CCBJ Spring 2024 Edition

Corporate Counsel Business Journal SPRING 2024 EDITION VOLUME 32, NUMBER 3

Hire People with the Skills You Seek JAMIE SKLAR, GENERAL COUNSEL AND MANAGING DIRECTOR, EMIGRANT PARTNERS, SHARES WHO SHOULD COMPLEMENT YOUR STRENGTHS AND COMPENSATE FOR YOUR WEAKNESSES.

INSIDE A Leadership Call of a Lifetime Watch the Gap Moving Toward a New Paridigm: Strategic Counsel Outside Management The YMCA of Metro Chicago Maximizes Resource Efficiency and Connects More Communities AND MORE!

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JANUARY • FEBRUARY 2021

In This Issue SPRING 2024 EDITION VOLUME 32, NUMBER 3

AT THE TABLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2

LAW BUSINESS MEDIA

Kristin Calve EDITOR & PUBLISHER

Jennifer Coniglio ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER & VP, EVENTS

Neil Signore

SVP & MANAGING DIRECTOR OF EVENTS

Hire People with the Skills You Seek Kristin Calve

FRONT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

SENIOR DATABASE DIRECTOR

Lydia Boecke

ADMINISTRATOR, EDITORIAL AND GRAPHIC DESIGN

Watch The Gap

Strategic Partners

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Short Takes

Agiloft

PULSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12 12 Moving Towards A New Paradigm: Strategic Counsel Outside Management

15 The YMCA of Metro Chicago Maximizes .

Resource Efficiency and Connects More Communities Dave Parks

18 A Leadership Call of a Lifetime Jenn McCarron

Katie Mills ACCOUNTING

The participants in the CCBJ Network demonstrate, through their many contributions, their unwavering commitment to the advancement and success of corporate law departments. The engagement and support of these “partners of corporate counsel” assure we continue to develop and distribute the news and information this unique and sophisticated audience relies on to meet the evolving legal and business needs of their organizations.

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Renee Meisel

Matthew Tortora

NETWORK

LEGAL TECH SPOTLIGHT . . . . . . . . 20 20 Legal Tech Spotlight Series Trust & Will

American Arbitration Association Axiom Barnes & Thornburg Contract Logix Exterro Inc. McGuireWoods LLP Mitratech Thomson Reuters

Advisors CobbleStone Software Epiq OpenText

Contributors Advologix Epona Everlaw iManage Legal Files Lighthouse OneTrust Onit Protiviti SimpleLegal SCCE Trellis UnitedLex Please help us improve and expand our services to corporate counsel by sharing your ideas with our publisher, Kristin Calve, at 203-722-1188 or kcalve@ccbjournal.com.

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Kristin Calve At the Table

Hire People with the Skills You Seek

 Jamie Sklar, General Counsel of Emigrant Partners LLC shares how who should complement your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses.

CCBJ: What led you to join Emigrant Partners?

Jamie Sklar: In December 2018, Emigrant Bank acquired, under contentious circumstances, the 25 percent equity stake of Fiduciary Network LLC that had been held by the previous management team. A former colleague who I worked with at a distressed debt fund manager years earlier reached out and told me that he and the incoming CEO were looking to build a new management team. The opportunity looked like the best of both worlds: coming in on a new ground floor of a venture that we basically had to figure out from scratch (there was zero transition from the former management team) combined with a strong, very profitable business, backed up by the balance sheet of a solid bank. I left my position as a partner at a highend, boutique law firm and jumped right in. We created Emigrant Partners LLC to make new investments, flew around the country to meet our partner firms, came up with ways to simplify and improve the business model and very quickly started sourcing and executing new investments.

Please tell us about your leadership style and who or what has influenced it?

I put a large amount of trust in my team-avoiding micromanaging while making myself available for coaching and consultation.

A few years ago, I had a test called the Kairos Assessment conducted on me. The purpose of the assessment is to identify one’s cognitive preferences, i.e., how one tends to think, listen, observe, move, read and talk. Among other things, I learned that I have an “associative preference” to thinking, which means that I take in large amounts of information, recognize patterns, generate ideas and

improvise. The flip side of that is that I am not as good at screening out distractions and following specified processes (i.e., a “selective preference”). Armed with this insight, I have adopted a style of listening to the views and perspectives of the people I work with, making connections with my existing views and perspectives, and

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using this combined information to set direction. When I have confidence that the people I am working with have the skills and attention to detail that I seek, I put a large amount of trust in them, avoiding micromanaging and making myself available for coaching and consultation.

