Building a Global Legal Operations Community With Anne Graue & Colin McCarthy

Made with speech-to-text software, so a few words may be off.

0:00You're listening to the Contract Heroes Podcast, your one-stop shop for all things contract management. And now here are your hosts, Marc and Pepe. Colin, thank you so much for joining us. We're really happy to have you here. Before Pepe kind of gives us an understanding of what we're gonna be chatting about today, I'd love to get a little bit more information for those that don't know you, who are probably few and far between, just a bit more information, you know, on the team's backgrounds, and then we'll dive in. So Colin, why don't we kick things off with you, and then we'll go over to Anne. Okay. I'll keep it high level, so we just kinda jump in and, you know, get the crux of it and then, you know, we'll move on to Anne. So my background was an attorney, went into legal operations, worked at companies like Sonos, GlobalFoundries, Rubrik and Twitter. When I was there, I set up a community called Legal Operators. Legal Operators had about, you know, 5,200 members, and then we reached about 52,000. That was almost 10X people globally with a magazine. We did a conference called Summit by the Sea.

1:06Uh, one of the things at Legal Operators we focused on, uh, decision makers and above. And now new community. Sold that, uh, December 2022, non-compete ran up, and then me and Anne are about to take over the world with OLC, Our Legal Community. Perfect. In some words to me, um, so I'm Anne, I'm based in Germany. Colin is based in San Francisco, by the way. And my background is, uh, I have been doing everything in legal probably possible in the past. I started, uh, working as an associate at Clifford Chance. Didn't like it too much. Went into becoming a criminal judge. Wasn't fancying that one as well, so I went in-house, and for the past 10 years I worked in different in-house departments such as Volkswagen, Audi, but also some scale-ups like Tier Mobility, for example, the E-Scooter company. And the past four years I've been, uh, self-employed and was a fractional general counsel for multiple startups and scale-ups here in Germany.

2:03And, um, so yes, I'm really, really excited to now, uh, scale things up and work with Colin together on forming OLC, Our Legal Community, which is gonna be a global community network. This is awesome, and I feel really related to your story because I'm also a lawyer, but decided I didn't like it that much working in a law firm, and I think this is much fun, right? To know more people, right? To have this global reach on how to interact with all the different legal communities and how to make legal teams more efficient, and that's pretty much what are we going to talk about with our founders of Our Legal Community. Um, let's start to kick off this chat with... Because I'm very curious on how you guys came out with, with this community building, right? Especially when you have this legal background. I think it's the perfect combination of what Colin has been doing in the past, building Legal Operators, and my experience as someone working in-house in different departments, in different ecosystems.

3:02I think partnering up just made sense because we've seen both worlds, like the legal operations world heavily and, uh, the in-house world heavily, and we just realized that things are progressing globally, questions are asked globally, and so it just made sense to tackle this community from a global approach. Colin, what do you think about it? Yeah, look, I'd have to agree with that. Like very high level, the same thing, right? There was synergies from both sides. We've known each other since 2018. Big important thing is trust is kind of built. We've come into each other's worlds. We've seen them and we're like, we've worked together over here in the US and in Europe, and we're like, "Let's do this. Let's drive it on together." And yeah, I think- And it's been a lot of fun since then. Been a lot of fun. And, and how you guys decided, like what was like the shifting point where you were like more focusing to events and then you said, "Okay, we need to build that community"? What happened there?

3:57You want me to jump in, Anne, or, or like... Or- Yeah. Okay. So I would say we got fairly good at doing events, right? Did hundreds of them, focused on and did them well. Did a lot of webinars, so started getting hundreds of hours of content. And where we decided to work together, probably about 18 months ago, I was taking a couple of companies into Europe and the UK and I was like, "Anne, can you help me do this on the event side?" So we've spent a lot of time together, working together over, over in Europe, and we're kind of looking at the landscape a little differently. Anne had a network that I didn't realize. I knew she had a big network, but she put 25 to 30 attorneys at every dinner. We've seen about 450 of them in an 18-month period, right? Or, or 14-month period, 18 events. And having discussions with a lot of those people and seeing the gaps, like Anne and I were, were like, "Where are the gaps?" It's barriers to entry. The landscape in Europe is a little...

