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EP 08: The Real Role of AI in Legal Teams
8 Plays6 days ago
What does it take to turn legal from a bottleneck into a business enabler?
Sean Rayani, Global Head of Legal Operations at Twilio, shares his unconventional journey from aspiring prosecutor to legal ops leader. He unpacks how early exposure to inefficiencies shaped his mindset, how Twilio’s rapid growth influenced his career. From manually handling contracts to building scalable systems at a high-growth company, he breaks down how legal teams can operate smarter, faster, and with real business impact.
The conversation covers practical frameworks for legal ops, the right way to think about tools and AI, and why the future of legal isn’t about perfection, it’s about progress.
Topics
Introduction: 00:00
Early life, family expectations, and ambition to become a prosecutor: 02:14
Motivation to pursue law and desire to create impact through justice: 06:35
Rethinking law school and exploring alternative career paths: 10:06
First role at OpenTable and discovering inefficiencies in legal processes: 13:32
Joining Twilio: early responsibilities, scaling, and IPO experience: 18:15
Building confidence through international experience (Dublin): 23:16
Learning to make decisions with imperfect information: 26:59
Transition into legal operations and expanding scope: 30:52
Building scalable contracting systems and reducing friction: 35:37
Legal ops framework: people, process, data, technology, and AI: 37:30
AI in legal: mindset shift from perfection to assistance: 48:11
Advice for legal ops professionals: intake, problem-solving, and focus: 54:25
Career lessons and long-term vision (COO, public office): 59:29
Connect with us:
Sean Rayani - https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanrayani/
Akshay Verma - https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshay-verma-esq/
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading contract lifecycle management platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues. Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
Changing Views on AI
00:00:00
Speaker
When I started to see that, I'm like, oh, this is garbage. It's not 100% perfect. Like, I'm not going to use it. And funny enough, I was at CLOCK last year, and it was my first CLOCK. And I went to um a seminar where it was, it was performed by so Stephanie Corey, and it was hands-on on how to create your own AI assistant. So I said, you know what, let me like try to get my hands dirty with this.
00:00:21
Speaker
And there was just something about that where like, I then went back to my hotel room, and just spent the rest of the evening trying to create this agent that could just do automated NDA reviews and then give me a list of deviations.
00:00:35
Speaker
And was like, wait, this is super cool. And through that, I started to shift my mindset from moving away from, hey, this is garbage because it's not perfect, to hey, this is here to help you.
00:00:48
Speaker
It's not AI, but it's AI assist, which means it's not going to be 100% perfect, But let's say it's 60% perfect, you just have to now 40% of work versus 100% of that work.
Introduction of Guests
00:00:58
Speaker
versus one hundred percent of that
00:01:08
Speaker
Hi everyone, this is Akshay Verma, the host of the Beacon Voices podcast. I'm also the Chief Operating Officer at Spot Draft. And today, excited to have a conversation with industry legend, and I'm gonna call you that, because it's turning out that way, Sean. Sean Rayani, who is the global head of legal operations at a little company, you may have heard of called Twilio. Excited to talk about your career, Sean, your thoughts on legal operations and legal technology, and maybe learn a little too about you personally and your journey along the way. Sound good?
00:01:42
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. Super excited to be here. Absolutely. And it's glad to have you on the West Coast. I know you are based out of New York. and We were just talking about how beautiful this weather is right now as the New York area is getting cold and snowy again. So welcome to sunny California. I hope you're enjoying It it might be a little warm in that blazer, but I appreciate you dressing up for us today. Of course, of course. You know, coming back coming back home, is ah it's always a good it's a good homecoming.
Early Career Influences and Education Choices
00:02:07
Speaker
Yeah. um ah' let's Let's start with a little bit about your early career. You and I are both Cal grads, go Bears. Yes. Talk to us a little bit about what it was like thinking about college and if you had any expectations around what you were going to study, what if you were goingnna do anything after college, what was that like for you early on?
00:02:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. you know i um grew up in the North Bay and I'm, by by way of background, Indian, so a lot of high expectations coming from my family. College was always an expectation. It was the 13th grade yeah ever since, I mean, ever since I was a kid, right? like the the the C word in our house was college. So it was very much ingrained that that is something that you were going to do. And there was a lot of pressure to to go to good schools. And so from like a very early age, it was like, I mean, I was thinking about like Harvard and then Stanford and then Berkeley. And and as I thought about it more and more, I said, you know what, like I want to be
00:03:09
Speaker
far enough away from home, but not too far so I can always come back. um When I was around 11 years old, my parents divorced and my mom was running her own business. And we we don't really have a ton of family here in the States. Most of our family's outside of the US. So I also wanted to be in in close proximity so I could always come home and help my mom.
00:03:31
Speaker
And so, you know, that took Harvard off the list very quickly. I love that. But then, you know, you had like Berkeley, you had Stanford, you had, you know, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara. And for the longest time, right, Berkeley was always my top choice, but I just didn't think I would be able to get in. But, you know, I said, hey, let's apply, right? Dream big. And lo and behold, I got in. So at that point, I was like, well, this is a no-brainer. And well, the funny thing is, like, I also applied to like a bunch of these like smaller,
00:04:05
Speaker
public schools um or private schools rather. And it's interesting because when I was applying to schools, that's when Obama was elected president. So, you know, that's when he started hearing about like Occidental College. He went there for two years. so i said, Hey, like, you know, there you go goma went let's just go ahead and apply. The funny thing is they ended wait listing me and I was like, great. I'd never heard of the school before you wait listed me. And I was like, hey, take me off the wait list and the right. Great. we We want to know where you're going to go instead. And I said, oh, I'm going to go to Cal. I'm sure. Hell yeah. Better choice anyway. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. No regrets. And like just from a career standpoint, like since I was 12 years old, um I knew that I wanted to go into law and be a lawyer. And from that early age, I really had my eyes set on being a prosecutor. And then eventually being appointed to the bench and and being a
Childhood Aspirations and Early Career Experiences
00:05:00
Speaker
judge. And so there were there were many Halloweens where I took a Harry Potter robe, converted it into like ah a judge's robe and wore that as like my costume, like over and over again to the point where my friends were like, we need to take you shopping. We're the same thing every single year. Now, did you have a wand or a gavel? Like, what did you do to actually get things done?