What qualities do you look for when you’re hiring new people for your team?

As an initial bar, I look for high levels of intelligence, legal knowledge and ability to perform the basic functions needed of them. Once those boxes are checked, I look for the ability to complement my strengths and compensate for my weaknesses by having more of a selective preference. I see this as part of the goal of forming a team that provides more value than the sum of its parts. Then, most importantly, I look for people who show high levels of integrity and the ability to put ego aside (both theirs and those they will work with, including me) and be wholly focused on achieving the best results for the company. I do not want team members to be afraid to challenge me.

On the contrary, when a team member can get me to see an issue from a different perspective and take a different path that will lead to better results, I see them as adding immense value.

How would you describe the culture of your organization?

We are a small team of 11 people supported by the resources of the larger Emigrant enterprise. Several members of the team work remotely most of the time.

The whole team meets over Zoom at least once per week and in person once or twice per month. Everybody understands and is focused on the same big picture goals of (i) ensuring that we invest in the highest quality firms poised for significant continued growth and (ii) tapping the experience and expertise of the team members to help our partner firms achieve their highest levels of success

and value. While each member of the senior team has a primary area of responsibility, we routinely contribute to each other’s areas and work together on strategic matters.

What is the most influential career advice you’ve ever received?

A partner at the law firm where I summered as a law student, told us that you know your work product is solid when you feel it reflects your best efforts and you’re proud of it. I have always felt that this way of thinking pushes people to a higher standard than externally imposed criteria. It also makes working much more satisfying and enjoyable, which is an absolute necessity for anybody who intends to practice law at a high level for the duration of their working lives.

What changes would you like to see within the legal profession?

Whether we like it or not, the profession is in the process of changing dramatically with recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI). I would like to see AI employed in a manner that doesn’t replace lawyers but allows them to spend less time and energy on mundane work and more on creative thinking and exercising judgment. One challenge that the profession will have to navigate is how to get newer lawyers to develop judgement and creative legal thinking without the experience that doing the mundane work affords. I don’t have a ready answer for this but I think a helpful model can be found in the banking profession, where people have learned to provide higher levels of value through the use of spreadsheets and other modern tools that have made crunching numbers by hand unnecessary. 

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SPRING 2024 EDITION

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Watch the Gap

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GCs and C-Suite Leaders Out of Sync In this piece from Thomson Reuters institute, William Josten, Senior Manager, Enterprise Content, discusses the alignment – or lack thereof – between General Counsels and C-Suite leaders, who understandably view the enterprise and the role of the law department through different lenses. In many cases, Josten says, there is alignment of priorities, but not always. “In other instances, there are apparent gaps, however; but these gaps actually matter less as we dive deeper into them,” Josten writes. “Yet, some areas present true gaps in the understanding of upon which areas GCs think their departments should focus and what the C-Suite wants. This leaves the typical legal department leader with a choice: Try to craft a message to demonstrate the department’s broader alignment with enterprise goals, or craft a different message designed to influence the C-Suite’s perceptions.” The accompanying chart illustrates the competing realities, which are most pronounced in areas such as the quality of advice GCs are providing to the enterprise, which is obviously of concern, but Josten’s analysis is nuanced. Instead, he opines, GCs likely see quality of their advice to be table stakes. “If it’s something that’s done as a matter of course, it doesn’t need to be an area of particular focus anymore because it’s more of a daily reality,” he says. Read more at Thomson Reuters Institute.

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Contributors Briefly

Thanks to the law firms, technology companies, alternative legal service providers, management consultants and other supporters of corporate law departments who share their insights and expertise through the CCBJ network. Your parti­cipation is appreciated.

OpenText Completes Divestiture of Application Modernization and Connectviity (AMC) Business to Rocket Software for $2.275B Mitratech's AdvanceLaw Marks 5th Year innovative Diversity Membership CobbleStone Software Included in United Nations Global Compact Once Again Agiloft Selected To Join Oracle ISV Accelerator For SAAS Initative CobbleStone Software Dives Deep Into the Benefits of AIBased Contact Mangement Bayshore HealthCare Automates Contracting Processes and Drives Regulatory Compliance CobbleStone Software Hosting Webinar of The Effects of Trauma and Compassion Fatigue on the Lawyer Who Cares Axiom Completes 250 Large Legal Projects, Expands Program with Law Firm Services

Renee Meisel is EVP and General Counsel at UnitedLex. Renee heads up the global legal function which includes commercial transactions, dispute resolution, compliance and privacy, and risk management for the company. In 2023, Renee launched PracticLaw where she provided General Counsel and Chief Operating Officer services to small and medium business and advised larger companies on global data privacy issues, data governance, and data security. Renee recieved her J.D. from the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and achieved dual bachelor's degrees from the University of Oklahoma in French & English Literature.