4:57Very, very smart people, but a little further down the road than the US is. So we were like, "Okay, what could we do to solve this?" And one of the things was, if we start to standardizing the certification and giving people a barrier to entry and make it more readily available, then we would actually create the standard for people to hire. So that was one of the things with the certification, to make it like more sticky with the community. So we set up the community. It still has a wait list. This is very fresh, right? But they're at the door lining up, and then Anne's gonna let them in one of these days, but- ... we're, we're still creating the anticipation, and then we're gonna allow it to flow in and, you know, we're kinda building it as we see it, right? Anne, do you have anything to add to that? Yes, maybe just to add some more background about, uh, the certification program, uh, because this is gonna be an interesting one from my perspective. It's a certification program for legal operations specifically.

5:54So it's, um, as Colin said, we, we want to, uh, kind of badge and certify people so that they have the entry point for legal operations possibilities. And landscape, what Colin described, uh, is different in Europe at the moment still is basically legal operations is evolving. It's becoming a thing, but it's not as frequently yet, uh, as it is in the United States. And so that's where we are thinking, let's bring in top leaders who have done this so many times in the US, who have so many years of experience, and have them being the coaches, basically for the people who are just getting started and who are just having their first legal operations position, for example, here in Europe, and then to get them off the ground running. Can I just add to that before you jump in, Pepe? You know, I know, I know you're chomping to get a question in there, but it's like, the way I kind of see the world, right, it's not just US-centered focus. This should be everywhere, right? It's like, okay, yes, it might've been born... I think some people say, "Oh, it was born out of the West Coast, this legal ops thing."

6:52People have been doing this 20 and 30 years in New York and other places in some of the bigger companies, right? Where, where they've had, like, two or three people working for them doing this type of work. It's just got a life, it's got a brand, it's got an image. There's a lot of momentum going. Every community has added to this, not just one community, right? And it's gonna take every community again to add to it to make it even bigger and make it resonate. What we think about, like, doing this entry level course is a minimal threshold of competency, so every HR person that's hiring gets to look at this and say, "Okay, they did six to eight hours work on a high level what legal operations is." And the folks that we're targeting are legal adjacent. They could be paralegals, they could be legal assistants. They could be attorneys that wanna shift in their career and see, hey, what is this? Right? They could be legal ops folks that are doing the work and really good at it, but they're siloed. We wanna open up the landscape for them, right?

7:48And just give them the opportunity to kind of see all the way across the spectrum. Everything from th- we know that, like, if you know finances in legal, y- your director level and above, there's a good opportunity your salary and your career is gonna shift. Let's say you're a paralegal in Mississippi right now. If you're going by the national standard, you're probably earning $40,000. You probably have the skill set to make thr- $200,000 or $300,000 if you just open up your blinkers a little bit, right? And just say, "Turn to the left, turn to the right," you know? Do a little bit of work, and then your career could change overnight, right? Especially living in this remote work, right? So that's how I kind of see the world, is give people access and let, l- let the chips lay where they lie, you know? It's like blocking people off, making it invisible. I, I don't think it's done intentionally, but I think, like, if, if you don't give people the access, they'll never know. We don't know what we don't know. And then my thing is, like, let's...

8:44how do we empower and bring people up? So I w- I just wanna put this out there, because I'm passionate about this, Anne's passionate about this. We are putting our money where our mouth is. We are not taking sponsorship for this, right? We are going all in on making this thing. We're gonna hold a two-day event this May, before clock. We're not gonna interfere with that, but we're gonna take about 15 to 20 leaders to San Francisco. We're already negotiating either Salesforce Tower or Google, and we're gonna bring videographers and we're gonna do six to eight hours in 20-minute segments on topics that are kinda 10,000 fu- for view what legal ops are, and then we're gonna score it. We have that coaching faculty together. Still building out some of it, but this is what we wanna deliver as our goal to the community in September of this year, right? So that's it on the certification. When we talk about, you know, those folks, right, were... that are lining up, right?