00:05:23
Speaker
Oh, yeah, gavel, of course. Yeah. I love it. i mean Like, look, like wands are great, but like a gavel is really, you need that force to get things done. makes a great sound. I love that. First of all, I got to say, you are a far better and conscientious Indian child than I am, because when I was making the decision to go to college and I went to high school in Arizona, I was like, how far away from my parents can I possibly get? Yeah. And Berkeley happened to be one of the top. thing Same pressure. I totally get where you're coming from on this. Happened to be one of the top schools that I got into that was far enough away. The others were on the East Coast, Sean. I'm going to tell you, like you know when we moved to this country, I was in Cleveland. and like I love the snow, but like in like one week spurts where I get to go skiing, not to live, walk, and drive in, like that wasn't going to be for me. So the East Coast was kind of...
00:06:12
Speaker
off the table for me and so berkeley was a natural fit i loved it and then you know what they did in my first semester they moved back to the bay area it yeah and so instead of a two-hour plane ride i was a one-hour drive away from my parents for most of college you can you can run but you can't hide no you can't yeah they'll follow you everywhere yeah all right um So you want to be a prosecutor. Like why? What was it about that, about being a lawyer, being a judge, prosecutor? What was it about those things that really spoke to you at such such an early age?
00:06:44
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, really, it was it was my it was my parents' divorce, right? like In in an our household, um you know, ah didn't have the best relationship with my father. um And, you know, just based on that in terms how we treated my mom and me, and I have a younger sister, um you know, you you you're able to just learn a lot and and are really expected to grow up at a young age. And, you know, based on that, I really wanted to to help victims of crime. um I also had very, very...
00:07:12
Speaker
very big like ambitions. I was like, I want to eradicate crime in the United States. I want to eradicate poverty in the United States. um Every single case that I have, whether it's a misdemeanor or a felony, I'm going to take every single case to a jury trial and I'm going to get guilty verdicts across the board.
00:07:30
Speaker
yeah Now that I have a bit more sense, um you come to realize, hey, it's actually not a good use of like taxpayer money and like whatever county I'd be working in, everybody would hate me because their full time job would be serving as a juror. So, you know, as as you grow up, you you learn a bit more. But you know that was really the sort of angle that I was coming at. Maybe maybe a little too aggressively, but you know all with the with the right intentions. And I wanted to take that a step further as well. um in terms of being a judge and and being that referee and and making sure that you're able to dispense justice um equitably and and really being able to to help people.
00:08:09
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Look, Judge Rayani has a really nice ring to it, but I think our profession is better because you decided to go a different route. And so yeah we'll talk a little bit about that, but talk to me about your Cal experience. I mean, did you find what you were looking for? Did you, looking back now, like, did you think it was the right choice?
00:08:29
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I have zero regrets. i'm I'm so happy I decided to go there. You know, it really ah stretched me in in ways that I never would have thought both like intellectually and socially. You know, I think i high school was great and I had great educators, but I think just the holistic experience of going somewhere like different and having to meet new people and make new friends um and also being able to Think about, you know just different types of things, both in life and theoretically in different ways, um just pushes you outside of your comfort zone in ways you never would have imagined. A lot of my friends, I was very close to my friends from high school, and most of them actually ended up staying back here at home. So I was one of the few that actually left. So kind of leaving that sort of safety net was really hard for me in that in that first year. But I'm so grateful that I had that experience because um i wouldn't be able to live in a place like New York today by myself had I not had those kinds of experiences. Or you know as we'll talk about, even with the Twilio, Twilio relocated me to Europe for a year. And i helped build the commercial legal team out there. even that kind of an experience had I not um had that early experience of of leaving home and going somewhere else for school and figuring out like, you know, how to get your feet under you, how to make friends, how to how to create um a new family, so to speak, I think it would have made some of these other experiences that I've had much more challenging.
00:10:04
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So but you're going along in in your undergrad years and at some level you had intentions of going to law school and being becoming a lawyer or prosecutor and a judge.
00:10:15
Speaker
When did that change? And like what was the impetus for that? Yeah. So for me, it was, it you know, I had a great experience at Cal. You know, if I had to look back, I wish ah i wish i was I was a little bit more reckless um compared to what my actual experience was like, Because I was all about like, you know, getting the good grades and I was going to office hours and and doing all of those things. And really all of it was... in furtherance of getting good grades so I could get into a good law school. So for me, in the grand scheme of things, like college is really a pit stop to like get into law school because it's it's a prerequisite. um
00:10:51
Speaker
And so once I graduated, I was trying to figure out what to do. And, you know, initially I wanted to go straight through, but a lot of folks said, hey, like, just just take some time.
00:11:02
Speaker
um and and experience life, that's never going to hurt you. Like when i I interned at the district attorney's office here um every summer throughout my college experience, I would talk to a lot of those lawyers and especially the ones that went straight through, they they all said, hey, I really wish I would have taken some time off to just- Sage advice. Yeah. Enjoy life. I remember there was there was one lawyer that I worked with. he's He is now a judge.
00:11:25
Speaker
And he said to me, he's like, hey, I graduated for two years. Like, I just worked in a warehouse and like built furniture. And just like, you know, just doing something completely different, like outside of a school setting and outside of a formal professional setting, just just naturally gives you a very different perspective and a different way of looking at things than if you just kind of go you know straight through in these ah in these experiences that are contextually very similar. And so I decided to take, I said, I'm going to take two years and what I'll do is I'll work. but I'll also study for the LSAT at the same time. And i
00:12:04
Speaker
like wanted to get experience in a different area of law that wasn't criminal law. And an area of law that I always really thought was interesting was commercial contracts. And I remember when I was when i was um in college, I was trying to sublet my place for the summer because I signed a 12 month lease, but I was coming home for the summer.
Developing Interest in Contracts and Process Improvements
00:12:24
Speaker
And I was like, I don't want to lose that on that money. So I drafted i drafted my own like subleasing agreement and, you know, use defined terms for the first time and did all of it. I mean, like it was completely like unenforceable because I could not sublet my apartment. The provision was in your original lease that you couldn't do. It had, it had like absolutely like, like no enforceability. and it actually turns out that the person we sublet it to ended up burning down our kitchen. so Oh my gosh. I know. Yeah.
00:12:57
Speaker
Wow. I know. um So yeah, that didn't go so well. um the The piece of paper that i drafted didn't really do ah do us much good. But you know just like those kinds of experiences, as I said, this is super interesting. Let me like i mean let me see what a different area of law brings, right? It's always good to to have experiences in different areas of law and then figure out how you can analogize um across those areas of law. I just think it makes you a much stronger legal professional. So You know, at this point I was like, hey, I'm going to study for the LSAT. um Let me just see what's out there. And i ended up getting a job at OpenTable, the restaurant reservation company, as a contracts cataloger.
