Join us for CLOC Academy Day London, a one-day event designed to bring Core 12 training to the legal ops community. This event is open to legal ops professionals at all career stages, whether you’re new to the field or looking to deepen your expertise. The certificated CLOC Academy workshops offer practical insights and actionable skills.
Join us for CLOC Academy Day New York, a one-day event designed to bring Core 12 training to the legal ops community. This event is open to legal ops professionals at all career stages, whether you’re new to the field or looking to deepen your expertise. The certificated CLOC Academy workshops offer practical insights and actionable skills.
Join us for CLOC Academy Day Seattle, a one-day event designed to bring Core 12 training to the legal ops community. This event is open to legal ops professionals at all career stages, whether you’re new to the field or looking to deepen your expertise. The certificated CLOC Academy workshops offer practical insights and actionable skills.
This year marks CLOC’s 10th anniversary. It’s a good time to reflect on how far legal operations has come and where it’s headed next.
What started as a support function has become a strategic force in modern legal departments. That evolution is front and center at the 2025 CLOC Global Institute in Las Vegas.
The Rise of Legal Operations
Over the last decade, legal ops has moved to the center of legal department strategy. CLOC’s 2025 State of the Industry Report found that 83% of departments expect demand for legal services to continue growing, with the top five most common legal operations services growing or remaining key to legal department functioning. Additionally, 77% of respondents said increasing legal operations headcount was medium or high priority for their organization.
According to a 2024 survey by Axiom, 94% of legal operations professionals anticipate department growth within the next two years, with 59% holding decision-making roles within their organizations. This growth reflects the increasing recognition of legal operations as a strategic partner in managing legal spend, implementing technology solutions, and fostering cross-functional collaboration.
Legal ops now owns budgeting, vendor strategy, process improvement, and data analytics. This work is essential as legal departments face pressure to deliver more with fewer resources. Our expertise in streamlining processes and optimizing performance is indispensable.
Economic Headwinds are Real
Even with this progress, economic conditions remain tough. Legal department budgets are under review and staffing is tight. Some organizations continue to invest in legal ops, others are adopting a more cautious approach, focusing on cost containment and efficiency.
In prior economic downturns, legal ops roles were often reduced, especially when viewed as administrative rather than strategic. That’s why this moment calls for clarity. Legal ops professionals must show their strategic value, not just support. They are no doubt up to the challenge.
Adapting and Finding Bright Spots
There are opportunities abound. Smart teams are embracing change and doubling down in a few areas:
Looking Ahead
Ten years in legal ops has earned its seat at the table. The job now is to grow the influence that comes with it. Economic challenges persist for sure. But legal operations professionals are well-positioned to navigate these headwinds by demonstrating strategic value.
“Creativity opens doors.” That’s my spin on the theme of the 2025 CLOC Global Institute. And it’s a mindset shift for legal operations professionals ready to lead what’s next. In Las Vegas this year, we move into a new phase of innovation, strategic thinking, and collaboration.
The Shift in Legal Operations
Legal ops is changing fast. According to CLOC’s latest State of the Industry report with Harbor, 93% of legal ops professionals say their roles are growing. The focus is shifting to AI, data analytics, and vendor management. This marks a clear turn from Legal Ops 2.0, which focused on efficiency. Legal Ops 3.0 to emphasize strategic value and smart execution.
AI adoption in legal departments has doubled in the past year. The trend is accelerating. Legal ops teams need to lead with creativity to unlock new ways of delivering results.
Soft Skills Matter
Technical skills are important. But leading real change also takes:
These skills align with key parts of the CLOC Core 12, including Strategic Planning, Technology, and Optimization & Health.
What’s Ahead
This week features speakers like futurist Nancy Rademaker, legal leader Irene Liu and CLOC’s Executive Director, Oyango Snell. Their insights will help shape how we move forward.
As you explore new tools and approaches, choose creativity. It opens paths to impact, growth, and leadership.
