There’s no doubt Jennifer McCarron ’01, MSW ’04 has stage presence. At a recent conference, she came out with her fists pumping, pointing at the audience. She walked back and forth, delivering her message about the importance of corporate legal operations full tilt.
Four years ago, McCarron joined the legal group at Netflix to help them innovate and work more efficiently. About 80% of her team’s focus revolves around managing contracts and legal documents.
“In a place like Netflix, there’s going to be a lot of contracts in order to see all those people on all those shows and run all those productions. And it’s a high-volume shop, and I’m innovating how they contract, how they draft, how they store, how they unlock the data, the words inside a contract. And transform that into metadata that the business can get very quickly and run more efficiently, run faster, make better decisions on.”
McCarron’s road to a top job at Netflix hasn’t been linear, but each turn helped shape her future and taught her how to trust her instincts, leading her to the position as the streaming platform’s director of legal operations and technology, following a stint at Spotify.
“Back in 2008,” she told the group, “I was touring up and down the East Coast playing bass in an indie rock band, living out of a van while playing for a few dozen people in dive bars.”
The dive bar scene got old and when she landed in New York City for a sorely needed break, she took a temp job as an office manager that was only supposed to be for a few days. She managed that office so well that she ended up staying at that gig and began her journey into the world of legal ops, leading her eventually to the group she was speaking to, the Corporate Legal Ops Consortium, where McCarron is a board member and considered a thought leader.
“I love the stage,” she said. “I do love having an actual literal platform to stand on and deliver a message to the people, to an audience.” The stage also allows her to take in the audience’s response. “I think it’s a really a special place to have a two-way dialogue.”
At UAlbany, she learned how to be organized and discovered a simple tool — a paper planner pad — at the school store, the kind she still uses even though she’s in the upper ranks at a tech company. “I’m still on an academic calendar, I never switched,” McCarron said.
“It forced my hand at organizing. I was very overwhelmed when I got there. I had to build a system of productivity to do the thing: a double major with all of these concentrations.”
After getting her bachelor’s in economics and in business administration, she worked in software development and was about to take a management consultant job on Wall Street, but had a bad feeling about the economy, so she passed. That was right before 9/11.
She then enrolled in UAlbany’s social work program, which she wanted to drop out of, but her social worker father convinced her to stay. And that degree came in handy later on as a manager who could listen.
“I’m a finisher. I stuck it out,” said McCarron, who grew up in Mahopac in Putnam County. But she was unhappy, so she turned to music to escape and decompress.
“By the end of the master’s, I was so good at bass guitar.” And she was encouraged to join some bands by her guitar teacher at Blue Sky in Delmar.
“I came out of social work school and played with every band I could find in the Capital District. I was in three to five bands at once.”
The discipline of a bass player who practiced countless hours and her own organizational talents honed at UAlbany came in handy for legal ops, which provides strategic and financial planning and technology that keeps legal departments running smoothly.
“It is one of the most exhilarating rides you can be on,” said McCarron, who divides her time between New York City and Los Angeles.
“I joined [Netflix] because I knew it would be another ride of a lifetime. So it’s fast moving. We’re building the rocket as we go. It zigs, it zags, it’s a roller coaster of ups, and then it’ll just start going down really fast."
Sometimes, it will take your breath away.” What she gets out of the experience is leadership growth.
“I think my whole life and career’s been a tug of war between my right and left brain,” which she said may be her greatest asset.
“And it sparks because it’s creativity. And that is contagious when someone’s passionate and can bring that into the fold with you. And yeah, all of a sudden, you’re creating with me and you feel like, I don’t know, a kid again,” she said.
As for the bass, she still plays and writes songs, keeping her right side of the brain engaged. She even got back up on the stage as a bass player to mark the winter solstice, but she was rocking out in a very different kind of venue.
“That was a fun first: It was me as an avatar performing two of my songs in the Metaverse.”