00:13:39
Speaker
And so um when I first started, my role was to um take contracts that were printed out. I had to take staples out manually. Like, put I know. And this was like 2013, too. Yeah. oh Like, take staples out manually, like, you know, put pieces of paper in between them and then scan all of them. um And I spent a way, way too much time trying to like remove all these paper jams from the copier and then go back to what we used as a CLM and how to like manually file them. And and then had to take all these paper copies, staple them again, print out labels and put them in a filing cabinet.
00:14:20
Speaker
yeah And so, you know, even in in like my first two weeks there, I said, hey, there has to be a better way of doing this. Like, this just makes no sense. And so, you know, from the get-go, I just started offering different solutions to to my manager and the general counsel around, hey, do you really need to like,
00:14:39
Speaker
save like a hard copy of this when you already have a digital copy because um you're renting out like space on the fifth floor and there's no more room for additional cabinets um and you're having to pay rent for that so you know just from and and very like sort of early stage like thinking about how can we make things more efficient and better and during that time I was studying for the LSAT which was like a horrendous experience um so I ended up studying for like a year and then again had big goals. i was like, oh I want to go to Harvard Law School or I want to go to like NYU or Columbia or even Berkeley. um Took the LSAT, did not do ah anywhere like close to as as well as I wanted to.
00:15:24
Speaker
yeah perform And so that was something that I think, you know, it stung because this has always been a goal and I spent so much time working towards this goal. But then, you know, I i said, you know what, let me just sit on this and like actually just throw myself into work 100% and see what happens. And so that's exactly what I did. And I just ended up being more curious. So, you know, I would see like lawyers on my team exchanging red lines. And I just went up to them and I said, hey, I see that you've marked all this stuff up, but I don't know why. Can you like spend 30 minutes with me and just walk me through this? And they were super gracious. They were like, oh my God, it's amazing that you're so interested in this. Like, we'd love to have you start taking first passes at Red Lines. um
00:16:11
Speaker
And so that's really how I got into more of like the commercial work. yeah um which ended up being super interesting. And then, you know, towards my sort of tail end there, like I was looking for something that was going to give me a bit more growth. I still hadn't completely discounted, um you know, law school as a whole, but I said, hey, let me, you know, like I'm now in tech. I had no idea what tech was before I joined joined OpenTable. I had no idea that I was going to explode into this amazing cool thing that now dominates our lives in so many ways. So I said, let me you know let me look around and and and see if I can find some other growth opportunities. And the interesting thing is Twilio was a client or ah a service provider for OpenTable. And so I was like, okay, um you know, funky, yeah funky name for a company. And when they, when they had this opening, I said, all right, let me apply. um You know, went through the interview process. It was a much smaller, scrappier company at the time, I think only 600 employees. pre-IPO. And for me, it just seemed like ah a really good fit. And especially working in a smaller environment where you could just get your hands dirty seemed very appealing to me. And so um I also got a sense of like, hmm, they may be going public sometime soon. So this would also be really good experience to get in and see what this looks like. So I kept my
Joining and Growing with Twilio
00:17:41
Speaker
fingers crossed. I was like, I really hope
00:17:43
Speaker
I get an offer and i did and and the rest is history now. That's fantastic. it's By the way, it's it's a really, really small world. Who was the GC at OpenTable back then in 2013, 14? John Yeah, John Orta. So he was my client at Axiom. I will bet you, Sean, you and i exchanged emails when I was at Axiom, especially if you were in the role that you were in. Yeah. Probably to get the Axiom contract signed to start providing support to to to John. What a small world. Yeah.
00:18:15
Speaker
So contracting really kind of spoke to you. and And I actually didn't know that little tidbit story. This is why I love having these conversations because now, as i and I know your career at Twilio and and I've seen what you do and we've talked about it before, the way that you attack those problems, you literally came in at the ground floor of Staples. Like I will go that far to go as like,
00:18:39
Speaker
You took some of the biggest pain points, and I live in this world now, of contracting that we used to have. And granted, the pain points are a little bit different now, but not really because so many of our customers, it's a big win for them just to get their contracts into one place. Oh, So that they are searchable and you can get insights from them. But to hear your story about taking this very horse and buggy solution, which was, hey, John, our stuff is sitting in file cabinets on the fifth floor and we're running out of space. Oh, and by the way, you also have digital copies. There is an infinite amount of space in the cloud.
00:19:15
Speaker
How about we just make that easy switch and we'll either save some money or you hire more people, we can put them somewhere. Right. You really started to understand the operational side of things. yeah So talk to us about Twilio. like what were your What was your first couple of years like? What did you dive into first? Was it purely on the commercial contracting side or did you start to touch on other aspects of legal operations as well?
00:19:38
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, when I came in, the the legal team was nine people. And and just for scale, we're at 130 people now on the legal team. And the commercial team was, it was just four of us. And now the commercial team that we have is like,
00:19:55
Speaker
close to 30 plus people. So you're, you're able to see, you know, the, the scale. And as I mentioned, we were at like 600, 650 employees um at that time were close to 6,000 now. So, you know, like, like pretty 10 X growth, pretty significant, yeah which is, I mean, when you, when you look, look back in retrospect, it's, it's just, it's a,
00:20:18
Speaker
just It's very moving and and in a number of different ways. But you know when I came in, you know started doing a number of go-to-market deals, also vendor deals, product integration deals. And what was great is is my ah boss at the time, the head of commercial, she was great. you know and Even though I didn't have a law degree, she said, hey, I fully trust you. She's like, you you come with great experience like that a lot of folks on our team don't have, like working at another company and so you can help us really up level our commercial processes and I'm very opinionated so i'm I'm not one to to shy away from offering like different perspectives or ah solutions to problems that I see and so very similarly right like I've had people say hey you should probably just like shut up for six months and I don't do that like So you're just never going to get that with me. So I just started offering up solutions like right away. I remember in my like first two weeks, I'm like, you have two different agreement templates. And the biggest difference between the two of them is one of them is month to month. And the other one has like an annual term that auto renews. like
00:21:28
Speaker
let like let's just make this a variable field and let's get rid of rid of one of these templates. like like There really is no material difference. And just you know things like that that are super small and she was always open to that. um And also as a part of that journey, three months after I joined, Twilio ended up going public.
