Legal Ops at Scale: Sruthi Kosuri and Cindy Prabhakar of Marvell Technology

How does a legal operations team at a global semiconductor company cut contract request time by 73%, earn a seat at the CLO's staff table, and build board-level analytics, all while keeping pace with AI?

In this episode of CZ and Friends, Cecilia Ziniti sits down with Sruthi Kosuri and Cindy Prabhakar from the legal operations team at Marvell Technology, an $8 billion company powering the infrastructure behind AI, cloud, and the devices we use every day.

Sruthi and Cindy share how they transformed Marvell's legal function from a manual, reactive team into a modern, data-driven operation that the rest of the business actively wants to partner with. From auto-triaging 40% of contract requests to building self-serve SOW workflows that close in under 15 minutes, this episode is a practical masterclass in legal ops at global scale.

In this episode:

• How Marvell's legal ops team cut contract request time by 73% across a 7,000-person user base.
• Meeting stakeholders where they are and how that changed how legal is perceived across their company.
• How auto-triage and self-serve workflows replaced a single-point-of-failure manual routing system.
• The strategy behind pushing Marvell paper on the front end to unlock downstream contract speed.
• How the "Legally Brilliant Challenge" gamified AI adoption across the legal team.
• What board-level legal analytics look like and how to get there.
• Why legal ops is no longer just legal ops, and what "global operations" means for the future.

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@Sruthi Kosuri on LinkedIn

@Cindy Prabhakar on LinkedIn

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⁠@Cecilia Ziniti⁠ on LinkedIn

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Transcript

Cindy Prabhakar: 00:00 And yes, previously we were seeing as quite administrative. We absolutely had to transform. We actually now divide and conquer.

Sruthi Kosuri: 00:08 Everything was so manual. And that's where like things started changing.

Cecilia Ziniti: 00:16 Welcome back to CZ and Friends, where we talk with legal leaders, operators, and technologists shaping how modern companies work. I'm your host, Cecilia Ziniti. Today we have two guests from Marvell, a global semiconductor company that powers most of the chips in your devices today. The company's got an incredible past and an amazing present with a hundred billion dollar market cap, huge global implications in the semiconductor industry, and thousands and thousands of agreements for compliance and other legal matters globally. My guests are Sruthi Kosuri, the director of legal operations at Marvell, and Cindy Prabhakar, the legal operations manager on the team. The two of them have worked together for a few years now, and they don't always see things the same way, which is exactly why I wanted them both on. Quick bit of context on Marvell. They just posted record revenue of over $8 billion in fiscal 26, up 42%, all driven by AI infrastructure demand. NVIDIA just dropped a $2.2 billion investment in Marvell. Marvell is moving at a serious pace now, and these two are running legal operations inside of all of that. Sruthi? Cindy, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. Cindy, I wanted to start with something you said in your notes to us. So you described legal operations previously as being seen as an administrative function. Um, pushing paper around, kind of get a docusign type of thing. How has that changed and is it a consequence of the scale that you see at your company?

Cindy Prabhakar: 01:42 Very good question. And I believe it pretty much started with when Sruthi joined the company. She ensured that we got a seat at the table. And yes, previously we were seeing as quite administrative because we are extremely supportive, which we are still today. With the scale that we had to take on, we absolutely had to transform. We actually now divide and conquer. There's three people on our small and mighty team. Previously, I actually had a whole team of five when we only had a global team of 50. Now we have a global team of almost 80 and only three of us. So things had to take shape to ensure that we are able to be scaled and not just be a support admin team. And of course, there was a lot of thought about what Legal Ops should be doing and shouldn't be doing. And some people don't even know what Legal Ops was at the time when I joined the company. And we all know this. I think that's how we essentially had to get once we got the seat at the table, things turned around

Cindy Prabhakar: 02:44 quickly.

Cecilia Ziniti: 02:45 So, Sruthi, you came in with an MBA, and we've got this incredibly global company. You're talking to us from India right now, huge geopolitical implications, a legal team that my guest has is being pulled in a lot of different directions. So, how did you make that change that Cindy just described? And so was it from like legal ops as like, you know, Cindy's words, administrative to partnering to helping? It sounds like you're GC scale the team. So give us a give us a picture of what you did.

