Real Talk with Mary O'Carroll Vegas Edition

Welcome to the Corporate Legal Apps Consortium podcast, where we dive deep into conversations with technology and legal apps, thought leaders from across the ecosystem. This is Clock Talk. I'm your host, Jen McCarron. I'm on the board of directors at KLOC and I lead the Netflix legal operations and technology team. On this episode, I'm teleporting you to Las Vegas to the 2023 Clock Global Institute podcast lounge. I sat down with frequent Clock Talk guest, friend and former colleague KLOK founder and former president Mary o', Carroll, Chief community Officer at Ironclad. When Mary and I catch up, stuff gets real. We do not hold back. So in this episode, we talk about her standing room only sessions at this year's Clock Institute, why she's pumped on how generative AI will disrupt legal for the better.

It's poised to disrupt knowledge work and to give lawyers more deep work time. Set up the lawyer of the future for even greater challenges and rewards. Mary also reflects on how powerful it is to see this thing called clock that she built and how it's grown.

In size and impact. And we get into some of the.

Fun gimmicks and swag of the week, like neck tattoos. Little did Mary know one of these temporary tattoos would be on her bicep by midnight.

Enjoy.

Mary and Jen. Real Talk clock Global Institute 2020.

Ironclad. Had a breakfast this morning or something that you couldn't be at the opening session, but I shouted you out. Oh, I said, once upon a time, Mary stood on this stage and I'm filling her shoes in a little less of a heel, but I'm up here. I'm up here. But yeah, generative AI and all the things we have to get into that because it's the topic du jour, the topic of the week. It was the topic from your talk, and my friend and I have been going deep and I've been trying to figure out my stance on it one podcast at a time.

Okay.

Yeah.

So what was interesting? Just over lunch today, people were like, yeah, I went to your talk and it changed my perspective even as I'm walking around the halls in the way that I'm talking to the vendors today. And I was like, that's interesting. So you didn't walk in here thinking that generative AI is going to change the legal landscape and it's going to affect our jobs and like, we should be thinking about that. And I was actually surprised at how many people said no. I mean, I feel like that's every conversation I'm having these days. Is how is this impacting legal? But there was, at least before yesterday, you know, a lot of wait and see. And now people are like, no, I guess I do need to start acting.

But that doesn't surprise me because there's a lot of noise and a little signal and you're someone just by way of industry clout and prowess. You separate noise from signal and people come to hear people like you do that for them. So it's great that you were up there galvanizing and kind of opening their eyes. And that's what I got at with my MIT educated friend, that it is going to change industries. And we were talking about the legal industry being changed. The mundane work is going to be swept into that.

I mean, it's not just legal. It's going to affect every part of the entire world. And the economy.

It's going to affect the economy and the way work gets shipped out of the us different industries have gotten shipped to different parts of the world. I was wondering, like, what will it do for graphic design for background artists? I saw an AI tool last night where I can take a vocal stem, which is a vocal track acapella that I write for one of my songs and record it. You've heard my songs, you've been in the studio. I can put it into this AI application and I can go, Miley Cyrus or Katy Perry voice. That's crazy. Send that in to, you know, someone has the idea, which I'm relieved cause I don't want to send my vocals into everything. I. It can help me imagine my songs to the actual vision of my songs, which is either Miley Cyrus or Katy Perry or something.

That's really cool.

Yeah, so it's cool. So the arts, legal, engineering, it could be your entry level coder, your young coder. And I think that's all positive. I tend to glance over the underbelly here. Is there an underbelly? Are you feeling?

I'm with you. I'm like very optimistic about things. I'm excited. I like change, I like disruption. And I think things sort themselves out. Like, sure, there will be things that people stumble in, will misstep, and there'll be risks. But I think there's a lot of good. And actually I was talking to our CEO because we're going to prepare. We're talking this afternoon on the super stage about AI and its effect on knowledge management. But he made a really interesting comment when we were chatting, which is we would have guessed that things like automation and AI would have started with really routine Work and replacing that. It started by disrupting legal, which is knowledge work. And that's not what you would expect.

