Digital White Papers

ILTA WHITE PAPER: NOVEMBER 2015 WWW.ILTANET.ORG 11 WHAT'S NEXT? Legal operations professionals are the trailblazers of legal department innovation and the shapers of the scope and impact of in-house practice on the corporate legal industry. Their impact continues to increase as GCs leverage this role more and embrace it as a way to extend their abilities and drive their missions and visions. Legal operations executives are responsible for strategy and innovation, working with their GCs to lead their departments toward the future. The trajectory of this role is clear: In three to five years, all medium and large corporations will have this function, and legal operations executives will be the number-two players, alter-operational-egos of their GCs in their legal departments. Legal operations executives will play a critical role in directing the estimated $100+ billion in legal spending associated with the corporate law segment of the legal world. In Konie's words, "We are changing the profession for the better." emphasizing a necessity for doing things in better, faster, more efficient ways. Newer members of legal departments are open to such changes, explains Corey. But those accustomed to the old ways of doing things are hard to persuade, which is why change management proves such a challenge. By trying to automate certain processes within departments, operations directors are also taking lawyers out of discussions with outside counsel, which makes some lawyers feel like the profession is being commoditized, Mango explained. While no one solution fits all problems, most agreed that they spend a lot of time thinking about messaging as one way to temper this issue. "Being able to tell the story and tie it back to people's day-to-day work helps," Konie suggests. "Trying to communicate what is in it for them is important." Keeping the team involved in the creation of new processes helps to ease concerns; it helps if they are a part of the solution and have a platform on which to be heard. Fostering relationships of trust and collaboration makes them less likely to resist change. Brenton states. "CLOC allows a large group of us to leverage lessons learned as well as jointly develop industry guidelines. In a market that is experiencing a paradigm shift, never having to reinvent the wheel and building an industry infrastructure that includes everyone in the legal ecosystem will create a long- term win-win-win across the business, outside counsel and the industry." LEGAL OPERATIONS: RELATIVELY NEW AND ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL For more information about ILTA's legal department offerings, visit lawdept.iltanet.org.

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