Using Tech for Efficient Legal Ops with Lisa Mango at One Medical

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Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Pearls on Gloves Off. I'm your host, Mario Carroll and with me today is Lisa Mango, Chief legal officer and General counsel at One Medical. I am very excited to get into it with Lisa today because she is not only an amazing clo of a company that we all know and that was instrumental to us getting through this, this recent pandemic and had to pivot to do everything very quickly with little information. And she was likely able to do that because she's a big believer in legal operations and technology. I know she is someone who would invest well and being able to scale the department because we actually met very early on in my legal ops career as Lisa did a stint in legal ops at Autodesk and was one of the original members of Clock in our very early book club days, even before, before Clock was a real organization. So there's a lot of good stuff to dive into with her today. And first we will start with a little background. So as chief Legal officer, Lisa leads the legal compliance and government affairs teams and is responsible for all legal and regulatory affairs at One Medical. She brought broad legal, business and leadership experience to One Medical, acting as a senior legal advisor for a number of public and private businesses ranging from large technology and professional services companies to early venture backed enterprises. Prior to joining One Medical, Lisa spent several years at Autodesk, an international design software company where she had the opportunity to build and lead several legal function areas. Lisa earned her J.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy from Duke University. Welcome, Lisa.

Thank you, Mary. I am really thrilled to be here and thrilled to have the opportunity to talk with you and share my thoughts with others. So thank you for affording me this chance.

It's an honor to have you here. Let's start from the beginning. Tell me about the early days of your career and how your journey start because it looks like I think you went to law school right after college. Was that presumably always the goal and where you wanted to go?

No, I was like many college kids who didn't really know what I wanted to do. I majored in public policy. So I thought and worked at a think tank and I thought to myself, I'm really interested in that area, but I think I wanted to just explore. So I actually did take a year between college and law school.

Oh, you did?

Okay. I moved up to Boston with friends. Only chose them because my friends were going only chose Boston because my friends were going there. I got a job at an early software Company loved it, but I was like, you know, I want to have more options for a career. So then I decided I was going to go ahead and go to law school. So that's where I started. And after law school I moved to the Bay area to work for mid sized law firm. Okay. I started in litigation and got a lot of great experience, especially a lot of experienced a lot of humility in some of my first depots and trial work. But it wasn't my jam. So I moved more into employment counseling and then tech. Tech, tech transactions.

Oh, interesting.

I know, I know. It was, it was a way to sort of not just expand my skill set but I don't know, I try on, I guess it was a way to expand my skill set. But through that experience I learned that I liked talking to my clients almost on a daily basis like, and helping them through their issues and learning to understand their businesses. So then I thought to myself, I really think I should go in house. And I eventually transitioned to in house. My first real in house career was during the dot com years working at a fast growing Internet consulting company. I this was really a seminal moment for me because I had limited in house experience to speak of. I had just had my first child who was six weeks old at the time. And a former colleague and friend reached out to me and she said, why don't you come be my second lawyer. It was her first general counsel job and I really thought she was crazy. I didn't really know what I was doing but she told me, you know, I've worked with you, you're smart, hard working with good instinct, let's do this together. And you know what, that was awesome, but also stressful. I joined and immediately had to deal with like a number of different issues from complex licensing and consulting agreements to corporate matters, to litigation marketing, international expense expansion. But it was great. You know, like many dot com companies though, it grew really, really fast and then it wound down really fast. So. But I was lucky. I moved with some of my colleagues from that company to be their GC for a small startup, which I enjoyed, you know. And this again was this working on a broad, broad array of legal work. Yeah, that you know, but that company wound down too. And then I decided to make a change and go to a larger, larger legal department. And my thinking was, you know, not just going abroad, but I'd really liked to have deeper experience in different areas. And so that was Autodesk. It's an amazing company. I had a great experience there. And even though I was there for almost 12 years. I probably had five or six different jobs, which we could talk about later. And then after almost my 12th year, the amazing woman that had hired me to the Internet consulting company reached out again and said, hey, I've just joined as general counsel of One Medical. Can you come join me? And let's do it again.

Wow, that's such an interesting background. And it's so unique because you were able to practice so much different types, like expand to different practice areas and do touch a bunch of different things within the legal department, probably because it was small and you kind of had to do everything, but you got exposure early on, and even at the law firm, you moved around and touched a bunch of things, and that probably set you up really well to be successful both in house and eventually as GC and Cielo. Right.

