More than 2,300 people showed up in Chicago this year. General counsel, legal ops leaders, law firms, vendors, consultants, and a lot of first-time attendees, all in the same room. That many perspectives change what is possible in a conversation. It’s why the CLOC Global Institute is so special to me.
My goal as CLOC Chair is the same one I’ve carried throughout my career: to leave this place better than I found it. That means solidifying legal operations as a career of choice. What I saw last month made me more confident we are doing that.
In several sessions I attended, leaders were talking honestly about a pressure most of us recognize: the CFO wants more than a legal update. Turnaround time, contract volume, and spend by category still matter, but they don’t carry a budget conversation on their own. What finance leaders want to see is revenue acceleration, faster product launches, lower Days Sales Outstanding, and protected margin. The leaders making headway have learned to connect their work to those numbers directly.
Many of the people I spoke with are being asked to prove enterprise-level impact before they’ve built the infrastructure to measure it. The foundation has to come first. Start with the high-volume, repeatable work where the link between legal effort and business outcome is clearest. Map before you tool, and standardize before you automate. Financial fluency is becoming the baseline expectation for legal leaders. Treat it that way now.
The AI sessions I liked most were ones where practitioners were honest about what they’d tried, what broke, and what they’d do differently. While much of the content last year was still theoretical, we are now comparing notes. I found that shift energizing.
The most successful efforts were often lower-stakes tasks, kept humans in the lead, and built oversight into the workflow. I heard more than once that governance is what gives teams room to move. A car needs brakes to go fast. If legal builds the guardrails, business partners can move with more confidence.
Our program sets the agenda, but as always, many of the valuable exchanges happen around it. That can be over breakfast, in the hallway, and in our new Community Conversations. I led one of those with CLOC President Oyango Snell and several attendees told me they greatly appreciated that session because it was a real conversation.
We’re all writing the playbook at the same time, and nobody has a finished version to hand you. Your colleagues moving fastest are documenting what they’ve tried and sharing it. Invest in your networks as seriously as your professional development. Send different people each year because the exposure compounds. Bring your vendors and firms in before procurement, when there’s still room to shape the work together.
Stronger by Design was our event theme, but it means something beyond CGI too. We have to make deliberate choices about how our people, processes, and technology fit together. We’re not observers of change in this industry. We’re the ones deciding how legal work moves through our organizations.
I left Chicago with more questions than I arrived with. How do we build operating models resilient enough to hold up when the technology keeps shifting? How do we earn the CFO’s genuine trust? I’m sitting with those questions, and my guess is you are too.
That’s the work. Let’s keep building it, on purpose.
For the full picture, including the data, session takeaways, and signals for 2027 and beyond, download the 2026 Insights Report.
