CZ and Friends

Епизоде

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  Leading Legal Through Crisis and Global Growth with Barbara Barrilleaux, Brooks Running GC 10.09.2026 56мин

  Barbara Barrilleaux is the VP of Legal and General Counsel at Brooks Running, the performance running brand owned by Berkshire Hathaway. She leads a 15-person global legal team covering everything from IP and contracts to compliance and privacy across 50+ countries. A former competitive swimmer and former IP litigator, Barbara has guided Brooks through more than a decade of serious growth, including the company's best quarter ever. Barbara gets specific about what it takes to run lean legal a...
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  Building America’s First Digital-Only Bank as Employee #8 with Marina Gracias, Varo Bank CLO 19.08.2026 41мин

  Marina Gracias is the Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary at Varo Bank, the first and only digital-only nationally chartered bank in the United States. She joined Varo as employee number eight before the company had a product in market, leaving a managing director role at Accenture to do it. Marina led the three-year process of securing a de novo bank charter through the OCC, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve. Before Varo, she spent close to six years at Visa running global procuremen...
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  Building Legal Ops from Scratch with Kimberly Woodward, VP and Head of Legal at OVERJET 13.08.2026 58мин

  Kim Woodward wasn't looking for a new job when Okta's sales rep reached out. She was happy at her boutique law firm, working closely with clients, and had zero interest in going in-house. But after meeting the team, believing in the mission, and learning she'd have a train buddy for the commute, she took the leap as Okta's third attorney. What followed was an 11-year journey through an IPO, a heated showdown with the CTO over a code scan that nearly got her fired, and the creation of an entir...
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  Greenfield to Gold Standard: Building Legal From Scratch with Alisha Cieslak, Gordon Food Service 29.07.2026 1ч 3мин

  Alisha Cieslak is the former Chief Legal and Risk Officer of Gordon Food Service, the North American food service distributor operating since 1897 across the U.S. and Canada. She joined in 2014 as employee number one in the legal department, when the company was already a $10 billion operation across a dozen states with no in-house lawyer, no active-matters list, no board legal reports, and no files. Over roughly a decade she scaled from that greenfield start to a 150-plus-person enterprise t...
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  The Blackberry Era of Legal AI with Tina Hwang, ClassDojo Head of Legal 17.07.2026 51мин

  Tina Hwang has a spicy take: legal compliance is table stakes. If you're building technology that parents trust with their kids, meeting the legal bar is where the conversation starts. Tina is the Head of Legal at ClassDojo, the platform connecting teachers, parents, and kids in classrooms worldwide. Before ClassDojo, she spent over a decade at Google, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Meta, building product counsel teams of up to 35 lawyers. She started her career as a software developer, a background ...
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  Building Legal as the Company's Air Traffic Control with Ekumene Lysonge, NerdWallet CLO 24.06.2026 48мин

  Ekumene Lysonge is the Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary at NerdWallet, where he leads a combined Trust and Safety organization of 34 people spanning legal, security, compliance, and privacy across a public fintech platform that serves 25 million+ customers a month. With operational experience across corporate America before legal leadership, he credits that time as a business operator with shaping his approach: business-centric first, risk-centric second. His team is three-qu...
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  "Yes If" Thinking: Sharon Johnson of MODE Global on AI, Logistics and Legal Leadership 17.06.2026 39мин

  Sharon Johnson took a winding path to the GC seat. Before law school, she worked in marketing, sales, project management, and contract management at Verizon, and she credits that experience with shaping how she leads legal today. As Chief Legal Officer, Corporate Secretary, and Chief Compliance Officer at MODE Global, she runs a team of six lawyers across a $3 billion logistics business, with 100% AI adoption and KPIs to prove it. Her team was a finalist for Best Use of AI at the 2026 Legalwe...
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  The GC-to-Board Playbook, with Executive Coach Anne Marie Segal 10.06.2026 49мин

  Anne Marie Segal spent 15 years as an attorney - at White and Case, a hedge and private equity fund, and her own firm - before becoming an executive coach to general counsel and senior executives across six continents. She knows what it takes to make the leap, and what holds most lawyers back from making it. In this episode, Cecilia and Anne Marie get into the psychology behind lawyer identity, why so many high achievers stay stuck, and what it looks like to grow beyond the legal function, wh...
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  The Kanye Clause, Taylor Swift IP, and AI: Mary Ambacher of EverQuote and Lauren Anderson of Wayfair 03.06.2026 49мин

  What does it look like to build a legal team from first principles in 2025, with AI at the center from day one? Cecilia sits down with Mary Ambacher, Deputy General Counsel and Assistant Corporate Secretary at EverQuote, and Lauren Anderson, Senior Counsel at Wayfair, to talk through exactly that. Mary just started a new GC role after eight years at Wayfair and walked in to find the calculus for headcount had already changed. Lauren stayed behind to run a leaner team covering hundreds...
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  Risk, Calibration, and 5,000 Bad Haircut Lawsuits with David Schellhase, 3x GC and Okta Board Member 21.05.2026 56мин

  David Schellhase has been general counsel at three public companies - Salesforce, Groupon, and Slack - and he's learned that great in-house lawyering is less about knowing every law and more about knowing your company's risk appetite cold. In this episode of CZ and Friends, David joins Cecilia to share what three decades in Silicon Valley taught him about risk, prioritization, and when to push back on your CEO. David and Cecilia cover: Why the best in-house lawyers "always be calibrating," re...
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  The End of the Billable Hour with Bjarne Tellmann, CEO of FjordStream Advisors 06.05.2026 55мин

