Erin Harrison
LIMELIGHT
Sydney, 6 August 2026 – CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium), the leading member-based association for the global legal operations community, hosted legal operations leaders from across Australia on Wednesday, August 5 at the CLOC Australia Summit.
The 2026 Summit welcomed 200 attendees, a 33% increase over 2025. Participants traveled from across Australia, including Melbourne, Brisbane, and Adelaide, as well as from the US, Singapore, and beyond. The Summit brought together in-house legal teams, law firms, and technology service providers to tackle the legal operations issues that matter most in Australia, including AI implementation and governance, resource optimization, skills development, and the evolving design of legal departments. Sessions were centered around active participation and practical problem-solving.
The 2026 Summit included a pre-event program on August 4, with a General Counsel Breakfast and the return of CLOC Academy, offering foundational and specialized training in vendor and knowledge management.
As Australian legal departments move from pilots and early implementation toward full-scale delivery, Matt Duncan, CLOC Australia Co-Lead and Head of Legal Operations at Transurban, noted the Summit focused on what teams can put into practice now.
“We’ve moved past the initial anxiety around generative AI,” said Duncan. “The conversation now is implementation: what legal ops should be doing, and how we keep proving the value of the legal work in the organisations that legal teams serve. The benefits of legal operations and legal engineering are becoming clearer, too. Legal engineering builds the tools, while legal operations creates the framework needed to maximise their impact.”
The Summit also highlighted the unique strengths of Australia’s tightly knit legal ecosystem. Operating with smaller teams and tighter budgets has pushed Australian legal departments to prioritise deliberate technology selection, clear ROI benchmarks, and user-centered legal design.
“We’re small and mighty here,” said Anna Golovsky, CLOC Australia Co-Lead and Executive Manager, Legal Operations and Agility at IAG. “Platforms like Xakia, Checkbox, and Ivo all started in our backyard and are now expanding into markets like the U.S. We’re modest in scale, but our reach outpaces our size. In leaner markets, every technology investment and legal operations role must deliver meaningful impact.”
Keynote speaker Dr. Catherine Ball, Scientific Futurist, examined the emerging forces shaping business, technology, and innovation, challenging attendees to prepare the legal ecosystem for broader technological disruption. That challenge carried into the afternoon’s Roundtable Discussion, Reimagining the Legal Team of the Future, led by Katrina Gowans, Group Counsel at APA Group, where attendees considered what a legal team built for the future would look like, what technology it would run on, what skills it would need, and how it would measure its own value.
Underscoring the need for deep collaboration across corporate teams, law firms, and technology providers, Oyango Snell, President and CEO of CLOC, emphasized that sustainable industry progress depends on intentional connection.
“Nothing meaningful grows stronger in isolation,” said Snell. “These are global pressures, and the response has to be built locally, shaped by what works in this market. Our strength is designed deliberately; built through the relationships we choose to form and the work we choose to do together.”
Reflecting on how legal ops professionals can build on the discussions in Sydney, Petra Stirling, CLOC Australia Co-Lead and Director of Operations, Risk, and Transformation at Westpac, said, “What makes legal ops in Australia special is our willingness to learn from one another and turn ideas into action. This Summit showed that innovation comes from designing better ways of working together across the Legal ecosystem. Every conversation, every connection, and every practical takeaway strengthens those relationships and helps legal teams deliver greater value to their organisations.”
Following the event, CLOC will publish the 2026 CLOC Australia Insights Report, capturing key themes, trends, and takeaways from sessions and speakers to extend the value of the discussion beyond the room.