She is a native of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma and a proud member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Jenn McCarron is President of CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) and is an innovative legal and tech leader. With her creativity-first lens, McCarron builds teams from the ground up that revolutionize major organizations and the industry at large. She also brings this ingenuity to the legal transformation-themed podcast, "CLOC Talk," which examines both the technical and philosophical elements of the field. Most recently, McCarron served as the Director of Legal Operations and Technology at Netflix, prior to that she held roles at Cisco.

Dave Parks is the Chief Marketing Officer of Contract Logix. He manages the company's overall marketing strategy and initiatives including product marketing, demand gen, digital, contrent, and public relations. He has over two decades of strong product and content experience having served in senior marketing roles with Progress, Ciena, Lucent, and Cascade Communications. Dave is a passionate marketer who loves creating content that answers people's questions and delivers his audience value. He holds a BS from Northeastern University.

CobbleStone Software Announces Their Contract Management Conference in October 2024 AAA-ICDR Announces Enchancements to Mass Arbitration Rules and Fee Schedules Carly Ginley Joins McGuireWoods as Partner Nicholas Soarokhanian Joins Barnes & Thornburg in Minneapolis as Partner Contract Logix Expands and Enhances Groundbreaking Contract Collaboration Technology

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Jamie Sklar is the General Counsel and a Managing Director of Emigrant Partners. He is a corporate attorney with more than 24 years of experience managing mergers and acquisitions, private equity, speciality finance, fund formation, and other complex transactions.

Jamie graduatied from McGill University in Montréal with 2 law degrees with Great Distinction and an MBA.

SH O T A K RT

ES

Bob Ambrogi, a legal technology guru, recently took a look on his popular LawSites blog at the “5 most momentous legal tech fails” of the last decade. As you will see, some went out with a bang and some with a whimper. They are:

Exterro and MH Service Host Landmark Partner Day, Uniting India's DFIR Community

Atrium, a company with a dual-entity model as both a law firm and a technology company, similar to another fabled failure, Clearspire, which flopped after 4 years.

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, writes Ambrogi, noting that Atrium itself fizzled in 3 short years.

National Study Reveals In House Legal Teams Faces as Perfect Storm of Rising Law Firm Costs and Talent Shortages Amidst Increasing Worklaods and Conplexity

QuickLegal, in a ripe-for-the-tabloids tale that includes charges of impersonating a lawyer, Derek Bluford, legal tech entrepreneur who in better times was selected to appear on Shark Tank, was sentenced to 7 years in prison amid the wreckage of QuickLegal.

Agiloft Strengthens Connectivity Data-First Agreement Platform with New Google Docs App and Custom API Creation Platform

ROSS Intelligence, a precocious company focused on using artificial intelligence to supercharge legal research, saw its sweetheart run collapse when Thomson Reutres sued for allegedly filching content from Westlaw to build a competing research platform, allegations ROSS vehemently denied and continues to fight in a neverending lawsuit funded by insurers.

Thomson Reuters FirstQuarter 2024 Earnings Announcement and Webcast Scheduled for May 2, 2024

LexisNexis Firm Manager, which seems to have been sucked into a whirlwind of cloud-based practice management platforms for smaller firms, came to market in the late 2002. After a rocky start, LexisNexis went back to the drawing board and retooled the product, but it was too little too late as they shut it down in 2017.

Gavelytics, a litigation analytics company with a pithy name, should have had a happier fate based on its ability to attract significant funding, as it still closed its doors abruptly in 2022, though the blow was softened when another litigation analytics company, Pre/Dicta, acquired the court data Gavelytics had amassed.

