Disruption looms as James Wood reports on first European conference for CLOC
Richard Susskind must have lost count of the number of times he has spoken about the future of law, but in his introductory remarks to the 2018 CLOC EMEA Institute gathering in London he seemed cheerfully off balance. Many of the concepts Susskind has prophesied are now realities at large US companies and even sceptics would concede that the emergence of sophisticated legal operations teams feels like a decisive shift for the industry.
Speaking alongside Susskind was Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) president and NetApp senior director of legal operations, Connie Brenton. She began by reminding delegates that CLOC started seven years ago as an informal group and only held its first official institute meeting in 2016. The group already counts a quarter of the Fortune 500 among its ranks in the US, and is making inroads into a growing number of increasingly-diverse companies each month. Last year it launched a European chapter, led by VMware’s deputy legal counsel for worldwide legal operations, Aine Lyons.
CLOC’s first conference outside the US is another sign that legal operations is entering the industry’s mainstream. Not only is the group’s membership rapidly increasing, but a wider legal ‘ecosystem’ (CLOC’s preferred term) is beginning to court the growing ranks of non-lawyer professionals working in legal teams.
While the conference celebrated the spread of CLOC away from its West Coast tech-centric heartlands, it also underscored the relative immaturity of the European legal ops community. Turnout was impressive – standing room only for the introductory remarks – but nowhere close to the 1,000-plus who attended CLOC’s US conference last year. The single-day conference covered only a fraction of the topics that will be discussed at the group’s forthcoming Las Vegas meeting, where 80 sessions will stretch over four days.
Sessions saw CLOC’s European president Lyons alongside Juniper Networks chief of staff Hans Albers on change management, while in the next room Google’s head of legal operations, Mary O’Carroll, was joined by Google’s legal technologies and systems lead, Julian Tsisin, to discuss machine learning.
In contrast to many law conferences, it was striking how little theory was covered in the presentations, with content often tilting toward the nitty-gritty. Most speakers spent the bulk of their time standing in front of organisational charts and flow diagrams outlining projects on which they had led. Such an approach reflects CLOC’s emphasis on peer learning and knowledge sharing, rather than airy predications of professional revolution.
There was some waffle and snake-oil marketing, but overall it was a thought-provoking showcase of the work being done by legal ops in
the UK.
That said, some speakers could not resist talking up the dawn of legal disruption. O’Carroll and Tsisin described a document review process involving a large number of tech patents that, they calculated, would take a conventional legal team up to three years to complete (at a cost of $1.5m in lawyer hours). The Google team built its own artificial intelligence (AI) system to complete the work in a few hours. The same system is now in place to work on future projects and will likely shave millions from the company’s legal budget. Impressive, but then Google designs things like AutoML, the AI programme that can teach itself to write code. No external legal tech supplier has anything like Google’s tech firepower, which raises the question of how applicable the lesson is to the average legal team.
Speakers from US tech companies were a big draw, but it was as interesting to hear how legal ops has been applied in UK-based plcs. A session aimed at beginner and intermediate teams was one of the day’s highlights. Sarah Barrett-Vane, who spent five years as director of legal operations at Royal Mail before setting up legal ops and bid support agency SBV Consulting, gave a strong talk that covered e-billing, the need to analyse legal spend and how in-house teams can fashion data into ‘news they can use’. She emphasised the ‘quick wins’ legal teams can make without resorting to expensive IT. The underlying advice: do not rush to buy tech until you know what you want to achieve.
This was followed by a presentation from Jamie Fraser, director of legal operations and innovation for Smiths Group, who offered a crash course in request for proposal for beginners. Focusing on Smiths’ recent tender exercise for an M&A panel, Fraser went into detail on the issues to cover and mistakes to avoid when conducting a panel review. He also gave interesting details about Smiths’ new temporary resource model – a daring attempt to set up a sort of captive Lawyers On Demand.
Inevitably, there was some waffle and snake-oil marketing, but overall it was a thought-provoking showcase of the work being done by legal ops professionals in the UK, even if non-US speakers were a sideshow to the main event.
Steve Harmon, deputy general counsel (GC) at Cisco, commented on how quickly the industry is developing in the US, which is now seeing lateral moves within legal ops roles, something that will likely happen soon in the UK.
And as Brenton pointed out in her introductory remarks, the UK market has a number of advantages over the US when it comes to growing the legal ecosystem away from traditional providers, not least of which is the alternative business structure model.
On that note, traditional suppliers were notably absent from the conference, with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe the only law firm among the 17 sponsors.
Surprisingly, GCs also appeared underrepresented. Many speakers noted that most legal heads have yet to grasp the role of law operations, let alone see it as a viable career path. Hence, the next phase of CLOC’s evolution will be to develop training in legal ops and legal project management. As Brenton noted, all GCs should be asking who can help them better deliver services to their organisations and an increasing number of those people will not look like traditional lawyers.
For more on the rise of legal ops in-house, see ‘Precision instruments’