No.

You think about how much of the legal work is already replaceable. I wouldn't have guessed it. And I'm excited.

I'm excited. I started this journey out with paralegal Flash in my multi headed title and I think it's a boon for paralegals. It's a brighter future for them 100%. I think it can get paralegal folks. I always say that paralegal roles in this day and age will come to a fork in the road eventually at your companies where you either choose to go in a drafting direction and maybe learn the innards of a contract negotiation, be a lawyer without the jd. I used to see those all the time at Cisco and they did really well.

Totally very valuable.

Yeah, contract negotiation, it's a real skill that you can learn as a trade from the masters or the fork. Other way is you can become this contract ops enabled legal ops enabled data wizard. The tech is beneath your fingers and they think you're a magician. I've been told I'm a magician. This kind of mundane first drafts work is not mundane, but the mundane of data entry and trackers and all of that can be accelerated to that fork.

The other interesting idea that we're going to talk about in our next session is we call legal work knowledge work.

Right.

They're all knowledge workers. What if they've never actually been doing knowledge work? What if all of that's been knowledge management, which is doing the first draft.

Doing the research, saving the tagging, the back to the knowledge base.

And then once you do all that, 10% of your time is left to actually do the advising, the strategic thinking, the like telling your clients why this matters. Now that's going to be flipped. Now you actually get to do 90% of the time actual knowledge work.

Yeah.

So what does that mean? What does the lawyer of the future do? What does the school need to do?

Maybe the lawyer of the future will go home and feel better because then sometimes we hear, we read articles that there's high burnout, it's a high stress job, it's a high reward job if you're a great attorney out there in the world inventing the code for us all to operate within. But it's a tough career.

Well, and that's why I don't think it should be as threatening as I think some people do. There's so much work to be done and in fact in the short term there's definitely more work. Think of all the regulatory, the privacy, the IP stuff that needs to take place. So that needs to happen. But there is so much work to be done in the lawyer life. And they're always trying to prioritize and trying to tell us that they don't have enough time to do the thinking and like the deep work. Well, now they will. And so it's not a bad thing that you actually have more free time, because that free time is how you do the deep work.

I learned that in my career the hard way, with calendar blocks and fighting for deep work time and. Or I call it white space time. And I try to teach people on my team, budding leaders, to become more strategic. You need those pockets of the day.

I needed a lot of that like last week to get ready for this and to think about my talk and what I wanted to put in it. Cause otherwise your day goes by. It's five o' clock and you're like, shoot, you need to find a few minutes to. You know. But you need to think.

You can't find a few minutes at 5 o' clock for the most part, unless you're a musician and you work that kind of reverse schedule and you're a. Nighttime is where all this creative comes out. Some people are night people. But for what I imagine you're doing on stage and your big talks and just synthesizing months of combos in your reading and your writing.

Exactly.

You have to have. What do you do, like an hour or two hour block mornings?

Yeah, I need at least a two hour to get into it. And then five o' clock, the minions show up in my household.

Yeah, the minions show up and they need to be fed and they had a bad day or a good day.

They need you.

Or they just start screaming and they need you because you're their mother and you signed on for that. I was with some health stuff, recovering, as you know, last week, and it gave me immense white space to just lie down, be still. And I did a lot of writing last week and all the prep for this week came from being still last week and just pumping LinkedIn. LinkedIn was like my accordion last week. I was just.

It was really fun. Mary, what do you think of, like, what's going on on LinkedIn this week, by the way?

On LinkedIn is crazy. I don't know if you've tried to see it the last couple days. I can't, I can't. Someone's like, did you see my post? No, it's buried within the other 200 posts about CGI.

Yeah. There's so much activity. There was so much great buildup to this.

This is great, by the way. So I already told you on text that once the lights went down for the keynote session, Jen took the stage. And just like last year got. Cause it's like you look around the room and it's so, so big.

So big.

There's so much buzz and so much. Like, you can feel the positive energy, and then you are doing an amazing job. And it's like, we built something.