Rebecca Bernhard Joins Barnes & Thornburg in Minneapolis as Partner

Rick Valentine Joins Exterro as New Chief Customer Officer

OpenText Strengthens X12 Collaboration to Accelerate the Future of Supply Chain B2B Data Exchange Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE solutions are now SAP Endorsed Apps Available on SAP Store Epiq to Host Sustainability Webinar on Earth Day, April 22 McDermott Will & Emery advises Main Capital Partners on the aquistion of UK-based Isograph LTD, a leading provider of safety engineering software, by PeakAvenue GmbH

SUBMIT YOUR ANNOUNCEMENTS TO editor@ccbjournal.com

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JANUARY • FEBRUARY 2021

CCBJ’S 6TH ANNUAL WOMEN IN BUSINESS & LAW Conference will be held in Tarrytown, NY November 2024.

We are looking for speaker nominations!

Email Associate Publisher, Jennifer Coniglio at jconiglio@ccbjournal.com

Pulse Moving Toward A New Paradigm: Strategic Outside Counsel Management RENEE MEISEL UNITEDLEX

Cost pressure is accelerating in many industries, fueled by a variety of factors, such as persistent inflation and high interest rates, and legal is no exception. At the same time, corporate legal departments are grappling with new and very demanding legal issues such as the emergence and use of AI, environmental and social governance (ESG), deglobalization, and political unrest. These challenges demand attention during a time when corporate legal departments are left with limited resources and tighter internal and external budgets, limiting their capacity to act as holistic managers of legal risks and deal with these and other emerging challenges When faced with difficult environments, corporate legal

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departments have historically turned to traditional outside counsel management levers to reduce costs. These are primarily tactical efforts, involving:

• Renegotiating hourly rates and/or “freezing” rates • Conducting RFPs to select vendors based on cost, scope, and expertise “right sizing” • Facilitating reverse e-auctions • Developing alternative fee arrangements • Creating panels of preferred law firms and third-party legal service providers • Enforcing billing guidelines

However, as pressures invariably increase on corporate legal departments to deliver greater business value, a pure cost-reduction focus for outside counsel management is insufficient to meet these demands. Instead, legal departments should turn to a strategic approach to outside counsel management that focuses less on tactical cost reductions and more on driving overall value and efficiency.

Moving toward a new paradigm Strategic outside counsel management moves beyond cost structure to determine the value created by decisions related to engaging outside counsel. It is based on 3 broader paradigms or best practices:

• Determining whether to make or buy Strategic outside counsel management challenges whether specific services need to be sourced externally or could be established internally and provided inhouse.

This opens various opportunities for insourcing with substantial implications on costs, speed and quality of services, and client proximity.

• Disaggregating legal services Instead of a 1-stop shopping approach with a top-tier or otherwise familiar law firm, strategic outside counsel management requires a detailed understanding of which specific services can be effectively separated and procured on the market. Corporate legal departments use data to split complex workstreams into distinct clusters of work and then assign each cluster to the most suitable vendor by leveraging the full legal ecosystem. For example, certain firms or vendors will be more effective at completing repeatable tasks with speed and precision by leveraging technology, while preferred law firms may be better placed to conduct complex legal analysis relating to the same matter.

• Going beyond the awarding phase (of a single matter) Strategic outside counsel management involves managing, tracking, and controlling the full engagement life cycle, from selecting a legal vendor to executing the work and closing a specific matter.

This comprehensive approach includes regular performance reviews at both the matter level and firm level, considering both quantitative and qualitative measures, alongside the vendor’s performance in the aggregate over the course of an individual matter and the long-term business relationship.

To learn more about shifting to strategic outside counsel management, view the Buying Legal Council NYC conference panel “Building your dream team: transform OCM & reduce spend with AI and trusted data expertise.”

Getting from tactical to strategic Transitioning from tactical to strategic outside counsel management takes time and effort. Yet in an industry rooted in tradition, many corporate legal departments have not yet established a legal operations function and continue to rely on traditional outside counsel management practices, making it incredibly difficult to meet expectations as enterprises look for legal to drive greater business value.

Three critical success factors are particularly important in developing a strategic outside counsel management function:

• Understanding client value Received and perceived value in their many forms, including the quality of service, time-to-market, risk mitigation capabilities, costs, revenue opportunities, and creation of value, needs to be assessed from the perspective of the business clients of a corporate legal department. This is also true for the value provided by law firms. The potential to create and improve

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value becomes a key consideration in assessing the performance of vendors.

• Building a new target operating model through disaggregation

The ability to deconstruct and disaggregate a specific legal service enables the assessment of insourcing potential and helps select the best vendors from the legal ecosystem, even if a service needs to be sourced and aggregated from various vendors. The degree of insourcing has a substantial impact on the target operating model of a corporate legal department. In that sense, outside counsel management and the ideal balance of insourcing and outsourcing become key drivers impacting the configuration of the target operating model of a corporate legal department.

