On Friday, December 4th the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) announced it was making three of the general sessions from the Global Institute available to the public. Whether one is part of a legal operations team, simply curious about trends reshaping the industry, or even skeptical about the need for data, automation and process engineering, I would highly recommend viewing Mary O’Carroll’s opening remarks and the two general sessions, Meet the Change Makers and The Global General Counsel Panel. These sessions explored themes from the global pandemic and how the Legal Ops community responded, to collaboration, innovation, diversity and sustainability.
The CLOC Global Institute
The CLOC Global Institute, held on November 10th, was a thoughtful, interactive and surprisingly social experience, where participants became re-acquainted with each other in chat and served up a dialogue that spanned the breadth of perspectives within the legal ecosystem. This experience echoed the announcement that CLOC was expanding its membership to include other service providers, technology companies and law schools and underscored the need for all participants to engage each other in meaningful dialogue and drive sustainable change.
One of the hallmarks of CLOC is its membership’s commitment to and honest conversation about diversity. During the General Counsel panel, Bradley Gayton, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Coca-Cola made a poignant case for “belonging” at the table beyond mere inclusion, for leaning in and confronting “adjective-flipping,” when describing women leaders, and for calling out “he-peating,” so that women’s voices are heard. Their conversation reminded me of Husch Blackwell’s virtual series titled “Communities For Change” that brings to the forefront the lived experience of our diverse colleagues, greater awareness of implicit bias and the individual actions each one of us can take to ensure greater diversity in our professional settings.
Meet the Change Makers
Jenn McCarron, CLOC Board Member & Director of Legal Operations at Netflix, and David Wilkins, Profession of Harvard Law University, set the stage in this session with a world on fire: how the current health, economic and social crises demonstrate both the interconnectedness of our global society and the differences in impact and response from communities around the world. While providers of legal services remained highly productive this year, the pace of change, remote work and economic disruption created real challenges for individual well-being, team cohesion, and meeting the demand for services under financial constraints.
In response to these challenges, Cornelius Grossman, Global Law Leader at EY, Aine Lyons, CLOC Board Member & VP & Deputy GC of Worldwide Legal Operations at VMWare, and Mitch Zuklie, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Orrick, discussed how their organizations nurtured resiliency, led distributed teams and partnered with their customers to deepen the conversation and jointly build solutions for their businesses. For those registered for the Institute, I would also recommend Michelle Elstein’s session, Making an Impact as a Leader in a Distributed World, where she highlighted what leaders learned as COVID-19 unfolded and shared many practical techniques to find balance, strength and purpose throughout the day. Taking a cue from the global perspective presented here, it was clear that traditional service providers need to pay attention to the way the Big Four and other law companies engage with clients and consider approaching service delivery with a mindset toward data, process, and automation and the goal of building tools that scale to meet demand.
The Global General Counsel Panel
These challenges are opportunities. Never let a good crisis go to waste. Maaike de Bie, Group GC and Company Secretary at easyJet, Dev Stahlkopf, CVP, GC and Corporate Secretary at Microsoft and Bradley Gayton, explored how they raised the profile of their departments through leadership, innovation and bringing together non-traditional skillsets while addressing burn-out, bias and belonging. A number of themes stood out in this session, including the need to spend time, even during a crisis, thinking about the longer term and folding it back into immediate and near-term planning. Similarly, the need to take a step back from the day-to-day activities and consider where the opportunities are for knowledge management, technology solutions and even de-prioritizing less-essential tasks. For those registered for the Institute, there are a number of sessions that explore these themes in greater detail, such as Jeffrey Marple’s roundtable on Automation, Intake and Self-Service, Sagi Eliyahu and Michael Levy's No-Code Automation from Tonkean and Google, KM for Developing Legal Teams, and Cisco’s Data and Dashboards among others.
The panelists also conveyed the importance of taking a holistic view of the way their department solves problems. Starting with inventorying existing point solutions and providing digital literacy and upskilling, to setting cultural norms for growth mindsets and psychological safety, these panelists are pursuing digital transformation by taking the time to brainstorm, even when it’s messy, experimenting, failing fast, and learning from prototypes. From the standpoint of the user experience, a great example above of this was Jason Barnwell’s session in which he used a virtual whiteboard, instead of a slide deck or talking points, to showcase the outcomes of brainstorming, sketching workflows and visually displaying the interconnectedness of people, process and technology.
As we look back at the disruption, courage and change we’ve seen in 2020, these general sessions point to an industry that is learning to collaborate across providers, striving for standards and aspiring to engage those who have yet to embrace legal operations. Registration for the Institute remains open and the recorded sessions are available for viewing through January 10th, 2021.
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