00:21:46
Speaker
And that was the first IPO of 2016 there was a bit of a hiatus where where companies weren't going public and um our IPO was was wildly successful. So even just seeing like something like that, like what does it mean for a company to go through like IPO readiness to become an enterprise based company, I think is huge. Also seeing like, all right, you had, you know, ah this executive panel like how how does that change as you get ready to go public right you know oftentimes you you have certain turnover you want to bring in folks who have taken companies public before and so just getting that like broad exposure and seeing how companies tactically set themselves up for the future is just so insightful because oftentimes I think Like with work, folks just focus on like what what they have to do before them, right? And they focus on those tasks, but they they often don't look up and out or or feel like they need to do that. And when you do that, you're able to take the direct work that you do um and and tie it back to like what the company is trying to achieve. And I think that's so important because it really motivates you, right? You're not just like...
00:23:00
Speaker
this anonymous cog in a machine, you are doing something that has impact and you're able to trace that like up and all the way back down from whatever your company strategy is. And so like engaging in that type of experience was, was super helpful. um And then about eight months in my boss pulls me into a room and she said, Hey, um so you're single and you don't own anything.
International Experience: Dublin and New York
00:23:24
Speaker
And I was like,
00:23:25
Speaker
What? yeah'm like Yeah, that's correct. you It sounds like two HR violations in two cents. i mean It is. but But you know what? Like, I love her. So i was like, she's she's on to something. But I was like, hmm, I don't know if I should feel good about my life or or bad. um But then she was like, so? um Given those aspects, um would you want to move to Dublin, Ireland? And I said, tell me more. She said, oh our general counsel would like to put someone in region to support our EMEA team because they're going to undergo some pretty rapid growth in the region. um And like...
00:24:03
Speaker
that was never on my radar like leaving california actually was never on my radar i thought i was always going to be here and so you know i talked to people because law school was still something that was you know in the back of my head um i thought oh i'll do like two years at twilio and then i'll go to law school and then we'll see what happens and again i i talked to a lot of people um and mentors and and all of them actually said the same thing they said hey if we had the experience or the opportunity that you have to go somewhere else and like live somewhere else and also have like once in a lifetime opportunity career wise, they're like, we would take it. They said, look, law school will always be there. You could always come back and then go to law school. But these types of opportunities, don't come up that often and they said hey you know they're like young kids i tell my young kids you know this all the time too like if you get these opportunities take them and if you think about it like that is a bit of departure from like how i was raised because i think if i went and asked um my mom she would probably say no you need to go you need to go back to school like why would you go move and like live in europe um
00:25:10
Speaker
But, you know, I said, hey, screw it. Let's let's see let's see what this brings. You know, it was it was initially going to be for a year. um so I said, hey, you know, like, it seems like there there can only be upside from this. And so ah towards the end of 2017, I ended up moving to Dublin, Ireland. And I will say like one of like the best experiences of my life of, of the past decade, like going there, um like we were working in this like tiny little coworking space. um There was like only 20 of us at that time and just working with like
00:25:46
Speaker
the people in that region on getting deals done, working with ah customers that have different types of expectations. Like it just gives you all of this insight and exposure that you normally wouldn't get. And on top of that, with everyone being we In San Francisco, we were still very headquarters focused. It put me in a position where I really had to make a judgment call on a bunch of different things like on my own. And I had to like become very comfortable with that and also be able to defend it if someone from San Francisco said, hey, why did you do it? And why didn't you check with anyone? And so...
00:26:24
Speaker
Being able to build that confidence like really goes a long way. I don't think i would be able to make decisions confidently today had I not been put in that position.
00:26:34
Speaker
I mean, that kind of experience is invaluable for exactly that purpose. I talk to my kids a lot now about, you know, they think they get into these life situations, you know, they're teenagers and um And sometimes i'll be like, well, how come you knew how to do that? i was like, well, when you've gone through it like five or six times and you've screwed up the first three or four times, then you kind of get good at making the right decision. first so So here's a spicy question for you, Sean, without divulging any specifics. Like, can you think about one instance where you're like, oh shit, I really screwed this decision up, but you move through it and you learn and you move forward.
00:27:10
Speaker
let let me Let me put it this way. There... There were, um, indemnities that I offered, uh, that if I, if I look back now, I'm like, mm, what the heck were you thinking? Yeah.
00:27:25
Speaker
Yeah. Fair. now but Look, that's also part of like, what kind of risk appetite do we have? are we willing to try new things? Are we willing to accept this? and And you don't necessarily have to make those in a vacuum. Like this is something, you know, I talk about with lawyers all the time and it's amazing that you have this experience too. It's like, ah well, you know, you're going to get some level of cover from whoever it is that you're working with because you're probably not making a totally unilateral decision. You've gotten some level of,
00:27:52
Speaker
pre-approval to make these kinds of decisions. And at the end of the day, like it's not gonna break the company. You'll be just fine. like Exactly. And and again, I think, you know, you you take the entire context, right? And the entire set of like circumstances and factors into consideration when you make those decisions. and And the reality is you're never going to be working off of information that's 100% complete and 100% accurate, right? and And I think as legal professionals, We gravitate towards perfection so much. yeah And when you work in a business like that just doesn't exist or you or even if the information is good, it could completely change tomorrow. And you have to, you have to then take all of that sort of imperfect information or information that was complete, but it's now no longer complete and, you know, make something out of it. Right. That that's logically sound yeah and and be able to defend it. And so even with that experience, as someone who's type A, like you're also not going to meet anyone out there who's like, an insane perfectionist as much as I am. And those types, those experiences, right? Like really help to like kind of take away this sort of like wall that I had around, hey, like like perfection doesn't exist. Like you have to figure out how to like get comfortable with working within like imperfect circumstances um to keep things moving because it's actually a bigger risk to hold things up because you're spending like,
00:29:25
Speaker
50 days trying to find the perfect solution versus moving something forward in five where you're making like, you know, an educated decision based on based on the information that you have.
00:29:36
Speaker
There's perfect, which is ruins companies, and then there's what's good enough, and that accelerates companies. I think that's a really good mantra that I've certainly learned after my lawyering days because lawyers, like, you know, when you get hammered your entire legal career that you forgot to put the appropriate number of spaces between certain sentences sentences in your brief, if that's what you're getting hammered on day in and day out,
00:30:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's going to turn you a certain way. You do that in the business, you're not to last very long. It's just not going to happen. And like what was really eye-opening to me is like, you know usually you think, oh, we all work for the same company, right? So we're here um for for the same goal and we're all going to follow rules. And I'm like...
