Mary O’Carroll, the former head of Google’s legal operations, has joined Goodwin as its new chief operating officer.
O’Carroll will oversee Goodwin’s more than 1,000 business professionals across the globe, the firm said Monday.
Goodwin “truly is a place that is supercharged with not just the best in class lawyers, but also this team of outstanding business professionals who I think together are truly focused on building and deepening these purposeful client relationships that I’ve been excited to foster and see grow during my career,” O’Carroll said in an interview. She will be based out of the firm’s Silicon Valley office.
O’Carroll, the co-founder and former president of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), spent 13 years at Google building its legal operations functions. She left the technology giant in 2021 for digital contact management company Ironclad.
Goodwin is a Boston-founded law firm that specializes in technology, private equity, and life sciences. It has steadily become one of the nation’s most profitable law firms.
The firm launched a search for its new executive earlier this year after longtime COO Michael Caplan departed in March. Caplan, who helped transform Goodwin into a 1,600-lawyer firm with $2.2 billion in gross revenue, now serves as chief operating officer of Lowenstein Sandler.
“We’ve gotten this far because our global operations team has played and continues to play a central role in our client success—it’s essential to what we do,” Mark Bettencourt, Goodwin’s managing partner, said in an interview.
The firm “sought Mary out” for the role because of her experience and “proven track record of transformational change” he said.
“That experience, that stature, that potential impact that she can have on our future, that’s exactly what we need at this point our life cycle, and that’s why we’re so excited that Mary’s going to join us,” he said.
Changes Ahead
O’Carroll, a former investment banker, first began her legal operations career at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe where she was a profitability manager and advised the law firm on operations and management practices.
She joined Google in 2008 as its first legal operations professional. While at Google, she also helped found CLOC and served as its president for a five-year period where its membership grew from 40 to 3,000 members.
Investments in technology have spiked over the last two decades as legal departments have grown and the role of the general counsel has changed, O’Carroll said. That’s put pressure on law firms to think about different ways to do fee arrangements and given rise to alternative service providers, she said.
“The law firm is the piece of the ecosystem that has changed the least during this time,” O’Carroll said.
Goodwin “really wants to be a leader in this space and to transform in a way that optimizes for generating, creating the best in class lawyers and delivering the best services to their clients,” she said.