By now you have heard about the momentum started by the Corporate Legal Operation Consortium (CLOC), a nonprofit group consisting of legal operations professionals who are driving positive change across the corporate legal services ecosystem. CLOC is becoming an influential group of people who are rallying not just their colleagues around the world but general counsel, in-house legal teams, technologists, law firms and other service providers who are equally as passionate about finding the best paths, processes and tools to guide legal departments to operate more like businesses.
To make the path to success easier, Jeff Franke, a member of CLOC’s leadership team and assistant general counsel, legal operations at Yahoo!, sought the guidance of Elevate and HBR Consulting to lay out CLOC’s 12 Core Competencies that make up the role of legal operations. This highly developed framework has turned into a superbly valuable tool referenced by many legal operations executives and business savvy general counsel. It’s being used by law departments that are asking “what should we be thinking about” and “where do we start?” when embarking on a path of hiring a first legal operations professional or creating a more robust legal operations team that will be fully integrated into a larger, more sophisticated legal department. The CLOC core competencies, which was presented at the inaugural institute in 2016 and used as baseline for the 2017 institute, provides a great fabric of categories and benchmarks for legal departments to assess their progress in key fundamental areas of legal operational excellence.