Really built something.

You never would have thought this 10 years ago. You never would have believed it if we told you that 10 years from now Legal Ops would have this kind of a presence in the world and that there'd be this much buzz about it.

It's. But you had a feeling. You had a vision.

We wanted this.

Yeah, you wanted it. And you were there, strapping on those pearls all the first years of the Clock Institute. And I was telling someone this earlier. I get asked sometimes, like, how'd you do this? How did you get on the Clock? How, how, how, how? And I'm like, I watched Mary do this years ago, before Mary even knew me. And I saw you up there talking, and I was like, I want to do that one day.

I mean, for me, too. I wasn't doing this kind of stuff before Clock showed up. Clock was my opportunity to, like, have a stage, to have an audience, to have a platform to preach.

Right, A platform to preach. Yeah. I maybe called us a cult this morning, if you weren't there.

But if there's something to it, there is something to that. Yeah.

Like, I'm not David Koresh, okay? Everything's gonna end just fine. But I do want everyone. Did you see that? I made tattoos, temporary tattoos.

I did.

This is my gimmick of the week. And I did cursive tattoos for the neck.

I don't think I've seen this.

They say, faster deal times, because that's what I think we're really all about.

No. Were you joking? You really did.

I made them.

Oh, I thought you were kidding.

Well, this is the great truth about being in the writer's room. Preparing for this week, for a few months, the writer's room is really a padded room that the Clock staff invites me into. I get on a zoom call, and I bounce off the walls and I say insane stuff, and I show up in ridiculous, like, sunglasses, and I'm inside, and I make everyone laugh, and I'm like, tattoos, spreadsheet or die. Stickers. And this year the staff was like, yeah, they guessed everything. And so we have a fun edge. We have clock talk that can go on your knuckles. One clock talk.

Honestly, is there any other professional organization in the world that is as fun and as real and as collaborative that this one is? No.

As I said in my opener this morning, accounting Ops, take notes, you guys. Legal Ops is over here.

Fun crushing the game.

We have a neon sign in here.

People like each other for real. Like want to hang out till two in the morning.

Yeah. What I think is unique is we're not competitive. We're all mostly one of ones in our role. Because you can't have two heads of Legal Ops. You can have several, maybe tech people on a function, but even they're going to cover different ends of the tech stack. So we all come here and we find our others and then we get to go, oh my God, this is hard for you too.

Yeah. And you get it. Even my parents don't know what I do, but you know what I do. That's such a good feeling.

It's an instant bond. And we all get to call each other and go, so how'd you do doc management in a Google environment? True story. Yeah.

And then someone else goes, I called.

You my second week at Netflix. I'm like, how'd you do this? And you're like, I didn't. I tried. And here's how it went. And you gave me your war story.

Exactly.

Which painted a picture of how this could go. And then I took my through the journey of it anyway. And you know what's so funny? Fast forward today I walked the floor. Aodocs is out there. And I walked by them and I said, this is the first time you're at a legal tech conference. They said, yeah. And I was like, wow. When I was working with you guys at Netflix on that pilot for a little while, I was pitching them like, you should do legal tech. You can really solve in legal tech, but we need you to do abc. And there they were with their banners at their booth offering to do abc. So I made them thank me for getting them here. And this is even our influence.

Female tech is hot.

It's hot. And kind of to your generative AI point, it's still so new.

Yeah, it is really new.

It's so new and we don't have it figured out. And I see there's more negative space in like the software problem space. There's more not solved than there is solved. And look at that exhibitor floor that You're a part of with Ironclad. There's so much more to solve.

There's so many providers.

I've never heard like, who is latch? They are here.

Like they're here. You should know who they are.

Well, I know who they are because I went right up to them and had a great chat with them. I'm like, tell me about your product. And I was joking with them. It's powered by GPT4. I'm like, that just came out. Did you just start two weeks ago? And they were laughing and they were like, no. They're like, yes. They're like 19 year old young men. They're like, we are in college. No, they've been at it a few years. GPT3 was beneath. And then when the landscape shifted recently, they were ready for the disruption. And here they are. First ever Legal Ops conference.

