#43 - Creating Buy-In and Driving Efficiency with Anna Richards

In this episode of Pearls On, Gloves Off, Mary O’Carroll sits down with Anna Richards, Director of Global Legal Operations at John Deere. With over 15 years of experience, Anna brings deep insights from companies like Autodesk, Zendesk, and Micron Technology.Mary and Anna dig into:

• Transitioning to John Deere: Anna details her onboarding journey, where Deere laid the groundwork by first understanding the role of legal operations and investing in its success.
• Unique Challenges: As one of the few remote employees, Anna shares the importance of relationship-building and progress-making despite her unique work arrangement.
• Diverse Roles: Anna reflects on her legal ops journey across different companies, sharing how no two roles are the same and how each experience is valuable.
• Technology in Legal Ops: They discuss how John Deere aims to become a tech-forward company, targeting 10% recurring revenue by 2030. This requires significant investments in tech tools and IT partnerships.
• Setting Up Success: Mary highlights the necessity of strategic hiring and the importance of investment in support, vendors, tech, and tools.
• Creating Buy-In: Anna talks about Deere’s strategic approach to building the legal ops function, conducting surveys to identify opportunities and building a business case for stakeholder buy-in.
• Current Projects: From implementing an enterprise-wide CLM system to aiming for 50,000 hours saved by 2026, Anna shares her ambitious goals and hiring plans.

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  linkedin.com Mary O'Carroll - Ironclad, Inc.  | LinkedIn Please reach out if I can be helpful at all. I love to provide (free!) advice on scaling… · Experience: Ironclad, Inc. · Location: San Francisco Bay Area · 500+ connections on LinkedIn. View Mary O'Carroll’s profile on LinkedIn, a professional community of 1 billion members.   linkedin.com Ironclad | LinkedIn Ironclad | 27,926 followers on LinkedIn. Ironclad is the smart way to make and manage digital business contracts. Now powered by Ironclad AI. | Ironclad is the #1 contract lifecycle management platform for innovative companies, powering billions of contracts every year. L'Oréal, Salesforce, OpenAI and other leading innovators use Ironclad to collaborate and negotiate on contracts, accelerate contracting while maintaining compliance, and turn contracts into critical carriers of operational business intelligence. It's the only platform flexible enough to handle every type of contract workflow, whether a sales agreement, an HR agreement or a complex NDA.   YouTube Ironclad CLM Software Ironclad is the digital contract platform loved by modern business teams.Contracts are business decisions trapped in administrative tasks. Ironclad is software that does all the administrative work better left for a computer, freeing teams -- legal, sales, procurement, finance, HR, etc -- to do substantive work and drive business strategy.We believe contracts should be business assets. Some document management vendors focus on contracts as risk assets: documents that, when poorly managed, expose companies to significant, surprising risks. While not knowing what’s in your contracts can certainly be dangerous, we prefer to focus on the valuable intelligence you can extract from them to drive… Show more   Apple Podcasts ‎Pearls On, Gloves Off - Legal Operations, Contracting, Change Management, and Career Growth on Apple Podcasts