It did. Because as GC and Cielo, you really do have to have a working knowledge of pretty much every area that your team supports. And so, you know, or at least enough so that you can people understand or think that you know what you're talking about. But. And so that that also helps you build confidence.

Yes.

That you can do new things. And that was super important as I developed my career.

Yeah. I mean, I have so many conversations with folks who are now clos who talk about the first few days of being a GC and just feeling like they're over their skis. And, you know, they're an employment lawyer, and now they're dealing with corporate things and filings, and they've never touched that before. But, you know, you probably felt a lot more prepared than others just having touched a lot of things. So let's then talk about your journey into Autodesk, which is a fabulous Bay Area company. You were there for quite a long time. I know that you also had the opportunity there to try out a whole bunch of different roles within legal. So tell us about that experience.

Yes. Well, as I mentioned, I was really excited to join a larger legal department and get the experience to go deeper in certain areas. I would say that, you know, unlike my prior roles, where I had to go super broad, this experience afforded me to go deep in different areas that I supported, or deeper, I should say. But the good news was also that it was almost like a rotation for me in that, you know, when I first joined, I supported, you know, the product division doing their transactional M and A and general counseling work. And then I was able to move into a bunch of different areas. So every couple of years, I switched groups, you know, and you know, sort of. Sort of built up their employment practice, which was international. Then I moved into privacy and compliance, etc.

Wow. And was that like a formal program within Autodesk, or did you. Were you kind of unique in the fact that you hopped around?

It was not a formal program. It was encouraged by the general counsel to move into different areas. I think I was probably a little bit more proactive. Proactive about it than others, because I really wanted to expand my knowledge set, you know, build something up and implement it and then move on.

Yeah, that's so great. From a continuity. A business continuity practice. From a professional development. And I know having tried to put some of these rotation programs in place, that it is encouraged, but it's also very hard to do because you want your attorneys kind of ramped up and hitting the ground running, and everyone's super busy. And so every time people rotate, you kind of have to slow down for a moment before you can, or you can speed up again. But that's fantastic that you had that opportunity.

Yes, because when I joined, it was a much smaller department and people had to do multiple areas. But as it grew. Right. People started having to specialize. Yeah, some folks were okay staying there, but I really wanted to continue to move into different groups, and I'm very glad I did.

And I know, because I met you when you were at Autodesk, that you did a stint in Legal Ops, which I find totally interesting now, knowing your career trajectory and where you ended up. Because a lot of aspiring GCs at the moment do try to get that Legal Ops experience, whether it's managing someone, managing that function, or at least getting involved in it. Because there's so much learning about how to run a department and thereby kind of preparing you to be a general counsel or a department leader, a CLO, eventually. We all know that the role of the GC is so much more than it used to be 10, 20 years ago. It's not about just being the top lawyer in the room. You're now tasked with budgeting and headcount and tech and strategy, all these things. The list goes on and on. And was that always kind of part of your plan? It sounds like you were already a general counsel in the past, but in preparing you to be a larger company GC and clo, was that a conscious decision to kind of take a role, you know, dabbling in legal ops and learning more about how to grow and scale and operate a department, or was that kind of just happenstance?

It was in between. So I just. I found Myself as I, you know, grew and you know, became more senior in the department, like even from the get go, wanting to always, you know, do things more efficiently and wanted to have tools and trainings. I had some early experiences helping out some folks on our team. We had an early contract management initiative that went horribly wrong. You know, the standard, we bought the tool before we had any processes in place. Right. And I don't think we started using the tool until two years after. Right, right.

It's very common. And this was, you know, this was way early days. So all these best practices. Right. All the things that we learned, it wasn't even a thing then, you know, you, you were getting involved in improving processes before that became a common part of a legal department.

