Driving Legal Innovation: Change Management and Tech Adoption in Legal Ops

Correct.

Also true.

Yep. Yep. But then people couldn't guess. Never mind. Please proceed.

That's right. We just recorded our one hundredth episode here in Las Vegas. And I've done, I think, most of the one hundred. You guys you're a content creator now. Congrats.

Hundred percent.

That's right. It was a vision. After I left Netflix last year, it's one of those moments where I saw the flux capacitor of the future of our industry.

And I don't know why. I just went 3.0. That's the era we're in or entering into. That is what's next.

One point o was about the founding talent group, right, of all those first legal ops folks in industry across America. And what they focused on topically was financial management inside an in house law firm because those were the times and the financial needs of companies. And so they put all those systems in, and then it went to 2.0, which is when CLOs and general counsel said, hey. You seem to be able to do a lot. What about this technology thing? Because IT is doing an okay job, but they need enhancement and more partnership. Can you handle the tech?

Sure. What do we get out of tech? We get data. We get efficiency. A lot of efficiency and workflow and foundational systems went in at 2.0 with the next rung of talent.

That's where I came online. I have done more CLM implementations than you have probably done podcast. I mean, and the 3.0 is like, well, where do we go beyond this? What's the future?

What's the next evolution?

It is taking all that data and making a real story from it for these businesses that they can drive competitive advantage from, strategy from, and really make a new turn and us being more in that position advising in the company. It's not about foundational tech anymore. That still exists. Companies still need to come online and put their CLM in or their e billing system or build the e billing program.

But for me, that's all table stakes now. That should just be happening quickly and more quickly. You look at this floor. And so 3.0 is what came in that flux capacitor moment, and I believe we're entering into it now.

Yeah.

To be bold, may I speak boldly? Please.

The industry is flattening right now. It's not hockey sticking like it's done for what's felt like eight to ten years in role and scope and expansion exhale, and leaders and markets. Like, what is going on in the markets? Not today. For the last two years before today, because that's how markets work on big time cycles.

Our company is conserving revenue and looking for money in the couch cushions. And so I think that has contributed to a lot of the flattening that or plateauing, I'll say, we're in right now. I don't think it's declining.

Year over year growth, I mean, this organization is sixty five hundred people plus. Two thirds of that are in house people. It started as twenty. I mean, that's a lot of growth.

Right. And then the markets do what they do. There just aren't enough roles being created in the strategic top level. There are a few roles up there, and so part of this thing I wrote in a messaging is those few, the advanced class have to carve out those roles.

It is strategic advising. It is legal ops, but we have some economic work to do while markets adjust and legal leaders, a, buy in and b, want to expand again and take that chance on someone at their right hand strategically advising.

Yeah.

Mhmm.

No. That's always been there for me. I had this is it a detour? Is it the happiest accident?

Is it all divine choices? I had this moment in my twenties where I was confused, like, we a lot of people are in their twenties. And I was like, do I go to art school after college? Do I go to I had this, like, grad school notion in mind.

And I was like, art school or social work school? What's the least amount of work to get in and convince them I'm good at things? And I was like, social work school. I'll just write an amazing story and an essay.

And I did that, and it's not hard to get into social work school. There I went. But I chose those two because those are installed skills or talents rather that I have from DNA. I'm an artist, and I have so much empathy that it hurts sometimes, and I have to take great care of myself.

I'm highly sensitive. If I sat here long enough with you guys, I will start intuiting your feelings, and you will think I am, like, a psychic.

So I went to social work school and refined that into real skill and learned, like, clinical skills. And it was really hard, but once I learned how to not let it take me down and out, I was like, oh, this is a powerful skill set. You can get to know people in a way that is really them centric and has nothing to do with me. I'm a mirror.

I'm a sponge. I'm your friend. I'm neutral. Like, thousands of hours in this clinical way.

And then so I find my way as a touring musician because the artist bit back after that. So I'm touring for a bunch of years, and then I find my way into technology. And I just went to work as a tech program manager and, like, kinda catching up with my peers in the herd who have been in corporate their whole twenties. And what was the differentiating skill was how I can sit and listen to the pain points of the person across the table for me in a way that they leave the room different than they came in because I absorb some of it or something.

And then I bring that into the solutioning, and I bring that into requirements.

And they see that, and there's this experience. And I started to notice that people were feeling a certain way after collaborating with me. This is, like, twelve years ago. Now I hear that in feedback in spades. I feel like I'm I'm with a friend when I'm with you and doing a session and requirements or whatever. So it's human centric on, like, their level of existence biologically, psychologically, sociologically.

And then we build stuff together and, like, make their jobs a little, like, flow better or the work flow better. It's deep. It's Yeah. It is empathy and it's EQ.

And it's like, they don't know what just happened, but they love it, and they look forward to the next meeting.

I agree with you that it's agentic AI. It's obviously, generative AI is the thing that's gonna take us steps forward and up again. So yeah. So we're having a plateau moment.

