Today’s world is one of intertwining systems, in which many challenges are fluid, multifaceted, and undeniably human. Organizations, inside and outside of the legal sector, must come to grips with – and even embrace – disruptive forces like technology. They must ask themselves how they will evolve in response to such rapid, technological change – and how they will support team members and transform large systems simultaneously.

For many, the problem-solving methodology – known as design thinking – is an effective way to answer these and other big questions. In fact, it is slowly becoming an important part of today’s complex, interconnected world. Design thinking is vital to the development and refinement of skills – those allowing us to better understand and respond to organizational and societal changes. It helps designers, especially, carry out research and brainstorm ideas before creating prototypes and testing out viable solutions.

Design thinking is more than just a process, though. It combines the possibilities of technology, the needs of people, and the requirements for overall business success. Thinking more like a designer can help transform organizations’ products, services, and entire business strategy. That’s because the approach brings together what is the most feasible, technologically speaking, with what is the most desirable from a human standpoint.

The Evolution of Design Thinking

Compared to the centuries-old scientific method, design thinking is relatively new as a mindset and methodology. In a way, it sprung from the industrial revolution, in which the limits of what we thought was technologically possible were pushed in dramatic fashion. Industrial designers, architects, and engineers, etc. – driven by the significant societal changes of the 20th century – later came together in a demonstration of collective problem-solving.

But it was cognitive scientist and Nobel Prize laureate Herbert A. Simon who was the first to mention design thinking as a way of conceptualizing. In his 1969 book, The Sciences of the Artificial, Simon offered many ideas considered to be the principles of design thinking. Then, in the 1970s, design thinking started to address the human and technological needs of the day.

Celebrated designers who have adopted this method include Naoto Fukasawa, Saul Bass, Florence Knoll, and Le Corbusier, as well as Ray and Charles Eames. They each knew that coming up with elegant answers requires paying attention to the context of the problems and the consequences of the solutions. It means taking into account human priorities along the way to innovation.

Today, design thinking is on its way to becoming one of the leading innovation methodologies. Across many industries and disciplines, hundreds of thousands of people have now been introduced to the most basic concepts of design thinking. Through it, many have even experienced those ‘a-ha’ moments, in which they suddenly view their work – and the world – from an entirely new perspective. Individuals realize their own creative capacity, while problem-solving teams make progress toward their goals in less time than it takes through traditionally entrenched methods. Design thinking has generated groundbreaking solutions in the most exciting, innovative ways. It has been promoted at every level of business, and is behind the success of a number of high-profile, global companies, particularly Google, Apple, and Airbnb.

The Five Stages of Design Thinking

Of course, there’s no one definition of design thinking. But most agree that it is a systematic yet adaptable approach to problem-solving and innovation. Think of it as a non-linear methodology that offers a means to think deeply outside the box in order to solve problems that are ill-defined – or even unknown. Design thinking, after all, is human-centered, intentional, experimental, and responsive, as well as completely tolerant of failure, itself.

More specifically, design thinking consists of five phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The first phase allows you to better understand a problem from an empathetic standpoint. The next phase is an opportunity to analyze and synthesize all of the information gathered during the first phase, before identifying and defining the core problem. In the third phase, you can begin to think ‘outside of the box,’ looking at the problem in alternative ways and generating ideas based on the knowledge acquired during the first two phases. In the fourth phase, you can come up with possible solutions to the problem – those fully explored during the first three stages. Finally, the solutions that are identified in the previous phase are put to a rigorous test.

The Future of Design Thinking

As design thinking moves further away from being a nascent practice, more people will appreciate its value, becoming committed, leading practitioners of design thinking, themselves. Of course, design thinking takes some learning and practice. It takes time to tinker with and test, not to mention an overall willingness to fail early-on – and often – throughout the entire process.

