Legal Operations: Transforming the Future with Connie Brenton and Jeffrey Franke

Thanks. We're delighted to be here.

I started my career at Sun Microsystems in my first legal operations role.

I was tapped on the shoulder by the general counsel, and I walked into a team of twenty three, which is which is a large team even by today's standards.

Sun was then acquired by Oracle, and I stood the role up at Oracle.

And then I moved over to NetApp where I spent the last twelve years or so. It was, however, at Oracle where Jeff and I founded CLOC because not only were we moving to another large corporation that did not have a legal operations function yet, but I was moving also from Colorado to California, and I had a wide network in Colorado. And now I'm moving into a new, what turned out to be a smaller community than we had in, Colorado.

And with that, I'll turn it over to you, Jeff.

So I've been in the field now since, two thousand five as well. I started off practicing law in the early nineties and spent the better part of a decade practising law, doing mostly tech transactions, commercial transactions.

I picked up the role actually at Sun, but not at the GC level, but supporting a sixty attorney tech transactions group. But I did have kind of the entire stack there. So that was a really great training ground. And from there, I moved over to Yahoo and spent the better part of about seven years as the chief of staff and head of legal operations there.

I do think it's worth noting that both of us ended up in a chief of staff role and we both have a JD and an MBA.

I think it's a perfect segue from the comment that we both have JD MBAs. There's a certain personality that really moves into legal operations.

And part of that is individuals that are really driven by efficiency, effectiveness, wanting to get things done as well and quickly as possible. I think you'll also find a lot of entrepreneurs. And Connie is an entrepreneur at heart, deeply so, so am I, but a little bit less so than her. And I think from the earliest days, we were both struck by how immature legal operations was.

And even just the running of legal departments, you know, we do it a whole separate segment on the evolution of legal ops and the evolution of legal departments. And I don't know if I have time to cover that today, but it really does tie into larger conversation. But as we grew our roles, Connie at Oracle and I at Yahoo, one of the things that became apparent directly and indirectly was there was no definition for the role. There was no structure for compensation.

HR teams didn't know what to do with us.

Even though we had fairly good clarity of mind around how this should work, what should be included in the role and what shouldn't, what the organizational structure should be. For example, this role as a leadership role must report into the GC.

That wasn't the case in those days.

So, you know, initially, our goal was to bring some structure to all of this.

And Connie started creating some regional groups, which we referred to as book clubs, mostly on the West Coast, but she started expanding out.

And we reached a point where we realized that if we were going to push this field forward, we needed to formalize it. We needed to take all of these individual players that were talking about it a little bit differently and get them all into one organization, create a community.

Actually, Connie created a community, but formalize that community in a way that we could then leverage all of these individuals to solidify the basics of what legal operations is and what the function should look like.

Let me comment on the fact that there was no role definition when we started CLOC. Others were defining the role for us. Others who were not in the role were defining the role for us. And on the comp side, we were challenged with the fact that there were no benchmarks for our own HR departments.

When we first started, there were probably one hundred and fifty across the country, legal operations executives.

And now look at us now.

Ten I think if you did a search on LinkedIn, there are ten to twenty thousand who now have legal operations in their titles. And so you can see what we started by defining the role, by creating some infrastructure around what the role should be, not only for the legal operations executives, but now, as we are talking about it, it is the definition of the general counsel in a small to medium size legal department.

And the third thing I'm going to talk about is the fact that legal technology was becoming more commonplace and we needed to expand the ecosystem.

So when we were first starting, we started with, okay, you have in house and you have outside counsel and that's it. The providers, however, played a very significant role in the definition of legal operations.

The providers knew more, knew more of us than we knew of each other, And so, they really acted as the glue between in house and outside council relationships, and that continues to be so.

So, as we expand the ecosystem to include alternative legal service providers, technology providers, staffing agencies, in house and outside counsel.