00:30:22
Speaker
Actually, no, that that's not what happens. If you're a blocker, people will just circumvent you and they don't care. And then they'll ask for forgiveness and then throw you under the bus. So like this idea of like, hey, like, you know, if you're taking too long on something because you're really trying to cross every T dot every i um Yeah, it actually ends up becoming more of a risk because they'll they'll just go around you at that point. So you really have to figure out how you cover the big risks um and are able to move things forward. right, so you're plugging along, you go to Dublin. At what point, and maybe this has already happened, so you let me know, but at what point at your tenure at Twilio are you like, yeah, legal ops, this is a thing for me now. Like, this is where I'm headed.
00:31:04
Speaker
Yeah, so when I was actually in Dublin, I i was i was you know a contracts manager, but then i was doing a lot of improvement with our like CLM stuff. And I remember i actually went to our general counsel at that time because I would have to i would work the full day. And then at 5 p.m., everybody in the office would leave and go home. yeah And i was like, you know what?
00:31:26
Speaker
i I have to like stay on now because it's 9 in san francisco so i have to join all these meetings and if i don't i'm gonna get iced out and i don't want that to happen so i would have meetings at the office by myself until about like 10 30 at night and then i would have to tell people i'm like look i really have to leave because i called a restaurant to order dinner and that restaurant is about to close so i have to like go pick up dinner i'd like go to the restaurant pick up dinner um you didn't have very good public transportation so then i'd have to like walk home 30 minutes i'd like scarf down dinner and then wow at like midnight i would like log back on so then i would work until like 4 p.m like you know pacific standard time so you essentially worked like like two shifts
00:32:11
Speaker
um But I was like, you know, I'm like, I'm not going to get iced out. And and really during during the nighttime, that's when I was able to meet with folks and focus on some of the more operational stuff that I was doing. But also during that time, I went to our general counsel and I said, hey, you know, I'm doing all this ops stuff. You may want to hire um a legal ops manager so they can do all this stuff so I don't have to.
00:32:33
Speaker
um And the funny thing is, I never thought I would... eventually end up in a legal ops role. So it's again, funny how, ah funny how life works. um And so, you know, we, that's, she actually thought about that and that's how we ended up making like our first legal ops hire, but a lot of the commercial ops work that I did continued to stay with me.
00:32:54
Speaker
And yeah towards the end of my tenure um in Dublin, you know there was a decision like, do you want to stay? Do you want to move back? And I said, OK, I want to move back, but I don't want to come back to the Bay Area. I want to go to New York because while I was in Europe, I supported you know our European markets, but I also supported the East Coast because of the time zone overlap. And that's where we did all the multimillion dollar deals. And everyone always said, hey, like if you have the opportunity to live in New York, like give it a shot. Exactly. So I went back to my boss. I was like, Hey, guess what? I'm still single and don't own anything. like what what It's okay if you say it, but just to be clear, it's okay if you say it. But
00:33:39
Speaker
I was like, what about what about moving to New York? And they said, yeah, go for it. um Which is how now I've been there for seven years, but that's how I ended up there. And, you know, during my time there, I would do deals. But then as we continue to go through these growth surges as a company, and we were doing a bunch of acquisitions, like we were going into um highly regulated countries, like there continued to be this need for more and more um commercial legal ops support to make contracting more efficient. And so
00:34:09
Speaker
So leading up to the pandemic, my role kept expanding. And while I was doing the commercial deal negotiation, I was moonlighting as this ops person. And during the pandemic, that's when they said, hey, why don't you move into like a full-time commercial legal ops role?
00:34:26
Speaker
And so that's kind of how I made that transition from deal negotiations into more of a full-time ops role and having that experience doing the deal work was super valuable. I think as you know, for any ops professional, if you've lived through those problems and those challenges, like that is so useful because these things don't exist in the vacuum and they also differ from company to company. So if you know what the problems are like within your company and how folks react to it, like it sets you up for so much success as you actually try to become
00:34:59
Speaker
um a change agent. Yeah, I mean, look, ah my holy trifecta for legal operations has always been people, process, technology. And if you have lived and worked with the people and you have been and engaged in the process, then your ability to understand any technological solution, any process improvement, whatever the change management may be, gives you a huge leg up, which is, I mean, many of us do it without having had that kind of granular experience, actually engaging in the specific work.
00:35:31
Speaker
but it can only help. That's a fantastic transition as well for you, I think. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. all right. So you get into legal ops. What was your sense? Like, did you know what legal
Role in Legal Operations and Technology Integration
00:35:41
Speaker
ops was at the time? Or was it kind of like, oh, it's a new role. And I know that the people on this team have been doing it. And so I'm going to join them. Or was there something more in it for you that you had already seen about legal operations? Yeah.
00:35:53
Speaker
Yeah, no, I mean, I didn't really have much exposure to it, but I loved the work. And so while we had like a general legal ops team, I basically created my own shadow organization because I had that commercial experience. So I was able to have like this deeper insight into the issues that were specific to go-to-market team and our commercial legal team that our broader legal operations team didn't have. And so that's why like my role was kind of carved out and I continued to sit under commercial legal and our head of commercial legal who's still with Twilio um like one of the one of the best uh managers that I've ever had like was super invested in my growth and the way he and I thought about contracting was like spot on like he always knew the value of ops he always was um about keeping things simple. And so like our first big project together was completely revamping our entire contracting framework, redrafting all of our terms and conditions, like making things as simple as possible. So our go-to-market team could bring on customers um that allowed them to onboard, but then also allowed them to expand very easily without having to like sign more paperwork. Like the fact of the matter is,
00:37:05
Speaker
Anytime like you want to expand a customer's use of your products and services, if you're going to throw more paper at them, that's just more friction. So if you're able to take a lot of that away, it it just it makes it a much better experience for you go to marketing, but it also lessens the work for you like as as a contracts manager or a commercial lawyer, reserving your time for like real deal work that actually matters.
00:37:29
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. How do you think about operations now? Like as you sit in this new role, you've been in this leadership role for eight or nine months now, I think. Yeah. I'm sure there's a lot more under your remit than just commercial agreements and commercial contracting because legal operations is so much broader than that. But, and especially at a company like Twilio, like commercial contracting is a big component of success for the company.
