On this episode, Shana Simmons, General Counsel at Everlaw, joins Mary to talk about Shana's career journey. From how Shana got a job as a law firm associate in London to why she left that job and moved to California to work as a contract manager at Google.


Shana waxes lyrical about her deep love for Google and what it was like to work at a company that was growing so rapidly. She also shares the tools and skills Shana learned at Google and why she didn't learn them as a lawyer, such as building and managing a diverse team. She then goes through how she worked her way up at Google, and why she ultimately left.


Lastly, Shana goes into detail about why it's so important to hire talent that is different from you and how to manage them effectively as well as how to use technology to modernize legal operations.


If you enjoyed today’s show, please leave a 5-star review. You can find more information, as well as the resources mentioned in this episode, at ironcladapp.com.

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#LegalOps #LegalCareer

In this episode, Mary is joined by her friend Niki Armstrong, Chief Legal Officer & Corporate Secretary at Pure Storage, to talk about optimization and innovation in the legal ops space.

Niki has had a long and successful career, first as a lawyer and now as a CLO. She runs through her career and how she got to her current position. Then she and Mary walk down memory lane and talk about how their 20-year friendship started at a poorly put-together event in San Francisco. 

Niki also recounts her time on Richard Branson’s short-lived reality show. She talks about the experience and what she learned from it before sinking her teeth into legal ops. 

Niki is passionate about legal operations. She shares her approach to innovating processes, optimizing, and automating everything that can be automated while keeping the team on board and free from burnout. 

If you enjoyed today’s show, please leave a 5-star review. You can find more information, as well as the resources mentioned in this episode, at ironcladapp.com.

In this episode, Mary is joined by Fergus Speight, General Counsel at Royal London, and Jenny Hacker, Head Of Operations - Legal & CoSec at Royal London, to talk about how they created and innovated a legal ops department before it was an established industry.

Fergus explains how he started to see problems in the legal processes at Royal London but lacked the creative thinking to come up with innovative solutions. So he looked to his team and saw Jenny, who has a mind for innovation and the ability to bring ideas to life.

Jenny discusses how she came up with ideas for change and how she and Fergus started legal ops in their company long before anyone knew what legal ops was. She explains how they went about making these changes and what they did to make sure that their whole team was on board.

To finish off, the pair compare the legal ops industry and tech in the UK with that of the US.

If you enjoyed today’s show, please leave a 5-star review. You can find more information, as well as the resources mentioned in this episode, at ironcladapp.com.