Last week, the TCDI team had the privilege of attending the CLOC Global Institute conference in Las Vegas, NV. This year’s event focused on Transforming the Business of Law, and the information provided highlighted how innovation and technology are helping to reshape the legal profession.

Last year’s event had attendees feeling near euphoric after returning from the Covid shut-down and during hiring boom. But, this year’s event had a bit of a different feel with attendees facing a flat or reduced budget, loss of headcount, or hiring freezes.

In this post, we will recap the key takeaways and share the most valuable insights gathered from the event, shedding light on the exciting developments shaping the future of the legal industry.

new cloc

Key Takeaways from CLOC 2023

  1. Building Legal Ops
    Many attendees are working to find the balance between solving low-value problems to provide quick, easier wins on their team versus tackling high-value, high-risk projects that stand to advance the legal operations project.
  1. Managing, Motivating, and Building High-Performing Legal Ops Teams
    Another common theme discussed throughout the conference was that many people on legal ops teams are still geographically separated. But, in today’s environment, these same groups are now tackling the same heavy workloads with lower budgets. The challenge becomes how to continue to manage the current load and increase to grow the legal ops team to stay afloat in the industry.

  2. Smart Software Usage
    In the same light, the legal ops leaders discussed the need to carefully select and implement the most efficient software to replace lost personnel and budget using arguments about short-term and long-term cost savings

  3. The Pendulum Swing
    Attendees also noticed a movement back to partnering with outside vendors/ALSPs in eDiscovery or CLM for on-call, scalable support, instead of building internal teams and operations.

  4. Partnering with BUs
    Legal departments are continuing to shift from working as if they were in-house law firms focused on risk, to operations partners that specifically help their business units maximize revenue, even in the face of reduced head counts.

  5. More Efficient Litigation and Discovery Management
    Another trend discussed at CLOC was the need to reduce costs and delays using a smart combination of people, processes, and technology, including re-use of work product and managed ESI repositories. This trend also identifies further functions that can be moved from law firms to ALSPs.

  6. Appropriate Use of AI
    The discussion of artificial intelligence continued, and many agreed that the appropriate usage of AI would be to eliminate or automate repetitive tasks and processes. But technology leaders warned vendors not to over-promise for more complex tasks, including contract coding and data analytics in eDiscovery.

Conclusion

In all, the 2023 CLOC conference was another wonderful and enlightening experience for the TCDI team. The trending topics of today’s current challenges and potential innovations provided thought-provoking discussions of solutions to streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, and drive efficiency in the future of legal technology.