9:36To, to learn more about the community, and I think you just gave us a bit of an inside look at how you envision working with folks that are gonna be part of this community. But where do you both see the future of in-house legal teams? What does that look like? How are they gonna be interacting with the community? And, I mean, at a broader scale, right? With all of the, the movement, and obviously AI playing a big role in this. Obviously there's a lot of, there's a lot of moving parts everywhere, but what, how do you foresee the, the community working with those folks that, that wanna be a part of this, this next journey that you're taking? So from my perspective, everything will be about human interaction in the future. When it comes to in-house legal, it's the most important piece of the puzzle at the moment. The more we get to work with AI and tech solutions, the more important it will be to exchange with, uh, like-minded people to stay updated and to just know what kind of new tools are coming up, um, so that you don't lose the overview. Um, so from my piece, perspective, it's really about connections, and this will be the most important piece when it comes to the future of in-house legal. Colin, what do you think? What's your perspective?

10:44I'm gonna put my mystic math hat on here and try to figure this out. Like, but it's just like, right, if you see how corporates, right, if any of us worked in corporations, how slow it moves. Like, they're still buying CLM tools, right? Like, the, and it, it's taking them 90 days to 120 days, and to implement it. I think the future looks different in every company, right? But the ones that are driving it forward, right, you're gonna have to do a SWOT analysis on it, right? Just to kinda get any sense. My discussions with some of the consultants right now that have traditionally doing well, they've been in the game since the '90s, are seeing people looked, looking at ChatGPT. And it's like, "Hey, we're not bringing our consultant in because we're doing first review and second review ourselves." And then, you know, on certain things, and then they're not bringing them in. But it's the first time in history they had that empowerment, right? So you're probably, as the AI gets better, you're probably gonna see a lot more of that, right? You're gonna...

11:37Consultants are gonna have to up their game if they wanna get in, right? I'd like to say I know the answer to this, but it, it's like I... You're gonna see... In my, in, in my analysis of it is, like, being more prescriptive with subject matter experts or legal operations folks coming in on, um, a consultant basis or a fractional basis to work on different projects, and they could work across many companies. Maybe that is five, 10 years. It could be three years. It's probably happening some places now. But yeah, it's a wild west right now, you know? And it's, everybody's talking about AI. I'm talking to CEOs that are saying, like, "Hey, this is a mandate," right? An old company I worked at, GlobalFoundries- Across everything. The CEO is like, "Mandate, mandate, mandate every department, AI." He wants it in everything, right? So I'm hearing a lot of that stuff, right? So the future, who knows, but we're here for it, right? So... Yeah, I mean, AI's, I think, it- well, in my opinion, of, of course, after ChatGPT was just a revolution, and now you've seen AI in a lot of different commercial team, not just lawyers, right? It's taking a lot of jobs, too, right?

12:50And it's also creating new ones, right? I'm, I'm really, really not against about that because you know it's technology and you know people will need to get more involved in, in how to use it, because people who aren't using it, well, they're going to fall behind. And one of the things that I've seen, right, like, AI in the legal team is not that new. It's been there for a little while. You know, like, in the beginning it was usually only used when you want to extract information from document, right, like metadata extraction. It was painful at the beginning because it wasn't that clear, especially because every contract is different. If there's no a single template for an NDA, so there's like, that's why one NDA became s- like so su- successful, right? But now that there's, like, agentic AIs and you can, let's say, outsource a lot of that manual work for piece of software that can do a lot of that, and you can use a lot of AI to...

