Legal Engineering's Moment
Mary O'Carroll on her new CEO Role and the skill set that is becoming more and more highly prized
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# Legal Engineering's Moment
> Mary O'Carroll on her new CEO Role and the skill set that is becoming more and more highly prized
[Read on Substack](https://lawwhatsnext.substack.com/p/legal-engineerings-moment) · 2026-05-06 · Law What's Next
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A quick reminder: Law://WhatsNext is our vehicle to explore through dialogue (or occasional reflection) how leading lawyers, educators and technologists are using emerging tech to evolve how we practice and administer legal services. No hype — just practical conversations.
🎙️ This week we sit down with Mary O’Carroll - the newly announced CEO of Legal Eng Consulting Group (LECG), and one of the most influential figures in the legal operations and legal technology industry.
Mary’s career arc is, by her own admission, a “portfolio” one. She built and led legal operations at Google. She founded and grew the CLOC community into the global home of legal ops. She moved into big law as Chief Operating Officer at Goodwin. She has sold legal technology (Ironclad), advises investors (she is an Executive in Residence at Signal Fire), technology companies (Sandstone), hosts her own podcast Pearls On Gloves Off, authors her own Newsletter, and — as of yesterday is now the full-time CEO of LECG, a boutique legal operations consulting and services firm focused on what she calls legal engineering.
She’s busy, and she loves it! Hitting pause a few months ago 👇 didn’t really last much longer than the announcement 🤣
Alex and I are big fans and friends of Mary - few people in the legal industry benefit from her wide ranging experience and perspective.
Even fewer can so succinctly distill the objectives, incentives, opportunities and competing priorities of the firms, teams, tech companies and individuals that make up our unique legal ecosystem, and none with the energy, candour and piercing intellect Mary brings to every conversation.
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Available here or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy your podcasts.
In the short time we spend together we get into:
The CEO Announcement — Mary uses the episode to confirm she is joining LECG as full-time CEO. She explains why!
What a Legal Engineer actually is? Mary defines the legal engineer as someone who can understand legal processes, re-engineer them, and then leverage technology to automate, accelerate, optimise and maintain them.
The Billable Hour is the Operating System — Drawing on her recent Substack piece - “Law Firms Keep Buying Tech. The Billable Hour Keeps Killing It” - Mary explains why everyone has been focused on the wrong half of the billable hour problem. Pricing on a fixed fee is the easy bit. The harder bit is the underlying incentive structure of a law firm. If you give an associate a tool that turns eight hours into one and tell them they still need to hit hours, you have created a structure that is at odds with the technology itself. It is, she says, “a hundred percent the innovator’s dilemma.”
The View from the VC Side — As an Executive in Residence at Signal Fire, Mary has watched venture capital wake up to legal in a serious way.
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Connect with Mary O’Carroll — through Legal Eng Consulting Group (LECG) | on Substack | or LinkedIn
If you enjoyed this conversation please do share it with someone or a community who you feel would benefit from listening. If you have any more time do tell us what resonated; what didn’t; and rate the show (it helps us grow the audience and get great guests like Mary).
One more thing — if you are in the UK and able to make it to Scale Up GC, go and watch Mary’s keynote in person. We have a strong suspicion it will be one of the talks people quote for the rest of the year.
We hope you have a great week!
Tom & Alex
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