• Leveraging data and technology Driving the disaggregation of legal services, measuring value creation, executing holistic vendor performance reviews, and leveraging the full legal ecosystem 14

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requires access to strategic data.

Therefore, leading corporate legal departments are systematically exploring ways to get access to wider data pools (often in cooperation with other functions like finance or procurement) and establish specific data pools with corresponding analytics capabilities beyond current matter management, reverse e-auctions, and e-billing platforms. 

Renee Meisel is EVP and General Counsel at UnitedLex. Renee heads up the global legal function which includes commercial transactions, dispute resolution, compliance and privacy, and risk management for the company. In 2023, Renee launched PracticLaw where she provided General Counsel and Chief Operating Officer services to small and medium business and advised larger companies on global data privacy issues, data governance, and data security. Renee recieved her J.D. from the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and achieved dual bachelor's degrees from the University of Oklahoma in French & English Literature. She is a native of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma and a proud member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

The YMCA of Metro Chicago Maximizes Resource Efficency and Connects More Communities DAVE PARKS CONTRACTLOGIX

The YMCA was established more than 165 years ago as a place where community members could find growth and support. Today, the YMCA of Metroplitan Chicago is comprised of 14 community hubs, 5 camps and nearly 100 extension sites, making the Y one of the largest social enterprises in Chicago. More than half a million Chicagoans rely on the Y each year for health, wellbeing, and individual empowerment. The Y’s mission is to strengthen “the community by connecting all people to their purpose, potential, and each other,” and its vision is “to be at the forefront of advancing society by serving as a trusted convener, connector and catalyst for all communities.”

The organization turned to Contract Logix’s contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform to centralize and secure its contracts, mitigate risk and help the YMCA’s legal team optimize processes. It needed a CLM partner that could help them maximize resource efficiency and help guide the digital transformation of its contract management process, allowing it to focus on its core community mission.

Business Challenge The YMCA of Metro Chicago partners with numerous corporations, foundations, philanthropists, research institutes and more. It needed a solution that would allow it to easily, securely and accurately store and manage more than 7,600 contracts and more than 43,000 related documents, as well as be able to provide a holistic and accurate view of all its contracts and grants for auditing and compliance purposes.

“We needed a way to just keep everything as digital as possible,” said Justin Shlensky, Vice President of Legal & Risk Management at YMCA of Metro Chicago. “We were looking for a very utilitarian tool to help digitize some of [our] processes, manage the contract data and keep it in a secure location. The Contract Logix platform’s contract versioning, business continuity and reporting capabilities,

in a very user-friendly interface, have been incredibly useful.”

The YMCA of Metro Chicago’s legal department consists of a Contracts Manager/Paralegal, General Counsel, VP of Legal & Risk Management and Legal Counsel who orchestrate contracts as part of its portfolio of work, working with different departments within the organization on both contract review and creation.

The team collaborates with IT, the VP of Continuous Improvement and Audit, a 4-person Grants team and many other executives, directors and managers across the organization. The Y needed a more robust CLM platform to help streamline its contracting activities while ensuring business rules were followed in a compliant and automated manner. It also wanted to ensure that contract requests, reviews, approvals and signatures were routed to the appropriate person in the organization, with the correct access permissions, every time.

The Contract Logix Solution The YMCA of Metro Chicago chose Contract Logix because the data-driven digital platform allows the organization to have instant visibility into contract data, provides out-ofthe-box templates, automated workflows that allow them to execute contracts faster and frees up legal resources to focus on the core mission. In addition, Contract Logix’s robust security options and the ability to standardize and centralize contract documents in the cloud-based repository with real-time reporting, analytics and visibility, were key differentiators.

“The Contract Logix platform allows our Contracts Manager to establish new files, notify assigned attorneys, show any intake data of what’s requested and attach relevant files and supporting documentation such as someone’s certificate of insurance,” said Shlensky. “The attorneys then work with our internal department clients to make sure we meet their needs and understand all the stages and status of each project. It’s a very precise way to keep track of all that data so we’re not searching in

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various folders trying to find items. We are becoming more efficient with our time management, because it is a very easy and clean platform to use.”