Yes, but exactly to your point, Mary, I can't imagine being a general counsel without having that background because. Yes, exactly. You are expected to be more than the top lawyer. Legal departments are expected to function more and more like all the other business units. That's right. They're supposed to have strategic operating initiatives. They need to become more efficient. They, you know, manage to a budget. They are really, you know, the larger your team gets, you really have to focus on org design and professional development. And I think without that experience and exposure, it would have been harder for me to do those things because I hired folks who are, who were brilliant lawyers, but they didn't have a lot of legal department management. And so it was just helpful to be able to leverage my experience there to help build my team and to make it a really, in my experience or opinion I should say, you know, kick ass legal team.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that's. Do you think it's surprising to a lot of folks who take that role for the first time as a leader of a legal department that so much of their job is about the infrastructure and the processes and helping the rest of the department be able to work efficiently and well and improve the quality of their work through some of that foundational work.

I think for many it is if you come from a larger legal department, I think thanks to the work of you and many of our peers on clock, you know, that's changing and people are starting to understand the importance. But for many folks who don't have that exposure, I think it is a surprise. They are, they want to be the top lawyer, which often means spending quite a bit of time with your board, your CEO and the executive team. And it's sometimes hard, particularly if you don't have experience in this role, to focus on these other things. That I view as just as important as advising the executives.

Yeah, absolutely. So going back to your days at Autodesk, then, did someone at the top kind of say, we have challenges, we need to improve things, we need technology? Or was that something that just organically happened, as it often does? And were you playing a hybrid role? Did you raise your hand? How did that all happen?

I know, I'm trying. Trying to remember, but I will tell you, I felt like I was always asking about, you know, what, how can we do this better? What tools can we develop? What kind of professional development opportunities should we create for the team? And so I learned somehow that there was legal ops that was a thing. And, you know, coincidentally knew Lisa, Connie from. Who's also a legal ops person on Clop. I knew her from one of my employment benchmarking groups. And she. I got in touch with her, and she said, oh, yeah, if you're interested in learning more about it, come to a clock meeting. And it was at that first clock meeting, you know, which was a smaller group then, that I felt I learned so much, I should say. And I think one of the individuals handed me a presentation and said, here's the presentation you need to make to your general counsel to create this role. So. And it worked. Now, I still had a hybrid role. I still was supporting a product division, but I did start building out legal ops processes and eventually hired, I think, three folks to be on a legal ops team that I also worked with. So. And honestly, some folks that I was working with, my colleagues were like, that doesn't seem like a substantive area that you should go into. Like, if you really want to move up.

Yep.

You know, why are you doing that? And I. I didn't have a great answer for that, except for, I just feel like this is important to our department, and I was really interested in it. I can geek out on legal Ops.

Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. That's why we're friends.

Exactly. And sometimes when I start talking about it on my team now, they start rolling their eyes. They're like, oh, she just goes. Start talking about clock again and tell us those stories. But in any event, so it just sort of happened organically for me. And, you know, once I joined One Medical, I felt, you know, I was thrilled that I had had that experience because now it was me, you know, doing these types of things.

Yeah, yeah. You know, it is. It is common, I think. Steve Harmon is another early legal ops person. He was at Cisco, who's also now a general counsel, and he. He has A story he tells of when he was first tapped to take on the hybrid role and also kind of own Legal Ops. And he said to his GC at the time, what did I do wrong? Almost like there's this perception that if you want to move up, should you be looking at Legal ops? And yet when you look back now, there are so many general counsel who are very successful or clos who are very successful in their roles now in building out some of the leading, most innovative legal departments out there, because they did take a moment to get involved and roll up their sleeves and get involved in some of looking at the foundation of how their, their previous legal departments could be scaled and what technology could be put in place and how to operate it, what roles to hire to help, you know, help with the efficiency and the improvement in quality and balancing budgets and such for the organization. So I think that there is still that perception of, like, what is this role? Why are you doing it? And yet I think I'd love, you know, that we're here talking today because so much education still needs to take place about the value that it has, the impact that it has, and how it really does set you up, you know, really well for the next part of your career if you are going to take that leadership role. I know when I was at Google, our team bounced around quite a bit under various deputies of the general counsel over the years. And everyone who kind of became the person who owned Legal Ops for a moment has moved on and is a very prominent general counselor, clo at some big tech company in the Bay Area. So very proud of that fact. And I do think it is very important to helping people prepare for the next step. So let's move on then. So now you are prepared. You're ready to take on the world. And as you mentioned, you got tapped again by this amazing friend who's taken you around from company to company, and you end up at a place called One Medical. So tell me about your story there.