At the end of the day, though, in-house counsels and the like should try looking at large-scale challenges in legal through the eyes of a designer. In that way, they can become dynamic and superior problem-solvers, themselves. They can help create design criteria, and brainstorm and test solutions that can eventually become real-world innovations.

Also key to problem-solving are the craft and expertise of designers across many disciplines. Design thinking calls for collaboration with a critical mass of individuals with unique mindsets and sets of skills – those who can approach the unknown with certainty and resolve, and develop new approaches and strategies. With them, legal teams can utilize design thinking to take on some of the biggest organizational challenges, such as how to drive artificial intelligence (AI) applications as part of their digital transformation. They can aspire to have CLOC’s 12 core competencies for legal operations, reaching new levels of maturity.

Learn More About Design Thinking and ContractPodAi

Want to learn to develop your own framework and best practices around the design thinking process? At CLOC 2020 Vegas Institute, ContractPodAi will lead an informative, 90-minute workshop session on this excitingly relevant topic. Join us at 3:30pm on the 12th May.

We will be joined by Hunter Simon, Vice-President of Business Affairs and General Counsel at Technicolor Production Services, the multinational media, communication and entertainment corporation. Together, we will discuss the need for outside-the-box thinking in order to solve problems; the ways to go about the design thinking process; and how exactly to leverage design thinking in order to implement – and drive the adoption of – brand-new systems.

The third annual CLOC London Institute kicked off on January 20th, 2020, at the Landmark Hotel, London. Over the course of two days, an energetic crowd of 430 attendees from 27 countries came together to CONNECT, LEARN, and COLLABORATE.

Legal Operations professionals from corporate teams and law firms filled the educational sessions and networked with legal vendors and service providers in the exhibit hall to exchange ideas, share information, learn about new services and technologies, and to challenge each other to reach new heights in 2021.

The structured meet-and-greets were fantastic opportunities to forge new partnerships and to rekindle existing ones. Members of the CLOC community also got together quite organically during the Institute to share dinner, or a cocktail, and built even stronger connections. These “Off the CLOC” social and business gatherings presented additional networking opportunities for participants, that will have a ripple effect throughout the year.

The Institute kicked off with opening remarks from Mary O’Carroll and me, followed by an always inspiring opening keynote by Dan Katz, who spoke on (yes, you guessed it) where legal technology and innovation has taken the industry over the last 10 years and his top predictions for the future.

Our goal for the Institute was to provide content that was tailored to the European legal ecosystem, while being practical and providing actions that could be implemented immediately. CLOC’s 2020 priorities seemed to resonate well across the community in Europe.

Here are a few key insights that I took away from London:

• Better Together: We are stronger as a connected community. In an ecosystem in a rapid state of evolution, everyone acknowledged that working in silos will hamper our ability to drive sustainable transformation. We need to work even more closely together to be successful. All boats rise with this collaborative approach, and we all become more invested in each other’s success when we work together to build solutions. Hearing the results of these types of collaborations will be a focus for CLOC London 2021!
• The CLOC Community is a Powerful Movement and Force for Good in the Industry. In an industry that is in a rapid state of transition, harnessing our collective ingenuity and diverse skills and thought will be an imperative for law firms and in-house teams that want to be agile, innovative and impactful to the clients and businesses they serve. We have the opportunity to leverage our collective power to drive positive change across the legal industry and create space for conversations on how we can make a difference. Let’s take on this challenge together!

