Extract from ZyLAB’s article “Take Aways from CLOC: Legal Operations as New Competence for the General Counsel”
Earlier we stated that understanding of technology is increasingly becoming an important skill for the modern General Counsel. Last week we were at the annual conference of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) in Las Vegas where the CLOC Legal Operations Maturity Model was presented. We learned about the evolving corporate function called Legal Operations, which is a function that helps the General Council deal with the ever increasing breadth and complexity of his or her role.
Legal Operations: everything except the law
Legal Operations is a multidisciplinary department, typically reporting into the General Council, that is charged with optimizing legal services within an organization. Increasingly the Legal Operations portfolio is expanding to include compliancy, security and other risk-related areas. As such, the Legal Operations team deals with a broad array of topics within a firm or legal department and, as a result, less-and-less with the details of the legality. The Legal Operations team supervises budgets, data management, technology, human resources and many other areas. According to CLOC, Legal Operations focuses on the twelve basic competences shown in the model below.