Yes. So, you know, having, you know, worked in practice in many areas, I felt fairly comfortable, you know, when she asked me to join and she was, her view was like, I want you to build out the legal team and the functions while I focus on strategic work. And someday you're likely to be the general counsel here. So I was excited to join. I like learning new things. So I joined. There was myself the GC and a very junior lawyer. She'd come right out of law school working there. And I probably walked in the door and was thinking, okay, good.

I Got this.

I know, employment, litigation, et cetera, et cetera. Well, boy, was I in for it when I realized I really didn't know anything about healthcare law. And healthcare law, in my humble opinion, is not super intuitive unless you've been around healthcare organizations before.

Yeah, I bet, I bet.

So that was a really steep learning curve because it's complicated and it is, it is at times, you know, opposite of what you would do and expect in a tech company. Right. And honestly, to be quite honest, those regulations can be hard to work with when you're a disruptor. Right. One medical is the fast paced, technology enabled healthcare provider that we are looking to disrupt the way healthcare is delivered to bring better care.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so a lot of the regulations don't really, or they don't seem to address what we're trying to do. And you could read them as really, you know, being silent or potentially covering what we wanted to do. Let me restate that. That didn't come out right. But the challenge we have of being a tech enabled healthcare disruptor is that the regulations weren't really written to fit our business and sometimes it's really hard to figure out how they apply.

Yeah, absolutely. I can relate to that from being at Google in the early days of the Internet law kind of being written, so. And same looking at driverless cars now. Right. There's so many areas where the tech is further along than the regulatory landscape has gotten us. So yeah, interesting to have to navigate that. So how was it? How did you do that?

It was really, honestly the junior attorney that I worked with was very helpful, but the key for me was finding good outside counsel. And this is another one of my, you know, my tips for people, but really trying to find good outside counsel that not only knows the area but is able to adjust their advice for the type of company you are and think outside the box. Healthcare law is so complicated and the consequences of breaking rules are so severe when it comes to Medicare, et cetera, that people are always very careful and there's not. My experience was there wasn't, after talking to many different outside counsel, there wasn't a lot of out of the box thinking when it came to how can we do this and you know, not violate the regulations. So when we finally found our outside counsel to help us with that, that was life changing for me. And it was, it was too in any event. So that was super important as well as having experiencing things day to day and trying to absorb them like here are the rules. And then, you know, every day you you encountered different issues that you had to address because it affects every area of our business. Sure.

The drinking from the fire hose, so to speak, that we all know, so. Right. And then it wasn't that long before you took over the general counsel role there. So then continuing to kind of grow out your team and supporting the business. So how did. How is that transition to now leading. Leading the department in function?

On one hand, it was not. It was somewhat easy because I had been handling most of the day to day and growing the team and hiring the team and supporting the business. So that part was not as stressful. However, on the other hand, two things I think really stressed me out about the new role. One being just my expanded responsibilities in supporting the board and the CEO.

Sure, yeah.

You know, I had done support here and there, working with boards and the committees, but I didn't do it directly. And I also didn't have a ton of experience with these large corporate transactions, which we started doing within months of me becoming the general counsel, which included an ipo, a large acquisition of a Medicare business, and of course, just more recently, the Amazon transaction. Right.

Yes.

That's a lot to happen. So that stressed me out. The second thing was just if I thought about it, which I try not to too deeply, is the level of responsibility which I was charged with. Right. Like the buck stops with me when it comes to advising the board, CEO and executive team. Right. As well as managing a growing team that eventually, you know, we added compliance and government affairs to our team. So it's. There's no one else necessarily to escalate to and talk things over with. Right. Like, the end of the day, the buck stops. It stops with me. So those two things were scary. But, you know, now looking back on it, taking this responsibility was really, really no different than the other times. I had to learn a new thing. I mean, higher stakes, but it's important to keep your perspective and confidence that you can do it.

Well, what you failed to mention during all this, that was happening. So your GC in 2018, you go public in 2020, you've got M and A stuff going on, but right after you go public in January of 2020, then the pandemic hits and everyone's life was turned upside down. But one medical. You guys were at the heart of it. I know that you became a household name to all of the US Given your involvement in reacting and being a part of helping everyone get tested and all that. What was that like in trying to scale your organization and pivot to probably a Completely unexpected level of service and, I don't know, offerings that you weren't planning on doing probably the day before.