• As GC roles evolve, Legal Ops is an Imperative Hire. Our panel of General Counsels leading the “General Counsel and their Legal Operations Lead” session demonstrated the powerful and strategic nature of the GC/Legal Ops Lead partnership and how working together, they are driving transformation and delivering value to the businesses they serve. Legal Operations Leads are now essential hires for GCs.
• Technology is an Enabler, Not a Silver Bullet. Technology implementations are still very challenging: user adoption and change management are still areas of underinvestment. Efforts to gain consensus on both the problem being solved and the potential products and services that will lead to better adoption of the selected solution is key. This will be another area of focus in 2021!
• The Proliferation of Legal-tech and Legal Services Providers is Overwhelming for In-House Teams. The new CLOC Legal Ops Directory is a good start in identifying all the vendors; however, this proliferation of vendors represents a more significant challenge for in-house Legal Ops teams . We would like to see more vendor consolidation within legal-tech. We need enterprise systems that work together seamlessly.
• This interoperability between systems will only be possible when vendors across the legal technology industry begin to collaborate to solve the problems challenging Legal Ops and their teams.
• Data is Power. Leveraging data and analytics to measure Legal Teams impact on the business is imperative in driving strategic decisions with business leaders and law firms. Many teams are struggling with access to easily consumable data due to multiple tools and integration challenges. Consolidated platform systems will help to access data and legal service providers can help with cleansing data and the human effort to build foundational dashboards to leverage predictive analytics capabilities.
• AI Needs HI. AI is still in the nascent stages with multiple tools solving unique use cases that need significant Human Intervention (HI). We need to see more vendor consolidation and collaborating in this space to reduce the heavy lift for in house teams. Legal service providers working with AI vendors can present better solutions to clients if they work together.

• Human Capital is Still Our Most Significant Asset! Are we doing enough to nurture and grow our Legal Leaders? The “Legal Leaders of the Future” session reminded us of the need to invest in our people and not leave anyone behind. This will require an intentional effort and investment in the development of resilience skills to prepare leaders for a more VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) world. The CLOC community can help chart a new course for those in our community who feel rudderless and fearful of the changes ahead. Together, we can inspire confidence in our ability to operate successfully in a new future by sharing ideas and leveraging next-gen development programs.
• Progress, not Perfection, is Our Mantra. The Legal Ops Journey panel offered a fascinating insight into the different approaches each of the panellists took when prioritizing their initiatives in the first year of their roles. Progress, not perfection, is an essential mantra to adopt. Investments in change management initiatives are crucial to bringing people with you on the transformation journey.
• Law Firm Leaders Need to Solve Client Challenges. Law Firm COO and Innovation roles will help drive change, but in-house teams need to use their influence and buying power to invest in and reward innovative firms.

The 2020 London Institute was a great success in bringing our members together to Connect, Learn, and Collaborate. We are excited to begin planning the 2021 London Institute and hearing how the connections and collaborations forged this year have impacted each of you and your journeys as Legal Ops Leaders.

Mark your calendars for January 18-19, 2021. We’ll be meeting at the Grand Lancaster, London. See you there!

The pace of transformation in the legal services market continues to accelerate and we’re seeing a growing enthusiasm from in-house legal teams to embrace this change. There are a growing number of opportunities to develop skillsets and embrace alternative legal careers, as well as to be at the forefront of this evolution by driving change and encouraging genuine thought leadership. In this blog we focus on the people aspects, including how the pressure to upskill teams may affect individuals in different ways; the diversification and introduction of new roles and skills, and an increased focus on wellbeing.

The lawyer of the future: One size doesn’t fit all

‘Strategic’, ‘commercial’, ‘flexible’. According to in-house legal teams, these are the key attributes needed by the future lawyer to succeed. Are the days when lawyers were expected to know the law and only the law now in the past?

With many organisations aligning their legal teams to business areas, lawyers are under pressure to become more strategic and flexible; equipped to respond to queries across multiple legal disciplines and having the commercial knowledge to support this advice and provide tangible solutions. Add to this the need to consider legal tech within these solutions, provide thorough project management and become data literate, and you can see that the role of the in-house lawyer is under immense pressure to evolve. Many lawyers are embracing this challenge with enthusiasm, hungry to be learn new skills and discover alternative career pathways. Where though does this leave those lawyers who want to remain in a specialist position and don’t have the appetite to develop further skills? Is there still a place for them in the in-house legal team structure? We recently discussed this question with a group of clients, and the answer was a resounding yes. These people are in fact integral to the success of the legal team and we need to acknowledge the value they bring to the function. Whilst they may not wish to bring new skills to the table, they too can be part of this transformation solely by adapting their mindsets and becoming more inquisitive. By challenging the status quo, identifying alternative approaches to tasks and asking colleagues if certain tasks could be done more efficiently, they will add a huge amount to the legal transformation agenda.

