Cloc Legal Operations Model

As I mentioned last week in my article on Strategic Management of Legal Technological Change, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) Global Institute conference will be held in Las Vegas next week, May 9-12, and IPRO will be present. This week, I`m focusing specifically on CLOC, which is “Legal Operations,” and the “Core 12” functional areas that include Legal Operations, via a great infographic from CLOC! How do we reconcile these two parts of the GoC`s role and how can legal operations help? The answer lies in 2 of the CLOC Core 12 features of Legal Ops: Technology and Service Delivery Models. Legal Operations offers a fundamentally new approach to the provision of legal services. It is a multifunctional practice focused on designing, managing and executing faster, more efficiently and with improved accountability. Legal operations experts believe that today`s corporate legal team must be focused, efficient, and aligned with the broader goals of the business. This is a rapidly evolving field that includes many functions, but at its core, there is a simple idea – that legal services should work better for everyone. As in any other area of the organization`s business, the legal department must evolve to provide more advice to a greater number of business users without compromising the quality of that advice. Get the best ideas from some of the world`s leading legal leaders. The more mature your organization is along the X axis of organizational maturity, the more opportunities you have to reach areas of functional maturity. Similarly, increased functional maturity along the Y axis allows you to create a better business case to add more people to your organization.

It is a challenge to develop both levels of maturity at the same time. However, it`s important to keep these two areas in mind when developing your legal department. At first, when you expand your Legal Operations feature, you can be on your own. It`s just that you`re trying to achieve a lot of different goals. As you increase organizational maturity, you may want to consider hiring additional features such as an e-invoicing specialist. Then, as you develop your organizational and functional maturity, you can define additional functional areas. However, AFAs – which offer benefits for expense management over traditional billable hours – can be incredibly beneficial for clients, legal departments and law firms. They offer more control over spending, more reliable billing, and a greater ability for businesses to stick to their budget. When legal teams are freed from manual work and repetitive tasks and equipped with the right tools, they are able to do the strategic work for which they went to law school. They are happier and able to be a strategic partner for their colleagues in other departments rather than an obstacle to quick profits.

“Legal transactions” (or legal transactions) describe a set of business processes, activities and professionals that enable legal departments to serve their clients more effectively by applying business and technical practices to the provision of legal services. Legal ops provides expertise in strategic planning, financial management, project management and technology that allows lawyers to focus on legal advice. CLOC is a 501(c)6 non-profit professional association. CLOC`s mission is to help legal professionals and other key players in the legal industry (e.g., technology providers, law firms, APLs, law schools, etc.) optimize the legal service delivery models needed to meet the needs of small, medium and large legal departments. A professional role in a legal department that manages and provides services and processes that adapt to changing business priorities and needs within a company Mike Haven, Gap, “The 3 pillars for me were legal finance, partner management and technology with a comprehensive set of strategy. Remember, this is not a sprint, it is a marathon and you need to focus on the pillars and mature gradually. “Due to the ever-changing and growing role of the legal industry, CLOC has updated its original core competencies of CLOC to reflect the increased scope and priorities for which today`s legal professionals are responsible. The CLOC Core 12 defines the functional areas served by most legal services. These features are essential for the organization to think differently about how to impact the business. The CLOC Core 12 can be used to mature the growth of a legal organization in specific functional areas based on priorities, goals, opportunities, and resources.

In 2020, a global pandemic forced legal departments to get creative, find new technological solutions for remote work, and find ways to maximize efficiency without increasing the number of employees or risks. Now that the worst business impact of the pandemic is hopefully behind us, forward-thinking legal operations teams continue to build on this evolution and accelerate transformation to help their organizations become stronger than ever. A modern legal services model provides guidance on where internal tenants want it (their current native environments, including mobile devices), when they want it (on demand), and how they want it (digital). Whether you`re in a startup or a mature organization, creating a sophisticated legal operations program from scratch can be a daunting task. This takes time away from day-to-day legal obligations and requires a strong focus on business principles. To get it off the ground, many questions must be taken into account: why is it necessary? When should you start? Who do you hire? What should you build and buy? How do you manage change and measure performance? What`s the first thing you need to think about? Start by having an overview and what you want to achieve in your legal operations role. Your main goal in building the function should be to make the business possible. A clearly defined legal operations function follows two paths of organizational and functional maturity in its growth. Functional and organizational maturity is symbiotic and depends on each other for balance. Of course, this process is driven by the care and responsibility of the legal team.

There is rarely a quick and clear answer to a legal question, but there are ways to evolve knowledge so that similar and repetitive problems do not have to be solved on a case-by-case basis.