I Know the Future of Legal Ops. Welcome to the Space Age.
You should see my house right now. It’s overflowing with boxes of books and clothes. We’re shipping out my guitars and synths, and the art is coming off the walls. Walking from the kitchen after I make coffee to my studio out back means stepping over the latest pile as my wife and I pack up our life in LA. It’s charged, high-stakes, and chaotic like it always is at the beginning of something major—just how I like it.
In 2018, I got an unexpected call: Netflix needed a more innovative approach to running its legal department, and they wanted me to show them what they didn’t know about technology and operations. The opportunity sounded good on paper, but the company didn’t have any legal ops or tech foundation, and I wasn’t sure it was the right fit. So I said a polite thanks but no thanks. And then I said it again. And again.
However, they persisted and showed a willingness to invest in the function. I saw in their approach the same dogged pursuit that I live by, and my no turned into curiosity and then interest—and, did I mention I’d always had a quiet dream of spending a few years in LA?—and so I hopped on a plane from New York, and my wife and I started to build a new home in California. I came in with a specific goal for my time at Netflix: five years to build the foundation from 0 to 1.
Just over five years later, the mission has been fulfilled. Netflix has a tech, data, and ops foundation; the team is staffed by the highest caliber talent handpicked for their innovation, and the organization has accomplished more than anyone thought possible. (Well, I thought it was possible. Why do something halfway?)
With that organization in place, I’m off to design my next adventure and build something new. Something big. My next chapter starts now.
This chapter is going to be high stakes, uncertain, terrifying, and absolutely thrilling. I have seen the future of legal ops, and I know that in the coming months and years, we will witness a massive shift in our industry. Every one of us will have to transform actively. I cannot wait.
I started my career understudying for the industry’s trailblazers—I learned directly from the team at Cisco who went on to found the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC.) They’re Legal Ops 1.0, the founders. They passed things onto Legal Ops 2.0—my peers who came up under them and ran off the steam of the initial engine, including the designs of how legal operations functions should work (e.g., outside counsel/financial management, knowledge management, technology, project management.)
But the world has changed since I was coming up. The initial designs won’t get us where we need our businesses to go. It’s time for something new. It’s time for 3.0.
It’s time for space travel.
My manifesto for Legal Ops 3.0 focuses on technology, data, and a new kind of storytelling which crafts business-driving narratives with that data. These three form the braided core of Legal Ops—they’re interdependent, not unique, pillars. Technology and data are what lead us to storytelling—our next planet for exploration.
Legal Ops should be centered around technology, allocating resources, agency, and priority. I’ll go a step further: If you don’t have the technology function budget and team empowerment to build, develop, launch, maintain, and iterate—a.k.a. run the software development lifecycle—then you’re not transforming. If things move at all, the pace will be glacial. And that time wasted comes with a massive cost—legal ops won’t be able to impact the business. That’s tons of potential down the drain, and eventually, you’ll watch your team leadership burn out trying to convince IT to allocate more budget. To that end, Legal Ops should be funded and entirely operated inside the legal department—it’s the only way to build for speed and impact.
Legal Ops should be centered on the data from technology. In the race to innovate, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture, but the entire point of technology is to produce data around the department’s workflows. We’re seeing this at a scale that our industry couldn’t have imagined ten years ago: With AI at our fingertips, the amount of data will blow Moore’s Law out of the water. We have to be ready to break big patterns, innovate and function in a new equilibrium. I’m talking about true, transformative disruption—not the day-to-day disruption we bring about in the tech industry as we iterate forward. It’s revolution versus evolution. And that means we in the industry must be skilled, flexible, and ready. Otherwise, we’ll be left behind.
Technology and data are the fuel and the engines, not the destination. But together, they lead us to storytelling, the next frontier we’re all seeking. Storytelling needs a particular talent at the helm, someone both analytical and creative who can lead the analysis of large data pools and draw up meaningful metrics and data narratives for the C-suite.
I’m in awe of the amount of work, growth, technology, and data I was empowered to create during my run at Netflix. Just before I left, we took Evisort, an AI-powered contract intelligence technology, fully live, and it alone yielded over nine million metadata points that were already mined into stories leaders could make meaning out of. Storytelling is what makes the actual impact on actual business. It’s where the massive potential of our industry gets unlocked.
It’s where we connect with something new—beyond the static world we know.
Because 3.0—the space travel evolution of our field—means going beyond legal in the first place.
It means we become Strategic Ops.
3.0 elevates our roles outside of the legal department. To take Legal Ops to its new height—Strategic Ops—we need to play with gravity while dreaming of what we can be. We need to demand a seat at the C-suite table to meet our fullest potential. We need to envision our field beyond the atmosphere we mostly dwell beneath now. We need to imagine a future where our game-changing expertise goes directly to the C-suite so they can use our data to drive business-accelerating change.
If I sound defiant, it’s because I am. I cannot and will not accept the status quo. The stakes are too high, and our industry will get left behind if we do. We cannot accept what is merely easy or comfortable. We can’t be afraid to break things. We have to break things.
Strategic Ops are bigger than legal. We are at a point of exploration and transformation, and I am clear-eyed and ready for the most significant leap of my career. I plan to pioneer the next age of ops, and I want to bring you with me. In fact, your experiences, from pioneering change in a small team to steering innovation at a multinational company, fuel our collective journey into Legal Ops 3.0.
So what’s next for me? I’m writing a book about what I have learned and reflected on. I’m composing new music. I’m serving as CLOC’s board president, focused on redrawing the shape of our industry, teaching, and podcasting worldwide. I’m seeking my next Strategic Ops adventure, and I’ll do all of it at home with my family in New York City.
I’ve always felt most like myself when I’m exploring. I’ve always been a wayfinder. My career trajectory—which involved knocking down doors, building new ladders, and carving my path—is a case study I want to share with all of you as we enter this new age. Because this isn’t about me. It’s about all of us.
As some of you know, I’ve been working hard with the CLOC Board, staff and with inputs from you, the community, drawing up career frameworks for our industry that I’ll unveil as the keynote speaker at the CLOC Global Institute on May 6. Think of it as me dropping the cheat codes I’ve pocketed over my career.
I’d love to have you along for the journey, so you can jump over to my website, www.jennmccarron.com, and subscribe to my newsletter, listen to the podcast, or check out my upcoming tour dates.
It will be a hell of a ride, but I’m ready to count down and take flight. I want us to be bold and resolute. I want us to enter this new age of new frontiers ready for transformation. I want to hear something above us shatter, and I want us to build something bigger, better, and more powerful in its place.
Are you ready? Space travel starts now. Let’s go.
