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1. ‘Under Connie Brenton’s leadership as senior director of legal operations, the NetApp legal department transformed from an expensive cost centre to an award-winning, barrier breaking, sales-enhancing centre. Brenton’s focus in creating a “deliberate discomfort” pushes the legal department to embrace new technology and challenges existing processes. As a legal service provider, it is typical to encounter resistance to change from the legal department, Brenton fostered a culture that does not only accept change, but encourages it. Brenton has successfully developed a global service delivery model to right-source activities, allowing attorneys to spend more time on value-add activities, while delivering routine requests from the business in a quicker, more efficient, and more consistent manner. She has also leveraged technology to improve the speed and accuracy of activities. Whether it is encouraging the implementation of a technology-assisted contract extraction programme or pushing for eSignature for all documents, Brenton understands the value of technology – over $4m in cost savings and over 75K hours saved from implementing eSignature – and encourages the use of new technology. In addition, Brenton embraces analytics and metrics to develop legal dashboards that allows the NetApp legal leadership team to obtain instant insight into the performance of the teams against pre-defined goals. Finally, by partnering with law firms and service providers to implement alternative fee arrangements, Brenton shows her understanding of the value – for both partners – of a fixed fee arrangement and works with partners to ensure the arrangement is beneficial for both. This exhibits itself as nearly 70% of all of NetApp’s legal spend is through an alternative fee arrangement’. 2. ‘It is impossible to utter the words “legal operations” without also including the name “Connie Brenton” in that same sentence. Through her roles at Sun, Oracle, NetApp and of course as CEO and founder of Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), a non-profit organisation, Brenton has put legal operations on the map, defined the role, been an industry pioneer and brought together the entire legal ecosystem in championing change. She has been a serial innovator in the space and a spokesperson and champion for all who are in this role. We have Brenton to thank for the increased prevalence, impact and seniority of legal operations’.