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EP 29: What’s Next for Legal Ops: Jenn McCarron, President of CLOC
76 Plays10 months ago
What can a strong community offer a legal ops professional working alone within their organization? How do you deal with the stress of a chaotic project management role while fostering change? Will legal ops eventually shift away from legal and into the business and tech sphere?
Jenn McCann, Director of Legal Ops at Netflix and President of the Board of Directors at CLOC can offer an expert perspective on all of these questions and more.
During her term as CLOC president, she is strengthening the organizations to community, content, and conversation, and developing a legal ops framework for CLOC’s more than 7,000 members.
Hear Jenn talk about finding the courage to share your ideas, building and leaning on your community of fellow legal ops professionals, emphasizing the importance of project management, allowing change to take shape, and more.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-29
Topics:
Introduction: 0:00
Advancing the legal ops industry at CLOC as President of the Board of Directors: 3:35
Getting started with CLOC: 7:22
Unpacking the mindset of service and giving back: 11:21
Lessons learned as CLOC president: 14:23
Advice for professionals getting their start in legal ops: 17:24
Hiring detail-oriented staff with stakeholder management skills: 22:07
Recommending platforms for learning project management skills: 26:04
Dealing with the loneliness of a one-of-one role: 30:25
Legal ops as a business team vs legal ops as a legal team: 37:06
Focusing on the future: 41:02
Maintaining an after-hours music career: 46:47
Connect with us:
Jenn McCarron - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennmccarron/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn S
potDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading CLM platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues.
Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
Recommended
Transcript
Learning Through Failure
00:00:00
Speaker
She said the reality of learning complex systems you own the only way to learn them is through failure you don't know it isn't working or working until the little red light goes off and Shows you the engine just cut out and hydrogen is dripping in That almost took her one of her shadow sound so I'm humbled by the reality of that like just because I'm good at this doesn't mean I'm good at this and
00:00:35
Speaker
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00:00:56
Speaker
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Spotdraft Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:01:24
Speaker
Where is the legal operations profession headed? How can you break into legal ops? What role can community play as you grow over the course of your career? Today, I'm joined by someone who's really put the work in herself to build a career in technology and operations, Jen McCarron. Jen leads legal ops and technology at Netflix. She is also the president of Clock for the next two years.
00:01:51
Speaker
And she is a pro at podcasting. She's been doing this longer than me. Her audio will sound better than me. She's the host of Clock Talk, Clock's podcast. She's previously been a legal ops and tech leader at companies like Spotify and Cisco. Jen, welcome to the abstract.
00:02:11
Speaker
Tyler,
Community and Event Engagement
00:02:12
Speaker
it's so nice to be here finally, and don't beat yourself up on inferior audio quality. We are all just an iteration away from our next best selves. Is that a joke about the small cuts on my nose for those who are seeing video? Don't beat yourself. No.
00:02:30
Speaker
No, you've been beating yourself up. Yeah, it was a minor flesh wound from backcountry skiing. Luckily, no one wins. So I wanted to get that out of the way, just in case folks were watching and wondering, it looks a little different than I've previously seen him.
00:02:48
Speaker
I was hoping for a, I was at a bar and a member of every CLM in the market walked in and I only came away with this. You should see the other guys, a CLM bar fight joke, but that's just pretty good. I like that. We'll save that for Vegas. We'll save that for Glock.
00:03:07
Speaker
Great. Yeah. And then we'll all get into deep trouble in Vegas.
Jen's Goals for Clock Presidency
00:03:11
Speaker
Just kidding. We won't. Vegas is going to be a great time. Tyler, will you be coming to Vegas, to the global institute we put on? Yes. I absolutely will be. It will be my second. I went for the first time last year and had a fantastic time.
00:03:26
Speaker
I'm really, I'm looking forward to all the programming, but more than that, just seeing lots of old friends, folks who yeah, I'm excited to spend time with. Let's kick off. Let's start with clock. You, you just started a two year term. You're president of the board of directors. Tell us a little bit about your ambitions for your clock presidency. What are you hoping to accomplish over the course of the next couple of years?
00:03:52
Speaker
Sure. So we have been re-ratifying our clock strategy vision mission. And of course, my slide isn't loading neatly right now, but we're here to advance the legal ops industry and profession so that we can innovate the business and practice of law. And we've added this new piece onto our vision mission statement, which is we're going to do that through three
00:04:19
Speaker
column principles, and it is community, it is content, and it is conversation. So what you know of the org and what everyone has seen are our large events, like our Clock Global Institute in Vegas. We're doing a MIA Summit in London. We've done summits in APAC down in Australia.
00:04:40
Speaker
We've done regional chapter meetings for a while. We've experimented with medium-sized format events as well, taken the podcast on tour,
Community Events, Marketing, and Career Framework
00:04:49
Speaker
et cetera. So community gatherings are our bread and butter. And then from there, content starts to come into the market, right, onto the LinkedIns, the white papers, the clockcore 12,
00:05:01
Speaker
frameworks, and more from our members. I'm hoping to really help turn on all the lights in that third bucket, which is conversation, where how do we get two-way dialogue and people talking about it all? In a way, you see me drawing a line. You can almost take something cool you see in a community event.
