Articulating the Value of Legal Ops Through KPIs & Metrics

Jessica Nguyen is the Chief Legal Officer of Lexion, a contract management company powered by AI. At Lexion she wears many hats – basically everything but the technical stuff. Jessica has an extensive in-house legal career at companies of various sizes and stages, and primarily in the technology and B2B SaaS space.

Prior to Lexion, she was the General Counsel of PayScale, a Microsoft attorney supporting Outlook email, and the first in-house attorney at Avalara. Jessica has been recognized as the 2020 “Startup GC of the Year” by Corporate Counsel magazine, a 2019 Top 100 Legal Influencers by The Business Journals, Best Under 40 by the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, and a 2018 Puget Sound Business Journal 40 Under 40. She is a champion of diversity, equity, and inclusion in companies and in the legal industry.

Lizzy McLellan is an editor for ALM who covers the business of law. She started as a reporter for the Legal Intelligencer in 2014, covering the Pennsylvania legal community based in Philadelphia. Lizzy is now part of the business of law team in ALM’s global newsroom. She also works with a team of editors who launched and continues to produce the Mid-Market Report, a weekly newsletter focused on mid-sized law firms.

Laurie Ehrlich is Chief Counsel - Sales and Alliances at Datadog, Inc. (NASDAQ: DDOG), one of the leading monitoring and security platforms for cloud applications helping businesses to secure their systems, avoid downtime, and ensure customers are getting the best user experience. In this role, Laurie leads the expanding Sales and Alliances legal team which provides commercial support to sales and strategic legal counsel to product engineering. With revenue growth and sales department growth at over 50% YoY, Laurie's focus is on process transformation and team development in order to support the rapidly scaling organization.

Laurie has a passion for creation and transformation. She focuses on creating value and better solutions for her business partners through cross-functional and intradepartmental collaboration while protecting against potential risks.

Prior to joining Datadog, Laurie spent 10 years at Cognizant. Most recently, Laurie established the Legal Operations function at Cognizant, so that she could focus on her passion projects, knowledge management and process optimization to drive more efficient legal support for commercial transactions powered by common sense and data analytics. Prior to running the LegalOps function at Cognizant, Laurie was Chief Counsel for Cognizant’s North America Insurance vertical where she served as a business-savvy, trusted advisor to her business teams and a mentor for many of Cognizant’s junior attorneys. Laurie also served as the NYC Regional Lead for Cognizant's Women Empowered for five years. Before going in-house, Laurie was the first US intellectual property specialist at Allen & Overy after starting her career on the IP team at Schulte, Roth, and Zabel.

Laurie received her J.D. from New York University School of Law and a B.S. from Cornell University - School of Industrial and Labor Relations, where she focused on organizational behavior.