Episode 17: Legal Ops with Matilde Montanari, Legal Operations Officer at TomTom

Inspiring Legal

Legal Operations is on everyone's lips. But what is it actually all about? What are the best practices, what are some quick wins - and how does one go about pursuing a career in Legal Ops? Join us in a conversation with TomTom's Legal Operations Officer, Matilde Montanari, as we dive into the specifics of this fast-moving legal field.

Thank you for listening to Inspiring Legal.

Full episode transcript:

[00:00 - 00:16] Welcome to Inspiring Legal, the podcast for in-house legal. Get insights, learn from peers, life lessons from some of the most influential GCs.
[00:16 - 00:35] If it's related to in-house legal, we cover it. For more inspiration, go to Openli.com slash community. Today, I am joined by Matilde Montanari.
[00:35 - 00:52] I hope I pronounced it correctly. Welcome Matilde. Thank you very much for having me today. So Matilde, for the listeners out there, they might not know you, but you have a very interesting background when we're talking about legal operations.
[00:52 - 01:08] And again, this is a topic that is on a lot of people's minds, but maybe not necessarily that familiar. So I was thinking, what about telling the audience a little bit about who you are and your background and maybe how you got into legal operations.
[01:09 - 01:26] Yeah, absolutely. So, hi Matilde. Perfect pronunciation for my surname, Montanari. I'm currently based in Amsterdam and I'm the legal operations officer at TomTom. TomTom is currently a technology company.
[01:26 - 01:43] Maybe most of you might remember for the GPS. Everyone at some point had a TomTom GPS and it was actually very revolutionary. But yeah, now they move more in the space of B2B and building maps and licensing maps to other companies.
[01:44 - 02:02] My background, I'm Italian from Pisa, so from Tuscany. I've graduated in law and then started in, worked in house for a law firm in private practice for a law firm for a couple of years.
[02:03 - 02:21] But after a couple of years working there, I soon realized actually that I really wanted to have a bit more business exposure. And then maybe that wasn't my actual path. But I really didn't know what I wanted to do. And I wanted to go back to study.
[02:21 - 02:40] So I found and I did an LLM here in Leiden, which I highly advise everyone to visit. It's an amazing little town in the Netherlands. It's a student city, very, very, very nice. And after that, I found, ended up finding a job as a legal commercial consultant in MessageBird,
[02:40 - 02:58] which is a tech startup, very, yeah, very hectic, like really the classic startup environment that everyone thinks and everyone sees in the movies. So it was very, very fun and very, very exciting. Back then, my GC was very into legal operations.
[02:58 - 03:14] Then in the back, it was very, very, you soon realized that to scale a team, you also have to have the proper tech stack and tech setup to actually support your team, especially when you're going at that speed and that growth.
[03:16 - 03:37] So you really wanted someone that, yeah, could focus on ops as well. And I've always been very interested in operations, like in general, my friends, they always like to say that, yeah, I like to fix things and that's the reality. So I started focusing 50% of my time on legal ops.
[03:38 - 03:55] And then, yeah, I fell in love and I was like, oh my God, I want to do legal operations. So I went, my next step in the career was indeed to find a 100% focus on legal operations position. And I moved to booking where I was doing legal operations by financial management.
[03:55 - 04:12] So yeah, budget, external counsel. So I need such a big team and inspiring team. That was very, very interesting. So yes, that's a few words, my life, I end up here. So from booking.com,
[04:12 - 04:32] you then moved into TomTom where you're now the legal ops officer. Just because legal ops is for some new and maybe also a little undefinable. Could you maybe just give us a little insight into what are
[04:32 - 04:50] you doing as a legal ops officer? You're probably doing so much, but what is that? Yeah, definitely. So I think indeed it's quite new and the entire legal operations community is still working and trying to define
[04:50 - 05:07] what we really working on. But I like to approach legal operations as, I mean, it's still an operations role and we have seen operations role in other different departments. So when I approached it and when I was the lead, when I started my work at TomTom,
[05:07 - 05:25] I really wanted to be inspired or take inspiration from other departments. So I really approach it as the classic way you do operations by focusing on data and technology, people and processes. So that's the kind of like three big cores that I like to focus
[05:25 - 05:42] on. And then under that, obviously there are sub topics or a sub focus. But yeah, I would say that in few words, legal operations is really trying to make the life of legal counsels a better life and a happier life, I would say.
[05:43 - 06:00] Yeah. Make them more efficient. Make sure that they can provide their best without like thinking to admin or processes things that like just slow down their work. So you're going in and like taking a holistic view of whatever
[06:00 - 06:18] you're doing within the legal teams. So, and then looking at how you can optimize it, how you can work smarter, how you can save cost as well, or. Well, definitely. So yeah, all of them. I mean, when, when usually approaching when started at TomTom,
[06:18 - 06:34] also like booking, there is a big period of just trying to understand what they're doing and how they're doing it. I always think that they're the first period that they're always quick and little wins that we can always have.
[06:34 - 06:52] So without having to engage in big projects or being changed management into new technologies, everyone wants technologies is always, but there are a lot of things that we can already do to improve the way we are working just by asking why, why we are doing a certain way and why certain things are like this.
[06:53 - 07:10] So usually that, yeah, the first step is just literally to speak with the team, trying to understand their struggles. So like, yeah, like therapy session, what are your problems today? And then from there, like, yeah, what we can do in the short term, like quick fixer and what would be part of a bigger project
[07:11 - 07:27] and a bigger approach, maybe introducing technologies and improving like, yeah, processes and yeah. Let's say that you're sitting and you are considering starting to hire your first legal operations person.
[07:29 - 07:45] In your opinion, what should you be looking for? What type of skill sets and what type of person should you get? Should you get somebody who has been working in the in-house legal team and promote that person to the legal ops? Should you try to find somebody who's good at that?
[07:45 - 08:03] Project management or should you try to find a finance controller type character? What's your recommendation? What should we be looking for? Wow, it's a very interesting question. So I definitely think that I was just recently speaking
[08:05 - 08:22] with other people in legal operations that I'm aware tha...