00:05:20
Speaker
A person, a speaker, a new idea that a member comes up with or maybe clock staff introduces and you can thread it through and watch the content creation aspect happen. Then you can thread it through to conversations and unveil it at other community events or in think tank meetings or on the podcast or on LinkedIn or in a white paper and really thread all of those pieces through so people can see it all.
00:05:45
Speaker
I think Clock has some of the most amazing IP and members in the world. Is the marketing where it could be to spotlight some of our members and pull them through, make them content kings of a certain subject?
00:06:06
Speaker
I think we're doing a good job. I'd like to get us to excellence there. So there's a big focus of mine to help turn all those lights on behind marketing efforts and, you know, executing on a strategy that has impact that isn't too broad. I'm very good at let's do three things and do them really well.
00:06:25
Speaker
I know my gear and yes, I'm trying to help instill some focus there. I've said this on a few other podcasts as well. By the time my term ends, I hope to introduce with the staff, with the board, a career framework.
00:06:43
Speaker
for members to sink their teeth into and feel like they know where they are on some gradient of the career. Because I don't think we've done a lot there. And given the newness of the field and all the people in the community and converting over, I think we need to ground some people.
Career Growth and Community Support
00:07:04
Speaker
It gives them a navigation point to work kind of forward in that I don't know that we all have now.
00:07:11
Speaker
I think that's what community is really about, right? It's about providing opportunities for folks to learn from each other, learn from experts, but also build each other up. Talk to us a little bit, actually, about how you got started with clock. That's exactly how I got started, by the way, what you just said. I sometimes am the last to show up to the party of competence and confidence for me. I just am. I develop on a delay. But when I get there,
00:07:40
Speaker
That surprised me. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just slower at that. And so I didn't know when I was at Cisco developing all of this KM knowledge management program tools, data strategies, frameworks. I didn't know it was good. I just thought it was what I was doing at Cisco and I showed it to my peer Francis Pomposo, who was at Adobe, who I met through clock. Her boss, Lisa, my boss, Steve were clock founders. Yeah.
00:08:07
Speaker
So I show her this. I'm like, and I just have this like assumption. This is crap. Francis is going to think this is crap. Red lines all over edits. Yeah. I'm like, okay, okay. Embracing. I'm like, what do you think? I showed it to her in like a half hour and she goes, yeah. And I'm like, that's it. She's like, yeah, you're on to something here.
00:08:27
Speaker
No, no, it's like gave me additions and thoughts and like more to even chew on with that, what relates to Adobe, how this is resonant. And I was like, oh my goodness. Fast forward another year or two, I'm still working on that strategy. I'm like, let me present it out to the community.
00:08:45
Speaker
Mario Carroll was looking for speakers for clocks New York City chapter first ever meeting I was living in New York at the time and I went I'll do it. I have a slide deck I presented those slides into the room and it was a 50 person standing room only was during legal week Room all the leaders from the East Coast not just New York, but the East Coast were there. Yeah
00:09:08
Speaker
They all recruited me, by the way, for the next few years. And that's secondary, though. That's like the benefit of going and presenting your ideas in a community, in your network. But primarily, to put that idea set in front of 50 people, and they go, this means something to me. And they take the slides and start to adapt them to their own companies. The clock heads at the time saw me do the presentation, and they slotted me for May. And they're like, you're doing this in May in front of, we're going to give you
00:09:36
Speaker
triple size audience. And I did that May and the following May, I did two big presentations into the community because other people saw value in what I was thinking, creating, frameworking, and putting out into Cisco.
Service Attitude and Leadership
00:09:50
Speaker
And that validation we get from a community and a network, we need that. And we need to step out of our companies sometimes
00:09:59
Speaker
and do that to see how these things resonate with others and that audience and engagement, that is a career changer. It will pull you forward and that's what it did for me. It just kept asking me to come speak about this here and speak about this there. I talked about that KM slide deck for a year.
00:10:17
Speaker
plus in all departments that people that got the slides, et cetera. It was so cool. So this is why we need community. This is why we need clock. This is how I came up, just giving my ideas first in service to the companies I work for. And then I package them up nicely and I'll go, let me tell you what I'm doing at Spotify.
00:10:36
Speaker
Let me tell you how hard it was to start a legal tech team function at Spotify. And I'll tell the story and people take to this stuff. So it's important for us to go out there and share it with like-minded folks and get that validation. A few things really resonate with me there. One, this idea that if you're an expert in something and your company finds it valuable, other people might find it valuable too. That's one thing that resonates.
00:11:04
Speaker
Two is sometimes you have to take a little bit of a leap then and put yourself out there. And as you said, you know, you were expecting a bunch of notes, but three, it was in the spirit of then ultimately giving back. I think that that's such an important component of community. How do you think about both sort of in your service now, but also for those many years where you were not on the board and you're not clock present, how do you think about
00:11:31
Speaker
being in that mindset of giving back to clock and giving back to the community as opposed to like, what can I get out of? Yeah, I love that you're hitting on that. I grew up in a military and police household. This is where the people in my family were employed for generations, 100 years of New York City police officers. And my dad served in the military as well. Service is in our veins.
