Close Ups Episode 3: Áine Lyons

‍‍This interview is part of the Litify Close Ups series, where we get behind the title and into the mindset of the legal community’s boldest leaders. Hosted by Litify’s CEO, Curtis Brewer, each episode features a leading voice in the legal operations community and covers career journeys, technology, trends, and how leaders are adapting their teams and operations to stay ahead. Subscribe to this series on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to be the first to know about future releases.

Recently, Curtis sat down with Áine Lyons, Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Workday, to discuss the evolution of legal operations, legal’s role in the enterprise, and how to drive AI adoption and ROI.

Can you tell us about the scope of your role and responsibilities at Workday?

I joined Workday about 18 months after a longer tenure at VMWare. I spent almost 16 years there, so it was daunting to start over. I was looking for a new challenge, and Workday offered a few defining things that I look for in a new role, including a value-based culture, an innovative DNA, and a startup mentality. Our ambition at Workday is to grow the business from $7 billion to $20 billion.

We’re managing a lot of risk and opportunity, and figuring out how we operate at scale. My role is to help the legal department make that journey as a connected team, learning new skills in the process and challenging ourselves to think differently about how we support the business. 

It’s also about helping our General Counsel, Rich Sawyer, who was also another element I was looking for in this role, and that’s somebody who’s going to go on that journey of driving change with you and be that champion. As part of the role, I sit on our CEO Strategy team. It’s about being embedded in the strategy of where the company is going. Both of these aspects of the role excited me as areas where I could influence from both those perspectives.

You’ve found yourself in a role that’s driving change and leading transformation. What set you down this path?

I started with a traditional legal career. I studied law and economics, and then went to Ireland to the Law Society for a couple of years and received my Master’s degree. Then I qualified and trained at a law firm, and it was very typical at the start.

After several years in practice, I made the jump to an in-house role. I had no experience, and someone took a chance on me. It was a technology company with a role in Ireland, which suited my personal life, and it all felt like this very safe, predictable trajectory. 

Then I remember getting the call, and the General Counsel of EMEA, who was hiring me, said, “I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that the role is no longer in Ireland. The good news is that you’ll be working in London, and it’s double the salary.”

What he didn’t know was that my husband – future husband at the time – and I were planning to get married, and I spent the next two years living in London while my husband was living in the West of Ireland, because I’d already handed in my notice at my previous job. Those two years were the best thing I've ever done. 

The company was Siebel Systems, and it was the best decision I ever made. One thing Tom Siebel was really good at was focus, clarity, and operational excellence. Every deal had a summary. He brought the right people into the room to make real-time decisions, and then we executed on those deals. When I look back, I actually learned a huge amount from the simplicity of how they ran their business that stayed with me. 

I stayed at Siebel for many years. Oracle acquired us. I had the opportunity to work at Oracle, but instead I joined American Power Conversion, which Schneider Electric quickly acquired. I became the General Counsel for Europe when we merged the two entities. I learned a lot there about working with an extremely small team and a large number of countries across Europe, and about quickly identifying what to focus on. 

I remember getting a shipment from my predecessor, and it was like 40 boxes of litigation. I spent the next couple of days sorting them by impact – low-risk or high-risk – and quickly calibrating, determining where I was going to focus, what we needed to close, and what we needed to move on. It was baptism by fire.

Then I was headhunted to go and work for a company called VMWare, which at that time was not very well-known in Europe. We had only 200-300 people in Europe, so at first I did that job and built the European legal team. Then we got a new General Counsel, and she came to Europe for a visit. I tried to use all the data and presentations to show her how complex the business was and all the work we were doing, and instead, two weeks later, she asked me to come to Palo Alto, our headquarters.

She told me, “I would like you to help me find your replacement because I want you to do a different role. I’ve heard of this thing called legal operations. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I want it.”

She was a fantastic mentor and supporter, but my initial reaction was an absolute no. I’m in a very predictable general counsel role. I can see my path, my career, but this seems uncertain, and I’m not qualified to do this.

But I met up with a few of the other early entrants to the role. At the time, fewer than 10 of us were meeting up in the area. After the first meeting, and hearing the challenges, hearing that they were also figuring out the role while on the job, and also their generosity, warmth, and support, I thought, “This is going to be something.”

Legal operations takes the legal department outside the traditional way that we’re viewed. It allows legal departments to showcase our value to the business. And it feels like we all knew that there was more pressure coming from CEOs expecting to see that impact — what are you driving? How do you quantify that? Why do you need these budgets? We have to be able to tell that narrative just like any other business leader.

Can you tell us a bit more about your perspective on the evolution of legal operations and where it might be going next?

In the early days, some fearless general counsels championed the role and made it integral to their leadership teams. And that’s what ultimately helps to make those roles successful. But then legal operations leaders also start hiring teams — technologists, data analysts, program managers, change management roles — all of whom become part of the community.

A lot of different roles started to develop, roles that wouldn’t have traditionally been part of a legal team. You might have a data analyst in the business intelligence team, but you wouldn’t have typically seen a data analyst on the legal team.

