‘‘Trust is a confidence you place in someone else; you’re willing to be vulnerable; they place it in you. It’s almost like forming a bond.’
Colin McCarthy, founder of Legal Operators, discusses the importance of trust in creating and building a community. With the recent emergence of legal operations as a discipline, Colin saw the need for a community for legal operations professionals to come together to collaborate with each other, share information and improve the industry. He believes the future of legal operations could involve a requirement for basic accreditation for businesses, not just legal professionals, to be up to speed with privacy issues.
If you would like to hear more from Colin’s experience of building a community, why not have a listen to the full interview on Spotify.
- The key role trust plays in building communities
- How the community expanded through the pandemic
- The importance of having the right type of support to build credibility
Catherine McGregor: You’ve got your community of legal operations professionals, Colin, called Legal Operations. When you started it, did you envisage it would grow as large as it has? Do you think perhaps the success in its growth has been the fact that it started quite organically, and started as quite an intimate group? And that it had that authenticity. Did you have the ambition for it to be that large or do you think it was more fortuitous - right place, right time?
Colin McCarthy: I think, Catherine, it’s all the above! When I started Legal Operators, there was, like, a handful of us; just a bunch of friends in similar places in some respects and different places on the spectrum of growth in our careers. It was just bringing like-minded people together, where we could express our views and do talks with one another, where we could actually trust one another. I set the tone really early. We’re all here together - drop any barriers, we’re all here to learn - and kind of create that environment. My mindset was like a rising tide race was all boats and so as we learn we’re all a support network for one another. It was a place to kind of lean in, learn, share their knowledge and that started out very organically with about 12 of us in our first session and quickly kind of ramped up over a year in the same type of in-person environments pre-pandemic to about 350 people at my last event pre-pandemic, in multiple different cities across the US. It scaled quicker than I ever imagined.
Access all episodes of the Trust Series