00:12:00
Speaker
My dad went and became a social worker. I almost became a social worker in a fit of youth and being lost and being LGBTQ. We all think about becoming social workers. It's a bit of our finishing school. Service comes first in my value set. It's not what can I get from this. It's always what can I give first. And so when I had this opportunity to become clock president,
00:12:25
Speaker
That story I just told, I'm trying to create a macro level system for that to happen to hundreds or thousands of people. I'm trying to create help, help foster this vision and mission and strategy that we have these big tent, medium tent, small tent, community events where you can show up and go scared out of your gourd. I'll do my slides. And they're like, Mary and Connie were like, who is this? And I was like,
00:12:53
Speaker
I do KM for Steve Harmon.
00:12:55
Speaker
And they're like, okay girl, we've never seen you go. And I went and I lit the room up because I'm good at presenting and I rehearsed that 250 times by myself and 50 times in front of Cisco Legal. So it was really a well-seasoned deck. And they were like, where you been? I'm like, actually doing this work for five years. So there was a degree of confidence there, but they didn't know me and I was nervous. And then from community, they took the content and went, this is now clock's KM framework. I'm like, cool.
00:13:25
Speaker
take it make it better teach me how to do it better and then we talk about it a lot in on stages in two-way dialogues i presented or dialogued at a dozen companies about it i want that to happen for thousands of people for all of our members and create the stages to do that and the workflows to do that like macro level we're building the ops
00:13:49
Speaker
superstars of the future, the people who can change how legal departments operate, make them more efficient. That's us. And I want to make them superstars and give the resources and the venues to do that. You are a superstar in the legal ops
Learning from Failure and Iterative Growth
00:14:08
Speaker
profession.
00:14:09
Speaker
Cool. Can you call my manager right now and give her that note? Thanks. Thanks. I think she thinks so too, but I'll send you an email afterwards. Thank you. Forward on forward. And you're giving a lot back to clock and to the community. Yeah. I want to also ask you though, like, what are you learning from folks? What's something that you've learned recently or what do you think you're going to learn from your
00:14:34
Speaker
tenure as president? How is clock sort of enriching you and your life and where you're going to take your career? You know, just because I know the clock core 12 up and down and can jump on any podcast and or LegalOps 101 or mentorship session and I can talk to it
00:14:55
Speaker
teach or mentor, that doesn't mean that my dashboards are awesome. It means that they're still an iteration away from their best version. And that I think I learned more and more how iterative this all is, how long change really does take to effect inside of a legal department or any system or any group of people.
00:15:19
Speaker
And there's a big thread right now where we're all like failures, failures, failures, failures, failures, failures. Someone just asked me, come speak about your failures. Bloomberg Law just asked me, will you write an article about your failures? And I'm like, wow, we really, we really care about all of that. But I just read in this great book by an astronaut.
00:15:38
Speaker
that in complex systems, her name's Colonel Eileen Collins. She was the first woman pilot and commander to man or woman a space shuttle out into space when we still had the space shuttle program.
00:15:51
Speaker
We'll put that in the show notes for folks. Put that in the show notes. It's a wonderful book. I read it. I read her memoir. I'll be interviewing her tomorrow for clock talk. Incredible. So I'm in space on all my metaphors and analogies right now. So go with me there. But she says this is an astronaut.
00:16:09
Speaker
She said, the reality of learning complex systems, the only way to learn them is through failure. You don't know it isn't working or working until the little red light goes off and shows you the engine just cut out and hydrogen is dripping in. That almost took one of her shuttles down. Wow.
00:16:27
Speaker
I'm humbled by the reality of that. Just because I'm good at this doesn't mean I'm good at this. I still have all the same struggles as everyone else and change management. I have more and more respect for the psychology behind the sales, behind the behavioral change, behind how to guide people on that journey than ever before. Back then, I used to think it was just like, tech, do my thing. I'm here.
00:16:54
Speaker
I'm here and hierarchy, like the bosses or the VPs have empowered me to be here, to put this in front of you, to lead you on this front, you have to, your bosses want you to. And now I'm like, no, it's not that simple. Like we each of us have to add value and convince our user base that this is a worthwhile expedition, even though it will be turbulence sometimes. So yeah, I don't know if I answered your question, I tried to though.
00:17:21
Speaker
Definitely. In that vein of it being complex, of it being something that you have to sort of learn by doing, advice that you would have for those who are starting off in legal ops. Folks are taking on these roles for the first time. Sometimes the titles are a little amorphous. We're going to talk about that too. I want to talk about sort of where legal ops is headed. Someone's taking on a legal ops manager role for the first time.
00:17:50
Speaker
What should they know that you wish that you'd known as you were growing in this space?
Reducing Anxiety and Embracing Experience
00:17:56
Speaker
You know, I'm gonna quote one of your former guests. Wow. Who? You listen. Was one of my former colleagues, Alice Beasgrove, from Cisco. Fantastic. You asked her a question like, this might be the next question you're asking me, but the answer's the same. Like, what would you tell yourself? What would you tell new legal ops, Jen? Or what would I tell the new legal ops person working in it? I would say,
00:18:19
Speaker
Don't worry, have 95% less anxiety, worry and fretting. It is all going to work out, but it does need, it needs its time to work out. It needs this stuff we are instituting especially inside an enterprise is all about transforming. And that doesn't come quick for anyone, including legal folks. It needs years.
