When I previewed the 2025 CLOC Global Institute last week, I focused on the doors this conference promised to open: doors to AI integration, smarter vendor selection, operational maturity, and a redefinition of legal department value. Now, having spent four days immersed in sessions, keynotes, vendor conversations, and community exchanges (not to mention one hell of a party featuring Flo Rida and Flavor Flav), it seems CLOC is trying to embrace the changes AI is bringing and rethinking its role both in the legal department but also in the business itself.
From Fear and Loathing v. Today’s Reality
In my pre-conference article, I wondered whether AI would make traditional CLM platforms obsolete. Would legal departments shift from reactive support of legal ops to seeing legal ops as a driver of change? I wondered if legal ops was struggling to find its place in a post-AI world. That the C-suite would see AI as being able to do a lot of what legal ops professionals are doing.
Yes, there was a sense among some attendees that AI could diminish their role. But I also saw in Las Vegas a profession that seemed to be squarely facing the future. There was lots of talk about the need for human skills in the legal ops matrix. Lots of talk about how AI could be used by legal ops to do what they do better. AI and the changes it may bring weren’t being thought of by most CLOC members as a future problem but a present reality. The people I talked to were asking how they could best use AI today to improve legal ops value.
I also got the sense that legal ops teams are looking for opportunities for an enhanced role in the legal department and in the business as a whole.
The General Session
On the penultimate day of the conference, a general session entitled Powerhouse Perspectives — with a powerhouse panel of Eric Greenberg, General Counsel of the Cox Media Group, Casey Flaherty, Chief Strategy at LexFusion, and Aine Lyons, Deputy General Counsel of Workday — encapsulated a lot of what I heard throughout out the conference.
AI Adoption Requires Leadership
The session reinforced a core theme: AI adoption is as much a leadership challenge as a technical one.
Legal departments are facing mounting pressure — from CEOs, boards, and peers — to operationalize GenAI. McKinsey reports and CLOC’s own surveys show AI as a top C-suite priority, with 96% of GCs expecting increased budgets to support it.
But while the business is pushing for transformation, the session panel highlighted that the biggest barriers aren’t technical — they’re human:
- Perfectionism in law makes teams wary of GenAI’s imperfections.
- Siloed adoption means tools are tested but not integrated.
- Cultural hesitation leaves mid-level staff uncertain about how to engage with AI meaningfully.
As one panelist put it, “The tech is moving fast — but humans aren’t.” Change isn’t about managing resistance, it’s about building confidence across teams.
Legal Ops As a Change Driver
One theme that echoed throughout the conference was the hope that legal ops could in fact evolve into a cross-functional agent of change. The general session panelists emphasized that legal ops teams should stop solving only legal problems and start using their skills to solve broader business problems.
The Panelists highlighted how legal ops could do such things as:
- Identify enterprise-wide inefficiencies (e.g., contract analytics, vendor risk)
- Collaborate with other functions like finance and procurement
- Uses data in new ways to justify budget, tools, and headcount
- Translate complex legal risk into actionable business decisions
Using these skills to impact the broader business gives legal ops — already focused on making legal run like a business — an opportunity.
GCs Are Strategically Elevating Legal Ops
The perspective of the GCs on the general session panel is noteworthy. The two GCs viewed legal ops as indispensable but only because they view their partnership with the legal ops professionals as real. One GC called legal ops “our department’s chief navigator” — bringing future-focused insight, not just cost management.
To build this partnership, GCs urged legal ops to:
- Be proactive in surfacing opportunities, not just reporting metrics
- Demonstrate the ROI of operational changes
- Learn the business deeply enough to speak in outcomes, not just tools
In turn, GCs were encouraged to create space at the table for legal ops to be full partners.
A Shift from Embedding Tech in Legal Processes to Embedding Legal in Business Processes
Relatedly, perhaps the most visionary comment came near the end of the session: “We need to stop embedding technology in legal processes — and start embedding legal knowledge in business processes.” Instead of legal tech living in a silo, it should become a service across the enterprise. Several GCs remarked they are leveraging legal ops to export capabilities into non-legal functions and generate savings. This could be big opportunity for legal ops.
AI Use Cases Are Expanding
The session panelists added to earlier conference discussions that gave examples of how GenAI is now or could be used in legal ops to further enhance value:
- To summarize documents, create charts, and synthesize tone and intent.
- To improve speed and reducing friction in compliance and billing.
- To use knowledge management to help legal teams avoid reinventing the wheel
- To simulate litigation strategies, producing perspective-shifting feedback
Legal ops teams can use and should use AI tools to building playbooks for such things as rollout, onboarding, feedback loops, and even how to label AI contributions in deliverables.
Future Skills
There was lots of talk throughout the conference on what skills legal ops professionals will need in the future. Things like human skills:
- Curiosity: Always asking, “Can AI do this better?”
- Storytelling: Using data not just to inform, but to persuade
- Empathy and translation: Meeting teams where they are
- Enterprise orientation: Solving business problems, not just legal ones
- Agility: Adapting in a world with no finish line but constant change
One session panelists called legal ops professionals “ambassadors of the future,” and urged legal ops to become their organization’s “AI person”—not by title, but by action.
The Cultural Gap
Something I didn’t focus on in my pre-conference discussion is the cultural gap between legal ops and law firm practice. Legal ops is agile, data-driven, and customer-centric. Law firms are often none of those things and until their business models shift, the transformation may stay one-sided.
Expectation v. Reality
Here are some expectations I had going in versus what I actually saw and heard:
- Outside Counsel Selection Would Be a Hot Topic: This was front and center with multiple vendors offering products to improve law firm selection and management.
- AI Would Be Ubiquitous and Replace CLM:. Instead of replacing CLM, GenAI seems to be embedded into it. Nevertheless, there seems to be lots of vendors in the space and consolidation is inevitable.
- Data Governance and Risk Concerns: I wondered whether privacy, compliance, and regulatory complexity would be top concerns in a world where AI touches sensitive legal data. This challenged was shared in many sessions. Legal ops teams are doing things like embedding structured onboarding, and creating governance models and AI usage guidelines into their tech rollouts.
Final Thought
CLOC 2025 didn’t just confirm much of what I expected, it demonstrated what could be the future for legal ops. Far from downcast, legal ops is an optimistic and upbeat profession right now.
Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.