O`Carroll, who joined Google in Mountain View, California, in 2008 as first legal counsel, will also end her role as president of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, an organization she co-founded in 2016 with other leading operations leaders. She remains a member of CLOC, but has resigned as president in accordance with the group`s guidelines for technology providers in leadership positions. His successor is Mike Haven, head of legal operations and deputy general counsel at Intel Corp. “No one will tell you that their contracting process is optimal,” O`Carroll said. “The speed at which you can execute them and the data in the contracts is so important, not only to the legal department, but also to the sales team and the finance team, and frankly to the CEO. “The organization of which I am the chairman, CLOC [Corporate Legal Operations Consortium], one of the things we are trying to do is define in a language and terminology common to the entire industry what functions are included in legal operations. Help us make statutory salaries more transparent. Get exclusive access to anonymized legal salary data. Mary Shen O`Carroll, founder and head of Google`s legal operations team at Alphabet Inc., who also served as president of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, said Thursday that she is leaving both roles and joining contract management platform Ironclad as community director. His career reflects in many ways the recent growth of the legal operations industry, which has become an increasingly important part of many legal departments over the past decade. More than 60 per cent of departments now employ at least one legal operations professional, up from 21 per cent in 2015, according to survey data from the Association of Corporate Counsel.
At Google, O`Carroll joined Google in 2008 as Director of Operations, Technology and Strategy for the Legal department. She began her role at Ironclad, a legal technology company in San Francisco, earlier this month as Ironclad`s first community director. “When there are periods of stress and companies are under a lot of pressure, the legal department and the general counsel also feel this pressure to prioritize ruthlessly to be more efficient,” she said. “We have limited budgets and staff, but the work is always to come. It`s not like we can turn off the demand. She said Google had an e-invoicing system in place at the time, but lacked the tools and processes to produce enough actionable data on legal spend, especially given the expected growth of the business and legal department. She called for an overhaul of the system. O`Carroll: Basically, the main client of the legal operations team is the legal department, but because of what lawyers do, what the department does, it`s so closely tied to the rest of the business. We have partnerships in finance and IT, real estate, and we support all the products that Google offers as well. The work we do often has a connection that goes beyond the department because it`s how we interact with departments, customers, or other parts of the business. While our direct client with whom we work and solve problems are lawyers, we are always looking for what is best for the company. San Francisco-based Ironclad offers a platform for contract lifecycle management and recently raised $100 million in its Series D funding round before acquiring legal technology company PactSafe.
O`Carroll then brought this problem-solving offensive to CLOC, where she and other legal leaders, including many other Silicon Valley tech companies, shared information about their best practices and built a network. The organization has expanded in recent years to include the entire “ecosystem” of legal stakeholders in the business world, including law firms. “We exist to empower the passionate and energetic innovators who are changing the way contracts work,” Jason Boehmig, CEO and co-founder of Ironclad, said in the release. “There is no one better than Mary – a visionary who helped set up the legal operations – to lead this community.” Legal Operations is still very new, isn`t it? We`re still creating the standard operating procedure, and often, if you go to three different companies that have legal functions, they`ll look very different. They will have different titles, whether it is a law firm or an in-house firm. Mike Haven, head of legal operations and deputy general counsel at Intel Corp, will succeed him as president of CLOC, an industry group that now has thousands of members. CLOC only authorizes in-house counsel to serve on its Board of Directors. We are now more than 50 professionals, in the legal department as a function. We outline our mission to focus on increasing the impact of the legal department by driving innovation, operational excellence and focused execution. What that means in practice and what we do – I like to think that we operate essentially under five broad skill sets.
The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium announced Thursday that Mike Haven, Intel`s board member and chief legal officer, will assume the presidency of the organization beginning in May. In an exclusive interview, Mary Shen O`Carroll, Director of Legal Operations, Technology and Strategy at Google, talks to Frankie Wang about the emerging field of legal operations, trends in legal technology, and the future of in-house legal teams. Mary Shen O`Carroll: Well, I joined Google about 12 years ago, and before that, I was at a law firm called Orrick. an international law firm. I`ve been on Google for about 12 years. Our team has grown considerably since then. I was the very first employee in legal operations. At the time, there wasn`t a lot of job description, and over time, our team grew a lot. Google`s longtime chief legal officer has left the tech giant to take on a leadership role at a contract management company. Mary O`Carroll is also leaving the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), where she has been Chair since January 2019. The global pandemic and the subsequent shift to remote work have only accelerated the importance of efficient processes and digitization in legal departments, according to O`Carroll.
She said the impact of recent financial pressures on legal services is reminiscent of how the 2008 financial crisis was a driving force behind the initial increase in legal transactions. Ever wanted to know what Legal Ops looks like on Google? Or are you curious to know what the president of the CLOC thinks about the future of Legal Ops? As a Legal Operations Associate, you`ll work on a variety of cross-functional contracts and initiatives to streamline procurement. They support you in the development of the legal team and its processes. “For legal operations, there`s nothing better than being president of CLOC and leading this incredible team of 60 people at Google,” O`Carroll said in an interview this week. “I`ve always had this passion for transforming the legal industry, and I`m certainly not done yet.” O`Carroll said part of the inspiration for her move to Ironclad is to address weaknesses in the legal industry`s contracting processes, which she calls “the 80% problem.” She said she believes procurement is the biggest challenge for legal services and that improvement could be transformative. If you look at what we call CLOC core 12, it`s very broad. That includes all the things we have talked about. In terms of titles and standard terminology, I think it will just take a while for everyone to figure out how to [label] all these things. And I think even in our own legal department, we have project managers, program managers, product managers, and it`s not always the same role. As time, space and function increase, I think we will achieve more clarity and alignment across the industry.
But right now, I think it`s a little bit any company that defines it for itself. When she started at Google internally, she said she found a radically different legal system than it is today. The fourth area of expertise is called technology enablement. It`s essentially the systems and tools, the way we evaluate and deliver technology solutions, that help the whole department grow with the business. Finally, one of the most traditional parts of legal operations is external consulting and supplier management, so external lawyers and other suppliers are hired. Proper sourcing, figuring out who is the right supplier for the type of work, then managing expenses, managing budgets, the real money we spend outside the business. Prior to joining Google, former investment banker O`Carroll worked for law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, where she worked as head of profitability and advised the large law firm on operational and management practices. The second area of expertise is data analytics, which is essentially business intelligence, dashboards, analytics and data management. The third pillar is education and knowledge management – this includes things like all the training materials we do for our lawyers, certification processes and onboarding new employees.