COVID-19 forced legal departments to become nimble and learn to do more with less. The lessons legal operations professionals learned from the pandemic and economic uncertainty will carry into 2021 by way of enterprise-wide collaboration and formalizing the innovation process.

“I think that will also continue as every legal department is facing a greater volume of work that needs to scale and get done faster with less touch by lawyers,” Mary O’Carroll, director of legal operations at Google and president of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) in San Francisco, said in an interview.