While benchmarking and analytics may not make great fodder for cocktail party conversation, they’re hot topics in corporate legal departments. And Stephanie Corey and Connie Brenton, the top legal operations executives at Flextronics and NetApp Inc., know those subjects as well as anyone in the Bay Area. About four years ago, the pair started the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, or CLOC, to compare notes with their peers at some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. Earlier this month, they helped launch the Association for Corporate Counsel’s inaugural conference for legal operations professionals—a sign, says NetApp’s Brenton, that the specialty has hit the “tipping point.”
How did you each get into legal operations?