We continue to expand the ecosystem and we also are still struggling with the definition of legal operations. And so what our passion around, why did we start it? Let's define the role, create an infrastructure, create an, a community that can train each other because really right now and still continues to be is the most significant way to be trained is on the job training.

That continues to drive us and our passion for the industry forward.

I think the first thing I would do is I go back to one of the most important frameworks that we created really even before we started CLOC itself.

So one of the challenges in the early days is what is the scope of the role? And that continues to be a challenge today. I don't think the definition there are definitely different people who don't know what the definition is, but there is a definition for dysfunction. And I'm I'm happy to share it. But but before we get to sort of the foundational definition, back in twenty ten, out of necessity, I created a spreadsheet that listed all of the different types of types and areas of responsibility that this role could have.

And then working together with Connie, we turned that into what became in the early days the CLOC core competencies.

Right? There were twelve of them. That framework was really a key starting point. And and part of the goal of CLoCK was to institutionalize that, if you will, across the industry, at least as a starting point.

And that had great uptake. And I think to this day continues to be a really solid framework.

Beyond that though, to this day, so in our new company, legalops dot com, we've created the next iteration of that, which still takes significantly from the same concepts, which tells you how little it's really changed. Because look, there are certain things that GCs need to do to run a department.

That is not going to change over time. And I think in the first phase of what we were trying to do was just refine, define the field and get sort of all the wood behind one arrow in terms of all of the industry players. And we did that. The next phase is really about taking those concepts, getting them much better understood by the GC community and accepted and embraced, because that's still a big mess. And really get it understood beyond that into the CEOs, the CFOs, CIOs.

Because right now, legal is a black box, and that's a problem.

And the last thing I'll say is the two final frontiers on this are one, creating really a single operational model for legal departments. It's taking really two frameworks that we have now. One for hard skills, we call it the legal operations management practice areas, of which there are fifteen, as opposed to the original twelve, and our leadership and personal effectiveness reference model, of which there are eight subcomponents.

And you can just think of those as the soft skills. Taking those two models and one, getting them into a single operating model that all legal departments are gonna start with. I'll tweak them a little bit.

And then second, driving all of this content into business schools, MBA programs, and law schools.

We need the people that are graduating from business schools who are likely to become executives to understand what to expect and how to leverage legal and how to use it, not just to get the day to day legal work done, but ultimately to drive a competitive advantage for a company.

On the flip side, we need GCs, lawyers graduating, that really come out with a different model.

Right now, law schools really are drawing individuals who are best suited to become, in many cases, litigators. And everything they teach is geared towards litigation. It's the case law method. There is no practical application of what it takes to run a law firm, let alone what it takes to run a legal department. So once we get these frameworks in place, we really want to build the educational frameworks and the content to create the models that are necessary to drive the next generation of legal departments.

There are many times where we step back, especially as hard as we work, that we honestly do step back and think, wow, look at what we have created. Look at what we have accomplished.

And none of it happens alone. None of this happens alone.

It has been such a tremendous passion for both of us that it doesn't feel like work, and I feel the same way you do. Look at the changes that we have been able to implement and grow and nurture across the entire globe with our partners, in collaboration with our partners.

That feels good at every level. And yes, we're equally in awe of what we have been able to do, but we don't think of it as walking this path alone ever.

It is the role of the GC and the evolution of the role of the GC that has been driving this. And what Connie and I and others have done is as this evolution has taken place, being entrepreneurs and business people at heart, we've looked at all the inefficiencies and the ways this could be done better, along with others. Right? The ALSP saw opportunities through labor arbitrage and otherwise, as have the staffing agencies and tech companies, to bring greater efficiencies and to take these ginormous legal departments and help them move forward. What we've done is create the frameworks and the thought processes and the education to try to drive alignment and clarity on how all of this could fit together intentionally rather than more of a an ad hoc evolution.

