Welcome to another episode of our Legal.io Community Spotlight, a series in which we highlight the careers and experiences of some of the most impressive legal and legal operations professionals working in-house.

In this episode, we explore the career journey of Anna Richards, Director of Legal Operations at Micron. Anna outlines she started off in eDiscovery and found her way to Legal Operations through her desire to learn more about technology management. She's gone on to get her PMP certification and took on legal operations roles at Autodesk and Zendesk until she came to her current role at Micron. Pieter and Anna cover:

• Anna's career journey to date
• Key responsibilities in her role as Director of Legal Operations
• Key challenges and lessons learned in all her roles
• The importance of communication systems and keeping all members of a legal team informed

Three takeaways from this episode include:

• Anna’s career journey in legal operations began with eDiscovery and eventually led to holding various roles such as project management in legal ops, first non-attorney hire in a legal department, Chief of Staff to the General Counsel, and Director of Operational Excellence.
• The Director of Legal Ops role requires leveraging technology and project management skills to drive strategic initiatives and improve efficiency. This means a large amount of stakeholder coordination to ensure the company has the ‘right process, right people, right technologies’.
• Especially in a tighter economic environment, there needs to be an increased focus on communication and sharing information to keep everyone informed. Effective Storytelling is crucial, especially when the legal department is often seen as a cost center or the “land of no”. 

Read the full transcript for this episode below. 

Are you a legal operations professional or considering entering the field? Join Legal.io to discover legal operations jobs, resources and more. 

Do you work in-house and are you interested in sharing your career journey and experiences with the community? Apply here to be featured in a Community Spotlight. 

-

Pieter Gunst

Hi everyone. My name is Peter Gunst. I'm the CEO of Legal.io, and I am delighted to be here today with Anna Richards, the Director of Legal Operations at Micron Technology. And today we'll be discussing Anna’s journey getting to that role and some of the challenges along the way. Anna, thank you so much for taking the time to join.

Anna Richards

Absolutely. So happy to speak with you, Pieter. Thanks for having me on.

Pieter Gunst

Amazing. Let's dive right in. I'd love to learn a little bit more about your journey becoming the Director of Legal Operations at Micron Technology. - What took you there?

Anna Richards

I think everybody in legal operations has a little bit of a ‘snowflake’ story. We don't generally start off with a direct line path into Legal Ops. So, I found my way through legal technology. I was doing eDiscovery for ten years at the beginning of my career, and that's really where I got my foundation. I started getting experience managing people, understanding legal technologies, understanding that there was this entire kind of world behind what our attorneys were doing. And helping to service that side of the business. I decided to give myself the opportunity to progress in that career by getting my project management professional certification. So I got my PMP, which was a great move and something that I absolutely recommend for folks looking for some kind of hook in. Because what that did is it allowed me the opportunity (when the company that I was at was being acquired) to make a decision on rather than staying there, to take a route into legal operations. 

So my first legal operations was a project management role for legal ops at Autodesk. It was an individual contributor role. It worked great having a technology background. I got put right away on the projects that had to do with bringing in eDiscovery solutions, as well as workflow solutions. [I] got to help with contract management workflows and really had a good platform within which to get to know the legal department, how the people work there, where the opportunities existed. It was just tons and tons of learning. [I] found this community in legal ops that became very sticky for me, something that I wanted to stay and be a part of.

And when I was offered the opportunity to come and build a function at Zendesk, which was my next role, [I] jumped at that. So I was the first non-attorney hire brought in at Zendesk. I got to do all of the individual contributor efforts around bringing in - I think a lot of people's first project is to bring in an e-billing system. Then changing everybody's world, getting them out of spreadsheets and email - which was a huge win for the department! My poor General Counsel at the time, who I give a lot of credit to, he really believed in me and gave me a lot of leeway [for] form and function. From there, again, leveraging project management skills, leveraging the technology background that I have, forming really deep connections with business partners and being able to champion the needs of the legal department on behalf of that team.

A new General Counsel came on in 2020, and I had the opportunity to work closely with her. That was in more of a Chief of Staff capacity, so everything that I was doing with the Head of Legal Ops in the function. But at that point, I had a direct report [and] then quickly added a second one, which was incredibly helpful to elevate my function to really focus on more of the strategic initiatives as well as the goal setting, the meeting management and the leadership. And being able to ‘plug in and play’ so that attorneys can focus on giving the substantive advice to the business, thinking about their strategic initiatives and rocks, and me acting as more of the COO, to the General Counsel CEO is really how it felt. 

