Tommie Tavares-Ferreira joins The Abstract to reflect on her career journey from music and media to legal ops leadership — and now, Chief Strategy Officer at Lawtrades. In this vibrant conversation recorded at CLOC, Tommie shares how creativity, curiosity, and community have shaped her path, and why she believes the future of legal ops is all about strategy, not just systems.

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Key Insights

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1. Legal Ops Is Creativity at Work

Tommie defines legal operations as a creative function. “Legal ops is never done. Like creativity, it’s about iteration — building, growing, fixing, doing,” she says. The best legal ops leaders aren’t administrators; they’re artists constantly remixing systems to make them better.

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2. Scale by Aligning Legal to Business Goals

At Cedar, Tommie helped the company through Series G growth by connecting legal’s priorities to the company’s objectives. Her framework:

“What does the company want to achieve? What does legal need to do to support that? And what can ops do to make everyone achieve it?”

This approach made legal a scaling partner, not a bottleneck — embedding ops as the driver of business outcomes.

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3. Prioritization Is Strategy

In hyper-growth environments, Tommie says, “If everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority.” She uses a “must-do vs. nice-to-have vs. wish-list” matrix to focus teams. Intake systems and automation help filter requests, ensuring legal talent is applied where it matters most.

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4. Technology Is an Extension of Humanity

A lifelong tech tinkerer, Tommie embraces AI but remains grounded: “There’s no tech I love that I don’t question.” She views AI as an accelerant, not a replacement. “AI helps me do more of what I want — but it shouldn’t erase authenticity.” Her prediction: as automation grows, the need for human connection will deepen.

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5. The Lawtrades Chapter: Strategy as a Superpower

Tommie joined Lawtrades after connecting with co-founders Raad Ahmed and Ashish Walia. What began as casual conversations about community and content evolved into strategic collaboration. “We started to realize — we were already building strategy together,” she says.

At Lawtrades, she’ll focus on expanding the company’s platform, deepening community engagement, and shaping new education initiatives for legal professionals.

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6. The Future: Legal Ops as Strategy

Tommie hopes her role inspires others in legal operations to see themselves as strategists.

“Legal ops professionals are strategists — they build, influence, and execute big ideas. The title might change, but the skillset is the same,” she says.

She also points out an industry challenge: many legal ops leaders hit a ceiling. “If there’s no Chief Legal Operations Officer, where do you go next? We need to build those paths before we lose great people.”

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7. Closing Insight

“Legal ops professionals are already strategists. It’s time the industry treated them like it.”

Tommie’s rise isn’t just a personal milestone — it’s proof that the next era of legal leadership will be defined by creativity, technology, and strategy.

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