00:37:53
Speaker
But now that you have all these other things that are under your remit, like how has that evolved your thought process on how legal operations and the role that legal operations plays with both the legal department and the company? like How has that evolved for you over the last year?
00:38:07
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I will say like first and foremost, I think, I think for folks wanting to get into legal operations, I think there are a number of different paths. But for me, I think having that experience, that commercial experience, and then that commercial ah ops experience was like super, super invaluable. I think it's a really good way to like cut your teeth and get into legal ops because because the thing is it's it's very high pressure, right? Because there's revenue that's on the line. um And at so many companies, like like what sort of high value, like high volume work do you have?
00:38:41
Speaker
It's contracts, right? And so if you're able to take things that have high visibility, that people are freaking out about all the time, and coming at you from all different directions, while also tackling something that by nature is very high volume and making it make sense and making it efficient. like I think that right there is like the crux of legal operations, no matter what sort of legal functional like area you apply that to. I think you can take those principles and apply them to to litigation or privacy or ethics and compliance. It really helps to create this framework in a way of thinking that really ends up being repeatable um across different legal domains.
00:39:25
Speaker
So then that gets us a little bit into kind of the technology side side of things with legal operations. And there's certainly been a little bit of a narrative in the last, I don't know, three or four years. And I should say, by the way, like you know I was a practicing lawyer and then I went into the business side of things at Axiom. My first, I was in 2012, my first ah three to four-ish years, all of my client contacts at Axiom were lawyers. There were GCs, there were their deputies. And then there was this very quick but large shift in who I was engaging with as an outside consultant doing the work with Axiom. And they happened to be the head of legal ops. And so you saw this shift in kind of who was the gatekeeper, who was thinking through the management of the legal department shift from
00:40:13
Speaker
you know, senior lawyers kind of doing it on the side with the help of IT, t if it was a technology issue or with the help of finance, if there were billing issues and economic issues to a more centralized function that was really managing or at least trying to manage the the business aspect of running that legal department.
00:40:31
Speaker
And so with that, very quickly came the advent and the importance of legal technology as a player in the legal operations space. The more recent narrative, which is a little bit controversial, I don't know, I think some people have a very strong reaction to this, I'd love to get yours. yeah Is legal operations just becoming legal technology at this point?
00:40:51
Speaker
What's your view on that? I don't think so. I think legal technology is a component, but like legal technology in order for it to be effective can't exist in a vacuum. And the way that I sort of think about it is similar to you with your um like guiding principles of people, process and technology.
00:41:12
Speaker
I look at it in terms of a ah pyramid. And your foundational layer is actually people, process, and then the third element is knowledge and data. And then the layer on top of that is technology. And with everything going on now, the layer on top of that, like that technology layer is AI, because I yeah use AI as a form of technology, another tool in your toolkit that just happens to be very powerful. But with technology, right, in order for technology to work, you need to have that foundational piece in place. And if you don't, like, technology is going actually compound your problem. And I'll give you an example. um We had acquired a company and we inherited their commercial legal team. And I was going through, like, their intake system where they had these requests for commercial legal support because we were trying to merge them into our process. So I wanted to clean it up so we had good data. And I go into it and there were, like, 1,300 tickets that were open.
00:42:10
Speaker
And so I go to their head of commercial and I said, hey, um it looks like you have like 1,300 requests that are sitting with you and this spans over three years. um Can you tell me what's going on?
00:42:25
Speaker
And the response that I got was, oh yeah, so we just leave it up to sales to close out those those tickets. I was like, okay, well, they're not doing it. And if anybody looks at this data, which is not accurate,
00:42:38
Speaker
it looks like all this work is sitting with you and um it's not complete. And if you want to report on any of this, like yeah you can't do it. Like if anyone asks you like, Hey, how many deals are you working on in a month or a quarter? Like you can't report on anything.
00:42:53
Speaker
any of that and that right there is a very like you know simple example but it's like you just didn't have any like process around like like who's responsible for closing a ticket when do you close it out like just those sorts of things so you can have one an accurate view of like what your work is at any given time and to actually be able to go out there and like brag about your work and and give your team credit um for all the hard work that they're putting in. But see, like the the intake tool that you have, that's technology, we're spending money on it, but it's not really doing you any favors. And that's because you didn't have elements in that foundational layer in place. And so I think really like for any legal department, like you need to have legal ops folks to really help put that foundation in place at the bottom. Because then as you add on like technology and AI, ah the the when you go up each layer in that pyramid, it acts as a force multiplier and you end up seeing more and more returns on investment. And when you have all those layers sort of working together, i call it like the the sort of like multi-layer orchestration. When those work together, that's when you actually get what I call like modern legal service delivery, a really good experience for your business stakeholders working with you. That's efficient, but also an efficient experience for your legal folks, because they're able to get through, you know, like mundane work very quickly, or they're able to automate it and then really focus their time on the work that I believe they always should have been focusing on.
00:44:26
Speaker
That's a great segue into the next kind of part of this conversation, which is going to be around AI. But before we get there, how do you, so other than the things that you have just kind of laid out and how you think about um people, process, knowledge and data, technology and so forth, as you're considering the potential for new technology,
00:44:47
Speaker
What is one piece of advice that you would give to every single legal ops leader out there who is in the same situation where either somebody at the company or department has said, hey, we should look at a tool for this, or you know they've had some conversations at a conference with a seller or a provider of that technology. Oh, you should really check this out.
00:45:06
Speaker
What's one piece of advice you'd give them? Yeah, I would say. you you need to think about what problem you're trying to solve. What is your problem statement? And you could have a series of problem statements, that's fine.
00:45:19
Speaker
But each each statement should should have one problem because oftentimes when when problems or issues are surfaced up to you, it's it's a conflation of problems, right? It's not just one problem. And so you kind of have to untangle that and really figure out like, what are the individual problems that are, that you're being asked to solve? And and as you sort of um like uncouple all of this, you know, you may realize, Hey, like three out of the five problems have to do with like a completely different department. Right. And it's because like,
00:45:50
Speaker
they're not following a particular process that they've outlined for the company. yeah And that way you're able to get sort of surgical around like what's in your control and what you should do and like what sort of sits in in other people's worlds instead of just trying to like go out and get something that's new and shiny, hoping that by implementing it, all your problems are going to disappear. And as a part of that analysis, I always do this. I ask the the the um the question why five times. So when I'm talking to people, they'll say, oh, this is the problem. I'm like, why don't say something else? i'm like, i mean, they probably like want to like, stream the me but as they should, as they should feel that way, because it's important to dig in.
