5 Things to Take Away From CLOC
The legal operations community was out in full (virtual) force last week for CLOC’s Global Institute online event. Kudos to President, Mary O’Carroll, and the entire CLOC team for putting on such an informative and action packed event despite all the challenges we are facing today. It was great to participate and share with other like-minded legal and legal operations professionals as well as get a snapshot of the current legal landscape. Here are my five big takeaways.
It’s change management, stupid
In the end, the biggest recurring theme of the day was: In order to get value one needs adoption and to get adoption one needs change management. It’s as true today as it was ten years ago and as it will be ten years from now. CLOC’s 2020 sessions revolved around many topics of substance but more than anything else, the question of change management was the most consistent. Simply put, the more we become digital, the more important change management becomes.
The deployment of new technology without proper planning, support, usability, and execution is a big issue. Many people spoke about their deployments taking over a year to implement and still not seeing an end in sight. This led to further discussion around deployments with white glove service for users to provide the best shot at changing client behavior. If they have the answer in one email or phone call they are more likely to adopt.
There was also discussion around training the trainer and having internal folks within enterprises who could take ownership of the change and help others make the change with them. The more self sufficient the group, the better the results. For legal ops to make a change in an organization, it’ best to feel like the change is coming from within.
All of this is to say that it’s not always about the tech as much as it’s about change management. The tech can help, especially with a focus on usability and user experience, but without all the other components you may not get what you’re hoping for.
Legal (still) needs more data
One thing that continues to hamper applications of AI throughout the legal tech stack is a lack of useful, relevant data. You can’t optimize what you can’t track. It’s data which enables organizations to drill down and quickly address critical problems. Unfortunately, in the legal space, there remains a significant gap which affects how we optimize and scale and make legal more data driven. It was clear during the event that this remains an ongoing concern and one that still needs to be addressed in order to meaningfully advance.
Collaborate & Listen
Fostering a sense of community and creating an environment where communication is seamless and easy has never been more challenging thanks to COVID. So, it was particularly heartening to see an overt demonstration of willingness to collaborate on the part of all the attendees. This necessity for ease of collaboration has never been more pronounced, so it was wonderful to see it happening all throughout the CLOC event. People are wanting to interact and help each other more than ever. It seemed evident that cooperation — even among companies — was much greater. CLOC, perhaps, best exemplified this by announcing at the start of the event that it would be opening up membership to the entire legal ecosystem as a nod to emerging industry wide challenges and as a way to stay true to their mission. Bravo, CLOC!
Leverage all the resources you can
Improving legal operations is a team sport. More than most, this requires a collaboration and an inclusion of multiple constituents. Trying to work across these divisions to bring people together is increasingly important and also helps with insight and change management, of course. Collaborating and pulling in external resources can also be very helpful towards efforts at modernizing and optimizing legal operations. The message here was: Use everything you have available to you, be creative, and don’t limit yourself to just your internal resources.
Lean in to the change
The one truly positive note struck consistently throughout the event was that it has become increasingly clear that enterprises are “leaning in” when it comes to legal tech. It was a constant theme throughout most presentations, that despite the serious challenges we face — be it with implementation or lack of data — legal disruption is a net positive and digital maturity isn’t some far-off goal but, rather, something imminently achievable. Across the board significant expenditures are being made in legal tech stacks building continuity and value while providing a smarter way for legal to do business. This was undoubtedly a most hopeful tone despite the dark times we are moving though. The one good thing we can say is the push to digital helps accelerate legal’s transformations and when we come out of this pandemic we will be stronger and better for it!
We are excited to see what the next chapter will bring and are thankful to be able to be part of CLOC and the wonderful community they have brought together. For those who want to learn more about this organization please go to https://cloc.org/.