Sruthi Kosuri: 03:15 I do want to say that it's not just us who made the change, it's also our CLO, who's been so proactively supportive of this group and what we do. And he saw that we could bring more value than just pushing people, like you mentioned. There's nothing wrong with doing that, but then he saw that we could bring more to this table, and that's where like everything changed. The first thing I would say is we saw that there were like there was nothing automated. Everything was so manual. And that's where, like, you know, when from where I came from, maximum integrated and analog, we saw a little much more automation than what was at Marvell. And that's where like things started changing.

Cecilia Ziniti: 03:52 So you come in and what was your given mission?

Cecilia Ziniti: 03:55 It was like, hey, we got 50 lawyers, we are gonna see breakout growth, public company. How did you go from okay, make this change to really putting meat on the bones of what your mission would be? Or, you know, maybe your CLO gave it. So your CLO is amazing. I think he's a long time Marvell guy. But tell me about how that took shape.

Sruthi Kosuri: 04:15 Um I think he really wants to get everything very efficiently done. And he is that person who won't like say one extra word if it's not needed. So he'll just like be super efficient and he expects that from everything. So when he saw like things being too manual, too, like, you know, not being efficient, it's taking too much time, he's like, okay, so they you come in, you change this, like you need to automate some of these. Our biggest things, I think most legal ops do have is the CLM. Uh so we have that too. And then the second thing was finances. He couldn't understand like anything about it. So that's where those were the two things that we started off with. But the mission was try to automate as much as you can, reduce manual work, and be more efficient. What's a good example of a process that was manual?

Cecilia Ziniti: 05:03 So you you come in and it's just like, hey, Mark has this instinct that we're doing things that we don't need to be doing, we're wasting time, resources, brain power, or whatever. Um, does any one process or um initiative stand out as something where you came in and were just like, yeah, we're gonna we're gonna revamp that thing?

Sruthi Kosuri: 05:23 First thing I would say is the finance. There was one cost center for all of legal. Wow. And he's like, How do I get my hands on the data? How do I know who is spending what? How do I know which team owns what? Right. And then that was the first thing that started reshaping this whole team.

Cecilia Ziniti: 05:41 So, Cindy, what is that the example you were thinking of?

Cindy Prabhakar: 05:43 I had a second one. So this other one was as you mentioned, Cecilia, we have thousands of agreements and it's only growing. So one thing Mark asked is we need to auto-triage our agreements, assignments to attorneys or legal reviewers. We can't be doing manual assignments anymore. It's impossible. Let the system train it and then have it prepped in the back end and have a process in place. And we're constantly trying to increase the auto-triage methodology.

Cecilia Ziniti: 06:12 Wow. All right. So I want to dive in on both of these things. So Sruthi, you know, there's a big thing, and I think it is a thing in legal operations where in any kind of operations, like follow the money, right? Finance knows who you're paying. And if you literally only know 80 people, I'm assuming a budget in the, you know, eight figures, if not high eight figures, you know, all of it is just one bucket. So you see that and you're like, all right, where you spend your money is obviously at least an addition of priority. What is what did you do from there? Did you just go to finance and be like, all right, we got 10 cost centers now? Did you implement a system? And what did success look like for that? And then Cindy, I want to come back to your agreements thing because that is especially with AI, it's just a topic that's on fire. But let's dive in on Sruthi's.

Sruthi Kosuri: 07:18 So they have like two groups, or corporate has corporate and stock, stock admin. And that's that's how we went about it. Um, and it also got like a lot of ownership because we saw like these some of these bills that come from law firms that are PDF documents, and probably they're putting in like both like multiple owners like work into that, and then one person is signing off because they're like, Yeah, I think this group might have got this done work, got this work done, and stuff like that, right? So, so that's where like we got a lot of ownership from the from the practice group owners, and now they come to ops and says, What's my budget? How much did I spend? Where am I heading this year? I mean, this year, what's what does my year look? So it's it's been a very good, like positive change. Accountability. Accountability.

Cecilia Ziniti: 08:05 And so now that accountability, was there any one moment where you rolled up this system, suddenly you figure out you're spending X million dollars on stock admin? Were there any kind of jaw-dropping moments like that? Or like like what was the when did you know that you were on the right track with this project?