00:46:32
Speaker
Exactly. And that's how you really end up getting to these root causes, because like the the technology that's available out there isn't cheap. And the amount of time and effort it takes to implement that takes time away from a bunch of other work and support that you you and your team can be lending. And especially in the legal ops world, right? Like it's it's still a very lean function. it's It's really encouraging to see legal leaders, GCs, CLOs prioritizing that but if you have like one or two people that's still quite lean and if you're going to engage in like a very complex implementation it's very hard to focus on anything else so you really want to take the time to make sure you understand what you're trying to solve for instead of just going out there and and and buying things and oftentimes like
00:47:19
Speaker
even when I do figure out what the problem is, I don't jump to like a tool. I first say, hey, um let's actually document this because there's no documentation like anywhere. Let's document it. Let's create like a process or a policy and see if if that makes things better. Because the thing is, if folks don't know what to do, you can't really get mad at them for like,
00:47:42
Speaker
not like doing what you think they should do. Right. yeah And so you're able to codify it, train them on it, socialize it then you're able to see, okay, I haven't spent any money. We've come up with consistency based on standards. How much of does, how much of the problem does that solve?
00:47:57
Speaker
And then you can reassess and say, okay, like, like what's the trade-off here, right? Like, is it still worth the time to do this or should we actually look at a tool to automate it? yeah Great, great advice on how to think about technology. All right, let's let's make the shift because you literally cannot have a conversation these days without that two-letter word called AI.
Evolving Perspectives on AI in Legal Operations
00:48:18
Speaker
How are you personally thinking about artificial intelligence and what impact do you think it's having on legal operations today? Absolutely. So funny enough, um as as someone who's a perfectionist, as I said, um you know, everyone was talking about chat GPT and I'll say I was, I was a very, very late adopter. I remember, you know, I, I used it a couple of times and this is when a lot of the LLMs like weren't that great. yeah Which was like just two weeks ago, by the way, it's improved a lot since then. Exactly. Right. But I remember and's funny I like put things in and I was like,
00:48:55
Speaker
look, I'm like, I would ask it like medical advice, right? And I'm like, no doctor, but i but it would like give me things. And I was like like, I didn't go to med school, but this is like wrong. um And so when I started to see that, I'm like, oh, this is garbage. It's not 100% perfect. Like I'm not going to use it.
00:49:12
Speaker
And funny enough, I was at CLOCK last year and it was my first CLOCK um conference. And I went to um a seminar where it was, it was performed by so Stephanie Corey and it was hands-on on how to create your own AI assistant. so I said, you know what, let me like try to get my hands dirty with this. And you know like it there was just something about that where like i then went back to my hotel room and just spent the the rest of the evening trying to create this like agent that could just do like automated nda reviews and then give me like a list of deviations and i was like wait this is super cool and through that i started to shift my mindset from moving away from hey this is garbage because it's not perfect to hey like this is here to help you like it's not ai but it's ai assist which means it's not going to be 100 perfect but let's say it's 60 perfect you just have to now do 40 of that work versus a hundred percent of that work and for me like that was that was like very very like insightful because
00:50:18
Speaker
like that mindset shift has been so important because even now, now I use like AI every single day. Like Claude is my best friend. And I, I, I've told my friends in our group chat, I'm like, Hey, you've all been replaced by my new friend, Claude, who is from Paris. yeah So it's pretty funny. But with that, like it's having the right set of expectations around it, I think is super critical to get that value out of it and to continue to, um go down this the journey of adoption.
00:50:49
Speaker
Do you think there's a mind shift away from some of the things that you found foundational in choosing non-AI legal technology over time? Do you think there's a mind shift change that needs to happen as we think in our professions as legal operators about choosing AI? Or do you think it's fundamentally the same thing? It's just a different kind of technology and a more powerful one.
00:51:10
Speaker
You know, i I actually, I think it's a little bit of both, right? I think in in one regard, view it as, as I said, like a subset of technology in my pyramid. It happens to be one that's very, very powerful. It's also one that's a bit more open-ended, right? Like if you think of like an e-billing tool or a CLM, like that's very purpose-built, but like,
00:51:30
Speaker
a Claude or a Gemini, like you could do so many different things with it. and And I think oftentimes that creates a sense of fear because you're like, I don't, you know, like I can do anything with this. So yeah I don't know where to start. Like, what if it's wrong? Like, what if I take something that was a bad output and put it into my work? So there's a lot of fear that comes with it. But what I've noticed is that the best antidote to fear is curiosity. And the only way you can go down that journey is if you if you get your hands dirty.
00:52:01
Speaker
And what I often tell folks is, hey, you know what? like there's all this fear and there's all this chatter on, Oh, AI is going to take away jobs. I think of it very differently. I actually think of it as, Hey, give AI all the work that you don't want to do. Like all the grunt work, like, you know, writing emails, first drafts, like the, the, the number of times I'll like write something up and give it to like Gemini and say, Hey, can you grade my email from like an A through an F and let me know what's going on here? Like, It just like use it for those types of things because that opens up the the time for you to focus on like the substantive legal work that I believe you should have been doing this whole time. And if you think about it in that way, like no one's taking away that legal work that you want to do. It's just over time, like you've had all this other work that's been added to your plate, right? That's administrative or um requires a lot of legwork to get to that substantive work. Yeah. And now you can automate it or reduce the amount of time it takes um to focus on that. So you can focus on on on the real things that you should be focusing on. To me, that has been like the holy grail of legal ops, right? Like are our goal, our mission has been to create space for the legal team in order to be able to enable the business. So fits in very nicely with that.
00:53:22
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely absolutely. And so it definitely fits in nicely with like the the two elements that that you described. Like, I think you need to have a mindset shift because it's a, it's an open-ended form of technology, a very powerful one and and very different from anything that we've that we've seen, but I also think in many ways, it's again, another tool in your toolkit that you can use um alongside like more traditional SaaS based technology, right? Like none of that's going away. And I also think we shouldn't forget about that. I think with AI, we need to strategically deploy it.
00:53:53
Speaker
and AI isn't going to be good for like every single activity or tasks. like You're still going to want to use traditional legal technology for that. And there may be other subset of work where technology is not appropriate. So I think that toolkit analogy is one that really goes a long the way.
00:54:10
Speaker
Fantastic. All right. um I have three standard questions that I ask every guest. Yours are slightly altered. Many of our guests, my guests are lawyers. Others are from legal ops. so These are kind of legal ops based.