Whichever ‘change bucket’ you’re in, the key is to appreciate the different perspectives each individual can bring, recognising that some may be more subtle than others.

From forming to storming: The changing role of the in-house legal team

The evolution of the in-house legal team is starting to gain pace and we are seeing new areas of expertise developing. The rise of the ‘legal operations’ role is a prime example; this is now a key senior role in many firms and does not necessarily have to be performed by someone with a legal background. Rather, business, financial and strategic skill sets are key to be able to identify opportunities to maximise value for money of external legal spend and deploying strategies to make efficiency and cost savings.

Given the demands on the in-house legal function to manage complex regulatory change projects, streamline high-volume legal processes as well as perform the role of the firm’s trusted legal expert and minimise risk, we are increasingly asked by our clients whether they should be looking to hire their own legal project managers or legal technology experts to support them. The answer to this is not clear cut. It depends on the size of the organisation and the appetite for keeping the work in-house rather than leveraging law firm’s expertise in these areas. Regardless of this, if you are considering it the first step is to fully engage with these roles and understand the value they would bring to your organisation, taking into account the behavioural change which would need to be adopted to ensure the full integration of the team.

Our view is that the in-house legal function’s transformation journey is, to quote Tuckman’s group development model (forming, storming, norming and performing), currently in the ‘forming’ stage where team members with differing skills will act independently of each other. To move to the next stage of maturity, ‘storming’ where the group start to work towards the common strategic goals will require people to embrace conflict and change in order to succeed. Actions speak louder than words: a refreshing approach to mental health.

Alongside the maturing landscape of the legal services market has come the recognition that the legal industry needs to be doing more around mental health. A leadership focus on this topic, and employee wellbeing more generally, has seen this become one of the key priorities this year. Two refreshing aspects which we have seen regularly are worthy of highlighting:

1. Pledges alone are not seen as enough. Operational and behavioural change need to align to deliver the improved outcomes underpinning those pledges; and

2. A movement away from sticking plaster solutions to the problems when they arise, and much more determination to address the root causes. We expect to see this remaining a key agenda topic in coming years ahead, with an increasingly strong focus both on leadership and actions, not just words.

All in all, this is an exciting time to be in the law! New career paths, brand new roles, and new opportunities for people with diverse skills. But what is clear is that traditional roles and legal expertise still very much have a central place in this broader NewLaw community, and integration and collaboration are key to the progression of the industry.

About Ashurt Advance

Ashurst Advance combines NewLaw expertise, a positive approach, collaborative working and thinking beyond the immediate deliverables, to help solve our clients’ business challenges and create value for our clients. We bring together the firm’s legal and industry experts, our process and technology capability, and a scalable range of cost-effective resourcing options in a fully integrated, managed and quality assured offering to deliver results which are aligned with our clients’ needs. Ashurst Advance has acted successfully for over 400 clients on nearly 1300 matters across 55 workstreams globally.

We would be delighted to have a chat with you at the London CLOC institute, so please do come and visit our booth situated in the Ballroom Hall.

As both a law student and a Project Manager with CLOC, I’ve gained a unique perspective on law school and the rise of legal operations. I’ve been a Project Manager with CLOC for three years, where I’ve helped grow our organization from 40 members to over 2,300 members and have participated in some groundbreaking changes in legal operations. While with CLOC, I’ve also been a law student at Stanford where I’ll be graduating this June.

