Laurie Ehrlich (she/her)

Associate General Counsel - Head of Legal Operations

Datadog

Chief Commercial Counsel

Executive Sponsor - Women of Datadog

Leads a fantastic global team of lawyers responsible for sales and alliances at Datadog.  Oversees Datadog's customer negotiations while designing commercial legal strategies to accelerate contract closure and mitigate risk. Creates scalable processes and automation to help the legal team support up with Datadog's rapid growth. Closely collaborates with senior leadership to ensure alignment between legal and business priorities.

Chief Counsel - Sales and Alliances

Cardozo School of Law

Adjunct Professor

Cognizant

Creator of the legal operations function to provide forward-thinking strategic leadership on the optimization of the legal department service delivery processes, finances, technology, and knowledge management.  
Key achievements:
 - Orchestrating the launch and continuous development of the legal department intranet pages, which provide on-demand access to key information and forms, saving time and providing consistency for our attorneys and business-stakeholders.  Launch included work-shopping the design, writing the copy, and setting up the pages using the content management system.
- Improving spend management through optimization of our e-billing system to provide better data and tighter spend controls, and competitive pricing process and strategic contract negotiations with our top law firms. 
- Creating a cross-functional alliances to optimize our contracting processes.
- Working with legal leadership to implement a legal metrics program.

Cognizant Women Empowered - NYC Regional Lead/Regional Advisor

Lead attorney for Cognizant’s Insurance Business Unit in North America. Provided strategic legal and business advice to C-Suite leaders, business unit leaders, and legal leadership around achievement of company objectives in deal acquisition, ongoing client relationships, disputes, and business operations, including day-to-day advice on security and privacy concerns, contract compliance, intellectual property, and human resource matters.  Process improvement lead for commercial contracts team.  Mentor to junior and mid-level attorneys and training lead for new joiners.
Key Achievements:
- Successful negotiation of a multitude of complex contracts and 100m+ deals for information technology services, infrastructure services, business process services, SaaS and BPaaS.
- Strategic resolution of disputes to expand and protect revenue opportunities.
- Created new deal intake process for commercial contracts team.
- Designed procedures for contractual alignment for infrastructure deals, accelerating time to contract and decreasing risk.
- Trained new joiners enabling them to grow into successful legal leads.

Chief Counsel of N.A. Insurance

Commercial transactions attorney negotiating MSAs and assisting commercial teams with legal matters.

Corporate Counsel

Allen & Overy

First intellectual property attorney in the United States.  Responsible for all U.S. IP matters, including all IP matters in M&A and banking, trademark counseling, IP and software licensing.

Associate

Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP

Intellectual property associate involved in IP litigation, trademark prosecution, and the IP aspects of M&A.

20+ years of broad legal experience including outsourcing, litigation and mediation, technology transactions, M&A, data and privacy, and trademark prosecution.  Laurie focuses on the strategic transformation and optimization of the delivery of internal legal services through process improvement, creation and expansion of knowledge management resources, and technology planning and implementation.

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