00:54:23
Speaker
right. You ready? Yeah. Number one, if you were starting in legal operations today, so think about anybody new breaking in.
Advice for Legal Operations Newcomers
00:54:30
Speaker
Yep. What would you have them focus on in the first year or two?
00:54:36
Speaker
Intake. And when I say intake, like no Slack, no email. And I will say this, last couple of weeks I've been so busy at work. Like my email is blowing up and my Slack is blowing up and I just sit there and I'm like, what is this outdated archaic,
00:54:50
Speaker
like just chaotic technology. Like this is crap. And so the one thing I would do, especially like if you have a small department or you're solo practitioner, have things come in in like a structured way because even like psychologically and emotionally, if everyone's coming at you, like it's very, very overwhelming. And imagine if you're a solo practitioner, you're just like,
00:55:12
Speaker
holy shit how am i going to this right but if things are coming in in a structured way and it's categorized like that helps because you're not going to lose track of these things you can triage you can reorganize it and then on the back end you end up getting some really good like data points from all that metadata very easily and then you can figure out okay like in the midst of all this like firefighting and legal work that I'm doing, what can I focus on based on what the data tells me to like empower the business to go further, right? Whether it's like like like an intranet site or a chat bot or FAQs or things like that. But the thing is, in order to figure out where to focus your like precious time, you need to have data to back that up. And then what you're able to do is see the effectiveness of those small improvements you're able to make to see okay i rolled i rolled out f faqs am i getting fewer inquiries and then you can continue to look at the data to see how it evolves to figure out what else to focus on later but this gives you like a holistic view of that and it can also inform technology decisions right like if all of your work is commercial work yeahp um like yeah you may need a clm if everyone's asking you will we sign contracts like you know
00:56:24
Speaker
What do they say? you may need like a ah ah post signature repository. So it allows you to also be more strategic in terms of investments that cost money.
00:56:36
Speaker
It gives you both a snapshot, but also a canary in the coal mine yeah with which to kind of focus your efforts. I love that. All right. I think I know the answer to this one, but let's see. What's a career bet that you've made that compounded for you more than you expected?
00:56:51
Speaker
staying Staying at the same company for almost a decade. It was not... on my bingo card. I'm i'm a millennial, so like yeah most most millennials stay at jobs between, what was it, 12 and 24 months? i was I was talking to a friend about this. I was like, oh, I'm like, I feel like I'm Joe who worked at Prudential for like 35 years and made this, you know, like career out of it. But honestly, like, ah you know There's so many different like companies out there and and and I get like that the fascination right of of jumping from company to company to company.
00:57:26
Speaker
I just think if you stay somewhere for a good period of time, it's super beneficial in any kind of a legal role, especially in-house, to see the business go through different cycles. And what I've seen is I saw a company that you know was going through serious funding that went through an IPO that had insane growth surges that grew even more like internationally through international expansion. um we ended up like acquiring like eight companies during 2020. We hired like a ton of people and made it all the way up to 10,000 employees.
00:58:01
Speaker
And then we did all these layoffs along with all these other companies. And so you're able to see almost like these core aspects of a company's life cycle. And I think that's so important. And also through that time, i was able to sort of build that muscle around how are you able to navigate change? Because especially in the tech sector, there's one thing that that's always going to be constant and that's change. And i I get that's very jarring for people. It certainly was for me because I was dreaming of the day when I solved all the problems and could put my you know put my feet up on the desk and just chill. Spoiler alert, that reality doesn't exist. But you have to go through those uncomfortable feelings of change to actually be able to navigate through them. And and that's just made me a much better leader, especially I have a team of eight folks now. and And when things happen, like, you have to remember, like, these are people. And they look, they actually, they look up to you as a leader.
00:59:00
Speaker
and you need to figure out, in addition to how you navigate changes in work, how do you make people feel comfortable through a situation that is inherently very uncomfortable for them? And some of that, you just have to stay in a particular place for a while to to really understand that and and figure out what are the different ways you you navigate these these different um scenarios of change.
00:59:26
Speaker
Yeah. Great answer. All right. Last question. If you have the luxury of thinking 10 years ahead and if you want to make it five, that's fine too.
Future Aspirations and Career Reflections
00:59:34
Speaker
What's the path that you hope you've taken? Where do you hope to be?
00:59:38
Speaker
So as someone who's a planner, like You know, I've always planned my life. I was going to be a lawyer and a judge. That didn't happen. It's funny, you know, like i've ah i have aspirations in in the long run to to become a COO of a company, I think very similar to your career. I actually think legal ops um is a great way to cut your teeth on on thinking about like- It is indeed.
01:00:04
Speaker
Operations more broadly at a company level. And especially like having stayed at a company and and seeing it go through all these changes, I think that makes the case even more compelling for someone in legal ops to like think about operations more broadly across the company like you understand the company you've been embedded in in different parts of the business you've gotten to know um you know different facets of the business as well and so by nature like that makes folks in legal ops perfect candidates for that um and also ever since i was a kid i've always wanted to run for elective office so the uh the plan is all right maybe in my like 40s we'll we'll do the coo gig and then um tying back to wanting to help people which is what i wanted to do as a prosecutor and a judge the thought is hey when i get into my 50s let's uh let's run for office and see what happens nice so was that something like are we coming back to santa rosa and running for local office there should we get your campaign team together now well i've i've i've purchased my domain name because you never know when you're gonna need it okay you know like i
01:01:10
Speaker
i I think like mayor of the big city would be, would be great. um Governor would be great. So, you know, i like I said, i like to, I like to aim, I like to aim big. i love it. I like to be part of a like president's cabinet. So, you know, the, the, the world is our oyster. We'll see where it takes us. So I have these aspirations, but given how my career has taken you know, ah a slightly different journey and the fact that I'm actually really happy with how it turned out.
01:01:40
Speaker
I still have these goalposts, but I feel like I'm not going to be as bummed if ah things kind of go in a different direction. wow Sean, thank you so much for taking time today. i've I've known you for a number of years, but I've probably learned more about you in this last 60 minutes than I have in the last few years. That was a really fantastic conversation. Thanks for your vulnerability around your path. And thanks for the fantastic advice that you've given us on legal operations, legal technology, AI, and potentially becoming president of the United States. Well, thank you for having me. It's ah it's been a pleasure. And i look forward to all the great things that Beacon has to bring.
01:02:18
Speaker
Thanks. Take care.