00:18:45
Speaker
No, I never needed to tell myself to sit at your job and learn it by doing for years. But I do tell mentees that a lot. I speak about that a lot on the Clock Talk podcast. I say, hey, sit still for a little while. If you can, try to give these chapters three years, because that's what it takes to institute change in any group of people, whether they work at
00:19:09
Speaker
Cisco, Netflix, Facebook, the forces are, the forces of change and chaos. It takes three years. Try to see some of that all the way through. You're going to come out with such stories and perspective and wins to reflect on, to build a foundational learning on, and then to speak on in future job interviews. I see a lot of people jumping around right now. Look, sometimes you got to jump.
00:19:35
Speaker
Sometimes you gotta just quit because it sucks. Please quit when it sucks and it's not a good mutual match. But if you can ride these things out, ride it out because it's actually all gonna be okay and you learn more through, I think, like a longitudinal focus on one legal team.
00:19:54
Speaker
And I just loved how Alice would tell her early self and career, like, chill out, girl. It's gonna work out, give it time to try all the things, to have happy days, sad days, to have wins, to have failures. And it's most important that we're looking back on all of those and reflecting. That's how we really ultimately learn.
Project Management and Communication Skills
00:20:14
Speaker
And make sure you have those mechanisms in your life to reflect back on. We're big at Netflix on. Let's do a retro.
00:20:22
Speaker
on how that went, what did we learn, how could we have done that better, how could we avoid that failure, etc., the feedback. We're on that very quickly. If you don't have that happening at work, institute them. And then if you don't have that happening in your professional development, institute it through mentorship,
00:20:41
Speaker
peer mentorship, your manager, or some people get coaches or do coaching stints so they can reflect forward on things. So that would be my advice for noobs. And I think if you had to have one skill set here to win them all, the hard skill set is project management and the soft, so I'm going to, and I have a hard time picking the soft skill set is communication.
00:21:06
Speaker
And really clear, concise comms that you can kick up to a mid-exec level, the high-exec level, the C level, or the team leaders or the teams or the individual contributors whose jobs will change because you're putting in a CLM. So you have to have a comms acumen that is flexible, that knows how to find the audience and then bring them the message. And always be willing to rewrite your messages because every time you rewrite them, they get better.
00:21:38
Speaker
Quick announcement before I let you get back to the episode. Spotdraft just released our annual compensation report for in-house legal professionals. If you're wondering how your compensation compares to your peers across industries, years of experience, and more, make sure to check it out. Find it at salary-report.spotdraft.com or head to the link in the description. Now, let's get back to the episode.
00:22:07
Speaker
Different question for you there. And by the way, I think is maybe we've talked about before, you know, I used to work in privacy program management, by the way, I see a lot of parallels in how the legal ops space is evolving relative to how the privacy space has evolved. Yeah. Being super detail oriented, keeping the trains running on time.
00:22:28
Speaker
managing stakeholders around a project, not an easy thing to do. Sometimes a slightly different innate skillset than managing up to C-suite stakeholders or similar, having strong communication skills. How do you hire? You manage a relatively large org at Netflix and have done similar at other companies. How do you find that and cultivate both of those skillsets in folks?
00:22:58
Speaker
So whenever we're hiring ever in the world or picking someone, a friend, a mate, a company, there's always things that are great, they're great at, and things that they're not, and you have to assess, what's the easiest one for me to teach? Do I have the time to teach that? What do they have and what do they lower incompetency on?
00:23:21
Speaker
Because I'm a strong communicator, Jen is a strong communicator. Like I'm a narrative obsessed person. I write songs. They have a beginning, middle and end bridges. Bridges, coincidentally, are the best thing I am at writing. I love connecting to pools of information. Go figure. I live with a writer.
00:23:41
Speaker
Shakespeare comes up in our house every other day in all in earnest as we just start talking about Shakespeare because it's really relevant and So I and I like presenting I love language. I love clear concise. I love the challenge of that I love an audience and trying to put the info into their brains and see if I can engage them So I'm like, I think I can teach and offer a lot of that
00:24:06
Speaker
in development if they're lower on that. So in this case, I've biased the project management side. Because if they don't know how to run projects and they come into a place like a Spotify or a Netflix,
00:24:22
Speaker
That's a more painful tripping and stumbling along than it is, oh, my comms were in an A plus, they were in A minus. That's okay, most people are in A minus. But if they can't manage the project, then people aren't engaged and we're implementing something huge. And they can learn where to ask for help on comms when the, you know, the CLM implementation, in fact, a memo just floated across my desk.
00:24:50
Speaker
that was the clm calm going out uh for a part of the go live very soon and someone on my team sent that to me and another manager and said hey give this a read give me your feedback give me your thoughts and i did a five minute edit and said minor stuff just take out some of the marketing like don't say things like you can get what you want when and where you need it you sound like a marketing brochure
00:25:15
Speaker
And it's actually, you're not getting it where you need it. You have to go to the CLM and log in. You could only come in our front door. So don't sound like we're API-ing the data everywhere. Instead, and I put this language, you can use this solution when you need to A, use case B, use case C and D and other.
