, that's for sure. I do think we're going to see still more momentum of the growth of the prevalence and people hiring for the Legal Ops. But I said on the webinar I and maybe it's just a realization right in this moment that I just think there's still so much education that the GCs and CLOs have to get and we have to. I'm starting to think about like, how can I help?

We're talking about that at clock on the board and Staff level too. Like, how do we really get the GCs engaging in a new, elevated way? We have this seven, almost 7,000 person membership because the ranks of all the roles, junior legal ops manager, senior execs are filling out cool. Now, how do we get their bosses in so that this organism can also help with the educational piece and take some of the burden off.

And you were in this conversation with me, with JB, our CEO, when we had this realization of a lot of GCs think that their job is to scope and hire the Legal Ops person and put them in place, get that headcount, and they've done their part and now set it and forget it. But that's not how it works. You have to stay engaged and you got to help Legal Ops be successful because CLOCK and all of us can help champion Legal Ops and get them influencing with that authority. But God, a little bit of authority would really help.

Yes, a little authority. My new manager and I were chatting recently about my service commitment to this org. I was teaching her about it and letting her know the presidency was an option and getting her alignment with it. And she said, I understand why you do this. It's for your growth and it backs you. And that really struck a chord with me. I need to come vet the things, the thinking, the solutions, the problems with peers like you and others. So I feel like I know what I'm doing because our leaders don't always. They're looking at us to know, and we need that growth vehicle behind us. But then we do need a little more authority from them too.

And while you're out there talking to what everyone else is doing, where the future is going, it makes you better at your day job. It really does. So it helps Netflix too.

It certainly does. It helps all of our companies if you can get out there and tell the story of what you did. I learned a lot by presenting on something we did at any one of the companies I've been at. And then I get this feedback from the audience. Like your KM program at Cisco Slides really helped me with a starting point and I stole your slides. And I'm like, they're yours because Clock stole them from me.

And you're like, human GPT first draft.

Exactly. I was the first draft. And may we all go onward solving KM in our legal departments. Notice how we skipped all the KM questions. Someone wrote in KM question mark, why is it still an enigma?

Oh, okay. I got on the clock stage, May 2023 and gave a little talk about AI. And I said, KM is over. I got hate mail.

Oh, geez.

Yeah, because there's like, people are really mad. Yes. There's careers.

But you meant it in a different way.

Exactly.

So if I maybe can clarify for a moment. I actually think KM is even more important than ever with the advent of AI because you have to curate and make sure that your AI is looking at the right set of data and learning from that. So, yes, knowledge management is more important.

I think you meant like the dead zone of KM is over because there's.

A search and find and who worked.

On what that as a core where. God bless us if we're the ones that have to go be that color.

Yes.

And manually sift through all this data to try to make a data set that's useful without the right budget or tooling and none of the tools pan out. I think there's the dead zone that's over. And that the AI combo can just accelerate some of that librarian style work and maybe make it faster to our fingertips. You're laughing.

Yes. I love everybody. Everyone's career.

We love everyone. I started with km, so I love it.

And you were the KM guru.

Yeah. I still believe in it.

As taught me a ton.

A central point and it's simpler than we all think. And it's okay to start with the website, the training, the orientation to the department on the tools, and frequently asked questions. Where are the forms? How do I x? That's km. That's 1.0 for most of us. Mary, thanks for coming on Clock Talk.

Always a pleasure.

I love Clock. Thanks for this wonderful space for your webinar today. We'll see you out there soon.

Good to see you, Jen.

That about wraps up this episode. Thank you, Mary, for coming on the podcast today and for sharing your thoughts. Catch this in other episodes of Clockwise Talk wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Until next time.