13:55for the negotiation process, I mean, not just for the contract part. Of course, we've been all involved, uh, with CLMs, but I'm very interested here on your opinion, especially with this new community. Like, let's jump in maybe not five year, that's too much, but, like, in two years or in three years, right? With your experience working as an in-house lawyers, which is completely different than working in law firms. Law firms, I don't know what they're going to do because a lot of the budget for private practice is just reducing and they keep, uh, making those, uh, hour, billable hours higher. I don't know how is that going to be successful, but anyways, going back to the in-house teams, how do you see these in-house teams interacting with AI? Without may- maybe we can talk a, a little bit about contracts, maybe that's already discussed, but for the rest of the practice inside a legal team with companies like the ones you have worked, which are massive, like, where do you see the main benefit there?

14:55That's a really good question. I think it depends a lot on the maturity of the company. Yep. Because for some companies that are just like big corporates, it will probably be difficult to reach a significant change within the next two years, so it would rather still be the five years that you talked about initially. And then for scale-ups, it will be probably the next six months that will be the decisive fa- factor about it. I see a lot of change, um, a lot of appetite for AI solutions at the moment, so everybody is super, super, super interested and wants to learn more about it and wants to engage more with AI. You're completely right. There's mandates, uh, coming from the C-level. Uh, this is a huge thing in Europe as well, for example. So there is push for AI and, um, it's coming to the legal departments, and I think the work in the legal departments will significantly change due to this, and new roles will evolve exactly as you described already as well. It will not be the typical way things have been running in the past 20, 30, 40 years probably, but there will be a huge shift, and it's gonna be interesting to see which kind of jobs will form out of it and which maybe will not be needed anymore.

16:02But I think there's a huge shift happening and, uh, I think probably legal departments will shrink a little bit and it will rather proceed to having a, let's say, flexible workforce in the long run, in the next 10 years maybe even. So basically like a small core legal team. Super specialized lawyers from private practices will still do their jobs when it comes to big projects, litigation projects, anything like that. And then from my perspective, fractionals will become a new thing, so it will be a lot more evolvement of the fractional council, uh, because they just plug in, plug out, um, so it's easy on the budget perspective. What do you mean with fractional? Sorry about that. So basically, fractionals are either in fractional legal operations or fractional council, fractional general council, whatever it may be. They just have like a fraction of their time spent within the company. So they are, uh, freelancers, and they are just coming in when they are needed, and once they are not needed anymore, they are dropping out.

17:00So basically there's no long-term, uh, restraint on the budget. It's, uh, just plug in, plug out- Yeah... Colin, if you think about it. Yeah, I think the model that exists, like they pay them well, right? If they're doing like two days or whatever, they pay them a little bit more what than what they would, but there's no friction with the budget. It's easy to get it, right? So but here's... Pepe, that's a really good question because, like, everyone's asking that every day of the week. All I can speak to is some of the trends that I'm talking to people about, but... a- and some guesswork from my experience. But if you're looking across legal and all the silos from IP to privacy to regulation, right to corporate, if they're all moving in that direction with AI, it's like it's gonna be quicker to get to your answer, right? I know you said not to talk about contracts, but I'm gonna talk about them anyway. But it's like finding your last contract like in seconds, right? And it's like, this is where it was negotiated or moving on to even everything, if you have like a bigger company and you have to file entities, if you can pull that information up without having, you know, lickety-split, like, you know, just without having to go down like, you know, 50 clicks, that's game changing, right?

18:06Things move at a different pace, right? Discussions happen at a different pace. The work that some people... You ever get caught in your... You get an email and you're like, "Where the hell is that? I have to ask two people," right? It's like all that friction is gonna go eventually. As people get trained up on this AI and, you know, where the stuff is. So I see things working a lot faster across silos, and it's gonna create... You know, when I say efficiencies, I mean, you know, hiring the right people for the right tasks, which makes the department easier to bring in fractional people to plug the gaps, right? Right, and I think, yep- That could be- Yeah... some of the future. Nice. Yeah. And I think... Well, in my perspective, I would say that, that silo part that you were mentioning, it's very important because a lot of the time, like, legal department is seen like a silo place, right? While it interacts with the whole business, and you gotta see it, like, in a enterprise view, right? It's not, uh, legal is not just a bottleneck.

