There’s a saying that overnight successes take 20 years to happen. I generally agree with that; it is rare indeed to come across a true overnight success. With the incredible ascent of the Legal Operations role within the legal ecosystem over the past five years, I am, however, willing to make an exception to this saying.
Background
CLOC – the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium – was co-founded by Mary O’Carroll and Betsi Roach in 2016. From my background reading I understand Mary and Betsi started CLOC as quasi book club membership group for quirky people with a legal operations title or elements of legal operation within their role.
Within a very short period of time, CLOC had set parameters around what they called the ‘Core 12’ skill-sets/roles of a Legal Operations professional. These include:
- Business Intelligence
- Financial Management
- Firm & Vendor Management
- Information Governance
- Knowledge Management
- Organization Optimization & Health
- Practice Operations
- Project/Program Management
- Service Delivery Models
- Strategic Planning
- Technology
- Training & Development
So far, so good. Nothing too exciting about this.
Legal Operations: Where are we today?
‘Fast’ forward (if you can) six years and CLOC and the role of Legal Operations has a massive global footprint, as evidenced by the release of two reports in that past month that clearly highlight the rapid ascent of this role within in-house legal teams.
The ACC Graph
The first was the ‘2020 Legal Operations Maturity Benchmarking Report‘, published by the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) in partnership with Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory.
This Report contains the following telling graph – the massive increase in the percentage of [legal] departments with at least one legal operations professional.
Take that graph in for a second.
Now let’s give it some context.
In 2020, just before COVID, when discussing CLOC and its role in ‘Episode 27: Legal Operation is it the new legal business game changer‘ of The Legalpreneurs Sandbox, the panel of presenters at the Centre for Legal Innovation (lead by the wonderful Terri Mottershead), took the best past of an hour explaining who CLOC where and what the Legal Operations role was.
This is in no way a negative comment on the Centre – far from it. They are a leading edge think-tank of highly knowledgeable people talking an audience that know what is going on at the forefront of legal innovation.
Frankly, they’re a clever bunch.
And yet, even for them, the ascent of this ‘Legal Operations’ role was – not to put too fine a point on it – mind-blowing.
The Gartner Graph
So we come to the second graph, which comes from a Gartner report that I read earlier today.
Again, this graph blows my mind. But, in this case, so far as I am concerned, the mind-blowing detail isn’t in the astronomical rise of Legal Operations role (which I think relies heavily on the ACC graph above), as it is in the number of so-called ‘non-lawyers’ who are doing this role.
If the growth in that yellow box doesn’t have you shaking your head, go back and take another look at the skill in CLOC’s Core 12 above. Then tell yourself that a ‘non-lawyer’ is in charge of those skills.
So what does this mean for law firms going forward?
The honest answer is, I don’t know.
I have yet to to decide exactly where the role of Legal Operations fits. Clearly this is an important role that will have a significant role to play in the day-to-day running of a legal team. But how do the tasks of Firm Vendor Management, Service Delivery Models and Strategic Planning fit with the role Procurement plays?
Truth is, I don’t yet know.
What these charts do show me though is that the role of Legal Operations here is to stay. We best get used to. And we best get used to working with them. So make sure it a discussion topic within your firm. And, I suspect you will actually be seeing this role playing out in your firm – with a ‘non-lawyer’ in charge!
As always, the above represent my own thoughts only and would love to hear yours.
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