The last three years have been incredibly valuable not only for introducing me to leaders in the legal industry, but also teaching me about the intersection between legal education and the evolving legal practice. When I reflect on what I’ve learned in law school, I think law schools are great at teaching students black letter law (e.g. contracts, torts, and civil procedure). Increasingly, law schools provide students meaningful clinical and pro bono opportunities and some sense of what it’s like to have real clients. Law school also provides an important sense of community within the legal profession and pushes students outside of their comfort zone, which is critical to our long-term success.

However, it won’t come as a surprise to anyone reading this, that at their core, law schools don’t teach students about the business of law or about our legal ecosystem – what we represent in the CLOC community. We aren’t taught about the synergies between law firms and legal technology providers, or the rise of alternative legal service providers and the evolving role of in house counsel. Classes in people management, business management, or the business of running a law firm aren’t required or even sometimes provided (and many students don’t take advantage of the limited offerings).

The truth is, law school can feel detached from the reality of practicing law. What I’ve discovered during my time with CLOC, is the way that lawyers work, the legal services that are available to clients, and how clients pay for those legal services, are all changing. That’s today’s reality. And, I think that our law school curriculum, at its core, should reflect those changes.

Certainly, some of this comes from experience, but I also think that it’s on the legal ops change-makers, practitioners of the law, and students of the law to challenge our conventional understanding of how the law is taught and how our legal education is provided. Naturally, law schools and business schools should be partners in this endeavor, which is why CLOC is so important. At CLOC we’re all about bringing everyone into the conversation – from academia to the AM Law 100.

For the last four years, CLOC has supported law students and the focus on legal ops training through its scholarship program. Much like CLOC itself, the scholarship program keeps expanding. In May 2019, ten (10) scholarship recipients from a variety of backgrounds across the United States were selected to receive CLOC’s 2019/2020 scholarship. From my experience with CLOC and involvement in the Scholarship Program, I know that those of us who are prepared with the necessary training in the technological and operational side of legal practice are in a much better position to meet and exceed our client’s expectations. Understanding how to practice is just as important as understanding the law itself.

The legal industry has been slow to adopt technology, but that’s changing quickly and CLOC is a testament to that change. Every day, new technology is altering the way that attorneys handle day-to-day operations and anymore, technology and operations skills are not just a “nice to have,” they’re critical for law school graduates to learn and exercise in practice. I’m excited to be a part of the changes that the legal industry is experiencing and I can’t wait to see what comes next!

About the CLOC Scholarship Program

Scholarship recipients from the 2019/2020 year were invited to attend the 2019 Vegas Institute in May 2019. View the impressive selection committee and equally impressive winners of the CLOC 2019 Scholarships. Learn more and apply for a CLOC Scholarship today.

Many teams in organizations face challenges where resilience is needed in order to maintain high-performance and well-being. This is especially true for teams working on high-stakes matters, under time pressure, and in intense environments, much like the work your team is doing in the legal profession. Additionally, research suggests that the personality traits of high need for achievement professionals can make team formation, decision-making and leadership considerably more challenging within performance-driven professional organizations.

Resilience is the capacity for stress-related growth, and it exists at the individual and group level. Complex, changing, fast-paced work environments require that teams quickly adapt to missteps, failure, slow results, and challenges generally.

Resilient teams (1) resolve challenges as effectively as possible; (2) maintain team health and resources; (3) recover quickly; and (4) display the ability to handle future challenges together). Here are some common team challenges that require resilience:

• Difficult and/or high-stakes assignments
• High consequence work
• Unclear team roles
• Innovating – the process itself is full of missteps and setback
• Angry/upset/skeptical clients
• Poor results
• Ambiguous direction/goals

The study of what it means to build resilience at work has thrived in the past decade, and as more organizations continue to orient their work in teams, there has been an increased interest in what it means to create a resilient work team.