00:25:35
Speaker
And they'll remember those things because then you're repeating it below. So I trust that they'll learn no to ask for help on things. So yeah, I buy as project management because it is, I think, the sacrosanct skill.
Role of Certifications and Mentorship
00:25:48
Speaker
Above all, you have to be able to get a lot of stuff done and lead people without authority. And that's all baked in to some of those PM, as they call them, project management frameworks. Being a project manager is incredibly hard.
00:26:02
Speaker
I'm curious, there's certifications out there. We've talked a little bit about how you hope clock will be building out a sort of more robust set of curriculum over the course of your tenure. And then we've talked about mentorship too, right? But where do you think folks should go tactically to learn, to learn how to be better at the whole profession that is legal operations?
00:26:29
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I do think you said it earlier, learning on the job with great real life business examples is going to be your number one teacher.
00:26:39
Speaker
And the teacher's aid is when those things fail or you bombed or something just didn't go well in the implementation and you get to really learn through reflection and humility sometimes how to do it better. But we need mentors over us that are maybe a little more battle-worn, battle-worn and torn.
00:27:01
Speaker
So they can ask questions and get you through coaching like thinking in the right direction maybe inspire you Maybe they give you some of that structure or ladder that uh, you don't you might not have you might just be like a one legal ops Man or woman or gender non-binary like doing the role you're the one in a small medium department so there's a loneliness to that that mentorship can
00:27:26
Speaker
kind of validate some of your the questions were always asking in our heads like just by hearing their story how they did this I still take advice from my mentor every three weeks on a calendar that's how like I don't portend to know how to do all of this
00:27:43
Speaker
Even though they made me president of clock, that doesn't mean my dashboards are great. I'm not trying to invalidate my own candidacy here, but we all need to be. We'd have to check the bylaws, but.
00:27:57
Speaker
We all have to be continuously learning and have these growth mindsets because this field is still defining itself. How we solve for legal is still taking shape. How we did CLM five years ago is different than three years ago is different today. And it will be different in one year and three years and five years. And so we're the ones that have to always adapt.
00:28:18
Speaker
All of that certifications, I think they're important, but guys, let's don't kill yourselves getting certifications or expect that to be the ultimate door opener. I don't know. I have a lean six Sigma.
00:28:36
Speaker
And it sharpened how I manage projects. And then I went into an agile project management, product management environment at Spotify. And I went through some training at work there for that. And it was all the same phases, just different labels. So learn one of them thoroughly. If an employer would sponsor some of your learning, do it. They're going to get 10X ROI out of you. Six Sigmas are good. PMP program management professional.
00:29:06
Speaker
That is solid. Sometimes I like that more than Six Sigma. My old colleague is a PMP. Same kind of staging, how you stage a project and bring people through. And then there's a million courses online you can do the shortcut version of on those and apply those frameworks to your real projects and be just as good.
00:29:27
Speaker
As if you went through Villanova University's $8,000 Lean Six Sigma program or whatever they cost now. So this is not an endorsement to go big on training, but learn those frameworks one way or another. Mentorship, some certification on the job.
Community's Role in Overcoming Loneliness
00:29:44
Speaker
I think those are my three, three big ones and community. I'll fall back on the clock piece as well. When you're a part of community, you can call anyone that you've networked.
00:29:54
Speaker
with and say, hey, tell me how to do this. I don't know how to start a litigation ops program.
00:30:01
Speaker
And someone, I did that phone call once in the middle of the night because I was in Sweden and he was in California. So it was my middle of the night and he just laid it out to me. He's like, got a pen and I took notes and went into Spotify the next day and was like, here is the way we're gonna do litigation, tech and operations. And faked it until I made it, I made it. You mentioned the word loneliness, which I find really interesting. Yeah.
00:30:30
Speaker
I hear that consistently across the whole variety of communities that I'm involved with. Yeah. Oh, those communities help people sort of overcome that sense of, at least temporarily overcome that sense of loneliness. And by the way, I hear that at every level from the C-suite all the way down to like work can be lonely. Leadership can be, can be lonely.
00:30:52
Speaker
I want to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about maybe your music and some of your passions, because I think it's very cool. Talk to us. How do you find outlets for that loneliness or how do you replace that with a sense of community or meaning?
00:31:08
Speaker
We're all typically hired into roles in legal ops that are one of one roles. We're not typically one of many. If you're starting the function out, you're the one. And may you get a headcount at some point or many, but you might start parsing out headcount like, okay, sir or ma'am, you're going to focus on financial outside council management, sir, you're going to focus on
00:31:29
Speaker
the tech piece, the project management around a CLM implementation, and then you're overseeing it all. You're still that one of one. And then someone like me, which many of us are as leaders of, are turning around and then explaining this to a lawyer. And many of us are not lawyers. And there's just a gap there in language, lingua franca,
00:31:54
Speaker
They come at problems with a different mindset than maybe I do as a technologist, creative. When I'm with the tech teams in my companies, I'm like this with them. Like me and my InfoSec team, we could go on vacation together and have a blast and speak the same language. But not us with our sometimes our legal leadership. It's a bigger sell. It's a journey for them. It takes years for legal leadership to fully embrace.
