CLOC Member Spotlight: Dewanna Planter

The CLOC Member Spotlight series profiles the incredible individuals within our community who are driving transformation in legal ops. Each spotlight provides inspiration, fosters connections, and gives readers a chance to learn more about their peers. By sharing these stories, we celebrate the diverse voices and talents that make CLOC a vibrant and connected community.

September 2026 Member Spotlight: Dewanna Planter

Dewanna Planter is the Director of Legal Operations at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She serves as the co-lead for CLOC Washington D.C. Keep reading to learn more about Dewanna.

About me:

I didn’t set out to become a legal operations professional. I set out to be a lawyer. I earned a Criminal Justice degree from Lincoln University, the nation’s first degree-granting HBCU, with law school in mind. Instead, my career took a series of turns that, in hindsight, were pointing me toward legal ops all along: paralegal work at a boutique DC firm; running the full-time pro bono practice at a large law firm handling systemic, high-impact matters; a stint at a social-justice PR firm; and managing operations for a team of capital habeas attorneys at the Federal Public Defender’s Office. 

None of those jobs carried a “legal operations” title, the field barely had a name yet. But the work had the same heartbeat: bring order to complexity, make the most of the resources you have, and create the conditions for people to do their best work. 

When the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a nonprofit biomedical research organization and one of the world’s largest philanthropies, posted its inaugural Manager, Legal Operations role, I applied without knowing much about the organization or biomedical research. I simply recognized the shape of the work. 

More than 12 years later, I’ve built the legal operations function from the ground up: crafting the team into what it is today, developing processes and workflows, establishing governance, and building the operational infrastructure to support the department’s work. Along the way, I earned an MBA and grew into my current role as Director, Legal Operations.

Why I love being a CLOC member:

I love CLOC because, for much of my career, I was building without a map and doing the operations work as a team of one. Before “legal operations” was a recognized profession, I was borrowing from finance, project management, and plain old problem-solving to figure out what worked. I didn’t have a legal ops team down the hall to brainstorm with or peers doing the same work to call when I hit a roadblock. 

Finding CLOC changed that. It gave the work I had been doing a name and, more importantly, gave me a community of people who understood it. Suddenly, I had peers who were wrestling with many of the same challenges, willing to share what they had learned and just as willing to learn from one another. 

Over time, I’ve gone from finding community in CLOC to helping create it for others. Co-leading the Washington, DC regional group, presenting at CGI on Impact Ops Forum panels focused on career development in mission-driven organizations, and facilitating CLOC Academy Day courses have reinforced something I value deeply: this is a profession built on sharing what we know. My own journey, first pioneering a role and then building a function, is a story many legal ops professionals recognize. 

As our profession continues to navigate disruption and transformation, none of us has every answer. That’s exactly why community, generosity, and genuine connection matter. None of us gets there alone.

My advice for other legal ops professionals:

Invest in relationships before you need them. Legal operations touches nearly every part of an organization, so our ability to get things done often depends on the trust we’ve built with people across functions. Finance, IT, HR, communications, and other partners shouldn’t hear from you only when there’s a problem to solve or a project that needs their help. 

 

That becomes especially important when you’re leading process transformation. Before you touch a workflow, find the people who actually feel the pain and get them in the room. The people doing the work every day usually know where it breaks long before an org chart or process map will tell you. 

 

Once the right people are at the table, do the unglamorous work of separating the must-haves from the nice-to-haves and the signal from the noise. The smartest process redesign in the world can still fail if the people who have to live with it weren’t part of building it. 

 

Relationships aren’t the “soft skill” that supports the real work. In legal ops, relationships are the real work.

A fun fact about me:

I caught the travel bug early. I grew up as an Army brat, living on or near military bases in Kentucky, Germany, and Texas, which sparked a lifelong curiosity about different places and cultures. These days, my husband is my favorite travel partner, and together we’ve made our way across six continents. I love everything about travel, including the planning. Give me a destination, and I’ll happily build an itinerary, compare routes and costs, hunt for hidden gems, and, yes, create a spreadsheet. This year, we’re celebrating my milestone birthday with an adventure through Zanzibar and the Seychelles. For me, the best part of travel isn’t collecting passport stamps; it’s experiencing how people live, eat, celebrate, and tell their stories around the world.

CLOC Member Spotlights provide an opportunity to showcase members within our community who are making a difference in their organizations, in their CLOC groups, within the CLOC community and/or the industry as a whole. Do you know of a really cool thing a CLOC member is doing? We invite you to nominate a member of the CLOC Community for a future feature in the CLOC Member Spotlights Series.