CLOC Opening Keynote: What If You Could Automate Everything?

I’ve got so much more to think about.

Deadlines and commitments

What to leave in and what to leave out

Against the Wind – Bob Seger

So what if you could automate everything in your life? What would you leave in? What would you leave out? And what does it mean for lawyers, legal professionals, and legal ops professionals?

These are some of the questions the CLOC conference initial keynoter put to the audience as the Global Institute, as it likes to be called, kicked off on Tuesday, May 12. The speaker was none other than noted author, presenter, and former OpenAI executive, Zach Cass.

Agentic AI Is Coming. Are We Ready?

His thesis: we are rapidly reaching a point where agentic agents can do much of what we do now. Things like preparing our grocery list. As Cass put it, there are only 2-3 items and brands that he really cares about. The rest of the items? He would be happier for his AI agent to just pick them out for him. 

I say that because this question — what to leave out of the automated tasks — goes to the heart of what’s bedeviling legal in general and legal ops in particular. Or should be. Nothing like starting a conference with a bang by talking about the elephant in the AI room.

Legal Ops and Automation of Everything

It’s a particular question for legal ops since as a discipline, it’s focused on bringing a business-like look at the handling of legal matters. As Mary O’Carroll, former head of CLOC and longtime legal ops evangelist, put it in her talk later in the day entitled, The Evolving Role of Legal Operations, legal ops is about things like right sourcing, speed, quality, and costs. Cass’s view is that now and increasingly in the future, all these goals can be achieved with agentic agents. Many can be achieved through automation. 

For legal ops, it’s a paradox: achieving the discipline’s goals requires using AI and automation to achieve savings and efficiencies. Yet by doing so, will they automate themselves out of a job? Here’s an example: CLOC yesterday announced something called CLOC Compass. It’s an AI tool that assesses where a user is in achieving certain legal operations goals and then provides a comprehensive plan how to get from point A to point B. Which is something legal ops experts and consultants would traditionally do.

Legal ops is not the first to face this kind of question. The issue is what does legal ops do in response? Double down on how its professionals operate or embrace that which threatens to make much of what they do obsolete? There is a roadmap: companies that embrace the latter have survived albeit in a different form: think Apple and its decision to move to the iPhone when it had to know it would ultimately be at the expense of the iPod. 

So legal ops has some soul searching to do. But it’s at least kicking off its mainstay conference by asking the right questions.

The Legal Profession and Automation

But it’s not just legal ops that better be asking what to leave in and what to leave out. I spoke to a leading mover and shaker in the legal tech and AI field outside the conference rooms (well, actually at the bar). He told me that c-suite personnel are starting to ask how can we build an agentic workflow that will reduce the need to consult with in-house counsel and outside lawyers as well. As he put it, asking in-house counsel a question will become a last resort. And asking outside counsel will become a last, last resort.

So the question then becomes, what will clients want their lawyers to do that perhaps can be automated but there’s value in not doing so. I’ve talked before about this very issue: what are the uniquely human things that will be valued, and we will decide we don’t want automated in the profession. 

Another discussion in the exhibit hall I had focused on brief writing. This person’s view was that brief writing was a skill we shouldn’t want automated since it takes a human to frame an argument that will resonate with a decision maker. But that assumes that AI writing, writing which I call AI slop, will become such a norm that it becomes the expected way to persuade. I already see AI slop on social media everyday by writers I used to consider credible. The more we see of it, the more it becomes the expected. 

Work in the Brave New World of Automation

And if you follow Cass’s logic, much of what we now consider work will vanish into an AI haze leaving us to do non-work we supposedly value more. But that ignores a reality: like it or not, work defines us. It’s not just a time filler. For example, I could have asked Claude to take my keynote notes and draft an article in substantially less time than it is taking me. But there is value in doing it myself, at least to me. What would I do if I had all the time in the world but no craft that brings self-satisfaction?

In these days and times, it can feel well-nigh impossible to even find the time to try to figure out where all this is going. To consider the hard questions. We don’t have time or the inclination to look up from our screens (another characteristic of modern-day life which Cass rightfully slammed) and ask hard questions. Questions that are hard for legal ops. Hard for clients. Hard for lawyers and legal professionals. It requires us to focus on things we just as soon avoid because they threaten us. 

But that’s the beauty of listening to people like Cass who challenge us to try to come to grips with a future that will be so different. And force us to begin trying to answer the questions: what if everything can be automated? What to leave in and what to take out?

And what would we all do if we had all the time in the world?

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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.