19:03It's just, like, a miscommunication between the commercial teams, either you're in procurement, you're in sales, you're in marketing, you're in IT. And one of the things that we've seen is that a lot of the times, there's no process there, right? There, there's a lot of the times when you have no idea where should you send a document here, and a lot of the times legal teams are involved just to turn down fires, right? Because you got a litigation, and then you got sued, and then you got a problem with corporate, and then, then there's a M&A problem here, and then tariffs. And then, you know, there's a lot of things- Force majeure. Force majeure, right? So there's a lot of things going on here that I think that AI will be, like, really good to... Like, a lot of the times, like... Well, now we can talk a little about, about contract, but when you think about contracts or compliance, right?

19:58You think that's only legal, and the commercial teams have no idea what it's saying because, like, when you use legal terms, they're so complicated. They're not written for everybody to understand, that AI will make it easier for commercial team to know what the hell this contract is, right? It may, maybe it will make it easier to negotiate because it's usually the commercial team who do the negotiation process with their, uh, vendors or with their customers, and this is going to be, like, really useful. And having that in mind, I think these type of communities will be really useful for that, right? Because when you think about legal operations, it's not just technology, right? It's financials, vendor management, all the principles with the legal operations. And one of the things that I've seen is that a lot of legal departments thinks that if they buy a new piece of software, then their bottlenecks are going to disappear. That's not, that's not gonna happen, right?

20:57Mm-hmm. Even with AI, right? Yeah. And right now, in my perspective, there's a lot of investing in, in AI, but if I haven't used, or Harvey or all these unicorns, but what I've seen is that they're making this kind of partnership with law firms because they keep bringing more information, right? They're feeding their LLM so it can get more information. And the bigger the information and the more that the training of these LLMs, they're going to get more information how, how they can use it into a, or turn it for the private practice or the in-house team, right? Yeah. So I think that type of conversations are going to be, like, really useful and there's a lot of communities, right? Of legal communities around the world and, uh, what I've seen there is that they're trying to facilitate this type of interaction by creating blocks, right?

21:54Where you can ask questions, and then you get 1,000 emails because some people got comments there. But it's really- Yeah... hard to follow up that, right? It's not a community. It's just like blog posts. And, hey, how have anybody have used Copilot, right? And then you get some people putting their experience there. And with that in mind, like, how do you envision our legal community there? Like, what makes it different from all the others communities? I'm gonna put an analogy for us, right? To kind of encapsulate what you're talking about, right? For everything with all the challenges with the communities bringing on AI and all the different silos and trying to bring it together. At the back of my house is Waymo. You know Waymo, the self-driving cars? So one of the chief engineers, he lives in another part of California, but he rents a room from my older neighbor across the street, so we usually go for a walk in the evenings, chatting around the block, and he gives me some insights on how the cars function and all that kind of stuff. So they're all AI on every camera that's taking information. So it's going out to the market. The fleet of the cars are going all over California, right?

22:57So imagine a fleet of cars or AI going all over your business, and imagine in real time when it gets a threat, something needs to be updated, the policy gets updated, right? As soon as people get prescriptive and they really get in with this AI, these cars are on the road and there's a pothole over here. Every fleet of the car, cars get updated, right? It's like they're not gonna... The, the, everyone's gonna know immediately there's a pothole at Santa Clara Avenue, right? So it's like, that's how good it's gonna get, right? The threats, it's gonna up their policies. The... I, I think humans are gonna be there watching to make sure that's right, right? Every time, there's probably gonna be an update leader there or whatever. They're looking at all the different updates and saying, "Is the, you know, do we need to have a meeting about this?" I think in legal, I think eventually, not legal, the business, it's gonna be every threat in the business, how legal gets impact, right? AI is gonna be in there assessing everything.