It was crazy even just from the corporate perspective. You know, we went public late January 2020. We were doing our first earnings release the middle of March. And we had no idea what to say because folks weren't coming into the clinics. And that is a significant portion of, of where our revenue is generated.

Oh, my goodness.

And given the timing, nobody, you know, folks had already reported their earnings in February. And most folks. And so there really wasn't a lot of guidance as. What do you say? Yeah, I remember sitting in that, you know, in our conference room reading the script and we were crossing out and editing it like moments before. And our investor relations colleague with dying, she's like, we, you're supposed to record these in advance. And I was like, we just, we're gonna just have to go with the flow here. That being said, the. It was, it was crazy, but it was also super inspiring because we had to pivot our business model and we had to figure out how to serve all of our members. Yeah, we all, you know, One Medical is very patient centric and, and the. All of everyone at One Medical, but particularly our providers, are so mission driven when it comes to providing care. So they were like, what can we do? And of course, there were no real answers out there. The public health emergency. We were granted some exemptions, I should say, from certain rules, but many of the things we were trying to do weren't really even covered, of course.

Yeah.

And we had, you know, it was like being in a. We were in crisis mode and we had, you know, 8am calls every day where people got in, the whole company got on and we were trying to figure things out. I would say the leadership got on, not the whole company.

Yeah, yeah.

But we did cool things. Within a couple of weeks, we rolled out testing. We were probably one of the first primary care organizations to do so.

Yep.

And I remember, you know, like calling my friends who owned, you know, event companies to see if we could, you know, rent their tent and their air conditioners or their heaters and all other things we needed to, you know, stand up. Outdoor testing facility. Yeah.

Amazing.

I know we created these separate indoor clinics that were respiratory clinics where people could come who had the symptoms. But, you know, there were still other respiratory illnesses that folks had. And in those clinics, those were super locked down when it came to what our patients as well as really our providers were wearing to care for those patients. And you know, we also the minute the vaccines came out, we were really an early adopter and worked closely with the public health agencies to help them get the vaccine out there. That was very, very. That was kind of crazy days because you're working with local public health agencies, state public health agencies and the cdc and oftentimes there are conflicting rules and processes. So it was challenging, but at the end of the day we were just so inspired and frankly proud of what we were able to accomplish.

Well, I cannot imagine how much work that took. And all after you just went public, which again is an astronomical amount of work. And you probably wanted to take a breather after that. And then Covid happened and you had to gear up for all the things that followed that. And I remember you and I caught up probably the tail end of getting everything under control and you said, I'm going on a sabbatical as much needed. And you needed a little break. But of course you're back now and hopefully life is a little bit more business as usual. We all knock on wood. I mean, it's so funny. We all wish for business as usual now because every day seems like something new. But what is life like now? What is a typical day for you as the CL of one medical. Is it? Yeah, I'd love to hear how that goes.

Sure. Well, I would say yes, we have a sabbatical and that's an amazing benefit. But when I came back from sabbatical, we were. We had just closed our large acquisition of the Amazon. Medicare.

No, the Medicare and then Amazon.

Yes. And then a few short months later, the economy changed again. Right. Inflation and other challenges led to stock prices plummeting, particularly in our space. You know, we had just purchased this Medicare business, which was a growth move to help us grow. But you know, it also meant that our timeline to being profitable had been delayed by a couple of years and that was okay in the fall of 2021. That became not okay shortly thereafter as the market, you know, switched and or moved toward more of a, you know, value based profit view and the cost of capital significantly increased.

Yep. Yeah.

