Mary O'Carroll has been a champion for legal operations and legal technology disruption in corporate legal departments for more than a decade.

O'Carroll said she fell into legal operations when she worked at the law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe in the early 2000s. Within her first week, she learned about how "backward the legal industry really was and how much they really needed to catch up with modern business practices." 

"Once I saw that [about] 20 years ago, I couldn't unsee it, and it's been my life's work to try and transform and push for change and to see those things happen. Sometimes you're a fixer or problem solver at heart and you see something and you've got to fix it," she said.

These days, O'Carroll serves as chief community officer of the digital contracting platform Ironclad and was president of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium for more than a decade. Before joining Ironclad last year, she spent more than a decade at Google as director of operations, technology and strategy.

O'Carroll talked with Corporate Counsel about how she got into legal ops and what an effective legal ops function should look like.

The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Corporate Counsel: You're the chief community officer at Ironclad. What does a chief community officer do?

Mary O'Carroll: From the start, Ironclad has always put community at the center of everything. Me coming into this role was really about doubling down on customer success, investing in the community, and taking it to the next level. My goal is really to create the world's leading community, focused on unlocking the value of digital contracts.

It's about creating more ways to support our customers. We want to add more ways for people to get value from the platform and from each other.

In our experience with Ironclad customers, the innovation and all the creativity is coming from the customers and they're using it in ways that we've never thought of. So, bringing them together gives you something very powerful.

CC: Prior to Ironclad, you were the director of operations, technology and strategy at Google. How did you get into legal operations and what was the highlight of your legal ops career?

MO: My background was in business. I was an investment banker and then a management and strategy consultant. I just kind of fell into legal operations when I joined Orrick and worked for the COO. That was my first entrance into the world of running the business side of a law firm and then, eventually, I got to Google.

The highlight of my legal ops career was really joining Ironclad because it was such a pivotal moment. We were all asking for legal technology to be a thing—for someone to create tools for us, and we were banging our heads against the wall.

Then CLOC came, and we all had this collective voice as an industry saying, "We all want tools, I want to do things better," and still, there wasn't a lot happening. But with that collective voice, there started to be investment, there started to be enough demand, and there started to be change in the industry.

Now, being able to be part of the company to help build it, it's just full circle. We were asking for a company like this to exist, and now I get to be part of building it. That is very rewarding.

CC: Can you tell us about this shift from legal operations to strategic operations that you so often talk about?

MO: I'll give you the short version. The idea is that legal ops is really at a turning point, as this role is emerging more and more in corporations of different sizes and industries in different geographies. And what we tried to do at CLOC was really define the core 12 [functions of legal operations]—like what is within the scope of this role.

And it's still so broad that it's difficult to find one person who can do all that. The result is that you have companies defining the role and hiring for the role in different ways. So you can have 10 legal ops managers but their jobs can look very different.

We're also at the point where some of the organizations that have had legal ops for some time are getting more mature, and their teams are bigger and starting to have layers.

It's not just one person. You actually have organizations built out and you have some bifurcation of the role, where you have the tactical role—you'll always need the people who are hands-on on the ground, keeping the trains running. And that's a really important part of what legal ops is. We set those processes, and we have to keep them going.

But there's another part of the role that is much more of the strategic mindset, and that's helping the general counsel or the CLO really understand what's happening in their department and what it needs to look like in the future. That role is helping to prioritize things, come up with the right initiatives, design the future of legal.

But there's another layer of development for legal operations to go to and embrace that strategic role. We are uniquely set up to see what's happening across the company and outside the company, and where there are opportunities to help achieve company-level goals and not just department-level goals.

So I want to push people in their [legal] careers to know that there's a lot more [to it] and we shouldn't wait around and hope that someone picks up on that and taps us on the shoulder and say I want you to be more of a strategic thinker. People don't think of lawyers as having that role. People don't think of legal as playing that role. 

CC: You spent more than a decade in legal ops. What was the biggest lesson you learned?

MO: The role is constantly evolving. There's no business-as-usual day. There are a countless number of things to fix. Maybe the biggest lesson is really to set expectations and to know how to prioritize. And you have to prioritize, because everywhere you look in your department, everyone you talk to, is going to surface an issue or problem. And they're all worthwhile things to fix.

But there's no way you can go around and fix them all at once. So it's really thinking about where the impact is, where the most resources—money, time, head count—is being spent, and where can you have the most impact.

And on top of that, learning to come up with your framework for prioritization so that you can set the expectation of why I have to say no to this project. And I think that is frustrating because they're all worth doing. It's just that you can't. If you want to move the needle, you have to focus.

CC: How would you define an effective legal ops function?

MO: It's really about optimizing a balance of speed, quality and cost and also thinking about the future and thinking beyond just legal.

How can you help—not just your lawyers—but your partners that you have throughout the company? So Success to me is having a happy clientele—which are your sales teams, your finance teams, your procurement teams, your business partners, your engineering teams—that you're advising. Your legal ops function should not just care about legal but how legal works across the company to get the corporate goals accomplished.

CC: You recently launched a podcast? Tell us about that. 

MO: The target audience is the same as our community—anyone who is interested in progressing the modernization of digital contracts and just business, generally.

It's really a conversation with people in the industry. We talk about everything from their backgrounds to the state of the industry to what they're doing that's interesting in their day-to-day jobs. It's new, so we'll learn and those conversations will change over time.

The impetus behind it is probably multifold. One of the things that I have loved about coming to Ironclad is that they've given me a platform to be able to advocate for the things that I'm passionate about, which is the transformation, the modernization of contracting and legal and business practices.

And frankly, I've been doing that my whole career. But now that I'm not sort of tethered to being a little bit more careful about what I said as the representative of Google or CLOC, I really have a lot more freedom to speak about the things that I think are broken and be very transparent in a way that I don't think I could have in my previous roles.

There are many interesting stories about how people have gotten to where they are and we all need each other. It just goes back to the basis of community matters. It's bringing people together, it's sharing stories, it's networking, and connecting people.