00:32:21
Speaker
So it's lonely and clock has been my number one resource For that for years. I used to go to the Institute's so that I felt It would just give me energy would refill my battery and I go. Oh my god They are all experiencing some of the same resistance. I am sure I go. It's it's not me
00:32:42
Speaker
And it's not my company. It's just reality of These solutions are sometimes very forward thinking and people can't think that forward And that grounds me a lot in the reality of because I just have this mechanism of my brain that goes If i'm if i'm struggling at work, i'm like it's me. It's me. It's me. It's just where my brain goes. I think that's really the
00:33:07
Speaker
The root negative thought pattern of imposter syndrome is something objectively is happening in reality and people are like must be me. Right. And I can't I therefore I can't and like the negative wheel goes. The clock has taught me that it's not me.
Evolution of Legal Ops and Domain Expertise
00:33:22
Speaker
And now there's almost 7,000 other me's, right? That's how many members we have. At least half of those are in-house folks. And whenever we speak, I just feel so seen a part of something greater. And we're passionate about bringing about these changes and constantly trying to iterate how we do it to make it more palatable for the legal users themselves, because they have to like it at the end of the day.
00:33:45
Speaker
Let's talk a little bit and I'm going to come back to the music question at the end because I want to hear about your music and I want our listeners to know where they can find it. Let's take a little talk just a little bit about where you feel LegalOps is headed over the next few years. And I want to start there with just for the audience, a little bit of your background too on the tech side, because you kind of have a little bit of a technology product engineering
00:34:14
Speaker
mindset and brain. And I think that may inform where you think things are headed. It does. And may all of our brain types or past experience types inform where all of these roles are headed. There's no single destination endpoint or making a role that is universal across legal apps.
00:34:40
Speaker
And because I have a heavy IT software development, IT engineering being like a third party product manager or trainer alongside a suite of tools for legal, I skew tech. I don't skew outside council management. Like, hey, I have a finance degree. I can spin like a top inside a spreadsheet and find the formula or write the macro or whatever. But I don't, I'd rather bring in people who are super passionate about that.
00:35:10
Speaker
to turn on all the lights in the room with that while I have heavy focus in tech. Because if I see a negative space, I'm going to invent the product or the piece of technology or software or gateway that can make all of that interoperate. And that's some of what I do with my amazing technical team.
00:35:28
Speaker
at Netflix. The tech can get so good that folks like me could be called, people on my team could be called to lead IT teams in the future, product, third party, first party, and integration teams. My career could go that way. I was in engineering at Spotify. It is not implausible to think I could wind up back in that one day. I'm in legal now. I was in legal at Cisco. It sometimes depends on
00:35:58
Speaker
the org charts of these big companies or small companies we're in and how they and where they want all of this stuff to sit. And there's not even an objective truth where I can say us legal tech folks all belong inside legal. I don't know. I'm there now. I'm enjoying it. We're building a ton. Legal gets first view into what we're building. But as all of this matures and companies change shape and orgs change shape, you have to be willing to ride these things
00:36:26
Speaker
into the sunset. The finance outside council management piece for legal, that's a good thing to keep in legal because it's a front line's view into how they're managing their spend with council, outside council. A lot of our peers like Mary O'Carroll and Steve Harmon went to vendors. Mary's head of community, Akshay, COO at your company at Spotdraft.
00:36:49
Speaker
Yeah, Steve Harmon is COO and general counsel. So here we are. It's, there's a lot of endpoints. And did I, I think I answered the question. Yeah, let's put the fine point on it though. I don't think this is a particularly controversial question. Like.
00:37:05
Speaker
You know, legal ops more of a business team than it is a legal team per se. It just happens to be housed in legal today. And does that mean? This is how much I vacillate on this. When we were together having coffee in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. I was like, we're all going to evolve out and be business teams one day. And now I'm getting like protective of that for legal. And I'm like, I don't.
00:37:33
Speaker
I don't know the domain experience that folks like us get in legal ops focusing on legal workflows for a living. Yeah. If you send that out to the business teams, some of that domain might get watered down or lost or what if it's slow and legal?
00:37:53
Speaker
or the finance project dominates that teams, that business ops teams thing because they're IPO-ing and they just dominate by way of sheer force and legal gets pinched. And now you have legal domain expert people applying it against really important finance projects. Now you're thinning out their domain expertise. And that's what we're really good at is domain expertise. I had a few colleagues that work in the tech side recently say to me,
00:38:23
Speaker
that they think they are more expert at contracts and what's inside of contracts and the metadata of. And I was like, ooh, I was like, that's deep. I've been staring at CLM solutions that have succeeded and failed for 10 years straight. I've been in more implementations than I can count.
00:38:42
Speaker
and built, bought, rip out the built, replace it with bought, built, built, bought, repurpose, built, bought. Let's take that compliance thing, module from Metrotech, reverse engineer it, make it a contract, this and that, add in contract express it, it was like inspector gadget, just a corkscrew, everything was like connected through a stick of gum. So yeah, I don't know, I'm getting protective now over, we can't water down the importance of legal domain expertise,
00:39:09
Speaker
And until our industry matures around us and all the systems mature to absorb and productify some of that, you need all the the me's and the teams of ops folks and tech folks to be that liaison force.
