Ten years ago, legal operations wasn’t a job title most people could define with confidence — including, often, the people doing the job. CLOC is now building something that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago: a formal certification for legal operations professionals, the Legal Operations Certified Professional (LOCP). As a board member and liaison to the advisory committee overseeing this effort, I want to explain why we’re doing this now, how it’s taking shape, and why it matters to how legal departments run.
Anyone who has worked in legal ops knows the challenge: the role looks completely different depending on where you sit. A team of one supporting a mid-size company’s legal department has a different day-to-day than someone overseeing a department of 50 or more inside a global enterprise. That variability, among others, has made legal ops notoriously hard to define, and even harder to measure or hire for with confidence. When I started in legal operations, CLOC was about five years old and my GC at the time was looking to transform the legal department, and “legal operations” was the pathway to help operationalize his initiative. But when I discussed my role as a team of one with other legal operations professionals across the country, what I did, I discovered, was different from others in larger corporations. What was consistent among all legal operations professionals are the skills required in order to perform the work.
That’s the gap this credential aims to close. The foundation is the CLOC Core 12, the competency framework CLOC introduced to define what a legal operations professional does, regardless of company size, industry, or where that person sits organizationally. The LOCP will be grounded in the Core 12, so candidates have a real, defined standard to work toward.
Earning your LOCP will mean demonstrating your judgment against real scenarios. We’re building the assessment now through a formal job task analysis and standard-setting process, working with practitioners across the field to make sure it reflects the work as it’s done. The goal is to have the first candidates begin that process at CGI in Las Vegas in May 2027.
We’ve brought in KaWest Partners and Assessment Systems Corporation, certification and psychometric specialists who’ve built credential programs for other professions, to guide the job task analysis, standard-setting, and validation work now underway alongside our Certification Advisory Committee. Having the best team of specialists in the certification space ensures that this certification means something to not only the examinees but to employers and the overall profession as a whole. Over time, governance of the certification will transition to an independent Certification Board, separate from CLOC’s own Board of Directors, the same kind of separation programs like the PMP or CAE rely on to protect against bias in how standards are set and exams are scored.
Ethics isn’t an afterthought here. Whether inside a law firm, in-house, or inside legal tech companies, lawyers operate under model rules of professional responsibility, and legal ops professionals working alongside them need that same grounding.
AI is the harder one, because it won’t hold still long enough to test. Capturing it in a static exam is akin to chasing a cat; it doesn’t sit still. So we won’t try to freeze a snapshot of today’s tools into the test. AI sits inside the broader legal tech competency, and the credential itself will be designed to evolve as the technology and the skills required around it shift, with regular recalibration of exam content over time.
In a recent global CLOC member survey, 53% of respondents flagged credentialing as a high-value addition to their career trajectory, and notably, that wasn’t even a yes/no question we asked directly. Members raised it unprompted. That demand has been consistent for years, echoed in conversations at the board level and across the community, and bringing it to fruition has taken close to two years of work. From conversations, to committee formation, and bringing in consulting and psychometric expertise to get from that feedback to an eventual launch.
The early response has reflected this desire in the CLOC community for a formal certification. Since the announcement last week, many people had already reached out expressing interest, through LinkedIn, email, texts. That’s a real signal of pent-up demand, particularly among “team of one” legal ops professionals who are often the least-resourced and most vocal about wanting a standardized way to demonstrate their expertise.
We’re still building this and we’re building it deliberately. CLOC is targeting the CLOC Global Institute in May 2027 in Las Vegas as the milestone where the first professionals will be taking the exam, meaning the full arc from curriculum to credential could take under a year for early candidates.
Long-term, I’d like to see the LOCP carry the same recognition in our field that a PMP carries in project management, a CP for paralegals, or a CPA in accounting. That’s an ambitious bar. But CLOC is 11 years old this year, mature enough as a community to build this the right way, and this certification is where that maturity shows.