Some may look at that as two steps back from the progress that in the job growth in this industry and the number of roles. But I have seen it firsthand how a chief legal officer all of a sudden cares in a new way to come by my office and go, you know all about it's like all the seeds we've been planting just sitting there, like, tech enablement, spend management. I just saved you seventy million dollars last year from a program. It wasn't even the tech.

It was the cleanup of the program and the data. And so you plant all these seeds and you hope for that moment where, you know, opportunity meets what is that expression? It's like, where you're ready. Preparation meets opportunity.

And you're ready. And so that's what the generative AI is doing. It's presenting the largest opportunity in, of course, all of our lives personally and professionally.

But Nancy Rademacher's keynote had the Goldman Sachs study up, and the results were in a graph. I love graphs because I was an economics major, and I just love drawing a graph. It's the lines. The bar graph was all the industries percentage wise whose tasks will be impacted tasks impacted by generative AI.

And legal was number two. And I was like, why aren't we the first place? We should I'm so competitive. Number two, forty four percent of the tasks involved in legal workflows can be impacted positively or done by agentic and generative AI.

That is huge, and that creates the hugest opportunity for us to expand our role, our power, our position, our negotiating power.

It does require sitting and waiting sometimes inside your role for your leadership to come around to you and go, okay. You you know a lot about tech. Start talking. Go.

Where's the strategy? Give me a strategy. Make me look at all of these leaders wanna be measured on we all wanna be measured on something. We're delivering in an outcome, and there's an arms race right now to do the AI thing first.

And so it's right now and in front of us. And legal ops 3.0 ish is how are you gonna tell stories from the outputs of these technologies to help your CLO to help drive the business or the legal services business.

Those who are the most creative will figure out how to use these to drive the success or the outcomes or the competitive advantage, whatever it is your company is driving towards in its business goals, it's not plug and play. You can do a lot plug and play with generative AI. But getting this stuff to work inside of an enterprise where it connects with other enterprise solutions, datasets, people. Right now, what I'm seeing on the exhibitor floor is a lot of, if and only if you get all your documents into our four walls, our pane of glass, then you can gen AI this and analyze that and draft this and analyze that. And I'm like, I used to say this to Evisort when we were implementing at Netflix. I was like, who cares?

My business people need to know how this relates to that, relates to that across the enterprise.

The enterprise is still a data and siloed document.

You need to weave together a tapestry.

You have to weave together a tapestry, and only creativity is the skill to weave a tapestry with. And sometimes legal ops people or all of us become operators and check listers and implementers because we need that side of the brain to do that kind of stuff. And it's hard to pull back and be creative and more abstract about things. And sometimes you don't have the luxury of that in your role. And so it's gonna be a road to get these things to integrate with the workflows today of an enterprise.

These little siloed one off boxes of, well, if and only if you get everything in that AI solution for legal, then the flowers will grow. Those are gonna get ripped out faster than they went in.

Yes.

That is the question. As president, in my second year of a two year term, all I'm focused on right now is succession planning of the leadership and the structure of the organization of CLOC. It's very leadership y to do that and think about the future. So I'm, like, focused a lot on the plumbing there and going overseeing with our leaders, these councils, and all the things that are successful at cranking out content and which is educating and making sure this forum, these gatherings are espousing our organizational values.

Education has always been at the core of CLOC. Sharing has always been at the core of CLOC. Like, we just all give time and hours to one another to help them be successful just because that's what's in all of us. That's what helped us all in the beginning.

And so it's all about paying it forward, and I'm doing it in this way as the president, which is cool and new. It's not just, like, scrappily. I scrappily did a hundred podcast episodes. One year recently, I was like, let's do an episode a week.

And I did fifty fifty episodes in a year, so that was my contribution then. And those are public artifacts that live on. And those topics and those combos, people tell me they're like, I'm on the treadmill and I'm listening. I'm about to go into, like, leadership meeting today at ten AM and present the slides with a CLOC core wheel, and you said don't do that because the CLOC core wheel is for us, not for the legal department to make sense of us.

So I rip the slide out. So it was very tactical. It was almost clinical then. If I can go back to, like, the social work framework, I was clinically doing it and making that and contributing to the educational work streams and the strategy.

And now it's at a macro level, making sure this organization is set up with the right people and the right, content creator now. But content is education. It's like you almost take the educational element and then chop it up into consumable content.

Educational element and then chop it up into consumable content bits. I push really hard on that in our strategy and how that comes out in social media and podcasts of the future and other ways of learning for people. This year, we launched the Clock Academy. It's a touring educational vehicle where we go out to where the people are around the world and sit with them in a day, half day session, round tables learn. I mean, just new formats, new content. And education's a deep value of mine and my family. So this is this is just fun at this point to be working and operating at a values level is, like, where I'm at as a leader.

Thanks for having me, guys.