Fascinating.

Yeah. I think we have over 116 sponsors this year. Sponsor exhibitors out there. And like I walked in there and I'm like, this is approaching Dreamforce level.

Yeah, it's huge. Not as much swag this year.

Really?

Did you notice that?

Well, not as much, but there's really cool swag. Lots of stuffies, lots of priorities. Swag booth swag was pretty cool with the unicorns.

Oh yeah, I got one of those a few years ago.

Yeah, it was very pink and purple. But I wonder if like just markets and budget cuts and stuff.

That's what I was worrying too. Cause someone was like, maybe this is like a leading indicator. Someone should do like data analytics on swag at clock.

That would actually be really smart.

Leave it to like us Legal Ops data nerds to make that kind of a conversation. Talk.

Yeah. And we can like get a tableau going. And can we have people like voting in the app, like who has the cutest plush dollar, which I'm trying to gamify all the way.

I think Cloch has the cutest plush doll. That thing is the Clocktopus.

The Clocktopus.

Is that you?

No. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say a cool idea happened. And it was by. Was it Farah's idea that Angela came up with the octopus. Oh, so maybe she came up with the octopus. And Nicole and Farrah came up with the pun of the Clocktopus.

Oh yeah. I think the Clocktopus is really cute.

It's really cute. And it's reversal, it's reversible. It's day night, which is very much keeping with the spirit of this event because we go day and we go night.

That's very true.

And transformation. And keeping with the spirit of here you are, version one. And then you can invert yourself and become nighttime.

And a ridiculously smart animal.

And a ridiculously smart animal with all.

The tentacles, which is adaptable and flexible.

And the whole thing. I really like this. It looks like the wheel. Looks like the clock core wheel.

It really works.

We wear a lot of hats.

Yes.

Sometimes I think too many.

Or maybe we have a lot of arms.

We have a lot of arms and tentacles and were insanely smart. I mean, do you guys remember when Inky busted out of the zoo a few years ago, went down the sewer drain and freed himself?

Yeah.

Do you guys remember this story inspo like, if I were to get a tattoo next year, we're gonna have a real tattoo booth here. If I were to get one, I'd get Inky on my arm.

Do you have any tattoos? Really?

I want zero tattoos. I don't have the skin for it. How about you?

I would never.

This is a shrine and I kind of adopt that as well. Like, this is a shrine. Like, even piercings were too much for me and left the piercing game at a young age.

Okay. Big fan of accessories though. So I'll pierce. Because anywhere I can put an accessory is. There's not enough places, which is why I don't understand, like the Apple watch or other watches or like a ring. I don't understand there's like not enough places for jewelry already.

I know. I don't understand the Apple watch. I think it is an inferior gadget. And I like wearing real watches, timepieces, and we have the phone. That's like enough Apple on me all the time. But you and I, we don't do aura. You and I do Whoop the whoop.

You're really like the only other person I know that has a whoop. Which is why I harass you on my texts about Whoop. The Whoop is our fitness tracker.

Whoop. And it's an analytics based fitness tracker. And they have a proprietary score they give you every morning. That's a combination of resting heart rate, heart rate variability, a couple sleep consistency. Mary and I were comparing our scores.

I'm a little worried about your health score.

And Mary's afraid I'm going to die soon. And because my numbers are so low and if you put them on a graph, my numbers track to an 80 year old woman's number.

Is that true? Have you actually looked?

Yeah, I've looked at the HRB in terms of decade of Life and averages and I'm extremely off from the average there, but I'm just gonna take that as a good sign. We're not gonna die. I'm not gonna die.

Well, we should think about what levers we can pull to experiment and see if it makes a difference.

I would love to know. Speaking of levers and the data analytics brains that you and I really do have behind all of this, I'd love to know what your top lever is that you play with to in terms of the whoop to influence positive recovery. To influence like self care and sleep. I loved your travel. You like went to Amsterdam and back in a day or two. 72 hours.