Time came recently for me to decide where I wanted to move my career from that position. I took this role with Micron, which the title is Director of Operational Excellence. It's a function that's really exciting to be leading. It's new for the Micron Legal team. It's very focused in project management, very focused in strategic initiatives and similar to something that I did at Zendesk, is focused on figuring out how to do sustainable and scalable offset of work. So it's going to be hopefully a shared services function somewhere offshore. I did have the privilege of building that out at Zendesk in the Philippines with a partnership of incredibly smart, wonderful people that we hired there. That was a major initiative and a major rock in my career that has given me the opportunity to sit in the seat that I am now.

Pieter Gunst

That's amazing. Yeah. What a journey and such a broad range of responsibilities you mentioned, right? Quite typical when you talk to Legal Operations leaders. So give me a sense and your role today. What does it look like? What are the key responsibilities that keep you busy on a day-to-day basis?

Anna Richards

Yeah, I'm working hard to keep it narrow, Pieter, to be honest. There's so much that I could potentially be doing. So, first thing that I did when I came on - aside from just sort of learning a little bit about the culture and the team, it's a much bigger team. I went from, a team of about 50 attorneys and 5,000 people at Zendesk to a team of 100 attorneys and 50,000 people at Micron.

So, the scale has just increased exponentially. One of the decisions, one of the reasons I made the decision to move was to act as a maturing function for my career. [I] wanted to see what life was like in a big, highly-matrixed, very different industry business. [I] wanted to test my chops against the influence and impact that I hoped to have having to convince stakeholders that are very much outside of the ‘pick up the phone and call your friends’ mentality [which is something that Zendesk culture and Autodesk culture leaned on a little bit more]. 

But my day-to-day responsibilities, after just getting my feet under me, had been to go around and survey the department to find out where the opportunities existed. I knew that my boss wanted me to focus on launching a shared services function, wanted me to dig in on optimization; a general help to bring up the function of the team into a thoughtful way that's enabled through ‘right process, right people, right technologies’. And I do have partners in the ops management who own technology and who own outside counsel, so I get to just really focus and dig into the project management strategic initiative side of things. 

So [I] went through and identified the opportunities that department leaders felt existed. We didn't survey GC staff, we actually went a level down to work with the folks who are a little bit closer to the actual execution of the work, to advise on our L2 leaders. So; ‘What are you doing? Where do you feel pain? Where do you see the opportunity?’ And create a list there. I then went through it and force-ranked, put together a ‘t-shirt sizing’ on how much effort I thought it would take. So we have it categorized with ‘strategic wins’ versus ‘quick wins’. And then, again, t-shirt sizing for impact. And wanting to make sure that we then coordinated with General Counsel staff on where should we invest our time. 

I have a team of two direct reports at the moment. We are all splitting up responsibilities across the identified priorities. We've linked those back to the OKRs for goal setting to make sure that we're aligned on deliverables and the value that we're adding to the department.

So [a] very long way of giving you the framework, the day-to-day, setting up a project management office, executing on that function. Doing technology and implementation, figuring out how to better operationalize a process and bring in new workflows. We don't currently have a ticketing system, so [I’m] working on doing a proof of concept with that, because I found that very helpful in past roles. You want to pull together metrics and dashboards and really turn over power to the General Counsel and leadership team to make data-driven decisions in setting the foundation for, I think, really exciting strategic initiatives with the shared services function - which will be forthcoming, at some point, hopefully, not in the too far distant future.

Pieter Gunst

Amazing. Yeah, and I hear some parallels in terms of projects that you're looking at now and things you're looking to achieve compared to previous roles. But, of course, it’s a completely different organization. You're coming in straight at the top, right? How does this compare to your previous role? Are you finding that most of the pattern is still completely mapped?

Anna Richards

It's more different than I expected, to be honest with you. I grew up in Bay Area Tech and collegial culture and you had your business partners and they were all pretty tightly-knit and had single points of contact. Now, being in such a large organization, it is highly, highly matrixed, there's a lot of attrition to manage - it really highlights the need for systems and processes that take the people dependency out of the game. So that's been a huge shift. 

I'm also not acting as Chief of Staff at this point, and I'm trying to instill instead really solid management principles within the team that I do directly manage. I’m managing up for the legal ops department generally; creating a SharePoint page, having some sort of feedback mechanism, doing visible goal setting, and making sure that we're accountable to it. [These are] things that I would have been executing on in my last role at Zendesk for General Counsel; bringing that to the philosophy of how not only I manage my direct reports, but how I can help to shape the culture of the legal operations function and hopefully that of the legal department at Micron.

Pieter Gunst

That’s such an exciting opportunity in an organization of that size. What's a key challenge you've encountered in this role and what did you/are you learning from it?

