Leo Murgel

Title: Vice President & COO of Legal and Corporate Affairs

Company: Salesforce

How did you get into legal operations?

My journey began more so on the operations side than necessarily on the legal side. My background is primarily in technology. I was head of the project management office in the Salesforce IT team for years and from there jumped into a more operational role leading the M&A integration on the technology side. I got a taste for how process and technology can really transform how a business functions within a department. In talking to the team internally with Salesforce, our legal and corporate affairs team was at a point where they recognized a need to do things differently and the opportunity to transform from within. 

When did you join CLOC? What was your main reason for joining?

It was day 2 on the job. If you think about the core principles of sound operations, who’s doing the work, how they’re doing the work, opportunities to deflect the work, every area has nuance because the work is different and the work of legal is very unique. I gravitated towards the Wheel and the 12 Competencies right away as a guide for me to think through. We built our strategies on top of that. I keep on coming back to the basic framework of the Competencies because it reminds you that there’s more we can do for the business. If we think broadly into the charter of the operations team, legal or otherwise, it is to drive efficiency to the business.

There have been many challenges over the past few months, how has this transition been for you and have you found this to be one of your biggest challenges?

What this pandemic has shown us is an acceleration of the imperative of digital transformation. A lot of the work we have done in Salesforce Legal is really helping drive the digital transformation of legal. What the pandemic brought to bear is that those who were already on that journey had the opportunity to accelerate because it became imperative to be able to work from anywhere. We were glad to have been on that journey already.

Why is it important for your fellow CLOC members to show their organization and community that the Legal Ops role is important?

Within their organization, particularly at this time, there is often minimally a desire, often an imperative, sometimes even a mandate, that the legal team becomes more efficient. You get more out with less resources. That really defines the role and importance of the legal ops team within the legal department. He or she is the right hand to the General Counsel to deliver on that charter. Typically, the practice leads, really haven’t been necessarily trained or often times don’t really have that as a main objective to become more efficient. It’s really a complimentary skill. The question with CLOC is separate because what you don’t have to do is reinvent the wheel every time you’re going to do it because it turns out, legal departments are quite the same. We all face very similar challenges so the opportunity to leverage the CLOC network is a tremendous accelerator. It’s unique. I have not encountered a community that is more willing to share to the benefit of each other.

What do you find beneficial about being a part of CLOC? Why should non-members consider joining CLOC?

Without overstating the network, which I think is imperative and an amazing feat of CLOC. There is a wealth of resources available to CLOC members, even the fundamentals of 12 Competencies and the material behind it, I’ve used in my world. It’s a great asset for you to build a strategy and get going in legal operations. I think a component Mary (CLOC President) and team have taken CLOC to which is really game-changing, which is the notion of bringing to the table, the law firms. A significant amount of legal spend is still with outside counsel. Legal Ops is something that has been driven from within corporate legal departments looking at their efficiency. You can’t look at your efficiency without looking at how you’re spending your outside counsel dollars. The idea now, through CLOC, building a bridge to have a dialogue with our law firms and partners in that space, ultimately we are all working towards the same goal. I think having law firms at the table is yet another component of CLOC that brings value.

Where do you see the trajectory of legal ops in the future? Are we going to see more businesses adopting this role due to a more virtual workplace?

I think the legal ops team is here to stay. I say that not necessarily just through the lens of legal. If you look through other functions, HR, Finance, in our case Product Sales, everyone of those teams are recognizing that one of the competencies they need to have within their leadership team is the operational muscle. At Salesforce, I have a peer group of COO’s of various divisions that really look at a similar charter of how to best drive the operations of their team. In that sense, in some ways legal is late to the party. Other groups have been building their muscle over time and legal, at an often-significant cost to the organization, has an opportunity to do better in that space. It is more about normalizing how to do operations within legal.