“When you're going to a CFO and asking for money to put in legaltech... it's not the ask that's important. It's how you tell the story to get them on board with what you want.”– Tommie Tavares-Ferreira, Chief Strategy Officer, LawTrades
Watch the full interview with Tommie Tavares-Ferreira
The pair discuss Tommie’s journey from HBO to becoming a leading figure in legalops, working at the likes of Rakuten and Peleton. Tommie shares her affinity for storytelling and the role it can play in legal transformation, the hidden value of contracts, plus, what questions not enough of us are asking when it comes to the future with legal AI.
Watch the conversation above, listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube, or read our recap below.
Picture this: You’re managing HBO’s international distribution deals when it hits you. The real goldmine isn’t just in making deals, it’s in the data buried inside a deal’s contract. It’s a eureka moment that hit Tommie when selling the series Game of Thrones to distributors in Switzerland.
“Every business runs on what’s inside their contracts. There’s such a large volume of information that hides there… It’s hidden inside their contracts,” Tommie explains.
Fast-forward to Tommie’s first CLM implementation at Rakuten, where she refused to have her legal team branded as blockers.
“What I was not going to allow was any of those folks thinking that my team was a blocker,” Tommie says. She did some digging and found that, “The reality is it’s often not a legal team” that slows a deal down. “It’s the counterparty who has a contract for a really long time.”
The problem? No data to prove it. So what did she do? Partner with a Salesforce engineer, map the entire sales journey, and build a system showing exactly where deals got to and, importantly, where they got stuck. Legal was transformed from perceived obstacle to recognized revenue accelerator.
Where did such intuition stem from? Of all places, Tommie cites a college documentary she produced on karaoke subculture.
“For my senior thesis, I did a documentary on the karaoke subculture. I wrote it, I filmed it, I produced it, I edited it,” she recalls. Understanding human motivation became her foundation for later business transformation.
She explains, “When you’re going to, say, a CFO and you’re asking for money to put in legaltech… it’s not the ask that’s important. It’s how you tell the story to get them on board with what you want.”
“When you're going to a CFO and asking for money to put in legaltech... it's not the ask that's important. It's how you tell the story to get them on board with what you want.”– Tommie Tavares-Ferreira, Chief Strategy Officer, LawTrades
Tommie shares her trick.
“Give someone two choices so they feel empowered to make a choice.”
“If I ask my son, do you want an apple or do you want broccoli? Either of those are healthy choices.” And either way, Tommie and her son wins.
Applied to legaltech: “Do you want tech A or tech B?”
Instead of leaving room for “we don’t want tech,” Tommie sets the rules. “What people want is autonomy. They want to feel in control.”
In one project, Tommie shares that her team used to manually process 100s of NDAs a month. It was too much! She decided to automate to save on time and focus on higher-value, strategic work.
Her proposal? Automate the NDA template and ensure that her business’ CEO pre-signs all NDAs, allowing counterparties to execute them immediately with little to no legal review required.
The reaction was… mixed. But ever the risk-tasker, Tommie asked her legal team: “How many times have we been sued over an NDA? I just want to know the number.”
The answer? Zero. “We went from literally seeing hundreds of NDAs a month to like probably 10.”
Tommie’s excited about AI’s potential in Legal, but encourages us all to ask her concern: “What it will do to someone who’s early in their career? Are we eradicating the pipeline to expertise?“
A look at history offers assurance: “When Excel came out, I’m certain there were accountants losing their mind about whether or not they were going to be replaced. And the reality is they just learned how to use those tools in really good ways.“
If we were to pluck out a few key takes from Tommie, we’d say:
The most impactful legal ops professionals don’t just optimize processes, they rewrite the rules entirely.
Dr. Megan Ma is Executive Founding Director of liftlab at Stanford Law School.
In conversation with Sam, Megan shares how legal teams can now move from passive tech adopters to active designers of their future workflows. She also shares her research on legal personas and the role they can play on legal training in the very near future.
The result won’t just mean faster up-skilling, but smarter collaboration. “Young associates can start thinking critically from your perspective and your experience.”
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