So after that, after moving toward that acquisition and that are attempting to close that and integrate that, that was a big deal because we were bringing in Medicare and a much more. Well, we were bringing in a Medicare business and we had had a small Medicare business before, but this was a very focused. Was all Medicare and they had a different business model. So that alone was pretty challenging. But shortly in 2022, myself, the CFO and the CEO started looking at folks, started knocking on Our doors I should say. And so we started looking at opportunities that were presented to us from larger organizations to acquire us. And for a while that was just the three of us talking and providing diligence materials. But eventually I was able to get more of my team members involved. So I haven't had really a typical day. We signed in late July and now we're in the process of trying to close. And that includes fun things like an FTC investigation and a bunch of other issues you have to deal with. But, but putting that aside for a moment, a typical day for me is, is there's nothing typical about my day. But what I would say is when I think about how I spend my time, yeah I spend. I'm still very much a working GCLO in the sense that you know, I don't have as much time as I would like managing. You know, I'm still involved in day to day business issues. My CEO is very innovative and proactive and expects his record ports to be that way. We are expected to really understand what's happening in other departments and what's going on with. With issues at a pretty detailed level. So you know it is a. I'm involved even in some of the day to day stuff so I can explain it and report it to, to him. So you know, really the large part of my time is spent supporting the board and supporting my CEO. That being said, because I can't help myself, I do. With a growing team I have built up a leadership team and we are rolling out more policies and programs focused on org design professional development. We are also focused on legal ops types issues like rolling out a contract management system. Yay. Which happens to be Aaron class early on actually we did roll out a matter management slash ticketing system to manage all the different requests that were coming in and we, it's very metrics driven and we report out on the metrics.

Yep.

And that I think impressed a number of my other peers in other functions because they hadn't really seen a legal department make those kinds of commitments. So we're working on. So I don't spend as much time as I'd like to managing the team and building these things out. But I don't have a choice anymore. Right. As you mentioned earlier, you know legal departments are expected to operate like other business units. So we are, we've got to be more efficient. We, you know we have to deliver work pursuant to SLAs or milestone. We have to develop strategic initiatives and so that the good news there is that has Helped us focus on some of these legal ops and building out processes and integrating technology in to support our teams.

And it's so great that you've had experience working in another company, seeing, I mean, seeing legal ops firsthand, really doing it yourself. But even the exposure to having worked elsewhere with a department that has that function, that has the technology and the tools, I think is really helpful, you know, for someone who's in your role now. There's so many that I talk to, however, who have never really had experience working in a department with tech and tools or operations. So it's a concept that is new to them. They're hearing about it. I think they're getting pressure from their CEOs and their CFOs to modernize their departments to be more innovative. But it's such a foreign concept of why would I bring this person in? What will I tell them to do? What is technology going to do? How is that going to help me? Is it going to scare my lawyers? What would you tell them? What advice do you give to someone who's coming from that perspective?

I think legal ops is not just a nice to have, it's table safe these days.

Yeah.

And I think that I do understand the perspective because I have experienced it, that lawyers are different, legal departments are different than everyone else. We're professionals, we have our own way of doing things. And so it can be difficult to, you know, change management is difficult with lawyers, with many people. But my experience has been that, you know, people are used to doing things the way they're doing do them.

Yes, yes.

They don't like having sla. Right. Yeah. You need to get this done by this. They don't understand why we need to have metrics often measuring their performance. And you know, to extent they're right, they're like, well, just because, you know, you know, X did 25 contracts, I only did four. But they were really big and hard.

Correct.

Yeah. And, and, and they're right. And so you, you, you worked to accommodate that in, you know, the KPIs and metrics that you build out, that you report on. But from my perspective, when you're in house, right, you're a cost center, you're not a revenue generator for the most part. Sometimes I make, you know, arguments that to the extent we are supporting big transactions and sales efforts, that's not totally true. So we're part of that process. But in any event, when you're looking, it's hard to get extra budget. And so what I really tell my team is let's make things more efficient and effective leveraging processes and technology. So number one, you know, we can, you know, build out our team and do the work that you want to do. Right, Absolutely. And, and two, we don't have to hire resources that do what I consider to be low value but often high effort work. So folks, you know, and it's like putting the time in now will make your lives much easier when we're done. And that's a hard sell because, you know, my team is small and they're just super busy.

Yeah.

I'm sure everyone says about their legal teams, but they, you know, given all of the, you know, transactions that have been going on at the same time, they have to do their day jobs and there's, you know, lots of issues to address. Yes, they often push back. Yeah, they will push back. Right. Even with our, you know, contract lifecycle management project, they looked at me like, when do we have time to build these processes? You know, let's just buy. There was two of my colleagues were just wanted to buy a system and figure all that out later.

Yeah.

And given my prior experience, I said no, no, no, we, we can buy, we can eventually license the system, but we need to spend some time thinking up front about how we want it to operate, what the processes should be. And they're lawyers, that was a foreign concept to them, but I think they've eventually come around to agree with me. So I was, I wanted to share like one of my favorite experiences in legal ops was we did the four box grid exercise.