A couple weeks ago it was 34 hours.

34 on the ground. California Amsterdam on the ground. You came back and your Whoop score was 4%.

Yeah, it was like bottom.

Yeah. So Mary died.

I was like dying.

Yeah, she died and I was like, whoa.

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And now back to the show.

You wanna know something funny? I had before you answer my question on your levers. I had a minor surgery recently, so I was in recovery mode on that and I, for the first time ever, got seven green in a row. Seven green recovery.

You showed me that. I was like, I have never seen. I'm lucky to get like one green every once in a while because we're.

You're a spaz. I mean that is a compliment. And I am like, you go to F45 and you do workouts that would kill an 80 year old woman. She would die, I would die. So seven in a row. It's like, why did it take surgery to get me to rest in peace?

Because you're resting. Because that's the lever, right? It's sleep.

That's the lever is sleep is full nights of sleep.

Yeah, well, you and I are military about our sleep.

Military. We're like Goggins. We're David Goggins. Really important on sleep. So you're in eight hours or.

Absolutely. Definitely more than eight hours. Eight hours is like a short night of sleep for me.

I'll take nine if I can get it.

Absolutely.

That's the goal. I get more green. I think it's because I'm always vibrating so much to get it all done, to have like a grateful day that the sleep really wants it. So what number is peril for you? Like six hours a night is death for you. Do you start to.

And I just like, I can't sleep in hotels and like on planes. And so even here I'm like, even if I go to bed early, it's terrible.

Well, I could recommend something to make you sleep on a plane. Try surgery. All I've been doing recently, I get on a plane, I'm like, hello everybody. And I'm out.

Hard pass.

Yeah, hard pass.

Okay. So the other things I do religiously, I work out every day. I'm an intermittent faster.

Yeah, so that's. You're into the fasting? Yeah, 12 to 6 or 10 to 6 when you open the window for food.

7 to 1. 7am no eating between 7pm and 1pm So I have a six hour eating window.

Perfect. 7 P to 1. Okay. That's just like.

It's pretty extreme.

That's baffling. It's pretty extreme, yeah. How are you not dead? I would die.

No, I feel better than ever. And I stopped drinking, by the way. I stopped drinking in August. So, yeah, I'm a crazy biohacker. Like I follow, you know, Atiya and Huberman and all that crazy stuff.

You turned me on a bit to Huberman. And I stopped drinking years ago. And the world's a better place for it. And look at my skin.

And your sleep is better.

And look at my sleep.

Yeah, her skin. We're gonna go way over the time we're supposed to be hunting. Because when we were talking about you being part of Clock and everything, I mean, even from the first time I.

Met you, you thought my skin was great.

No. Well, you were way.

You thought. I was 21.

We called you the next gen. Pun intended. Get it? Next gen of leaders. And I was like, she's the next generation. Because she's a generation younger than me. And then when we were last together in San Francisco, you told me your age and I was like, what? We're kind of the same generation.

Yeah, you're Gen X. I'm Xennial. I'm on the cusp. And different books and sources will Say I'm in or I'm out. So I'm on the cusp. So I'm fluent in Gen X and I'm fluent in Millennial. And I don't.

You lean X in your personality.

You think I lean X? I think I lean X in wisdom and work ethic.

Yeah.

And I think I lean Millennial in how digital I am.

Yes, I agree with that.

I told someone else this week. I came out to my mother on instant messenger. AOL instant messenger on AIM. Yeah, her screen name was Lady Di 7:15. Her name's Diane. She's from the Bronx. And I came out to her on aim. It was really a moment and I.

Was personal way of doing that.

But I'm very comfortable expressing myself digitally. Like, I'm very pixely in my personality. So sorry for another podcast, but it was really. That's.

I have a lot of questions, like, do you break up with people digitally too?

Yeah, I never broke up with anyone digitally. I think that's really a low blow. I believe in showing up and letting them down in person.

Yeah.