I think legal operations began with eBilling and cost management. Budgets and headcount are the two real levers you can pull in a legal department. It started in these more foundational areas, where it was almost easy to say that legal ops can support this.

The role has since evolved to help GCs inform strategy. Legal operations help convey to the board or the executive team the impact of the legal department. They help with communication, culture, and skills across the department.

Now, with AI, the role of legal operations is even more pivotal, and this community is poised to drive progress in this area. We know how to drive change. We have the resilience, that relentless sort of spirit to keep going and point out what needs to get done. Legal ops is about helping the legal organization influence, inform, and support the business. And AI is a great example of that because, in many cases, it’s the legal team that’s helping to educate, train, and assess opportunities for how to use AI and understand how to mitigate some of the risks.

We’re now the company's guides on delivering ROI, managing AI risk, and leaning into responsible AI, but it also means we need to experiment ourselves and understand how we’ll leverage it.

In the early days, legal ops was also about figuring out what could be outsourced. How could you tier work? What risk category would you put it in? What could be given to a certain level of resource? Where can you outsource? And now, the level of work that’s getting outsourced is moving up in that stack because AI is taking the bottom part of that.

That whole outsourcing piece has evolved, as have technology implementations. If it doesn’t have an AI component or an agentic aspect, it’s going to be very difficult to come into a company and succeed, because legal departments are also under pressure not to proliferate tools. 

In the world of AI, it’s about ensuring that you’re leveraging enterprise tools with your data and a broader database layer that combines legal data with other departments to deliver agents that are impactful across the business. That’s where legal operations come in, and what we’re thinking about as a community. How do we consolidate data? What are the personas of those internal clients we’re serving? What other department’s data could we co-mingle with ours to better serve that client? 

Let’s talk a bit more about AI. Many of our clients are still in the experimentation phase. Are there any AI-powered use cases in legal you’re particularly excited about?

There’s been a lot of fear about AI, that it’s going to take people’s jobs, so there’s been some resistance. To be fair, I think you’re always going to have 20% who are the change agents and will embrace new things, like AI, 60% who are hanging back to see what happens, and 20% who are going to be resistors. 

The pressure is now on all of us to move from experimentation and proof of concept to delivering ROI. I think about narrowing the focus to prove out fewer, more valuable agents. For us, there’s a lot of focus on our agentic strategy right now.

We’re focusing on serving our Sales client with a sales agent, and on a very complex negotiation agent, not just straightforward redlining.

We originally thought that we’d build the Sales agent to answer all the questions they ask us about deals. That was the wrong answer because the Sales team already had an agent they were building. What we’ve done instead is repackage all our data — rewrite, deduplicate, and update it. Now we have it in our database layer, so the Sales team’s agent can point to it. Every time a legal question comes up, that’s what answers the question. That’s much more powerful and impactful than us building a separate, siloed agent on the legal team.

With Litify, we’re looking to unlock more and more of that AI-powered eBilling and matter management, which is really important for us given the volume and complexity of our matters — having an invoice review be truly AI-powered, rather than relying on manual eyes on everything.

To get from experimentation to ROI, you need to drive adoption. How do you approach that?

A lot of it goes back to leadership. It’s a mix of the tone from the top that we’re uniting around a strategic goal, and that to execute, we’re all going to move in this direction as a team. Do you have the training? The enablement? The support? 

That approach continues well beyond launch and needs to be sustained over the long term, or you’ll see adoption drop again. There’s also a need to keep coming back to the why and to communicate how this connects to a company imperative. At Workday, we have a company imperative on “Operating at Scale.” We always come back to that as a company. Then we also make it quite personal for each individual. That’s where we bring it down to personal goals. We set a goal around AI skills for all 20,000 employees. Everybody needs to contribute to developing their own AI skills. 

If you’re driving change and neglect a major investment in training and enablement, I’ve learned from my own failures, you run a very high risk of not having adoption. When that’s happened, it’s often been on me — I encourage people to call out the red: where the project is at risk if we don’t invest in it, and call it out in the right forums.

Early in my career, I was sometimes afraid to call out what was missing or to have the difficult conversation, and those implementations didn’t go as well as I would have liked. I needed to be bolder about speaking up and getting the right people at the table because it never gets better otherwise. 

Now I’ve learned to flag the risks early and almost proactively before we ever start. I do a simple one-pager for every project or initiative that I’m going to focus on, and if I can’t explain in one line the value and impact to the company, then I don’t know if we should do it. If I can’t explain that, then what’s our readiness? And what are the risks of continuing?

What is the legacy you want to leave behind?

I’d like to feel like I left any place I worked better than I found it. But most of all, I’d like it to be about helping other people develop their careers. I’ve benefited from so many amazing mentors, and I want to develop my team as change agents and leaders. That’s the goal: for people to say they’ve learned something and enjoyed the time they spent on the teams I’ve led.

‍Ready to turn your legal operations into a platform of action? Learn more about how Litify ELM can help unleash your team’s full potential.