Sruthi Kosuri is the Director of Legal Operations and Cindy Prabhakar is her Legal Ops Manager at Marvell Technology, a hundred-billion-dollar semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California.
The company just posted record revenue of over $8 billion at the close of their last fiscal year, up 42%, all driven by AI infrastructure demand. NVIDIA just dropped a $2.2 billion investment in Marvell. The company is growing quickly, and relies on a small but mighty Legal Ops team to keep things flowing.
Together, Sruthi and Cindy have transformed a mostly administrative office into a cross-functional department that cut contract request time by 73% across a user base of 7,000 people. Now, other departments actively seek them out as strategic partners.
"Previously we were seen as quite administrative,” said Cindy. “We absolutely had to transform. We actually now divide and conquer."
In this conversation with GC AI cofounder Cecilia Ziniti, Sruthi and Cindy share the truth about the finance change nobody wanted, the contract automation that cut five-hour workflows down to fifteen minutes, and why informal “coffee chats” have become an effective way to kick off change management.
How Marvell’s Legal Ops Went From Admin to Strategic Partner
When Sruthi joined the Marvell Legal Ops team, they were the de facto “cost center” for anything legal-related. Everything was done manually, and a team of five was supporting a global legal department of fifty.
Marvell’s CLO, Mark Casper, was the critical enabler for change, and Sruthi is careful to say so. He began asking around about spending data and encouraging the team to begin automating as much as they could.
“He's like, How do I get my hands on the data? How do I know who is spending what? How do I know which team owns what?” recalls Sruthi. “Everything was so manual. And that's where things started changing. The mission was: automate as much as you can, reduce manual work, and be more efficient."
They began by creating a system for visibility into departmental spending to create team accountability where none had existed. Next, they built an auto-triage system to remove a single point of failure that was slowing down every agreement in the pipeline. These initiatives, encouraged by their CLO, earned them genuine respect across the company.
"Some people don't even know what Legal Ops was at the time when I joined the company,” said Cindy. “Once we got a seat at the table, things turned around quickly."
Today their team of three supports nearly eighty lawyers. The headcount may have gone down, but their efficiency, output, and partnering capacity have increased significantly.
Note from CZ: The Marvell legal ops team was smart to follow the money first. You cannot manage what you cannot see. Before diving into any technology project or a process redesign, focus on the data. Visibility creates accountability, and accountability creates partnership.
Navigating The Change Nobody Wanted but Everyone Needed
The single most impactful change Sruthi made in her first year at Marvell was successfully splitting one cost center into multiple practice-group-specific budgets. Now, every leader could see what their team was spending, where it was going, and how it compared to their budget.
The pushback was immediate and predictable. And of course, the people who resisted hardest were those who likely had something to hide.
"The people who pushed back were those who were scared of seeing their budget, who were scared about us seeing what work was done in-house and outside,” said Sruthi.
She decided to work with one objection at a time, one relationship at a time. Whether it was a coffee chat, a walk, or a formal one-on-one, she spoke to each person about what they were nervous about.
"I can't just come and demand something to be changed just because I think legal fancies it,” acknowledges Sruthi. “So we go sit with our IT partners, our finance partners, our HR partners to see what's happening at your end. What is your pain point? We'll make sure we accommodate your pain points too. That's where we get a lot of buy-in."
Cindy and Sruthi were careful not to add a new tool that everyone needed to learn. Instead, they expanded the functionality of an already existing software. It was the accountability and visibility that upset certain people. Eventually, their CLO stepped in.
“At the end of it, Mark said, ‘you guys don't have a choice, you either do this or don't do this with us.’” said Sruthi. “So, I think for those who were not willing to work with us, that was an ultimatum.”
The shift was painful for some, but the outcome was a legal department where practice group leaders now come to legal ops proactively. Folks come asking what their budget looks like, how much they have spent, where they are tracking for the year. That’s the clearest sign the new system is working.
"We're more approachable, more personable, more reliable, and more respected,” said Cindy. “We earned our seat at the table because we're meeting them literally and figuratively. They see us as a partner, as a trusted advisor."
How Legal Ops Cut Contract Review From Hours to Minutes
One of the best examples of how efficient Marvell’s legal ops team has become is contract request time. Previously, IT statements of work used to take up to five hours. Today, they’re completed in about 15 minutes. That’s a 73% reduction in response time across 7,000 users.
A new auto-triage system handles 40% of incoming agreements with the remainder assigned within 24 business hours. When one person was manually assigning every new incoming agreement, that person became the single point of failure for the entire pipeline. One sick day or weeklong vacation, and the backlog became unmanageable.
"If one person is out, you've got to train the backup person. Now we've auto-triaged about 40% and we have a global team who will auto-triage the rest,” said Cindy. “Things are assigned almost within 24 business hours."
The self-serve workflow takes an SOW from request to a prepared DocuSign before an attorney even needs to review it. They aim to nail the master service agreement on the front end, then empower the business to move without legal for routine variations. The hard negotiation only needs to happen once. Now, teams can execute again and again on a known framework.
"We created the IT SOW self-serve and Change Order self-serve. It has been able to go down from maybe five hours to 15 minutes,” said Cindy. “If you have an MSA in place already, all you need to do is add extra technical support, put in your scope of work, pop it into the system, and it will send out a DocuSign."
A Legally Brilliant Challenge: The Future of Legal Ops
Sruthi came up with a creative solution to drive AI adoption in her department: gamification, which she refers to as the “Legally Brilliant Challenge.” Because they work at a company whose chips power most of the world's AI workloads, the legal ops team runs structured internal competitions to build AI fluency. Learning a new skill feels less overwhelming when there are prizes and incentives attached.
Cindy imagines the future of legal ops in terms of the bigger picture. She sees a global team that goes where it is needed, fills the gaps other functions cannot see, and deploys solutions across the organization.
"We're not just legal operations, we're global operations,” said Cindy. “We go where we're needed and we're able to create 2D and 3D versions of us wherever we go."
By this Cindy means she imagines a function that scales without adding headcount. Through AI tools, agents, and automated workflows, a small team can support a hundred-billion dollar company, and they’re only just getting started.
"Anytime we think of process improvements or even implementing a process, we check in to see if we can build this in-house, if we have an AI agent or a workflow that we can work with," Cindy said.
Struthi’s advice for legal leaders attempting to modernize their workflows is to be patient. Implementing their new finance system took a year, and the auto-triage system required months of buy-in before deployment. Significant change does not happen in a single quarter.
The legal ops teams that will define the next decade are the ones building AI infrastructure now, one initiative at a time. GC AI is built for in-house legal teams that want to extend their capacity and scale their efficiency, without adding headcount. Try GC AI for free today.