Yes, yes.

Not, not the, you know, HR oriented one, but the one where, you know, you have four boxes and I'm one axis, it's, it's high impact, low impact. On another axis, it's high effort, low effort. And we put different tasks and things that we do into the different, you know, boxes. And then you start with looking at your high effort, low value work and figuring, figuring out what to do with it. I, I, I don't think, I don't know if I came up with this, but I've stuck with it and it always gets an eye roll from my team. But I'm like, you know, that upper left box, depending on how you set up your, your axes is something that you eliminate, automate, delegate or educate. Right. Like those are the things that I don't want us to be doing.

Yep.

Because you want to practice top your license. So let's get you doing that and let's try and get rid of this work. And that has helped going through that exercise with the team has helped develop sort of an understanding and buy in to many of the processes that we've rolled out. Like having a matter management ticketing system, like having. We are in the midst of implementing, you know, contract lifecycle management within the team and throughout the company.

That's great. I know the four box exercise you'd mentioned, you have value and effort as your axes. Another one that's very common is level of importance and urgency on the other axes. It's kind of the same idea, right. You find out where people are spending their time. And you also mentioned it's continuous improvement. It's not a one time exercise. It's all about. Right. Sourcing. That's a word that I probably overuse, but really about optimizing the resources and where people are spending their time, what should be automated, what should be done by humans, what should be done by outside counsel. Right. And that changes all the time. And so you just have to keep looking at that and figuring out what other levers you should continue to move to continue to optimize things. All fantastic lessons. Final questions, you know, now that you've had a chance to be in this role for a long time, you know, what are some tips that you'd give to others? What skills do you think are more important than they were just being a team member now that you're a leader in the department or you know, what, what can people do to prepare for that as their ultimate career journey?

That's a great question. I would think that, I mean, honestly, part of my career journey was opportunistic rather than planned. But what I would say is the following. I think to the extent you can, you know, exposing yourself to different areas of the law will always just make you a better lawyer. The other thing I, I continually talk to my team about is getting to understand the business is super important because you can be a much better business partner if you understand what works for the business, what doesn't work, what the strategies are and projects are that are going on. And so, you know, developing a business partner mentality can be super helpful because that's when you really get into what I think is our most important job is to develop, to develop solutions so the business can move forward with, you know, limiting the risk. Right. And so I think it's super important to understand the business. And honestly, we have a, we have a leveling document that we created like on career paths and what are the key competencies and knowledge that you need to have to move to the next step and One of those categories is business knowledge and understanding the business that you're supporting. Understanding the overall company's goals and strategies I think is super important. Expanding and developing relationships outside. The two things that have really saved me in my journey, particularly when I have moved and switched to different areas, have been finding a group of peers that are doing it. I think it would shock non lawyers to know that there are these peer benchmarking groups where lawyers get together, you know, other in house lawyers get together to share best practices, to discuss new developments, to help others, help their, help their colleagues. Those have been so important to me. Like my example with Clops Clock, I should say, because you know those people here to support you and they can give you and share their, their experiences and practical solutions. So I think that's key.

Yeah, the power of community.

Yep, yep. And then finally even the other piece is finding the best outside counsel you can. So as I mentioned, we found great healthcare counsel that have been with me on this journey and helped me work through, you know, interesting situations where we're trying to do something no one has ever done. That was also true with me with respect to all the corporate and board stuff. You know, I remember being on calls at the very beginning when we were doing this kind of complex VC/ private equity investment was a big, big deal and there were words that were being used at some of the calls. I didn't even know what they meant.

You Google it on the side. I know.

Well, no, I. Yes and. Or I was, I was actually texting my outside counsel who was on the call. I'm like, what does that mean? What should I know? And he spent so much time with me, educating me and so having that support system, peers and a good outside counsel community is so important, I think, and really sets you up for success.

That is such fantastic advice. So with that we'll wrap up. I'll say thank you, Lisa, it's been incredible catching up with you and hearing about your journey and the last few years, which have been quite a whirlwind. But so grateful for you to share your story with us today.

Thank you. It has been my pleasure and I really appreciate the opportunity.