00:39:26
Speaker
to understand the pain point connected to the tech and tell folks like your colleagues at Spot Draft, here's how you make the product work actually for people who are drafting, for example. Until all of the products get to their next iterations, we'll be in legal for a while and legal should enjoy this and embrace transforming your departments using us as your sword.
00:39:48
Speaker
It's a really interesting point because of course having folks on a legal ops team who can work well and play well with other stakeholders is important. Yeah. But if you take legal ops entirely out of legal, you might lose folks who have the ability to work well with legal and lawyers, and that's just as important.
00:40:10
Speaker
It's really important, understanding that user base. Now, look, I think product people and tech people generically, I think they're amazing. And I think they do know how to come in.
00:40:22
Speaker
and understand a domain and the pain points and then architect amazing solutions, it's not to take anything away from that. But we have failed so many times in CLM, please trust that we know a little bit more about how A, these forms, these templates should even be structured to go into tech so that AI can read and generate from them.
00:40:43
Speaker
better, faster, stronger in the future. It's like until we've hit the higher echelons of maturity as an industry and then in each department, we're needed there to help kind of balance, load balance all of the gaps and the uneven terrain.
Career Directions and Exploration
00:40:59
Speaker
I've got just a couple more questions for you, Jen. First, you know, what does the future hold for you? Are you focused really on the present right now? Because, you know, you could, you could evolve into a COO sort of role. Like where do you see your career heading over time?
00:41:17
Speaker
Yeah, I'm both focused on the present immensely, getting the foundation in at my current company Netflix and making sure that it can live on without me and that I'm succession planning in a way where someone
00:41:34
Speaker
on my team or someone else can come in and then take it on its next journey. I don't have to be the it forever, but I pioneered it. And my role and focus was to go in and really build that foundation. And so we're getting some of the big pieces in. I'm at the five and a half year mark. So all the all the lights are going on. And that takes so much focus because that's when all this stuff starts popping off. So I'm enjoying that and all the learnings and the comms.
00:41:59
Speaker
Cat's cradle that I'm sometimes in with that. But I always look out to the future and think about the future. I'm not someone who puts my head down and doesn't update their resume. I touch it every year. Whenever someone calls to recruit me, I take the call, I test the market. I like to see where the market's at and how it's changed and what they're looking for.
00:42:24
Speaker
And I test myself on those combos of where I want to be. Is this the right fit and mutual match for me now? And get this, I even tell my current manager about those conversations too.
00:42:39
Speaker
Not to make them nervous. I don't do it in a threatening way. I'm like, hey, so-and-so called. Check out how they're structuring this job. And then if I take it further, because it's interesting mutually, I'll go check out how they're structuring compensation. It's important for us to know these things. So I test a lot. I could do this role again. I've done every scale except
00:43:04
Speaker
I've done startup legal ops. I've done pre IPO to IPO legal ops. I did large scale, 70,000 employee, $50 billion public company legal ops. Netflix is like a child adult. Netflix is like a San Francisco guy. They're all like man-childs. Okay. Sorry, San Francisco guys.
00:43:25
Speaker
But it's like a 25 year old company that still acts without rules and is very creative and very chaotic and startup being entrepreneurial. It's really fun. So that's cool. The one I haven't done is turning the lights on in a startup legal ops, or I haven't done like 150,000 employees plus legal ops. And interestingly, I don't get any calls for the turning the lights on roles, but I get calls from the big ones.
00:43:51
Speaker
on how to do this in like 3x the scale I've ever done, because it's usually a very fractured kind of legal ops environment in those large, large companies. Maybe one of those. I could jump to a startup. What I would do in a startup, I don't know. Ops, I could do product.
00:44:11
Speaker
I could do product sales. There's a side of me, Tyler, that thinks I could sell. I'd be very intimidated by a number, but I do love selling. I do love when I understand the thing, I love trying to teach that value to people and go, is this meaningful to you? So something in there could be pretty appealing to me at a different scale than I'm at now.
00:44:32
Speaker
that resonates the selling piece, although I don't have a quote, which is very nice. And I just hope folks who are listening see someone who has, you know, a really developed career in legal ops. They hope they hear that optionality. And I hope they hear that ability to sort of like choose something that's going to at some point, right? Give you the opportunity to be creative.
00:44:59
Speaker
give you the opportunity to grow in a new way, right? That there are a lot of paths from legal ops. So many, so many, so many. There's so many, but don't be overwhelmed by that. I've been doing this stuff for
00:45:17
Speaker
11 years straight for real for real and there were two years before that where I was like half still playing in bands Half in the office doing the SharePoint management and then I had this funny deal worked out with my general counsel I'd be like cool if I go out for six weeks on tour
00:45:36
Speaker
And he'd be like, sure, I pay you next to
Music as a Creative Outlet
00:45:39
Speaker
nothing. Sure. Just do the stuff I send you when it comes your way from your laptop. I'm like, cool. So I'm on tour with like this off off Broadway show on the Eastern seaboard, like with my laptop in the room. The cast was all like getting lit in the cast house. And they're like, why isn't this weirdo bass player with us partying every night? This is what they get to do on set on the as a cast. And I'm like, I have a job and it's not.