23:56And I think how do we differentiate from different communities? Look, two things, right? And this is in all honesty, like having built a community before, I made every mistake in the book how I showed up. I did very successful. I'm sounding like Trump now, but it's like, look, but I've learned lessons. I have experience coming in this time from my perspective, right? And it's just like seeing how Anne thinks about it- So this is saying like, how do we come together? People ask me like, "Hey, how did you choose Anne to come, come in and build this community with you?" And I said, "I didn't cho- choose Anne, Anne chose me," right? Like, we are coming to build this thing together, like, and, and what we're thinking about, like, how we differentiate is we see the gaps in a lot of the US companies that can't get into the European markets or other markets, right? And vice versa. I think number one, we solved that pub- puzzle from a global perspective, right? Now I'm gonna jump into the AI thing and the whole community, how we differentiate.

24:56Look, I think we do 99% of what other communities do, and then we're gonna put our stamp on it, right? As our personalities. It's like what I've seen, Pepe, is all these communities pop up and they're like shooting stars, and everybody's looking at them and they're beautiful, but they've not got staying power. We got staying power, right? You know, so it's just like, do you have staying power? A lot of people come in and get their moment. They hold the cup up, they win, and then they go to the side. We've been involved in community since we started, right? Anne's been building her thing, I've been building mine, and I'm still here, right? She's still here. And we're still f- like, kicking the event off last week in San Francisco and seeing the level of companies coming out, and every one of them want to be our advisors, and will be our advisors, right? So we're getting some of the best of the best in the camp from the get-go, and I just think that knowledge sharing, like that's like... I'll give you an example.

25:49When I was in school, like I had a good friend that was a lot smarter than me, and he was like, he would hide his copy book. "You're not copying from..." I wanna open the fucking copy book and say, "Everybody copy from me. I got the playbook right now." And share, and I think that's how people advance. Sorry, that's my thoughts. That's exactly how I think about it. That's exactly how I think about it as well, Colin. Like, just adding up, like I think what differentiates us is really the global angle behind it, that we are approaching really every company level, that we're approaching everybody who is working in-house legal, from the GC level to the paralegal level, and every, uh, other industry, every kind of, uh, maturity and so on. So everybody's welcome at Our Legal Community. I think this is already probably a big differentiator. It's not focusing on any specific topic. We have spaces for all different kind of topics, and we want to really have people interact with each other, so we are making a lot of progress about meeting up in person.

26:45We're making a lot of matchmaking programs, and so on. The learning courses, uh, will definitely be a differentiator, and there's so much more to come, uh, that we are investigating and, and working on. So it's, uh, definitely going to be a stamp, stamp, stamp. And if you look into the future, what do you think is one thing that you want people to be saying about OLC, right, when you look, uh, ahead? Personally, I'm so happy that I decided to build this with you. So it's like everybody who signs up is gonna be a founder member, right? We're gonna have founding advisors. I'd like to say, like, this changed my life in a positive way, right? It added value to us. Like that would be- Ab-... that would be something very good to hear, I think. If it's really creating value for the members that we are having, then this is what we want to achieve. Awesome. No, I love it. I love it.

27:36And we appreciate you guys sitting down with us to kind of give us a, a look, uh, at what the team has been working on, right? What you guys have been building in the background and, you know, we're very excited to, to see this finally come to fruition, and I think we're excited to watch it grow online. We're excited to hopefully see you at, you know, in person at some events, right? So we can't wait to, to learn more, and if, folks, if this resonated with anybody that were listening, where's the best place to connect with you on this? Or is there, uh, a community that's a place for them to sign up and register? Yes, ourlegalcommunity.com is the place where they can register- Perfect... but they can also happily just reach out to Colin and I over LinkedIn, and we're happy to guide them through. Awesome. Awesome. Well, again, we're excited to, uh, to see this rolled out, and we appreciate you guys giving us a look behind the curtain here. And, uh, thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Contract Heroes. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much. This episode of the Contract Heroes is sponsored by Koho Consulting. Koho helps organizations of all shapes and sizes find, implement, and manage their chosen CLM tool.

28:39Whether your project is buy or sell side led, Koho can help you navigate the waters of the CLM space to make sure that you're getting a product that's going to fit like a glove years to come. If you'd like to learn more about Koho, visit their website at C-O-H-O consulting.com.