Legal operations in Australia sits right at the intersection of rising demand for legal services and flat resources and budgets. At the same time, legal departments are being asked to prove, in hard terms, how to leverage new technology to create capacity and deliver ROI.
These pressures are why it’s worth pausing to compare notes with people facing the same challenges elsewhere in the market. As we get ready to gather in Sydney for the CLOC Australia Summit, our legal ops community, small as it is, will lead a conversation on how to meet these challenges.
The “small & mighty” AU advantage
The Australian legal operations market has always looked distinct from our peers in the U.S. or the U.K. Because our corporate legal departments and budgets are generally smaller, our legal ops functions are scaled accordingly. Where a major U.S. financial institution might run a legal ops department of 30, 40, or 50 people, a comparable Australian institution runs one closer to 5-10. With far fewer people, each legal tech solution and legal ops role must be leveraged with greater and immediate impact.
Operating in a smaller market, that same discipline runs through the whole legal ecosystem. Australian law firms and ALSPs have demonstrated early adoption of legal AI solutions and the ability to innovate on service delivery and pricing solutions. They are beginning to work alongside in-house teams to reshape how legal work gets delivered.
And our legal tech sector has also grown at a pace beyond our size. Australia has quietly become a proving ground for legal tech solutions that are making an impact globally. Platforms like Xakia, Checkbox, Joseph, Lawcadia, Lawvu, Mary Technology, Cicero, Deeligence, Atticus, Haast, and Ivo all started in our backyard and are now expanding into major global markets.
We’re modest in size, but our reach and impact outpace to deliver at scale and with significant impact regionally and globally.
AU Summit highlights
The Summit program has a few sessions I want to highlight here. CLOC President and CEO Oyango Snell is leading a panel on Global Perspectives on Legal Operations, which pulls in what’s happening internationally and gives our market a useful read on how it will impact our region.
There’s also AI & Knowledge Management for In-House Teams. Knowledge management is unglamorous and often neglected in the in-house context, but it is fundamental to how successful teams will leverage historical knowledge assets as they deploy AI solutions. The session will focus on how in-house teams can get it right so the technology delivers and the cost of deployment doesn’t outpace its value.
On a lighter note, Thinking on Your Feet, an improv session run by Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art, is a good excuse to stop talking shop for an hour, and offers a different way to learn and act, which is critical in any legal ops role.
I hope people leave this Summit with a clearer sense of how much strength already exists among Australian legal ops teams, even at our size. CLOC gives us the room to compare notes, learn from what’s working for someone else, and figure out where legal ops in Australia goes from here.
See you on Wednesday!