00:46:06
Speaker
BRB, I'm going to go do some SharePoint work. So there was like a period of that, but the lights have been fully on since 2013. And it's okay if for right now you just put your head down and you're like, I'm a legal ops manager. And all I can see is this path to chief of staff with this general counsel or the next one. Totally fine. More will be revealed later in the great words of Alice B. Scrove.
00:46:30
Speaker
More will come later if you're just doing work, adding value, connecting dots in your businesses, and trust the process there.
00:46:40
Speaker
Last question for you. That's a good full circle on Alice too, as we come up on time. Your music. I've listened to it. It's really good. And it's the sort of thing I play, like have friends over. It's fun. It's vibey. I hope it's vibey. Yeah, I love it. It's definitely vibey. It's pop music.
00:47:05
Speaker
It is straight up pop music. It's going for two minutes and 40 seconds of fun and a feeling in its third grade literacy rate in those lyrics. Sometimes I have to hit myself on the face to dumb it down and not be that smart because and what an exercise in simplifying things and telling a story.
00:47:27
Speaker
and the sections of songs, you know, there are sections of our comms. When you open a presentation to a room, you have to hit them with the hook, then take them into a verse through the journey, then bring them back to the hook, then take them through another verse, and now they might need a bridge back to the last chorus, to a post-chorus. All the lighters are up at the end of the song for 20 seconds, stadium style, chanting two things, you're out. I mean, that's how I do presentations. It's pop song format.
00:47:54
Speaker
That's great. I love that. I've never heard that before. It's a storyteller format just in song. And yeah, it's an amazing, I've made songs my whole life since I'm a kid. It'll never go away. Someone asked me at Netflix recently, oh, is that what you want to do one day? And I'm like, no, it's what I do most days.
00:48:17
Speaker
Yeah. Like I'm here. I'm here in Netflix, like problem solving. And when I leave here, you asked me what I did this weekend. I wrote three songs in a musical for a 15 year old's play that she's writing. My wife's a teacher. It's her student. Like I just love the problem solving, looking at a blank page, no sound, put some music to this. I love finding that. So I play instruments until we find it. Then I hit record. I sing it into this mic you see here.
00:48:47
Speaker
When I sing lyrics, I'll put this down. For us, we don't need to do pop filters on podcasts, news flash people.
00:48:55
Speaker
even if they look cool. I haven't used one. Maybe something. You don't need it. You sound great. I would tell you if you were plosive, but yeah, it's a great escape and find your escapes, whatever they are. It's just what we all need in life, whether that's reading or maybe social media is an escape for people. That's becoming the new smoking cigarettes for me. It's just like, I don't know.
00:49:18
Speaker
It doesn't go deep enough, whereas playing piano or something lets me go deep and get lost for an hour, which helps me come back refreshed creatively for the work that we do. There's knitting, baking, there's so many things, like find your thing, this one's mine. I put out music under the artist's name, Ones. That's O with a slash through it. Very cool.
00:49:41
Speaker
Hold the six key, you guys, you'll know, hold the O key, you guys, and you'll get all the O's. And number six is O slashed O N E S ones. That's where I'm publishing songs today. I'm assigning homework to our listeners for the first time, which is listen to some ones. Listen to ones. Yeah. I have a song coming out on February 29th. Another one in March. Uh, my KPI for the year is try to get one out a month. Cool. Just call it done and ship it. Even though.
00:50:12
Speaker
I know what's not done. I just can't sit on these things anymore and just keep creating, just keep
Closing Remarks on Community and Creativity
00:50:18
Speaker
going. That's a great way to keep the wheel turning in life. So they're all go.
00:50:24
Speaker
It's like what I'm doing with this podcast. Totally. Yeah, just hit record, smash it, edit it. We're done. Even though you can harp on it, if you want it, just ship it. And we give ourselves deadlines so that we ship this stuff and you get better over the course of the episodes, not by hyper focusing on one episode. So I'm on that journey with songwriting and it's a fun place to learn how to improve. It helps my brain.
00:50:49
Speaker
That's fantastic. Well, thank you, Jen, so much for this conversation. This has been a lot of fun for me. I'm really glad that our conversation in an LA coffee shop on a rainy day in LA, which doesn't happen that often, turned into this.
00:51:04
Speaker
Yeah, me too. We did it. I'm so thankful you had me on. Hi to all the abstract people. And I hope to come back. And let's jam. And we're in Vegas together somehow, some way. I'll be running around with some microphone in some capacity. I look forward to it. And to all of our listeners, thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Abstract. And we hope to see you next time.
00:51:33
Speaker
If you enjoyed this episode, I'd recommend that you give my interview in season one with Akshay Verma, Spotdraft's COO, Alyssa. He's led LegalOps at companies like Coinbase and Meta. We talk about how to scale a LegalOps team and where the LegalOps profession is headed. You can also subscribe so you get notified as soon as we post a new episode. And if you liked this one, I'd really love to hear your thoughts, so leave a rating or a comment. If you'd like to reach out to us, our LinkedIn profiles are in the description.
00:52:03
Speaker
See you all next week.