Sruthi Kosuri: 08:24 I think, you know, in any situation, you do have some people who push back. And the people who pushed back were those who did not want this happening, who were scared of seeing their budget, who were scared about us seeing what work was done in-house and outside, right? So that is where we saw like a lot of pushback. I am not a huge believer in going and bringing a new system each time I see a problem. I'd like to like try and revamp what we have and to the most extent possible. So like we just used what we had for our e-billing process, expanded that into matter management. That way, like we are able to keep it. We're not introducing something new again on the system side and the finance side, right? So we just kept one system, went with it, and we said, hey, it's okay, like you know, we're just gonna go through this the first year, and then we are gonna talk about efficiencies in the second year, and that's how we went about it.

Cecilia Ziniti: 09:16 Yeah. So when um you went from, so in this case you did decide to put in a system, but when you went from the sort of global cost center, legal spends, why why million dollars to you know, stock admin spends this, you know, global compliance spends this, etc. Was there like a like a head smacking moment of like, oh wow, like we should change XYZ? And in that moment, presumably you're meeting with the individual leaders across Mark's team. How did you navigate it? And was there, you know, any kind of like if you have advice for people who are trying to do this kind of large-scale change management, operational up leveling, what would it be?

Sruthi Kosuri: 10:03 Cecilia, it's always like getting to know their side of the story, then just like understanding why I am doing it. And that has been the biggest thing is either I would go on a walk with the leader, I would like talk to them one-on-one, schedule one-on-ones, just kind of build that like relationship to see why they are scared of something, right? Change is always difficult for everyone, and that's where like we were able to see that we were able to talk to some of them. And again, there are folks that you can just talk through. Like every time they knew I had a one-on-one, they would divert the topic to something else entirely. So, yes, it was difficult, but at the end of it, I think um Mark was a key driver of this, and he's like, You guys don't have a choice, you either do this or don't do this with us. So, I think for those who were not willing to work with us, that was that was the ultimatum that we got.

Cecilia Ziniti: 10:54 Um so literally, giving that so with Cindy, and we're obviously at a front row speech to this process. You know, if you've been operating at the company a number of years and you're in a position to give ultimatums to people very senior to you, how did that, you know, any any thoughts on that? And you know, you previously had people call you an admin. Now you're walking in and like fix your budget or you're gone. What was it? Give us both the emotional and the kind of practical aspect of

Cecilia Ziniti: 11:22 that.

Cindy Prabhakar: 11:23 Obviously, we weren't so stringent. We do give them a premise. Like before you engage a new outside counsel, look at what we already have in-house. Is there a possibility that we can actually hire a headcount or even a contractor versus engage another outside counsel? Oftentimes there's the relationship you build with your outside counsel over years and decades. And that is the kind of the mindset we have to overcome. And you know, we don't mind being the bad guys because we know this is what we have to do in order to get things to work more efficiently. So we tell them before you docusign anything, come to us. Not only is it we can assist you with doing things right, we also can make sure that whatever you're negotiating or engaging in, it really is something that has value added.

Cecilia Ziniti: 12:12 Yeah, I mean, what you're saying is super powerful because what I've seen, the trend over the last 25 years has been that in-house lawyers as a portion of the company legal spend has gone up. And that's reflective of exactly the efficiency that you described. So how are you like so you're playing this trend out in real time? So a lawyer on the team wants to hire, you know, counsel in I don't know, Azerbaijan or something for some supply chain thing. Are you like, how are you convincing them to do it in-house? And then is it does it come down to the dollars and cents? And then is there more ROI in building that in-house? So background, the reason I ask, I spoke with the CLO of Netflix, and he said, if they hire an outside council more than three times in a country, boom, they're hiring a Netflix lawyer in that country. Is basically, and they have they have, I think, north of 75% of their legal spend is actually in-house. Don't quote me on that number, but it was it was high, and it was because the economics were exactly as you described. So I guess I'm wondering like, is in-housing like a specific initiative at Marvell? And then within that, how has that evolved? Like, so you you you saw it, you're putting the pressure on them, you're giving them those options, but is this reflective of like the legal industry at large, or like what's what's driving it?