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The Contract Logix platform has provided YMCA of Chicago Metro with:

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• A powerful data-driven repository to store, search, and

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analyze all contracts and contract-related documents securely. All contractual details including facility licenses, vendor agreements and insurance certificates are at their fingertips. The ability to automatically compare contract versions to ensure that changes are never missed was also a key differentiator.

A centralized process for requesting and reviewing contracts throughout the organization, saving significant time, money, and freeing up legal resources and grants teams to focus on strategic activities Automated workflows to accelerate the progress of

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contracts throughout contract creation, reviews, approvals, tasks and notifications.

Role-based and feature-based security to ensure employees can only access contract-related information that is appropriate for them to see.

Integrations with the Y’s key business applications, including ISBE for grants.

Results Digital contract transformation and process automation has delivered considerable reduction in time and resources spent managing contracts. Without Contract Logix, the Y wouldn’t have been able to accommodate the additional 1,000 new contracts they’ve executed in the last 12 months.

The platform’s reporting features also allow the legal team to graphically demonstrate where contracts are throughout each stage of their process including request,

If we didn't have Contract Logix or a system in place, people would be pulling their hair out."

Shlensky. “It always allows routing for signatures, version updates and corrections. This enables the team to mitigate risk, ensure compliance with the terms and obligations associated with grants, and automatically maintain an audit trail.”

draft, negotiation, approval and signature.

“We have had great collaboration with our VP of Audit whose job is to make sure that everyone is compliant with both business and external rules,” added Shlensky. “For example, he asked us to export the data fields of every contract we reviewed in 2023, and then he looked at how many of those contracts resulted in purchase orders being made. The Contract Logix platform allows us to show that the invoice matches the fiscal data. We were also able to quickly show him how many contracts we have with each vendor. The platform has been a tremendous help in complying with audit requests.”

Perhaps the greatest value the Y achieved by using the Contract Logix platform was freeing up the organization’s growing Grants department. The in-platform E-Signature integration has resulted in a tremendous increase in contracts signed electronically, enabling the Y to execute contracts much faster to secure more funding and provide additional and improved services across Chicago.

“The grants and legal team can work within Contract Logix to review terms and conditions for grants they are applying for, as well as any unusual clauses,” noted

“It’s hard to quantify the ROI. Contract Logix cuts down on the use of time and internal resources that it previously took to manage all the data.

Before we would be asking the questions, ‘Do we need a temp? Do we need a second? Do we need someone part-time to help with this?’ If we didn’t have Contract Logix or a system in place, people would be pulling their hair out.”

The YMCA of Metro Chicago plans to continue rolling out the Contract Logix platform to assist additional departments in the future. 

Dave Parks is the Chief Marketing Officer of Contract Logix. He manages the company's overall marketing strategy and initiatives including product marketing, demand gen, digital, contrent, and public relations. He has over two decades of strong product and content experience having served in senior marketing roles with Progress, Ciena, Lucent, and Cascade Communications. Dave is a passionate marketer who loves creating content that answers people's questions and delivers his audience value. He holds a BS from Northeastern University.

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A Leadership Call of a Lifetime

JENN MCCARRON CORPORATE LEGAL OPERATIONS CONSORTIUM (CLOC)

CCBJ: Why did you join CLOC as President? Is it quite a bear in terms of a leadership role.

Jenn McCarron: That’s certainly a way to put it! A vacancy was opening after Mike Haven announced he was stepping down. I threw my name in the hat because I’ve been around this organization since its early days. I have served CLOC for a decade.

I love CLOC. It has backed me through my personal 10 -12year career trajectory, from a legal tech person to a legal ops exec. I feel I owe the organization a lot and have a lot to give back too in terms of service, mentorship, content and breaking through to the unknown. I love CLOC’s immense growth and significance in the industry. This is leadership at another level.

To lead CLOC, and all its business affairs in front of our growing global community is the leadership call of a lifetime.

Under my leadership, CLOC is ushering in Legal Ops 3.0. We need change. We need refinement; we need an iteration. We need to retell our story and our value proposition. This is not a blank canvas. The CLOC founders created the wonderful Core 12 that’s now on version 3.0.

And we’re now creating the next thing and building from years of input, experience and stories from our community.

Historically, CLOC has drawn the map and brought our members along with us. Some of us are already in “3.0 roles” and some are starting to cross over. We want to help shatter the ceiling. I love that as an opportunity. That’s why I joined. It’s an opportunity of a lifetime to lead, to grow and to learn. And then, with the industry’s input, go even higher.

