CLOC Conference: 5 Takeaways on the State of Legal Ops
The Tonkean team had the opportunity to attend the largest corporate legal operations conference in the world. After listening to 3-days of sessions and speaking with attendees and speakers, we want to share our key learnings about the state of the rapidly growing legal operations space.
Just over a week ago, over 2200 leaders in corporate legal operations converged at the Bellagio for the annual CLOC Las Vegas Institute. The amazingly diverse crowd was made up of corporate general counsels, heads of legal operations, law firm representatives, and legal technology providers unified by a common set of objectives — modernizing corporate legal teams to operate more effectively and become a more strategic business function.
Like other business operations teams, legal operations is exponentially growing in importance as a function in corporate legal departments. CLOC, a leading pillar in the field of legal operations, started just over 3 years ago from a small gathering of early legal operations leaders in the Bay Area, and quickly grew into a worldwide legal operations community connecting people in 1145 companies across 45 countries.
The Tonkean team had the opportunity to learn about the current state of legal operations from the attendees, speakers, and sponsors at the 3-day CLOC conference. Here are our takeaways.
Legal ops is still in its early days
Although legal operations as a concept started formally taking hold about a decade ago, for most enterprises, emphasis on improving operations in legal is only just starting to happen. As such, most corporate legal teams are still operating with immature processes, ad hoc tools, and limited data. Mary O’Carroll, the President of CLOC, mentioned in her keynote address that “we are behind in many areas,” when comparing the operations maturity in legal with other business departments. Those in legal operations believe this presents an incredible opportunity. It was clear that the general attitude of the attendees, as well as speakers, was an eagerness to learn. Even early pioneers of the space made a point about the fact that even for them, CLOC wasn’t just about them sharing knowledge, but also an equal opportunity to learn from others in the space.
Managing change is the biggest hurdle
Legal teams haven’t changed the way that they operate in many years, rather preferring to stick to the status quo, and the common response faced by forward-thinking legal operations teams is “well that’s the way we’ve always done it.” The common challenge for all legal operations teams is overcoming the organizational resistance to change. In evaluating and implementing new technologies or processes, legal ops professionals need to think about how to lower the organizational or behavioral change needed to gain process or business improvements. They must also think about putting change in perspective of how it will benefit each individual member of the legal team. For example, implementing a new matter management system will require corporate attorneys to start regularly checking and updating a system of record. Legal operations must either make it easy for the system to be updated without changing behavior, such as automatically syncing email with the matter management system, or ensure that each individual attorney is benefiting in some significant way, such as reducing the amount of manual administrative work.
Focus on business alignment
One of the biggest motivators for the rise of legal operations is the desire for corporate legal teams to integrate with the rest of the business. Legal has been a vital part of business processes for a long time, such as negotiating contracts in sales cycles or partnerships, ensuring proper protections from suppliers in procurement, or providing the paperwork necessary to ensure compliance in employee on-boarding. However, legal teams are now thinking holistically about how they can impact overall business objectives through operational excellence. For example, improving the process of legal matter intake, how legal service requests are submitted and handled by the corporate legal team, to improve turnaround time and meet SLAs can bring faster revenue cycles in sales, more business agility in procurement processes, and more predictability and lower risk for HR.
Technology is an enabler, not the whole solution
Leading technology trends like automation, AI/ML, and big data were popular topics in many sessions at CLOC, with many success stories being shared about how legal teams are harnessing technology to make meaningful impact on their operations. However, another common discussion point was the fact that technology is never the full solution. Many words of caution were given around the importance of thinking about processes first and its impact to the people and business before looking at technology. Before any technology solution is adopted, legal teams must answer the question of what impact the change in process will have to the people in the organization and whether the change will achieve the right business outcomes.
People come first
The three days at CLOC were filled with interesting topics about how to improve processes and technologies that can help make those improvements happen. However, what stood out the most about the conference was its focus on people. The CLOC board wrapped up the conference with an informal fireside chat on the main stage, and the most prescient discussion was one about what makes someone succeed in legal operations. Rather than some of the qualities one would expect, like education from a good law school or extensive experience in corporate law, some of the adjectives that came up were, good EQ, curiosity, humility, good judgement, and customer-service orientation. Additionally, the sense of community was also overflowing at the conference where presenters, attendees, and sponsors demonstrated and shared an eagerness to support and learn from the community. At the end of the day, the business of legal is about people, and it is evident that legal operations thinks about people first in everything that they do.
The opportunity for legal operations to become a change agent in corporations is immense. Here at Tonkean, we are excited to learn together with the community and help empower legal ops teams bridge the gap between people, systems, and processes. The future of legal operations is bright, and we are excited to be along for the ride.
Tonkean is a robotic process orchestration platform for operations teams to integrate systems, coordinate people, and automate work intelligently and without any scripting or code.
