Years ago, interviewing for a senior position, I was asked how I would describe my work ethic. I said I grew up with entrepreneurial blood in my veins. That I could lead, and I could roll up my sleeves and get the work done. That answer came from somewhere.

I am a third-generation entrepreneur. My father started his career as an ad-man. Creative by nature, trained in marketing, he took his instincts into business. He exported marble products to Japan. When his Japanese buyers said what they actually needed was cotton terry robes, he pivoted. He imported vaccines. When the personal computer boom arrived, he sold computers, then realized the real margin was in accessories. Then he saw something no one else had seen. Companies buying these behemoth machines needed specialized furniture to put them on. He pivoted from technology to furniture. What started as a small business working with multinational clients eventually grew into a well-known interior design and construction house working with global brands.

I grew up inside that. Packing marble paperweights for export, then graduating to quality-checking them. Selling printer ribbon cartridges and computer tables with retractable keyboard drawers on the shop floor. Working through a walk-in client haggling over price and a corporate customer unhappy about a delivery in the same afternoon. Entrepreneurship in a household is not a concept. It is packing a box correctly. It is standing on the floor. It is the phone ringing and you pick it up because that is who you are today.

What you learn, growing up like that, is how to do more with less. How to wear multiple hats. How to make decisions with imperfect information. That saying no is a no-no. That saying “it depends” without something behind it diminishes the answer. You learn to be scrappy and resourceful because there is no other option.

Perfect training, it turns out, for the work I ended up doing.

Twenty years in legal.

I started at Huron in 2005. Legal operations was not yet a defined category. CLOC did not exist. “Legal operations professional” was not yet a title on anyone’s business card. But a handful of General Counsel could see what was coming, and they were looking for help building what they were calling, at the time, “law departments of the future.” A utility company in Indiana. An insurance company in Chicago. A few others. Real pioneers who wanted a real transformation.

We started from the people. Got the team right. Then the processes. Then, eventually, the technology. The data and analytics were an aspiration more than a capability in those early years, but the instinct was correct. I remember telling clients who wanted to benchmark against other legal departments that they were asking the wrong question. Benchmark against functions that were more advanced than legal. Finance, HR, IT. That is what you should aspire to. That is where the playbook lives.

At Morae Global, where I joined as a founding member, we were already working on a 3.0 version of legal transformation. BigLaw was still resisting any real change to its cost structure, so we built what we called, at the time, an ALSP with an advisory arm. In today’s parlance it would be called a law company. I traveled the globe selling the idea. One week I found myself in Kuala Lumpur, Charles de Gaulle, and Chicago inside seven days. Different continents, different clients, same underlying problem. And, in every room, the same genuine desire to elevate and mature the team.

Between Morae and Mitratech, I founded Transformlytics. A startup building analytics products to solve a problem I had been watching from the consulting side for years. How do you make decisions at the speed of business? How do you make the information available as the work happens, instead of three weeks later when the reporting cycle catches up? The venture did not become the main chapter, but the work shaped how I think about data infrastructure as the foundation of any function that wants to operate as a business.

At Mitratech, I had the chance to meld two things I care about, teams and technology. Mitratech was an Ontario Teachers’ portfolio company, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, and they were looking to grow. My mission was to partner with the best minds, technologies, and solutions to help expand the offering. I sat with hyperscalers, Big Four consulting partners, AmLaw firm partners, and corporate law departments of every size, from small and mid-size to Fortune- and Global-ranked. It was a unique seat to learn from and to help shape where this market is going.

Until Swiftwater came calling.