Here is what we know about what resilient teams do differently:

They recognize and actively mitigate against the producer-manager dilemma. Harvard Law School’s leadership programs for law firm and law department leaders always begin with cases that illustrate how the “producer-manager dilemma” significantly impedes effective leadership and team building within our profession. The dilemma occurs and worsens as professionals gain seniority and continue to need to “produce” client/technical work, as well as take on an increasingly long list of leadership, business development and organizational responsibilities. Moving from being individual contributors to team participants and leaders requires professionals to invest more time, focus and thoughtful energy into the healthy functioning of teams. Unfortunately, the urgent crowds out the important and without a strong cultural and organizational commitment, professional teams are often dramatically under-led and less likely to achieve the full benefits that a collaborative, diverse and inclusive team effort can provide. Resilient teams are more likely to be found in organizations that provide training, tools and incentives to help professionals identify and mitigate against the effects of the producer-manager dilemma. Team leaders create resilient teams through application of more formal team processes and tools and growth mindset frameworks; personally evaluating and optimizing what, how and to whom they delegate; building and using their internal and external networks to help their teams; and establishing and supporting team norms such as those described below.

They stay motivated. Professionals choosing to work in an intense environment most often exhibit the personality traits associated with a high need for achievement. Some of these traits, such as a high need for autonomy and a fierce competitiveness, can disrupt the formation of resilient teams. Team members may resist collaboration and view team members more as rivals or roadblocks than sources of new information, ideas, talents and support.

Resilient teams stay motivated and counteract those tendencies by accessing the power of intrinsic motivation, i.e., motivation from within the work itself and how it gets done. Indeed, research shows that focusing on intrinsic goals leads to higher performance, well-being, and motivation for teams. Team members become more intrinsically motivated when they have choice or a say in how their work unfolds, feel like they belong on the team and have developed high-quality relationships with their colleagues, and feel confident in their ability to learn more challenging skills The challenge is for leaders to create a team environment that supports those valuable outcomes.

They build psychological safety & belonging. A critical foundation of resilient teams is psychological safety – a climate in which people feel comfortable expressing and being themselves. In order for teams to appropriately manage adversity, people need to feel comfortable sharing their knowledge, which means sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, and partially-formed ideas. Research has found that teams that employ more positive emotions and focus on solidifying the connectedness of the people within their teams experience more of this type of openness, and thus higher levels of team resilience. In addition, teams that are able to openly and clearly discuss both positive and negative experiences are better able to work through adversity, have higher levels of trust, and higher levels of resilience.

They take an appreciative approach. While it’s important for teams to identify areas of where they are struggling, it is also important for teams to identify, organize, and elevate their strengths on an ongoing basis in order to maintain their energy and reach their full potential. For example, teams can apply an appreciative inquiry approach by asking team members to share and openly discuss what matters most to the team, what they want the team to look like or grow into, what obstacles stand in the way, and what changes they are willing to make to achieve this vision.

They prioritize well-being. Resilient teams openly talk about stress and burnout. Burnout is a chronic process of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy caused by a disconnect or an imbalance between key job demands and job resources, and it is highly correlated with lower levels of morale, turnover and disengagement. Interestingly, structured team debriefs or after action reviews have been linked to lower levels of team member vulnerability to burnout. Why? Debriefing facilitates information exchange and elaboration (so there is less ambiguity, a known burnout accelerant), enables team member support, and increases self-reflection and self-efficacy.

Professionals – especially lawyers in top firms and legal departments – operate in an incredibly stressful, dynamic environment. Research relating to resilience has shown that it is a trait that correlates strongly with thriving in such a demanding environment. Many legal organizations are now providing training and resources relating to the building of their lawyers’ and allied professionals’ resilience. The next frontier is for legal organizations to invest significantly more resources and attention to the building of resilient teams. Here is the big picture: the markets for talent and clients have never been more global or transparent, resulting in dramatically increased competition. As technology like AI increasingly disrupts and replaces traditional service delivery, professionals will need to distinguish themselves by providing interdisciplinary and integrated legal and business solutions. The only way to do that in a dynamic, complex environment is in a team, and it had better be a resilient one.

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!