Tommie Tavares-Ferreira Talks Legal Ops Career Progression, Leadership Pathways

In this interview, legal ops leader and Today’s General Counsel Columnist Tommie Tavares-Ferreira discusses her legal ops career progression into the executive suite. In May 2025, she was named Chief Strategy Officer at Lawtrades, a legal talent marketplace. She wrote about legal operations career development for Today’s General Counsel Special Edition issue dedicated to legal ops. 

You have built a decorated career in legal ops and now you’re transitioning into a C-Suite role at Lawtrades as Chief Strategy Officer. What inspired your move and what excites you most about this next chapter?

Tommie Tavares-Ferreira: The move to Lawtrades felt like a natural evolution of work I’ve been doing for a few years. I’ve been strategizing the way that the legal teams reach their goals, operationalize and modernize how they work. I feel like legal ops gave me the playbook for designing for scale and building cross-functional alignment, and how I can apply so many of those principles across a broader organization rather than just one department. 

And what inspired me was the relationship I built with the founders, Raad [Ahmed] and Ashish [Walia]. I’m very impressed with what they built and the direction of their company and how they value legal, how legal teams work and what I could offer to their future initiatives. 

I’ll say what excites me the most is how legal services get delivered across the ecosystem. I saw that from being on the inside for so long. How I would move inside a legal team, how fractional work can take a big project off someone’s plate, or how it can help you scale without that commitment. I feel like now if I’m at the intersection of all that, I can speak from both being someone who was the buyer of these services and the builder of operations. Now I can influence how we do it from this side—which I believe will have a real impact to the legal ecosystem as a whole.

You’ve had a front row seat to the rise of legal operations over the past decade. What should legal operations professionals be doing now if they want to break into the executive leadership tier like you have? Should they seek out special projects, responsibilities or experiences? How should they level up?

Tommie Tavares-Ferreira: I love this question. I hope folks are thinking about this. I wasn’t certainly when I started because I was just sort of doing what was in front of me. There comes a point where the focus will shift from tactical to transformational. When you’re early in your career, you’re probably doing a lot of tactical work that gets you the kudos to move into leadership roles—and this isn’t unique to legal ops. But then your perspective and what you do changes. 

In recent years, I found myself less, maybe less involved in how a workflow works correctly and more drawn to conversations about leadership. How do I inspire teams? Even when I wasn’t the leader, of course my GC would be the one tasked with inspiring the team, but that didn’t preclude me from taking that initiative with my peers. So if you’re thinking about how to stay steady when something doesn’t go right, anticipating what a GC needs and acting before they ask—thinking ahead to what the executive leadership team requires and preparing accordingly. All of that work is being hyper-focused on what’s important to the business at large and how you can play a role.

If you’re thinking about that in the big picture, you move from being tactical to strategic. And in recent years, I leaned into creativity. I sought out mentors and executive coaches and I really started to ask myself, how do I focus on the leadership part of my role. How do I create momentum? How do I navigate setbacks? These are called soft skills, but really they became what I was doing mostly in those last few years. So that was the enlightening part to me that I had migrated to a different mindset shift and probably to a different place in my career. 

You’ve described legal ops as a cross-functional bridge in a company. How has that vantage point helped you think more like a CSO?

Tommie Tavares-Ferreira: I think being the cross-functional bridge, being that cross-functional stakeholder, being a member of an operational cohort at Cedar where all the ops leaders got together from all the different departments doing these big initiatives like tech implementations across the entire business, some of that meant that no job was too small. I said yes to a lot of things simply to learn how things worked. How does the business work? The product is maybe not the area that I work in, but if I understand how our product works and if I understand how we go to market, I can make that connection of how that translates maybe into our contracts and what we do with them and how we can fuel the business to go to market faster. So really it was curiosity that turned into pattern recognition. Once you start to understand how each function operates, you can start to anticipate needs and connect dots and lead more strategically.

I think what accelerated my growth wasn’t just building relationships with other departments, it was learning how their leaders led. Like watching a product leader manage a launch taught me how to approach some of my launches. I have a very big tech bend, and I borrowed a lot from the way product teams work, to think of legal ops as a product, to think of our tech rollouts as a product. I would also look at marketing teams and say, how do you approach a marketing campaign? How do you socialize ideas and build momentum? Because I am doing that when I’m trying to get people to buy into change management. These are big initiatives, and they will die on the vine if people don’t know that they exist.

I think that vantage point shaped how I can think as a CSO, I can think about what the strategic initiatives are that we want to roll out. I can utilize the collaborative muscle that I’ve had. Now I just think about the bigger picture and how do I motivate people in the company to come on that journey for the big picture of what we as a company want to do.

Looking back, what are some of the key inflection points that helped you move from tactical execution to strategic leadership?

Tommie Tavares-Ferreira: I think one of the big shifts came when I stopped being the person who solved everything myself and started building systems that others could utilize. Another came when I began using data like metrics to influence decision making. One of the biggest inflection points was learning how to tell a story—not just what legal ops does—but why it matters. Strategic leaders know how to build a narrative, whether it’s a board deck or a product roadmap. They’re deciding what the strategy is and then they’re building the story that goes along with it. Storytelling has been one of the biggest skills that has unlocked doors for me, much more than any sort of tactical skill. Stories move you. I think thinking about how we tell the story of what we want to do is very influential and a big motivator.

You’ve championed the idea of community and content as powerful levers in legal ops. How do you plan to keep building that community in your new role?

Tommie Tavares-Ferreira: I think that community is built into the legal ops infrastructure. I think that stems from the fact that there’s no specific license required. You get to this career by many different paths—since there’s not a structured roadmap of how you get here, there’s also not a structured roadmap of how you do that role. When you think about how you might work when you’re stuck, it’s really leaning on that community. That also still stands in this new role. It’s a strategic infrastructure— building community around what we’re doing is investing in connection with people. And since we’re in the people business, I think it’s in our best interest to keep the connection with people going, they’re our most valuable asset, whether we’re helping accelerate someone’s career or we’re helping accelerate a GCs career by getting them flexible on demand so they can get something done.

That’s one of our big priorities: continuing that momentum of focusing on people and building the community together. We’re uniquely positioned to do that. We’re not just connecting companies to talent, but we can be a hub for innovation. And the way that people can ideate and share that stuff is by being together and being at dinners. I want to ensure that we keep that momentum of community.

So what’s one lesson that you’ve learned the hard way, but that you see was pivotal to your leadership journey?

Tommie Tavares-Ferreira: I think I wanted everything to be perfect early in my career, my outputs, what I’d be working on. But I’ve had the privilege of working for tech companies—some of which have a “move fast break things” ethos. I think one lesson that I’ve certainly learned is it doesn’t have to be perfect, just get something done because you can iterate from something being on the page, but you can’t iterate from there being nothing on the page. 

I’ve realized that leadership isn’t about perfection, it’s about momentum. It’s about empowering others and making strategic decisions with imperfect information. It’s important to know when to move versus when to over polish. So I think letting go of a perfect product as the output versus momentum has made space for creativity and trust. And that shift from being the person who wanted to ensure that perfection was the output versus there being a landing page to start from is where I was able to change a mindset shift. From there, you can continue refining toward perfection.