Anna Richards

Yeah, key challenge. I think everybody listening to this in recent times will relate: it's been a rough minute as far as budget and adjusting what we're able to do because of spend. The economy's in an interesting spot at the moment. Semiconductors - I didn't know this until I got into here - are also in a very kind of cyclical down moment with supply chain. So we are at a spot where we had these goals that we set up in the Fall when our fiscal year ended and action began. [These] now need to be course-corrected, and we need to find out what we can do with what we have. The feeling I'm getting from peers in the industry is no longer this idea of, “Okay, do more with less” and, “We'll take it, shove it down legal’s throat and make it work”. It's really more of a, “Do less with less” philosophy at this point. What that translates to is “How can we be effective, realistic, and focused on the things that really matter to the department?”. Trying to get really clear on that has been a challenge [and] trying to keep morale up when things are not ‘easy breezy’ is always a challenge. Making sure that the alignment exists from top down as we have less budget, as priorities change. Goals are going to change and there should be a really clear tie back to the work that my team is doing, to the department goals, to the company goals. Making sure that all of those pieces are coming into place sooner rather than later and that we're communicating out about that well has definitely been a challenge.

My takeaway is really about staying close, being communicative and leveraging all of the opportunities that I have to do the kind of feedback and share-outs that need to happen so people stay informed.

Pieter Gunst

Yeah, interesting managing a team, especially in these times of uncertainty. One of the things that we discussed previously is the idea of presenting a strong framework and story to people to create transparency. I know you're excited about the value of storytelling in the professional context as well. I was wondering whether you could speak to that and how you've seen that be effective.

Anna Richards

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my biggest learning on the value of communications was in my last role. It's one of those things [when] you get burned once and then you know forever and carry it forward. There was a project that I got rolled onto while I was still at Zendesk where there'd been a miss with communications. Not through anybody not doing what they were supposed to, but just in practice the way that one group thought an idea had been presented and validated in practice with the people actually doing the work, it was not that experience.

So things went a little bit haywire. Digging into it a bit, I think it was really the people who signed off were not the people who were doing the work, and there was no glue between the two to bridge that gap. You operate as though things are all approved and moving forward. Come to find out it actually doesn't work for the business you're in. You're in a bit of a pickle. 

I had an amazing comms [sic] partner that I got to lean on at Zendesk. I learned a ton from her and from the change management team and how to be thoughtful and structured around communications. I think we all talk about, ‘Oh, communications and storytelling and business cases,” and these things which actually I think legal has a big gap on. I don't think legal does a good job bringing business cases and mature business statements back to the org [sic]. I think legal rests a lot on really smart people who know enough, but I think that there's a lot that we can do to mechanize that, and I think that's a role that legal ops is primed to play.

Coming into Micron without a close partnership with a comms [sic] person is something that I'm working to set up as a structured communication plan. That covers everything from “How do we manage team meetings?”, “How do we send out feedback”, “How do we think about who to include on things?”, “Is there existing structures within the business that we can lean on?”, “When does it matter to go out further than legal?”, “How do we arm people with the right information and then how do we put some structure around that so it's repeatable?” - So there's a tone [and it’s] appropriate. So it considers the business needs. 

If we're in this period of massive change and we want to roll out something new, we want to be thoughtful about when we announce this, because change fatigue is real, and we want to make sure that we set ourselves up for buy-in. There's that kind of mechanical piece to it. 

Then you mentioned the storytelling, Pieter, and I think that's the last point I'll hit on with this. The value of legal is so often lost in the ether of the business. It's this cost center or it's the land of ‘no’. In fact, my team and the teams that I know well are doing really innovative things. They're actually doing things to recapture revenue. That's become a big thing in legal, and it's being led by legal operations. We are being strategic in the advice that we're giving to the business. We're getting involved and embedded in the different parts of the business, rather than just sitting somewhere just getting contracts routed to us. If nobody's there to champion that and tell the story in a way that the business can consume easily, it's going to be missed. I think as we are, again, in the ‘Doing less with less’ phase and hopefully looking forward to building a strong foundation, when we're out of this, we're primed to play big time. 

Getting the value known is something that we can start focusing on without having to invest in a huge technology that I think will make a big difference for how legal is viewed by the entire org [sic].

Pieter Gunst

I love that. Anna, thank you so much for sharing your story and part of it with us today. I really enjoyed learning a bit about your journey, the things that drive you, and the challenges you face. So thank you so much for sharing this with the community.

Anna Richards

So happy to have had the opportunity. Really nice to speak with you, too, Pieter.

–

Do you work in-house and are you interested in sharing your career journey and experiences with the community? Apply here to be featured in a Community Spotlight. 

Are you a legal operations professional or considering entering the field? Join Legal.io to discover legal operations jobs, resources and more.