Ep 130: Legal Ops Pioneer Mary Shen O’Carroll On Moving From Google To Ironclad

Mary Shen O’Carroll pioneered the field of legal operations during her 13 years as director of operations, technology and strategy at Google. She was also instrumental in forming the influential organization CLOC – the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium – and was elected its president in 2019. 

In April, she walked away from both of those roles, leaving Google and stepping down as CLOC president, to join the contract lifecycle management company Ironclad as chief community officer, where she will scale and lead the company’s global community. “In Ironclad, I see the same mix of magic ingredients of community, vision, and talent that I saw in my early days at Google,” O’Carroll said in announcing the move. 

On this episode of LawNext, O’Carroll joins host Bob Ambrogi to discuss her new role and the experiences that brought her here. She also shares her thoughts on the accelerating growth of legal operations in recent years and the increasing prominence of CLOC. 

Listeners may also be interested in the April 19, 2021, episode of LawNext, in which Ironclad’s CEO Jason Boehmig was interviewed. 

Thank You To Our Sponsors

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out. 

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, and MerusCase, and e-payments platform Headnote.
• Law Insider, producer of the show Contract Teardown, where they analyze the contracts that others are talking about. 

A reminder that we are on Patreon. Subscribe to our page to be able to access show transcripts, or to submit a question for our guests.