A Decade of Legal Ops: Reflecting on Growth, Navigating Challenges, and Embracing the Future

05/05/2025 |

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:

Showcasing Value with Tech: By using tools that save time and surface insight, and integrating them into legal workflows, legal ops can drive efficiency and reduce costs.
Cross-Team Alignment: Legal ops can work more closely with other departments, such as finance, procurement, and IT, to align legal strategies with broader business objectives.
Strategic Planning: By developing and implementing strategic plans that align with organizational goals, legal ops professionals can position themselves as key contributors to business success. This includes identifying areas for improvement, setting priorities, and tracking results.
Professional Development: Keep learning! Skill development is essential for legal ops professionals to stay ahead. CLOC’s Academy was founded for this very goal. And industry conferences like CGI also play an important role in enhancing expertise and career growth.

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: Embracing Legal Ops 3.0 at CGI 2025

05/02/2025 |

“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:

Change Leadership: Guiding teams through technological rollouts and process overhauls with empathy and clear direction.
Storytelling with Data: Turning complex data into compelling narratives that drive executive buy-in and team alignment.
Emotional Intelligence: Building trust through self-awareness and empathy.
Enterprise Collaboration: Connecting legal, finance, procurement, and IT to break down silos.
Critical Thinking: Responding quickly to shifting market demands and taking a creative approach to problem-solving.

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.

San Francisco Bay Area Monthly Roundtable: Legal Tech – Compliance Solutions

02/21/2025 |

Join your CLOC SF Bay Area regional peers for the latest installment in our virtual roundtable series. This month we will be discussing legal technology for compliance. Whether it is trade compliance, policy governance, export controls, or other, bring your questions and expertise and let’s learn from each other. We will be limiting the number of attendees to ensure group participation, so register early.

This session will be moderated by Deborah Haile, Associate Director, Legal Operations at Gilead Sciences, Inc.

AI, Empathy, and Legal Design

02/06/2025 |

In this episode of CLOC Talk, recorded live from the CLOC EMEA Summit in London, Guest Host, Lewis Bretts, Partner at PwC chats with Alisha Andert, co-founder of This Is Legal Design and chairwoman of the German Legal Technology Association.

Alisha shares her journey from traditional law into the field of legal design, her passion for innovation, and her work with legal technology company Flightright.

They discuss the role of design thinking in law, simplifying legal content, and how AI intersects with legal design.

Tune in as this episode touches on empathy’s importance in design, the challenges of the legal profession, and future trends in legal design.

CLOC Huddle: Ironclad Pros & Cons

12/16/2024 |

This CLOC Huddle has been setup to connect and further explore Ironclad, as discussed in this active community thread.* If you are a current user, or considering Ironclad for your legal department, join this conversation to gain community insights. This huddle is exclusive to legal ops professionals.

*This community thread is in the Legal Operations Professionals Forum and is restricted to this member type.

CLOC Huddles are live, virtual roundtables initiated from active discussion threads in Community Connect.

RE: Salesforce for a Clause Library?

12/10/2024 |

Convincing Corporate IT that Legal Really Is Different

12/02/2024 | Comment

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.

Sponsored

Meet the LATAM Leaders!

11/01/2024 |

In this episode of CLOC Talk, recorded live from CGI 2024 in Las Vegas, Jenn sits down with Pepe Toriello, from CLOC’s LATAM regional group whose based in Mexico City, and Gui Tocci, leader of CLOC’s Brazil Legal Ops regional chapter.

They discuss the nuances and challenges of implementing Legal Operations in their regions. Pepe highlights that in Mexico, Legal Ops is often perceived narrowly as technology-focused, specifically on contracts, with general counsels yet to fully adopt it.

Gui shares that in Brazil, Legal Ops is often mistaken for paralegal work without strategic involvement, and roles blend with other duties due to a lack of dedicated headcount.

Both emphasize the importance of technology in gaining initial interest and the critical need for a ‘translator’ role to bridge gaps between legal, IT, and business teams.

The conversation underscores the foundational stage of Legal Ops in Latin America and the efforts to evolve it toward a more strategic and integrated function.

So, get ready to travel to LATAM, via Las Vegas, and hear a lively discussion packed with actionable insights. Enjoy!

Strategies for Embracing Change within Legal Operations

11/01/2024 |

In today’s episode of CLOC Talk, recorded in person at CGI 2024 in Las Vegas, Jenn sits down for an in-depth conversation with Travis Zimbelman, a legal ops and tech in-house professional with a diverse career background from international business consultancy to roles in Google and Meta. His most recent role had him leading Meta’s legal and compliance central services team.

They discussed the evolution of Travis’ last role and team which included project management, technology, legal operations, and elements of community and connection.

The conversation is a story of growth, going from a team of five to dozens of employees. A story of integration of the technology component, and a reminder of the importance of project management, learning and development within legal operations.

Travis elaborates on the impact of generative AI and how we should all consider the proof of concept first before adopting in our workflows.

Working at a FAANG company and legal department is a learning experience in itself. Want to find out what it’s like inside the likes of Netflix, Google, or Meta? Look no further!

Enjoy this fascinating conversation and uncover strategies for embracing change, curiosity, and partnerships while maintaining human-centered change management!