Cindy Prabhakar: 13:33 I think because you you're giving a very corner country. It's very difficult. Let's look at normal video. That's very difficult. But yes, I mean, employment issue in France. All right, I'm with people. We try to, we try to make sure that they know we have resources in-house, AI resources, we have enterprise AI. We also have you know, a lot of companies coming to us with succumbs, with um legal expertise, knowledge. So we may not need to hire a law firm. We could be hired consultants versus lawyers, right? So there are other considerations, but we do have a lot of countries globally, and unfortunately, we do need expertise in those niche countries. For example, recently we have Greece from our acquisition. We don't we don't think we're gonna plant uh attorney in Greece anytime

Cindy Prabhakar: 14:25 soon.

Cecilia Ziniti: 14:26 So there is a balance. And the other part of it is are the clients noticing? Tell me how the clients are noticing this change.

Cindy Prabhakar: 14:32 Definitely. We we hear a lot of appreciations come through. We actually have a company-wide appreciation central tool and platform. And I oftentimes see people from all different business units coming and thinking down because we are now in-house, we don't have to rely on outside counsel for everything. So, like Sruthi says, they can work on other projects.

Cecilia Ziniti: 14:54 People use the term strategic partner, and I think you know, we have a lot of general counsels on the show, and a lot of them take this mindset of like you want legal to be invited to the table. And it sounds like that's that's happening. And you know, would you say you walk into Marvell now versus Marvell 10 years ago? That it is it is it different in that way? A thousand percent. Sounds like Mark is really the modern CLO. Would you say that's accurate? Yes, it is, yeah. CXO. CXO. You know, it's funny because I I so I was at Cruise, uh, which was a division of General Motors, and we had Dan Ammon, who had been uh basically the CFO and president at GM. He talked about how, and he said this publicly, so I'm not saying anything uh that's not public, but he talked about how um after the ignition switch issues um in the 2000s, that there was an analysis done. And essentially the fact that legal was not kind of sitting with the engineering team, literally different building in Detroit, um, made a difference. And there was a lot of time spent kind of figuring out, like, you know, getting past the sort of like who did what wrong, and more to like, okay, how do we partner better together? And so looking at the case of Marvell, 8 billion in revenue, growing 42%, like you're clearly doing something right from a management standpoint. Would you say that Mark is part of that or how do you see that reflected? Would you say that that that modernity, that that mindset has been part of Marvell's success or part of certainly Legal's success helping Marvell?

Sruthi Kosuri: 16:33 I feel like an attest to legal success at Marvell, for sure. Marvell's success, I think that would be a question to Mark rather than to us.

Cecilia Ziniti: 16:41 But to me, it's a feeling,

Cecilia Ziniti: 16:42 right? Like, does it feel like Legal is higher performing now than it was five years ago before you brought more in-house?

Cindy Prabhakar: 16:49 I think we're on all fronts. We're higher performing, we're more approachable, we're more personable, we're more reliable and more respected. We earned our seat at the table because we're meeting them literally and figuratively, right? We're not on the ivory tower anymore. They see us as a partner, as a trusted advisor. And I think that's part of Mark's mission statement, right? Yes.

Cecilia Ziniti: 17:13 I love that. I love that. And so when you go back and look, so Sruthi, you came in and you had this mission to improve the legal operations, make it modern, and you know, now you're doing it. Was there a moment and how do you drive that improvement continuously? So, what like you probably looked at, okay, you've got these metrics. We can talk about contracts signed, we can talk about outside spend, we can talk about the number of shout-outs that you get, which is great. I love that that you said that stat. So, how do you like how much more of the job do you have to do? And then when did you realize, okay, we've done a good job with that, the way that Cindy described?

Sruthi Kosuri: 17:49 I think it's the appreciation for sure. Like, you know, where you feel like, oh yeah, you, you know, we were part of this, we were part of the larger picture. And like, you know, being at the table, like Cindy said, uh, legal ops was not part of like the CLO staff before. Now we are part of the CLO staff. So all of those made a huge impact for us. And then, like, you know, talking to the staff, understanding where they're coming from, that's where we see our success. But I think there's so much more to do, Cecilia. It just doesn't feel like we are at the end of it. It just is so much learning for us, too. It's constantly like we're keeping up with AI, we're learning how to pick agents, we're working with like IT to understand more on the data end, like um on the technical side. I come with a little bit of technical background, but Cindy has learned so much, and IT is amazed with how much she's learned in the last year, year and a half. Um, I'm just like, oh my God, Cindy understands this stuff. Like, so I think giving us that visibility has also, you know, it's across other SG&A groups too, that they are seeing us as a valuable partner, that they are seeing that, hey, we can go to them, we can ping legal ops, and then they are like business units who'll come and ping legal ops when they see an issue. So that's where we know that this is a success story for us.

