The Modern Lawyer

Today’s episode is with Mary O’Carroll, the Chief Community Officer at Ironclad, a contract lifecycle management company. Mary comes from a consulting, business, and finance background and through her career at Orrick, Google, Ironclad, has become one of the faces of “legal operations.” It doesn’t hurt that she was a founding board member of CLOC, the corporate legal operations consortium. In this episode we talk about Mary’s start at Orrick, working with leaders like Ralph Baxter and Peter Krakauer, to Google, where she built the legal operations team from scratch. She talks about how she put in place process, procedures, and systems to ensure that Google could run a vast portfolio of cases effectively and efficiently, all while they were playing a part in inventing what we now may refer to as “internet law.” Finally we talk about Mary’s big move to Ironclad. Why did she make this move, and what is she hoping to achieve there? What is Ironclad’s vision for growth in the contract lifecycle space?

Today’s episode is with Varun Mehta, the CEO of Factor, a legal managed services company recently spun out of Axiom, the massive alternative legal services provider. Varun’s story is fascinating. He approaches the legal industry from the perspective of an engineer out to solve problems in a cross-disciplinary way, totally free from the traditional, and frequently ineffective, old ways of performing legal services for clients. Varun starts by telling the story of a formative experience earlier in his career where he was able to assemble a team of subject matter experts and data scientists and beat a Global 100 firm in a race to find highly relevant documents relating to a key financial investigation. If his team could out-compete teams of expensive attorneys at finding needles in data haystacks, how else could a cross-functional team raise the bar for legal service? Varun also talks about discovering his personal strengths, inspiration through Stoic philosophy, his idea of professional compound interest, and how he finally made it to the helm of one of the most interesting companies in the legal industry. Keep an eye on companies like Factor. As the legal industry approaches client service in new and creative ways over the next decade, Factor is likely to carve out a niche as a key player in the space, in an effort to, as Varun says, bring the human back to legal. As always, if you like our discussion, please rate us on Apple podcasts. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Today’s episode is with Joey Seeber, the CEO of Level Legal, a Dallas-based, next generation law company that bills itself as “problem solvers” for the legal industry. From e-discovery, to investigations, to regulatory matters, Level Legal takes on many tasks that can’t be done effectively or efficiently at law firms. In this episode, Joey talks about building a company in the depths of the Great Recession, large early clients opting to use Level Legal over traditional law firms, and all of the cultural and efficiency-based decisions he and his partners made in the early days. I think you’ll find Level Legal intriguing because it represents a different, arguably better way to do certain types of legal work. Joey is an experienced attorney who realized that he could do certain legal work more “efficiently, and more cost effectively” than the incumbent players. Could business like Level Legal represent the diversified future of how legal work is completed in the United States? As always, if you like our discussion, please rate us on Apple podcasts. We hope you enjoy the conversation.