2021: The Year of the ELM

Monica Brown Andrews graduated from Hamlin in 1984. She then attended secondary school at Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts where she spent her junior year abroad in Rennes, France. After graduating from Andover, she studied Political Science and Economics at the University of California at Berkeley and then obtained her Juris Doctor degree from Hastings College of the Law. She became a member of the State Bar of California in 1996.

Upon completing her legal studies, Monica worked at a law firm in Brussels, Belgium for two years. While she was in Brussels, she obtained a Master's degree in International Politics from Universit? Libre de Bruxelles. Upon returning to the United States, Monica worked for IBM, and in 2000 she accepted a position as in-house counsel at Equinix, Inc., where she works currently.

Monica’s career reflects her journey as a continuous learner and evolving leader. Although the foundation of her career has been the practice of law, primarily in the area of commercial transactions, her intellectual and professional curiosity has led her to gain a broad range of operational experience by leading teams in areas such as Finance, Business Operations, Customer Care and Post-Acquisition Business Integration. In addition, she has had the opportunity to travel extensively, live in other countries and learn other languages. Her current assignment has provided her with the opportunity to live part-time in Brazil during the past few years, which has been personally and professionally enriching. While her career has been unexpectedly non-traditional in many respects, it has allowed her to develop relationships with fascinating people all over the world, explore new places and enjoy developmental pursuits.

With over a decade in the legal operations and technology space, I've been fortunate to work across the maturity spectrum: pre-acquisition and pre-IPO startups, medium and large corporations.

In my current role at Netflix, I'm building a legal operations and technology function to help the legal department discover the future of how they work. I'm passionate about innovation, delivering value, good user experience, and storytelling. Understanding my users needs and delivering best-in-class people, process and technology solutions is the most important focus in my work.

In my current role serving the Board for the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium: I'm helping design the strategy and roadmap for the advancement of our growing membership organization whose mission is to scale the scale of transformation across the legal ecosystem. I also engineer and host the org's new podcast, CLOC Talk, where we elevate corners of the ecosystem into interesting conversations.

Core Competencies: empathetic listening, leadership, communications, operations and technology strategy, execution, and management, business process design and automation, product/project/program management, change management, knowledge management (KM), user experience (Ux) and user interface (UI) design, IT infrastructure management, training, instructional design, information design, information systems.

Sharath is VP, Products and leads the product business at Elevate. Sharath has over 20 years’ experience in product strategy, management, and execution across a variety of industries. Prior to joining Elevate in 2018, he was a Senior Director of Product Management and Industries at Apttus in California where he led a team of industry experts in Healthcare and Life Sciences, Financial Services and EU.

Prior to Apttus, Sharath worked in a variety of product, strategy and marketing roles at leading SaaS software companies including Model N, Intuit and Sciquest. Sharath developed several products at pricing and revenue management pioneer, Manugistics, and internet travel pioneer, Gethere (acquired by Sabre).

Sharath holds an MBA from Duke University and BTech in Electronics from National Institute of Technology, Karnataka.

Dr. Daniel M. Katz is VP, Data Science and Innovation, and manages Elevate’s data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) strategy. He assists in both internal and customer efforts to infuse data science and AI into existing work streams. This includes supporting not only the customer’s technical requirements but also the associated education and change management.

Prior to joining Elevate, Daniel was the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at LexPredict – a legal technology and analytics company which was acquired by Elevate in November 2018. In addition to his work at Elevate, Dr. Katz is also a Professor of Law at Illinois Tech–Chicago Kent College of Law where his academic work focuses on the scientific study of legal complexity as well as the application of artificial intelligence and analytics in law.

Dr. Katz’s academic work has been published in leading academic journals including Science, Plos One, Journal of Statistical Physics, Artificial Intelligence & Law and Physica A; legal journals including Cornell Journal of Law & Public Policy, Emory Law Journal, Virginia Tax Review, Iowa Law Review, Illinois Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Journal of Law & Politics, and Journal of Legal Education; and has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Wired Magazine, Bloomberg Business Week, 538.com, National Public Radio, BBC Radio, The American Lawyer, ABA Journal, Legal Futures (UK), Law Society Gazette (UK) and The Globe and Mail (Canada).

Daniel earned both his Ph.D. and J.D. at the University of Michigan.