Cecilia Ziniti: 18:60 I love that. So you're actually having other groups within the company want to model legal. Is that right? Did I hear that right?

Sruthi Kosuri: 19:05 I wouldn't say model legal, but I'm saying like they see legal ops also

Sruthi Kosuri: 19:09 along with legal. Got it.

Cecilia Ziniti: 19:11 Okay, all right. So Marvell moves fast, $8 billion in revenue, 42% growth, two big acquisitions the last six months. NVIDIA investment announced just announced. So you're basically sprinting with you know a hundred thousand global employees. Sruthi, you cut legal request time 73% across a 7,000-person user base. Wow. So there, so is that right? So 7,000 people rely on legal or have submitted legal requests. Is that right? Wow.

Sruthi Kosuri: 19:37 This is specific to the contracts, and Cindy has been the driver of that. So it's a teamwork. I can't take like a lot of the value. And then we have like the commercial transactions team who have been the greatest partners, who like, you know, have turned everything around. We had some new folks who came in and were able to bring in a lot of efficiencies. So we were able to achieve that. Um, those numbers.

Cecilia Ziniti: 20:00 So is this back to the what you said at the top of the show, Cindy, where you mentioned, okay, we used to have manual routing here on track requests, which with one people one person who makes that decision.

Cindy Prabhakar: 20:14 Wow. If one person is out, then you gotta train the backup person. So now we've auto-triage, I would say, about 40%. And then we have a team, global team too, who will auto-triage the rest. So it's a lot more efficient. Things are assigned almost within 24 hours, business hours. And to the contract efficiency, we had our self-serve workflows really can be generated, completed, docusigned within 15 minutes.

Cecilia Ziniti: 20:43 Wow. So everybody likes to pick on NDAs. So I'm assuming it's NDAs. NDAs is not. So yeah, I was gonna say, let's talk about not NDAs. So what are what are the things that you've automated that um that get to that you know, sort of less than a day time where it's completely self-serve? And how did you you know walk us through the process of how you got you got to that point?

Cindy Prabhakar: 21:03 We were mostly IT, especially during the pandemic. The huge influx of IT tools, applications, you know, that came in. So because of that, we had to create something a lot more streamlined. So we created the IT SOW self-serve and change order self-serve. So basically an amendment to any SOW. So that was our number one goal is pulling in our constant influx of IT agreements. It has also been able to go down from maybe five hours to 15 minutes. If you have an MSA in place already, you have the terms and conditions, all you need to do is add extra technical support. You put in your scope of work, pop it into the system, and it will send out a docusign.

Cecilia Ziniti: 21:49 I love that. So I have to imagine, I mean, even just literally for our startup, I'm looking at vendor agreements basically every day, adding seats on Zoom, whatever it is. And I can't imagine for that huge of an employee base. Wow. So in substance, is it how do you unlock that? Do you nail the MSA on the front end and then empower the business? Okay. Yeah. And so do you push your own? So this is a big thing. You all are a huge company where, you know, I we represent so a lot of GC AI customers are software companies selling to big companies. And the big thing is, okay, they want to use, you know, let's use Acme in the example. Acme wants to use their paper. And we're like, no, but Acme's paper is not relevant to what we do. So do you all hold the line on Marvell paper for software purchases?

Cindy Prabhakar: 22:36 Yes, for the most part. But we are trying to create a template for our SaaS tools because that is huge. So we understand that we still have to negotiate a lot of times on other party paper, but we where we draw the line is we have our must-haves and they have to be in there. So what we do is starting point, usually we push our paper and then we'll align, we'll add our exhibits or things that we cannot compromise.

