Maury Bricks is General Counsel of ARKO Corp and GPM Investments, a Fortune 500 company and the sixth largest convenience store provider in America. Maury joined ARKO in 2013 as a Legal department of one. Today, Michele Murray is Associate General Counsel and Maury’s second in command. Together they have navigated 26 acquisitions, scaling to over 1,300 store locations, and an AI transformation that neither of them anticipated.
Navigating the company’s rapid expansion hasn’t been an easy ride for ARKO’s legal team. Convenience stores are highly regulated and require licensing across a variety of areas, from alcohol and tobacco sales, state lottery regulations, egg handling, milk distribution, and city business permits. A single store can require 10 to 15 separate licenses, each tied to a specific entity, a specific state, and a specific set of renewal requirements. Multiply that complexity across hundreds of locations in a single acquisition, and you get a sense of what Maury was juggling as the only lawyer in the room.
“Michele was our second legal hire,” said Maury. “Our CEO asked, ‘are you sure you need someone else?’ And I said, ‘well, we have the work for three lawyers, I'm doing two, and one's not getting done at all. So what do you think?’”
Even without an M&A background, Michele managed to secure 1,306 store licenses in eight weeks for one deal. One of the phone numbers on the spreadsheet that had been used for tracking licensure status turned out to be a deceased mayor's cell phone, answered by a woman who wanted to know where Michele got the number. Thinking quickly, Michele told her she was trying to make sure the town received its sales tax. It worked.
Scaling an In-House Legal Team That Runs on Trust
Maury's philosophy for hiring great in-house lawyers is to look for smart people “willing to learn, eager to strive, and capable of growing.”
He understands that as general counsel, his bandwidth is limited. Maury doesn't have the time to check on what everyone is doing, so he just trusts them to do it. When stakeholders ask him about matters his team is handling, he directs them to the person closest to the work. When outside counsel calls with a question, he knows Michele is perfectly capable of handling the inquiry. Maury focuses on hiring talented people, then gets out of their way.
"Everyone is good at their job and knows something you don't know, " Michele said. “Maury is not a micromanager. He's not trying to hold any of us back from being seen as an expert.”
Maury and Michele have now built a team that spans over 30 people in legal, risk, and compliance. What makes their department function so effectively is a culture of trust that flows in every direction, and empowers team members to grow into their interests. For example, an administrative assistant moved into compliance, got an anti-money laundering certification, and built a new career path.
“I think one of the best parts about being in-house is getting to recognize that everyone has a different skillset, seeing internal growth, and helping coach people internally,” said Michele.
What 26 Acquisitions Taught ARKO About Integration
ARKO Corp moves quickly and is constantly acquiring new locations, so integration isn’t a project that has a formal beginning and end. The deals keep coming before the last one is fully digested, which means the ARKO legal team has had to develop formulas rather than strict playbooks.
Through 26 acquisitions in 13 years, Maury has developed a unique method for staying sane amidst the chaos. He recommends resisting the instinct to assume your way of doing things is the right way. For example, ARKO had a small wholesale division, and a company they acquired had deep expertise in wholesale. Rather than defaulting to ARKO's existing forms and processes, they put both sets of documents on the table to see what they could learn from each.
"We spent a lot of time knowing they were the experts,” said Maury. “We took our wholesale forms, we took their wholesale forms. Then we created the best of both, with them as the leaders."
This humble approach has served ARKO well in acquisitions over the years. When the acquiring team shows up with genuine curiosity about what the other side knows, integration naturally feels collaborative. On the other hand, when you show up with an ego, it doesn't matter how good the deal was on paper.
“We're constantly learning things, and updating if it makes sense,” said Maury. “In M&A, the dynamic is constantly changing, and you have to be open to everyone's wisdom and experience.”
Your forms and the processes can always be refined, but what you can't fix after the fact is a negative first impression.
Note from CZ: The companies that get integration right are the ones that go in with genuine curiosity about what the other side knows. Maury and Michele have done this successfully 26 times. What a feat! We think about the ‘best of’ framing constantly at GC AI. The customers we serve are great lawyers for their companies, be they Fortune 500 enterprises or startups with one lawyer. Each customer brings practices and instincts to the platform, and hearing their feedback and having the AI help them with their specific legal needs means we have to make the platform smart and extensible.
How ARKO Legal Went from Blocking AI to Championing It
Initially, when Michele thought of AI, her brain immediately turned to surveillance, cameras, and algorithmic decision making. She was focused on what AI could do to people, rather than how her team could utilize it. So when ARKO first started exploring AI tools, Michele was extra cautious.
What changed her mind was seeing GC AI founder Cecilia Ziniti demo the platform at an event for Chief Legal Officers in New York. After seeing it summarize a thousand-page trial transcript in minutes with source citations, she was sold. In fact, she was so excited about the tool that she made another attendee move seats so she could sit next to CZ at dinner.
"The output was insane,” Michele recalls. “It was citing pages of the trial transcript and just sitting there thinking, okay. This is a tool that can save us a lot of time, especially in our environment where we have to answer questions quickly."
Maury had also been proudly avoiding legal AI…until Michele sold him on AI generally and on GC AI specifically. What won him over was the GC AI easy prompt feature: the ability to type a general request and have the tool surface the specific questions he needed answered.
"I type in 'please redline this document' and it's like, did you mean you wanted to know these 40 things? And I'm like, yes, that's exactly what I wanted," said Maury.
The ARKO legal team has quickly adopted the platform, and even their corporate secretary is a fan. Michele uses GC AI to quickly analyze zoning notices across hundreds of locations, including pulling in a notice, asking for the potential impacts on convenience stores in the area, and getting enough of an answer to know who needs to be in the room. Maury recently used it on a Sunday to help his son double-check whether he needed a film permit in upstate New York.
The sheriff had a gun. They decided to wait for the permit.
