Close Ups Episode 1: Léo Murgel
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 thinkers. 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 legal 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.
As the legal industry moves past the initial wave of digital transformation, a new frontier is emerging. For corporate legal teams, it’s no longer about catching up with technology advances in finance or IT— it’s about transforming the department through the power of AI so legal can be even more strategic partners for the rest of the business.
Recently, Litify CEO Curtis Brewer sat down with Léo Murgel, SVP and COO of Corporate Legal Affairs at Salesforce, as part of the Litify Close Ups podcast series to discuss the evolution of legal operations, the shift toward agentic AI, and why the best legal technology isn't a collection of tools, but a unified platform of action.
Can you tell us about your responsibilities and the scope of your role?
"I’ve been in this role for about five or six years. I started as a traditional head of legal ops back when there were only three of us in the group. We had a forward-thinking head of legal who wanted to see some 'outside-in' thinking regarding how we achieve goals and bend our price point. I’d spent several years in IT and M&A, so I brought that business and technology lens to the team.
Today, the team handles typical ops responsibilities, such as outside counsel management and shared services, but we also have a global team handling tier-one work. Our scope includes eDiscovery, technology, data science, knowledge management, and an enablement team that looks after both our internal legal staff and corporate-wide training."
What drew you to a career path focused on change and transformation?
"I’ve always been fairly entrepreneurial. A good number of my roles were positions that didn’t exist before I took them. At Salesforce, I pitched the creation of an M&A technology group to up-level our due diligence.
The legal ops role was very similar. You have amazing practitioners and lawyers, but I wanted to help them reach the next level through a combination of processes and tools. The industry used to focus purely on efficiency, but the leading teams now achieve better results through new ways of working. It’s about net-new better outcomes."
How have you seen the objectives of legal teams evolve over the last several years?
"Legal operations really came about as GCs and CLOs started feeling pressure from management regarding operational efficiency. When I started with our legal team, we looked at the total legal budget over revenue. Today, we are at least twice as efficient as we were then.
I look at the evolution in horizons. The first horizon was largely a ‘catch-up’ phase, adapting best practices from finance, HR, and IT to the legal context. It was about vendor management, workflow, and ticketing.
The second horizon, where we are today, is defined by generative AI and autonomous agents. For those who have digitized their processes and structured their data, we now have an opportunity to lead the enterprise. Because generative AI is about making sense of unstructured data, and the legal department has more of that than anyone else, we are moving beyond efficiency to significantly differentiated outcomes. It’s about helping to raise the effectiveness of the group altogether."
How has legal’s partnership with business stakeholders changed in this agentic era?
"We are entering an era where humans and digital agents work together. At Salesforce, the legal team is critical to this juncture. We aren't just reacting to events — we are leading from the front.
For example, our teams partnered with our product team to design 'guardrails.' With autonomous agents, one of the hardest things is telling them what not to do, what boundaries to draw, and what subjects to avoid. By designing these frameworks, legal gives customers the trust they need to operate safely. We are also exercising a more 'client-centric' muscle, electing senior leaders to work directly with regional and functional heads to understand their needs before they even perceive them."
What are legal ops leaders looking for in technology today?
"The industry has been dominated by point solutions, little bits that solve specific problems but don't provide a fabric for managing the end-to-end business. That fragmented landscape doesn't let you put your data together cohesively.
Our strategy is a platform play. We use the Salesforce platform and Litify to manage the business from intake to outside counsel engagement. We have a digital agent that provides first-tier support to 70,000 internal clients. Because we have a foundation of trusted data on a single platform, our agents can tap into the same automation we’ve built for humans over the years. Those agentic use cases become much more powerful when they aren't partitioned across different systems."
What is the "secret sauce" for building successful relationships with outside counsel?
"It’s about a symbiotic relationship. We’ve brought our preferred panel firms together at Salesforce Tower to educate them on our corporate strategy and yearly goals. We want them to invest in us, so we invest in them.
A big secret we lean into is consistently exposing new work to more than just the incumbent firm. This drives innovation and cost efficiency. Too often, relationships 'harden' between one practitioner and one specific partner, and you end up in a boxed-in world. We use a workflow in Salesforce where attorneys tell us what they expect from an engagement, and then we inject data from Litify on the financial performance of similar matters. This allows us to select the right partner based on an informed point, rather than just habit."
How are you hiring differently to support this path of innovation?
"We look for a blend: the practitioner who has business understanding but is also tech-savvy. We’ve had great success hiring 'tech-savvy practitioners', people with law degrees who pursued further education in technical fields.
In the old IT world, you had a business person, an analyst, and a developer. With platforms like Salesforce, those roles collapse into a single role. In the agentic era, the person best suited to create instructions or prompts for an agent is the practitioner who understands the work we’re trying to do."
What is the legacy you want to leave behind?
"The first thing that comes to mind is being helpful to others. Throughout my journey, my work has been about helping people do their best work, regardless of the business area they are in. I get a deep sense of satisfaction not only from seeing people thrive but from the continuous learning that comes with it.
When I look back, I hope people remember our time together as an experience that helped them get better at what they do and enjoy their work more. Ultimately, I want to be remembered for helping others learn something new along the way and progress in their own professional journeys."
Ready to turn your legal operations into a platform of action? Learn more about how Litify AI can help unleash your team’s full potential.
