Based in Palm Springs, Madison earned a bachelor’s degree from University of California, Los Angeles and began her legal operations career at a Los Angeles law firm. She later joined a talent agency, where she learned how teams develop and negotiate agreements for talent. As Director of Legal Systems and Operations at a global entertainment company, she managed similar agreements from the corporate legal department’s perspective. Over nine years, she has built and customized legal technology systems that have transformed how the legal department works. She now works remotely for a global technology company in her placement as an Epiq Counsel legal professional.

1. How has Epiq Counsel enabled you to apply your legal expertise? 

Epiq Counsel connected me with a role where legal operations is central to the work. I sit in Meta's Global Legal Operations and Strategy organization on the team bridging legal business operations and legal technology. This includes matter intake and creation, outside counsel engagement, master retention agreements, Statements of Work (SOWs), and third-party access review. I own these workstreams end-to-end and work directly with the lawyers, program managers, and engineers who rely on them. 

2. What motivated you to choose a flexible legal career path with Epiq Counsel? 

Partly the work, partly the changing employment market. Full-time corporate roles are harder to land than they were, and layoffs have become frequent enough that a permanent title isn't the guarantee of stability people assume it is. Working with Epiq Counsel has given me a kind of security I'm not sure I'd have found elsewhere, they are a partner invested in my success, and a career that isn't tied to the fate of a single headcount line. Plus, going through an alternative legal services provider (ALSP) lets me embed myself in a sophisticated in-house legal department, working on interesting problems, without waiting for the traditional path to open. It also gave me a fully remote working life while still being a member of a team with real accountability. That combination of flexibility, ownership, and stability is rare. 

3. What has been your favorite part about working with Epiq Counsel? 

My favorite parts are the range of people I work with and the fact that what I build gets used. In one week, I'm working with engineers, e-billing, and spend leads, data analytics, outside counsel managers, and compliance stakeholders. Most legal roles focus on one discipline; this one sits at the intersection of legal, operations, and technology. You create a workflow improvement, and a whole team immediately gains back hours. 

4. How has the flexibility of Epiq Counsel allowed you to deepen or broaden your legal expertise? 

The role broadened my expertise in ways I never would have planned. I've become the AI and automation champion for the team I support. I map out manual processes and deploy solutions, including real-time alerts for blocked matter requests and automated weekly metrics reporting. That has led me to become fluent in process design, data quality, and AI tooling, while going deeper on legal operations domains I would’ve never been acquainted with, like outside counsel engagement, third-party access, supplier onboarding, and eDiscovery support. Legal ops is moving towards this hybrid skill set, and a flexible path put me ahead of the shift early on. 

5. What advice would you give to legal professionals considering a transition to a flexible legal career? 

I can offer three recommendations. One: reframe it. Flexible work isn't a detour, it's a way to choose your problems rather than inherit them. Two: bring a second skill. Legal knowledge paired with operational or technical fluency is far more valuable than alone. And three: show up as a fully committed team player from day one. 

6. In what ways do you see the legal industry evolving to accommodate flexible, on-demand legal talent? 

The legal industry is already adopting flexible talent models, and AI is accelerating the shift. A blended model is now normal: a core in-house team, ALSP partners, and flexible talent for specific expertise. What changes next is what that talent does. Demand has shifted towards people who can design and govern the systems that do it; process owners, workflow architects, and people who can judge when automated output should be trusted. Flexible talent is well-suited to that. We bring pattern recognition across organizations, and we're practiced at getting productive fast. I expect on-demand talent to continue shifting from overflow capacity to embedded, strategic roles. 

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