The doors are open. Walk through them. Take the lead.
by Josie Johnson, Chief Client Experience Officer at Blickstein Group
Technology implementations are never easy for legal operations leaders. But before anyone reaches that stage, they first have to build a business case for the new technology–and that remains a persistent challenge. The biggest challenge? Often, it’s convincing the corporate IT department, which is charged with keeping software costs under control, wrangling licenses, and keeping the tools as streamlined and consistent across the organization as possible. So, it’s little surprise that these IT experts often balk when asked about purchasing and maintaining legal-specific tools.
Many times, corporate IT just doesn’t understand why legal has needs that are unique enough to warrant a dedicated solution. That means that it often falls to legal operations to convince a–quite reasonably–skeptical IT department that a generic solution such as SharePoint doesn’t actually cut it for the legal department and a legal-specific solution is worth the additional budget and support. That was one of the key findings in Blickstein Group’s recent qualitative study, executed in conjunction with NetDocuments.
To better understand why corporate legal departments feel like legal-specific tools are a budgetary and resource investment they want to fight for, we interviewed professionals from a range of industries with roles varying from legal operations to IT to general counsel. Having spent two decades marketing solutions to in-house legal teams–including at the very first CLOC conference nearly ten years ago–my ears perked up when every one of our interviewees mentioned getting corporate IT onboard with their initiative as one of their challenges. This is a common struggle for legal ops professionals and tech vendors alike. After all, it is impossible to realize the benefits that a piece of legal technology has to offer if you never get to implement it.
In our report “Turning Data Chaos into Value,” we gathered insights from four large companies that, despite being in completely different industries, found many of the same things valuable to their operations, all related to having features designed specifically for legal. Our subjects were methodical about building a coalition of supporters for their projects, from users to leaders to stakeholders outside of legal. And they told us that while their lawyers have unique needs and ways of working, they built business cases focused on ramifications to the business as a whole. Those were issues such as:
Legal documents inherently represent and help mitigate risk. They need to be highly organized and be given extra layers of security. Features like the ability to create workspaces, integrate emails, and track conversations are especially important to legal teams.
The inability to index, and therefore find leverage, existing legal work product, for example, can make responding to legal requests difficult.
Allowing easier collaboration between in-house and outside lawyers and the business they’re supporting can lead to faster deals and competitive advantages, as well as keeping everyone efficient and happy.
Loss of all these functions can inhibit taking work in-house and cost the company a great deal of money.
During these interviews, I recognized many parallels between the tasks that legal software sales and marketing teams face and those that corporate legal teams must tackle to sell their initiatives to the business. While corporate IT teams should not be seen as–and likely do not intend to be–a blocker, a big part of their role is to streamline the company’s implementation and support of technology. Proof that a legal-specific tool isn’t redundant to the existing tech stack is something that IT naturally needs, and legal operations professionals must have a strategy to provide it. Many of the same principles used by marketers apply: Define why the tool you want is differentiated, articulate the value it provides, and socialize that information with people who can champion your cause.
We invite you to read the full report outlining how others have tackled this and other challenges in the course of procuring and implementing legal-specific technology.
Contracts are the backbone of all commercial relationships. They help businesses clearly define the parameters of a working relationship to ensure they meet everyone’s expectations.
Even before agreement terms take shape, contracts have a far-reaching impact throughout an organization. They affect functions as diverse as risk management, compliance, procurement, sales, and finance. Contract data defines how those key functions must operate, which becomes even more complex across a company’s contract portfolio.
CLOC ReCharge Webinar Series – Optimization & Efficiency
This presentation will focus on how to harness, measure, and present legal department data in order to tell the story of the legal department, both within the department itself and outside of it, through data-informed dashboards.
We will discuss:
Organizations find themselves locked in a fierce struggle against their own data. Legal teams are being engulfed by an overwhelming avalanche of information and enterprise data volumes are doubling every 2 years. In this whitepaper, we provide 7 crucial readiness steps to conquer the data avalanche and emerge victorious in your legal use cases.