  Bjarne Tellmann spent 30 years as a general counsel at Haleon, Pearson, Coca-Cola, and Aramco. Now, as CEO of FjordStream Advisors and author of "Law in the Era of AI" (Wiley), he argues that the disruption of the law firm model will not come from startups - it will come from clients. In this episode of CZ and Friends, Cecilia Ziniti joins Bjarne to unpack what he saw from the inside of some of the world's largest legal departments, why most firms are paralyzed right now, and what in-house le...
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  Legal Ops at Scale: Sruthi Kosuri and Cindy Prabhakar of Marvell Technology 29.04.2026 33мин

  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 transf...
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  Replace Me: Jimmy Toy of Articore Group on AI, Copyright, and the Future of Legal 22.04.2026 37мин

  What if the best thing a lawyer could do is figure out how to make themselves obsolete? Jimmy Toy, Chief Legal Officer at Articore Group (the company behind Redbubble and TeePublic), has been using AI and machine learning in legal work for over 10 years. In this episode of CZ and Friends, Jimmy joins host Cecilia Ziniti to share why the future of legal is not about working faster with AI, but about working differently. Jimmy and Cecilia cover: Why the best lawyers five years from now will use...
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  Inside Real Estate Law: Nicole Komin & Danielle Shainbrown hosted by Laurel Palluzi 15.04.2026 45мин

  Nicole Komin and Danielle Shainbrown co-founded two companies together out of Buffalo, New York: Bellwether Advisors, a real estate consulting and advisory practice, and Shainbrown Komin PLLC, a law firm. They launched both in 2022 and have been running them side by side ever since. Their paths to getting there could not be more different. Nicole came up through public interest work, elder law, and pro bono coordination before moving into real estate. Danielle spent nearly a decade at a comme...
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  AI Governance and Why Legal Bottlenecks Start Upstream with Rachel Harris of Suzy 08.04.2026 45мин

  Rachel Harris, General Counsel and AI Governance & Privacy Officer at Suzy, joins Cecilia to talk about what it takes to be a solo GC at a high-growth AI startup. Rachel's career started in an unlikely place: plaintiff-side pharmaceutical MDL litigation in St. Louis, where she learned to work fast, take big bets, and operate alongside founders who mortgaged their homes to finance cases. That scrappy, high-risk-tolerance mindset turned out to be the perfect training ground for startup life...
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  Crypto Law, AI, and Legal Leadership with Molly Abraham of Coinbase 01.04.2026 53мин

  Molly Abraham, VP of Legal at Coinbase, joins Cecilia to talk about what it takes to build and lead a 90-person legal team through one of the most scrutinized regulatory periods in tech history. Molly started as a chemical engineer at Procter and Gamble, taught the LSAT at night to pay for law school, and went on to Wachtell Lipton before moving in-house at Kitty Hawk (the Larry Page-backed flying car company) and then Coinbase. Her path is unconventional, and her framework for legal leadersh...
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  Gagan Biyani CEO of Maven on AI, Learning, and Building Big 25.03.2026 48мин

  Online learning, AI adoption, and what it really takes to build a company worth building. Today's guest is Gagan Biyani, CEO and Co-founder of Maven and co-founder of Udemy, one of the largest online learning marketplaces in the world. Gagan has spent over 15 years building at the intersection of education and technology. His perspective on how professionals learn, adopt new tools, and think about ambition is unlike anyone else in the space. You'll hear: – Why Udemy pivoted from live to rec...
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  AI, Leadership, and Why Great Legal Leaders Let Go: Matthew Campobasso of Zone & Co. 18.03.2026 52мин

  What does it mean to lead legal without white-knuckling every outcome? Matthew Campobasso, Chief Legal Officer of Zone & Co., joins Cecilia Ziniti on CZ and Friends to answer that question head-on. Matthew brings nearly 20 years of legal experience across criminal prosecution, big law litigation, and in-house leadership. In this conversation, he unpacks why the legal profession has a control problem, how anxiety can be a feature or a bug depending on your self-awareness, and what it look...
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  AI and the Cost of Getting It Wrong with Sarah Binder of BetterUp & Sophie McNaught of SVB 11.03.2026 47мин

  Sarah Binder, General Counsel at BetterUp, and Sophie McNaught, Managing Director at Silicon Valley Bank and advisor at Primary Venture Partners, join Cecilia for a sharp conversation on how legal and business leaders think about risk when the stakes are high, and the technology is moving even faster. They get into where risk shows up inside fast-growing companies, why the biggest early-stage risk is often not surviving long enough to matter, and how AI is reshaping decision-making across pro...
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  Translating Tech to the Courtroom: Michael Jacobs of JAMS on the Smartphone Wars and AI 04.03.2026 48мин

  Michael Jacobs, recently retired Partner and Trial Lawyer at Morrison & Foerster, current Evaluative Mediator and Arbitrator at JAMS, has spent decades at the center of the biggest technology disputes of our time, including Oracle v. Google and the Smartphone Wars. Michael shares his journey from serving as a U.S. diplomat in the Foreign Service to becoming a top intellectual property trial lawyer. He offers a masterclass on navigating billion-dollar cases, arguing that launching ma...