We’ve met with more than 50 clients in the past 12 months and have enjoyed a front seat to the transformation happening across legal departments. Our meetings have reinforced that CLOC’s 12 core competencies are not stagnant and continue to evolve in their application and impact. Here is a taste of what we are seeing you all accomplish. You can use these to plan your next project, benchmark with your colleagues, and to continue to show the value that you bring to your legal departments and companies.

Financial Management: This has evolved into so much more than simply reporting on spend or managing to the budget. Legal departments are overlaying spend against key objectives of the company to ensure that the allocation of legal resources aligns with the strategic priorities of the company.

Vendor Management: We started with preferred vendors and negotiating favorable pricing. Legal departments are working with vendors to solve common challenges in technology, ediscovery, and more. They are also asking vendors for data dashboarding to spot trends and inform future action.

Cross-Functional Alignment: Legal operations roles are often filled with business professionals from within the company, including finance, products and IT. These hires bring with them relationships and institutional know-how, and allow companies to repurpose people, process, and technology used in the business for use in the legal department.

Technology & Process Support: Legal operations is changing the culture of legal departments by driving the adoption of technology and incorporating process-driven workflows into serving the business.

Service Delivery & Alternative Support Models: This is not just about insourcing versus outsourcing. It is about right sourcing the work to ensure that tasks are assigned to the right resource. This allows everyone on the team to focus on the high-impact and high-value work. Legal operations professionals are shining a light on churn and helping legal departments to stop doing tasks that don’t bring value.

Organizational Design, Support & Management: Legal operations departments are no longer behind the scenes. The groups are front and center within legal departments and the business. Legal operations professionals are increasingly leading pitch meetings, panel selection, fee negotiations, and outside counsel evaluations, and have more optics into organizational changes impacting their legal departments.

Communications: Together with their GCs, legal operations departments are helping accelerate change and are creating innovation fluency about the company’s business and legal industry. At legal department meetings, they are highlighting how technology is transforming their business, mapping legal goals to innovation objectives of the business, and are training on skills core to legal operations. At legal department retreats, they are changing the curriculum to include design thinking sessions, technology updates, and data metrics discussions. They are also bringing together outside counsel to share innovation success stories so that they may be replicated across all firms supporting the company.

Data Analytics: Using data, legal operations is changing the conversation about value. What is the business goal for the matter? How will success be measured? Are legal resources aligned to the business’s strategies? Legal operations departments are driving the creation of dashboards to spot trends, inform future action, and identify missed opportunities. They are also capturing knowledge about the performance and use of their outside counsel. This includes tracking who at what firms have done work in particular areas for the company, working toward a future where legal operations can provide predictive analytics on who is best suited to solve a specific problem for the business.

Litigation Support & IP Management: Legal departments are partnering with IT to bring even more of the ediscovery lifecycle in-house. Teams from information security, IT, internal investigations, and legal operations are working together to show how particular license offerings can reduce spend exponentially. They are using advanced features to identify risk before litigation and are reducing their digital footprint with their vendors by 50 to 90%.

Knowledge Management: In response to the needs of the business, especially during periods of rapid growth, legal operations departments are creating on-demand, self-service legal solutions for their internal customers. To do so, they scope what the business needs, how much of the need requires interaction with a lawyer, and what portion can be solved with automation and standardization. These solutions are driven by playbooks, AI and legal bots.

Information Governance & Records Management: Legal operations departments are creating programs that provide the business better access to information so that it can harness data for a strategic advantage and, in some cases, monetize that data. They are driving the creation of policy and procedure that is practical and enhances service to the business. They are also complying with emerging data privacy laws and protecting against data breach and the associated reputational damage.

Strategic Planning: Legal operations leaders are reporting directly to their general counsel and are helping set the strategy and goals for the legal department. They increasingly have a seat at the table and are measuring their achievement and performance against the established goals for the legal department.

 

In April 2018, as I closed out the Vegas Institute, I was simply blown away by the energy, the passion and the power of that event. I remember thinking at the time, “It just doesn’t get any better than this.” Well, I was wrong. Our 4th Annual CLOC Institute in Las Vegas last week was, as so many attendees pointed out, filled with an energy level and positivity that was off the charts. I returned home more energized and inspired than ever before!

In the past, I have written and posted my closing remarks from the CLOC Institutes, but this time, I will simply direct you to the video of my opening (too lazy to type it all up!). As you’ll see, we kicked things off with an inspiring welcome video featuring testimonials by GCs from some of the world’s leading companies. Each spoke on the positive impact of legal operations and of CLOC. And to think, just a few years ago, people didn’t even know what the term “legal ops” meant.

I’ve had a week to reflect upon the Institute and wanted to share some additional thoughts. First, I am so humbled to represent the CLOC community and this movement as your president. This year’s Institute, with over 2200 attendees, was the ultimate evidence of how far our once-small community has grown. Nowhere else will you find this many experts, drawn from all backgrounds, all perspectives, and all parts of the legal ecosystem, sharing their best ideas and practices, and collaborating on results.

So what’s next? As I mentioned in my opening, we’re more committed than ever to taking this community and movement forward. This year, we’re purpose driven by two major principles: 1. Focusing on the community and 2. Engaging across the ecosystem.

Focusing on the Community

First, we are returning the focus to what we believe makes this organization great — the community. The whole idea behind starting CLOC was to help Legal Ops professionals do their jobs better and to create and share best practices. We want to ensure we’re doing that by making it easier for you to interact, participate, and learn from each other. To support this principle, we’re launching a new member community platform that will allow us to create more subcommunities and topical discussions, to create more webinars and trainings, and work across the ecosystem to generate more relevant and useful content.

Engaging Across the Ecosystem (with a focus on Law Firms)

While there is more interest and belief than ever about legal operations from all the players in the ecosystem, there continues to be a significant divide in our perspectives and approaches. We believe that CLOC has a huge role to play in bridging these divides and driving real change in the industry. As such, we’re starting by actively focusing on getting law firms more involved with CLOC this year. In a couple of months, we will pilot a new membership type for law firm legal operations professionals. This will be separate from our existing in-house CLOC community, but will allow these law firm participants to network, share ideas, and actively communicate across the divide with each other and with in-house members. We foresee creating topical discussion forums like pricing, diversity and inclusion, knowledge management, and more, where individuals from both law firms and in house teams can collaborate and help each other. We believe that including the voice of the firms in our discussions is critical to better alignment and movement in our industry.

One of the concerns I expressed from the stage during my kick off at the Institute is whether or not law firms can “embrace the CLOC culture” which requires us to be courageous enough to be imperfect, to share openly, and to admit when we have no idea what we’re doing. We were afraid that we would launch this thing and no one would be willing to ask questions or contribute their experiences, learnings, or struggles. After all, law firms are used to being the expert on all things to their clients and have indicated to me in the past that they are uncomfortable admitting that they don’t have it all figured out yet. By the end of the three days, however, I feel very hopeful about what’s to come. I had so many meaningful conversations with law firm attendees who expressed excitement, initiative, and positivity about what we’ll be able to accomplish together. I feel like we’ve moved past the point of uncomfortable conversations to a new phase where we are ready to embrace the change, energy, and passion and where happily we find ourselves sharing the driver’s seat on this new adventure!

As I have said many times before, everything about legal operations is hard — every step of the way. We’ve come so far, but there is still far, far to go. This community we’ve created is full of passion and perseverance and when we have passion and perseverance, anything is possible. Just remember the quote I closed with: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.”

Thank you for making the 2019 Institute a success and for being such an integral part of this movement. I can’t wait to see where this rocketship goes next. See you next year!