Legal Operations Takeover? Live Conversation From The 2017 CLOC Institute
Law firm, legal ops, and legaltech experts come together for a conversation live from CLOC, sponsored by kCura.
This week, legal professionals, consultants and tech companies from across the country will converge on the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas for what seems to have become one of the most important events of the year in the legal industry: the CLOC Institute.
CLOC stands for the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, and the growth and validation of legal operations, or legal ops, is one of the most significant trends affecting the legal industry.
Legal operations is a position inside the majority of Fortune 500 companies, separate from in-house counsel, whose role is to ensure that the legal department functions more like a business. According to Mary O’Carroll, head of legal ops at Google and part of the executive leadership team at CLOC, what’s helping make legal ops ubiquitous inside of corporate legal departments is the community of individuals who get together to share best practices with each other. “Many of us had been working on our own islands, but with CLOC, we’ve all kind of found each other,” Mary told me in an interview earlier this year. Connie Brenton, CLOC Chairman and Senior Director of Legal Operations at NetApp, describes legal ops as a movement.
The conference has nearly doubled in size from last year and they are expecting close to a thousand attendees. Most of the successful tech companies I know (big and small) will have folks in attendance. “If you’re selling to legal,” one CEO told me recently, “you’re going to have to get legal ops on board.”
Since there are so many sessions at the conference and I will not be able to attend them all, I’m inviting folks on all sides of the ecosystem, start-ups, legal ops, law firm, and in-house counsels — all of whom will be at the conference — to help me cover the conference here on Above the Law. Not able to attend the conference but want to follow along? Drop your email in below the conversation and hit follow! Special thanks to kCura, developers of eDiscovery platform Relativity for sponsoring this conversation.
Zach Abramowitz is a former Biglaw associate and currently CEO and co-founder of ReplyAll. You can follow Zach on Twitter (@zachabramowitz) or reach him by email at zach@replyall.me.