Let’s talk about the future. I know you don’t know where it’s going to go, but I’m sure that you came on board with a vision for where it could possibly go beyond contract management.

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My vision for CLOC is to help it achieve its mission and vision - to advance the business and practice of law.

My vision for CLOC is to help it achieve its mission, which is to advance the business and practice of law. We need to build warriors out of the members as the membership base are the ones fighting the good fight with legal leadership and sometimes, they get lost in the fight.

Legal operations can be a big, bloody “Game-of-Thrones” multi-battle scene. It’s so big and loud and noisy and we have to fight to advance how legal departments run. That’s CLOC’s mission and it’s a good one. We’ve been adding to and refining our mission during my first few months in this role and it’s all about building up and supporting our members and what they take back with them when they go and do the work. If we support people to be their best, give them resources and a place to engage and have meaningful conversations, then they will advance. Those are CLOC’s 3 Strategic Pillars: Community, Content and Conversation.

And what do we mean by that? You can guess what Community means. It’s hosting amazing gatherings small, medium and large - for people to come together, engage, learn and be validated. They come away with best practices, go back to work and have an actual impact at their companies.

For Content, we draw out some of the best-of-the-best speakers, the most-loved sessions and compelling presentations, and turn that knowledge into actionable content and share it into the ecosystem so people can learn from it and apply it to their roles.

Last is Conversation, our newest focus. Conversation is where Community and Content meets engagement.

For example, when looking through comments to a CLOC content posting on social media, you find people adding their experience and taking it further. That spin out

Another area of focus for CLOC is career frameworks, as we chart this new field.

People are a little lost right now but actually, there are more jobs than ever. It’s hard to see those aspirational positions at the top of your career ladder when you are a few rungs down.

If I took my career arc as an example, I had my head down for 12 years, navigating a career that started from a 2-day temp placement at the startup Tandberg, to the director of legal ops at Netflix. I bring that experience to my role as president of CLOC.

becomes new a new conversation to funnel back into the content and/or community machine. These 3 pillars feed off of one another and up the content game, making the CLOC community the most compelling place to come learn, meet people, get validation and then create an impact on your business or your legal department. That’s the power of CLOC. When content is distributed in a digitally engaging format, people just absorb it more quickly in today’s modern age.

We’re all on LinkedIn, but increasingly also on platforms like TikTok. We’re scrolling as we are learning, growing and connecting.

My goal is to get CLOC into our members’ scroll. I know CLOC has some of the best content and some of the best leaders, but if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, did it make a sound? The goal is to turn up that sound, so our content reaches as many people as possible and advances the business and practice of law. That’s my ambition for CLOC during my presidency.

What does it look like to go from a legal tech professional to a legal tech executive, regardless of industry?

That’s just one example.

We want to provide a career framework so people can feel heard as well as understand the timeframe and skills it takes to get there. 

Jenn McCarron is President of CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) and is an innovative legal and tech leader. With her creativity-first lens, McCarron builds teams from the ground up that revolutionize major organizations and the industry at large. She also brings this ingenuity to the legal transformation-themed podcast, "CLOC Talk," which examines both the technical and philosophical elements of the field. Most recently, McCarron served as the Director of Legal Operations and Technology at Netflix, prior to that she held roles at Cisco.

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LEGAL TECH STARTUP SPOTLIGHT CEO: Cody Barbo HQ: San Diego, CA # of Employees: 107 Total Raised: $50.46M Institutional Investors: • Affinius Capital • American Express Ventures • Aramex Ventures @trustandwill

14.0x MEDIAN

SIZE MULTIPLE

https://trustandwill.com/ Description:

Developer of an online estate planning platform designed to provide an easy, fast, and secure way to set up an estate plan online. The company's platform modernizes estate planning with a design-first approach, layered on top of customer support throughout the process, making estate planning simple, affordable and accessible for clients, enabling clients to provide familirs with a better way to plan for the future.

Most Recent Financing Status

The company raised $15 million of venture funding from Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, Touchdown Ventures, Aramex Ventures, and SEI Ventures (US) on December 4, 2023. American Express Ventures, Forecast Labs, Affinius Capital and Second Alpha Partners also participated in the round. The funds with be used on scale operations and further integrate with leading financial instiutions.

Source: Pitchbook (As of Oct 2023)

TO NOMINATE A STARTUP TO BE FEATURED, EMAIL KCALVE@CCBJOURNAL.COM.

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