About

In October 2018, Mark Cockerill took on the role of vice president, legal with ServiceNow, the world’s fastest growing enterprise software company and which was designated by Forbes as the world’s most innovative company. This has given rise to a brand new set of interesting and exciting challenges, with a wider global leadership role, as well as driving the local Irish organisation office and managing a worldwide team based across Asia, Europe and the US. Highlights of Cockerill’s career include his tenure as general counsel of Meteor during its exciting growth phase early in his career which he describes as having ‘opened my eyes to the day-to-day challenges, variances and enjoyment of working in a cross-functional in-house environment’. He also led on the acquisition and development of the television arm of eircom, whilst he was there and also the sale of Telefonica to Three, two deals that particularly stand out as memorable experiences. In his current role he identifies that, ‘every day in ServiceNow is genuinely the most invigorating environment with some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with. No disrespect meant to anyone in my past, but the global team, leadership and every member of staff is fascinating, passionate, driven and more often than not, just brilliant at what they do’. Cockerill is continuing to expand the company’s privacy function worldwide and is determining best ways of internationally supporting a company going through amazing hyper-growth. He highlights that ‘hopefully the impact has been to double-on the efforts of my predecessors and pre-existing team to position and demonstrate legal as a key business enhancer and supporter, not as a restriction or necessary evil’. ServiceNow deals with providing efficiencies to customers by automating workflows and providing practical solutions to common inefficiencies. Cockerill highlights that ‘it only brings to mind that there are plenty of legal practices that fall into the same trap and the opportunity for suitable legal technology that enhances the overall function of a team – whether in-house or in private practice – still very much exists, as most technologies only deal with isolated problems’.