Cecilia Ziniti: 23:03 Yeah. Well, so it sounds like this is kind of like a like a an orchestrated thing where if you want that result of being able to negotiate an SOW in 15 minutes, as you described, okay, then the way to do that is to have the Marvell paper on the front end. So it's funny because I I'm on the other side of this. Like literally, we had a customer who was selling to like a big candy company and they sent over a procurement agreement that talked about supply chain around like peanuts and cocoa and all these things. And it was just like our our customer was like literally a SaaS company and was like, I don't know the provenance of my cocoa. I'm not signing it. And so it was like a funny example. But in this example, I guess the cell would be like, look, if you sign our paper, then in the future you want to expand, it's gonna be way faster. And so I guess like, is that and so how has your you know, IT team or or the the I guess the how's that gone in terms of and maybe you made improvements to the template itself? It sounds like you have but like so I so let's just say I'm so lucky as to sell to Marvell one day. We'll get there. Let's say then I am. I'm getting the I'm getting the MSA. What am I doing? Like is it pretty good? Is it like pretty easy? Like what what are you doing to kind of make the commercial, you know, wheel spin faster?

Cindy Prabhakar: 24:18 The commercial side, you're I think you're honing in on the vendor side, right? With the vendor side, we are actually trying to create um workflow where we may be able to involve the requester and procurement team. That's the goal, the way

Cindy Prabhakar: 24:32 of the future. Right now, we're setting up the um, you know, the goalposts so it gets closer and closer. But right now, I think as I kind of mentioned, we're trying to templatize a lot of these common SaaS companies and pools. And then same thing, templatize a lot of the resources that we engage so that it's faster, more streamlined. And I think Sruthi works with our head of commercial transactions team really well. I mean, not just because they, you know, have they knew each other, but she gets her buy-in quickly. They talk things over. So it really helps when you have a top-down buy-in.

Sruthi Kosuri: 25:09 It's also the leader from commercial transactions. Like I said, it has been a shift in this group on like how they have been partnering with us. And Dina coming from like always being in the technology world, I think she comes in with like this passion of improving. So she also asks us, hey, can I have any of the AI tools? Give just give me a thumbs up or down on my like very low value commercial, like you know, procurement or like the wind-aside contracts, right? So then I don't need an attorney spending time on it. Can we like auto-triage that to a contract administrator? So she's really forward-thinking in those terms too.

Cindy Prabhakar: 25:42 So another great thing is she wanted each attorney to have uh, you know, their own respective teams that they support. So now people know who to go to because, for example, I have foundry agreements. Oh, I know who my attorney is supposed to be. Instead of chasing down who's working on my agreement, who is going to be assigned this agreement, who's likely going to support me. So a lot of efficiencies has been created because of her forward thinking and her ability to differentiate. Okay, what is the actual um time spent versus what is the time that's uh getting up to speed? So she was she did make that clear demarcation and she says, I want to cut out things that are getting people up to speed.

Cecilia Ziniti: 26:22 I love that. So that concept of assigning lawyers to stakeholders, you know, at Amazon, it was very powerful and it was, you know, it's a challenge for workflow, right? Because sometimes one group will get more busy and so on. But we found that the value of it was so high, also because of those relationships, because of the understanding what the business is working on. Was there any resistance from the individual attorneys then or not? Or like how did it, how did that go when you're like, all right, X group, foundry group, your lawyer is Y person?

Cindy Prabhakar: 26:55 And how did you set them up for success from there? Company or culture is if you want to try something, always sound off. Tell your manager.

Cindy Prabhakar: 27:03 So, yes, it's possible that they're assigned to a certain group. Maybe they prefer sales side, but now they got assigned, you know, buy side. But next year, if you sound off, I want to know more, I want to learn more about sell side, we're very amenable as a company, as a team. So I think that helps to assuage some of the um, as one of our favorite contract admin says, agita. Um stuck in the same role, right? I love that.

Cecilia Ziniti: 27:29 All right. So we've gotten surprisingly, considering it's a semiconductor company with all these, you know, very technical legal considerations. We've we've honed in on kind of the soft side a little bit more. Talked about agita, talked about visiting people's offices. I've got in my notes that you're big on coffee chats. So I've seen this in legal ops before, too. That's like you can make, you know, a gajillion documents, beautiful process, you know, agile and that EMP certified. And then reality is, you know, you actually have to like talk to the people that you're that you're serving. So tell me about that. And um, was that an initiative from from you? Is it just part of the culture? How do you use informal coffee chats as a tool uh with your stakeholders?