I did a phone call one once though, and that was rough for her, but not my problem. So I skew Millennial and I bloom later. I'm youthful, I'm fluent in teenage. I can speak to Z ers and, like, become a child with them. My teenage nephews think I'm cool.

You are cool.

And I.

But you are. You have a young soul. I'm an old soul.

No, you. I don't have a young soul.

Oh, I think you're definitely a young soul.

I just have like a young, vibrant, sprite aura and look. But I think this is why you and I hang, because I think we're old souls.

You think you're an old soul?

Yeah, I'm definitely an old soul.

I don't know. I think you have, like, self identity challenges because you also think that you're an introvert.

I am an introvert, Mary. Really challenging who I am. I am, but I'm in it. The recharge is solitude. When Covid happened and the world went home, I was like, finally.

Oh, my God. I struggled so much.

Yeah, you struggled.

I was like, where are the people, Mary? I mean, there's enough people in my house.

You've heard the songs that I'm starting to publish. Yeah, the songs, like the Solitude, Creating White Space, thinking. The best stuff came out from this period because of solitude, which is truly my happy place. But I do like to socialize.

So, like, this event, everyone is telling me this is really Hard because they're on all day and they gotta see all these people. For me, I go till like midnight and then I go back to my.

Hotel room and you pout.

And then I'm like, should I go on social media? I'm so lonely. There's nobody to talk to. So lonely in my hotel room.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I don't. I gotta get back down, get back out.

It's so funny that you think I am an extroverted young soul. Gen Xer.

Well, I want to ask you another question because I've gotten this this week. People are like, oh my God, I didn't know you would be so approachable. Do you get that?

No. Did someone say that to me this week? Approachable? No, it's like, I'm very approachable. People said it to me last year. Like someone said to me last year in the comments on LinkedIn, like, I was afraid to go near you. I'm like, what? I'm a child.

Yeah.

In a really nice suit jacket paid for by the adult me. Someone said to me recently after we had a first one on one mentoring style on a zoom, they were like, oh, you're so fun and cool. I'm so surprised. And they said, oh, I thought you'd be so corporate. And I was like, what?

You?

Me, corporate? Like, I can't believe I've made it this far in corporate. This is the best two day tent placement gone right. And career in Legal Ops over a decade later and they haven't removed me from the scene. But Netflix has a way higher tolerance for creativity than some places. I don't get approachable. I think it's your accessories and the pearls. Mary puts the collar up. When I first saw you with the collar up, you were like a superhero. You had the Hermes belt, big H. The white shirt was tucked. Like, even my wife still talks about your signature timeless look. So I think people are intimidated by just the power of that. It's so aesthetically put together.

It's the same style since the late 80s.

Yes. Basically, Mary's style hasn't changed and it just keeps coming back into vogue. So, yeah, people are shy. We're a bunch of nerds in here.

So let's just say it here. We are happy to chat with everyone. We are excited to chat with everyone. So if you're like in legal ops trying to build your team, trying to figure out how to scale, come at us. I would love to talk to you.

Mary would especially love to talk to you since she works at Ironclad now. I'm a little slower to get back to everyone.

Well, you don't have as much time.

Because of the Netflix time commitment. I make sure that Netflix gets my best creativity and time and devotion because we're doing the coolest stuff. But I eventually will get to people. And I was serious about the selfie competition. A few women have taken me up on this week. I'm up to four selfies with one woman. Yeah. And then another person heard I was. I'll mentor someone for three months if they do the most selfies with me. Ridiculous. And she's like, I'm in. And she started doing selfies. So I'm really into the power of mentorship. I'm just slower than you now.

Well, it's like part of my job now.

Yeah.

So I love it. But I also am trying to hear and learn what people are dealing with and struggling with and how I can.

Help Real Talk Mary and Jen. It happened at clock Global Institute 2023. Mary, thanks for coming into the podcast lounge.

Always fun, Susan. Bye.

That about wraps up this episode. Thank you, Mary, for bringing the Real Talk to Clock Talk. You can catch this and other episodes of Clock Talk wherever you listen to podcasts.

Thanks for listening.

Until next time.