Olga Mack (Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM)

Olga Mack, a veteran in-house technology lawyer with a track record of advocating to increase the number of women in corporate boardrooms, is set to take on the role of CEO and chairperson of the board for a Silicon Valley legal technology company. 

Parley Pro, a Los Altos-based company that provides an online platform for real-time, multi-party collaboration on contracts and contract management, announced Monday that Mack would take on the CEO role. 

In a phone interview in the run-up to Monday's announcement, Mack, who has held a variety of legal and business-side roles at technology companies, said that she's never been "driven" by job title, but has focused on the size of an impact she can make and the amount of learning she can do in a particular position.

Mack was most recently VP of strategy at Quantstamp, a Y Combinator-backed blockchain company that conducts security audits for smart contracts. Prior to that Mack served as general counsel for software sales company ClearSlide Inc., and before that, as assistant general counsel at online dating service Zoosk Inc. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Mack also practiced at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati early in her career.

Mack said that her weekly column on legal blog Above the Law and her connections in the technology industry led to multiple opportunities to interview for CEO positions, but that the Parley Pro opportunity was a natural fit, given that her current position at Quantstamp has given her a look at where contracts are heading.

"Because I'm a product counsel by training, I have a very high standard about what the product should be," Mack said. "I want to have a larger industry conversation what the contracts are, and what we think of them and how we live with them."

Mack said that she hopes the industry starts to think of contracts as digital assets, rather than pieces of paper that sit in a drawer until a problem comes up. She hopes that her new company can help people approach contract drafting and negotiation as a team, rather than as solo endeavor. She also added that since contracts have gone digital, they should be managed in a way that companies can monitor and measure them to create benchmarks to make processes more efficient and humane. 

"I'm a huge believer in this human-centric process of design," Mack said. 

WIth Mack's appointment, the company announced that co-founder and current CEO Lilian Caldeira will step down to become chief product officer and continue to serve on the company's board.  

"We have experienced tremendous success, growing over 300% in the last year alone, and Olga is the perfect person to take the helm and lead our company into its next phase," Caldeira said in a press release announcing the moves. 

Mack has been a vocal advocate for gender equity in the legal profession and the tech sector, as the founder of Women Serve on Boards, a movement that put pressure on companies that lacked female board members. She is also a co-founder of advocacy group Women In-House Support Equality and SunLaw Group, a networking organization for women in-house lawyers.

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