My academic backgrounds have always been technical, Information Systems, Business Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, topics that have always led me to more technical professional opportunities.
Programming languages, SQL codes, Query, Databases, Tables and Relationships are part of my daily life and of course they are common terms within the training area I chose.
On a normal working day I received a direct through LinkedIn for a possible job opportunity in a legal department of a large E-commerce.
I remember that the immediate response to the message was: More….I am not a lawyer….
I was surprised with a different job proposal, using my knowledge in data and analysis to help a Legal department of a large e-Commerce company understand its portfolio, structure its data and support intelligent decision making. In short, help this Legales team to no longer be seen as just a cost center but a business unit.
At first I thought: it will be easy…I will collect data, create graphs, paste it in a Power point and that's it!!! It will be a guaranteed success....
I wish it were something as easy as I thought…we know that the map is different from the terrain, and my idea of work had to take a lot of steps back.
I came across information and tables without standard, duplicity of concepts, lack of KPIS, KPIS in misalignment with the company's strategy...
Faced with insecurity I found myself thinking…. I think I made the wrong choice… I think they chose the wrong person, I felt like an imposter…
I believe that everything can be seen as an opportunity, so we started little by little to “clean up the house”, a term used to express the need to review the processes.
As for the non-standard fields, before any analysis is delivered, we will have to standardize all of them, we will avoid the error right at the entrance, working with edits and improvements in the registration systems.
For the duplication of concepts, we scheduled numerous meetings with everyone involved to define a common concept… It was not easy, but we also broke through this barrier.
However, as much as things seemed to be moving forward, I still felt like a stranger in the nest..
New words added to my vocabulary, like legal terms I had no idea what they meant.
It was then that I first heard about the concept of LEGAL OPERATIONS.
The company took the initiative to create a Legal Operations Latam area, based on the 12 CLOC competencies and with different skills/trainings… I thought… I think now I found myself..
I took over the Analytics area, shaping the business and demonstrating KPIS in a clear and visual way to the sub-departments.
Three years after this creation I can see that I made the best professional choice of my career, we are divided into small teams within Legal Ops, we have project, process, finance and data groups. And more than groups, we have professionals trained in these areas.
I found more people like me, not lawyers, venturing on this journey.
I understood that diversity is a great competitive advantage, especially in the Legal Operations department, the communication between the lawyer and the non-lawyer is for me the key to success, they are two different formations, two ways of thinking but with the same objective, and acting in partnership tend to create destructive and functional outputs.
I managed to increase my ability to think about projects aimed at the Legales universe, how we can use RPA to automate repetitive, standardized and time-consuming tasks, so that we can dedicate ourselves to what really changes the business.
Today I am very involved in the subject and in several communities such as CLOC, ILTA, CLOB and others, all focused on the exchange of knowledge and best practices in the department, I believe that the sharing of knowledge is a huge gain for those who are starting and also for those who want to advance in analytics and technology.
Embrace diversity in your team and always work with a focus on the company's direction.
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