Sruthi Kosuri: 28:13 Cecilia, I think maybe it goes like company wide. I'm not so sure. But for me personally, when especially when we're talking about pain points, we need to understand the other side of the story, which is where like I strongly believe like, let's have a chat, let's see what's happening. You know, I can't just come and demand something to be changed just because I think or I fancy it, right? Or legal fancies it for that matter. So then, like, we go, we sit with our IT partners, our finance partners, or you know, our HR partners to see like what's happening at your end. I don't want to send you this like huge document. I'm doing this project, this is the purpose. Like, no one, no one's gonna read your document. No one wants to give their input on the pain points. So that's how it started as I started off my career, and then like just got that in here. And that really helped us, especially with the CLM, with the changing of the cost centers. Maybe not, but uh, in some areas it might not have, in some areas it it was so successful. Like, but most of them they want to partner with you. They especially when you say, What is your pain point? Explain to me why you're not willing to work with us, and then we'll make sure that we accommodate your pain points too. And that's I mean, that that's where like we get a lot of buy-in.

Cecilia Ziniti: 29:25 So obviously, when we talk about change management, taking stakeholders' pulse, you're literally an AI company, or at least powering AI on the infra side. Being an AI company or or at least the infrastructure for AI, has that changed how you think about it and the pace at which you're moving? Absolutely. Absolutely.

Cindy Prabhakar: 29:43 Yes. See more about that.

Cindy Prabhakar: 29:46 If we're only going to hire headcounts, AI can't do it. So that's that's kind of a short run. But for us, it is. Um anytime we think of process improvements or even implementing a process, we check in to see if we can build this in-house, if we have a uh AI agent or a workflow that we can work with. Sruthi is I feel like she constantly reminds all of us how to make sure we embed AI in our daily work life. And she actually gamified it starting in you know, start of the year, which I thought was brilliant. And we actually called it the legally brilliant challenge.

Cecilia Ziniti: 30:23 Let's move to the lightning round real quick. All right, a leader or book who shapes how you think. Cindy.

Cindy Prabhakar: 30:31 I think people in Legal Ops probably know uh Connie Brenton. So she's sort of an idol of mine. You know, they have the mother of invention. I feel like she's like mother of legal ops. I really look up to her. Anytime she's around having her some seminars and conferences, if I can, I will try to attend. Learning from her passion, take absorbing the energy and knowing what she went through personally and still being so profoundly, you know, passionate about all things legal ops really helps me to know that I'm in the right place. I

Cindy Prabhakar: 31:04 really love my job. It's not just a nine to five and then turn it off when I'm done. I'm constantly thinking, how do I make my team, my organization better? All right. Sruthi, something you would tell your younger self.

Sruthi Kosuri: 31:19 Be patient. I was a Spitfire who wanted things to be done really fast. But coming to this age, I think like patience was the best thing that happened that that made things work for me.

Cecilia Ziniti: 31:29 I love it. Last one, and I I'll ask you both this question. Five years from now, kind of post-AI, let's say, or certainly more in AI. Uh, we've got AI chips in our brain. I'm just kidding. Um, what does a great legal function look like in a company like Marvell?

Sruthi Kosuri: 31:45 I would say it would be like one of the practice groups where you, you know, we are partnering with you, not just with you, but also the business units to kind of deliver not operations just for the legal team, but the larger company.

Cecilia Ziniti: 31:57 How about you, Cindy?

Cindy Prabhakar: 31:58 I feel like we're able to easily fill in the gaps. So legal ops is no longer like Sruthi says, we're not just legal

Cindy Prabhakar: 32:06 operations, we're a global operations. We go where we're needed and we're able to create 2D, 3D versions of us where we go. That's the one that's a great one, Cindy. I love that.

Cecilia Ziniti: 32:19 That's the futurism from a from a tech company. I love that. So good. All right. I'm so glad you both came on for this one. Thank you for being on the show. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for showing up.

Sruthi Kosuri: 32:31 Yeah, thank you for having us. Really appreciate and love the chat.

Cecilia Ziniti: 32:36 Yes. Love it. So good. All right. That was Sruthi Kosuri and Cindy Prabhakar from the legal operations team at Marvell Technology. If you want to see how legal teams are using AI to do better work and reach the legal brilliance

Cecilia Ziniti: 32:47 levels that the two of these folks describe, head over to GC AI and follow CZ and Friends wherever you get your podcasts. Have a great day. See you next time.