We've said many times neither one of us could have put these pieces together alone. We don't have the skill sets. And Connie has all the relationships. Right? You can't overstate the extent to which the providers have played a key role and Connie's role in bringing many of them together. There are countless high-tech companies that these young companies that she helped grow, not from within, but completely externally.

And to that point, some of the most impactful stories and the experiences that are most impactful to me. And I also think to the industry is mentoring up and comers.

There are two women in particular.

One I hired directly out of college, and now she is an attorney and working as a head of legal operations at a fortune twenty company.

And same with the other woman.

We incorporated in twenty sixteen, but it actually started from an idea concept conceived of floating on a lake in Northern California, a lake called Lake Almanor.

It was quick. We had five hundred people at our first conference, and we planned it in twelve weeks.

I'm gonna back up just a little bit. We've called out the fact that we are quite different, and this is why this partnership works.

I move very quickly.

And that would be such an understatement for anybody who has worked with me. And my pet name for Jeff is turtle. And so he will say, you're getting very, very close to that cliff.

But because we have those two components, I am a risk taker. I'm willing to go and try and tweak, whereas Jeff is much more thoughtful and methodical.

And so there are places for both of those characteristics in the creation of any of the organizations that we have started.

We had a vision for taking the operating models and taking them to another level, right? CLOC continues to be an organization that's focused specifically around kind of career development and the core members and their kind of in their current role.

What we really wanna do with legalops.com is certainly support that. It's all about career development. We move the industry forward that way, but we wanna work on the bigger picture, right? The frameworks that I mentioned before in terms of moving GCs, moving law schools, moving the industry to a different vision.

And I think we felt that we were in a better position to do that.

Yeah, I think that's spot on.

It is not just those who are coming out of law school and out of business school. It is also reimagining for the general counsel how to run their legal departments like a business and to create a competitive advantage. You know, we are very uniquely situated as AI has become a central focus in most corporations.

The CEO is looking now to legal to drive task forces, enterprise wide task forces around AI. So without this foundation of being able to not only guard the company, but guide the company, the law department, most legal departments, would not have been situated to have been even considered to be driving the business as it relates to AI.

So we're at a stage right now where we can leapfrog some of what has taken ten years and moved a little bit, you know, made a little forward motion.

Now, because the mindset has changed, not just within the legal department and with the general counsel and with the legal operations professionals, but also with the C suite within a Fortune five hundred or other corporation?

The same thing that has driven us to create every organization we have ever created because the role continues to crave and require a definition of this role, And there continues to be no place to get trained.

There have been multiple organizations who have attempted it, and so it is our contribution, a small contribution back to the community.

We are going to be launching a certification program also in this vein so that there are courses or activities that we can recommend that you become expert in ultimately, related to the fifteen core competencies?

I think that's a good point. I mean, certification is not the first place I would have gone. I think the first place I would have gone is so when we created this new business, legalops dot com, really the first thing that we did was not a conference, and it was not regional groups. We started this business in twenty nineteen.

And the first thing we began with was building a platform.

So we haven't really released the platform. It is a sprawling, as you can as you can tell from my many soliloquies on this podcast, and I apologize for those, the platform like my soliloquies kind of goes on and it's designed to be a bit of a three sixty degree view for legal operations professionals. It will have everything from a kind of LinkedIn, for lack of a better word, for legal operations professionals and others to find other individuals to connect with. But it goes really deep.

And it's funny that you all say that because that was my big takeaway. I went to a number of sessions and at each of the sessions, they were all struggling with this idea of what exactly do we do around here.

There, it's actually pretty clear.

It it just speaks to the lack of inconsistent thought around it.

Best to connect with us through legalops.com. You can reach us there by becoming a member currently either of the core platform or reaching out through our regional events. You'll find links to us there. You can reach me directly on email, jeffrey.franke@legalops.com.

Yeah. And you can reach me always at connie.brenton@legalops.com. I like those personal emails and those personal interactions.

Thank you for having us.