New community aims to bridge gap between in-house lawyers and law firm members
In response to the demand for increased collaboration between law firms and corporate legal operations, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium has announced the launch of a new global community for legal operations at law firms around the world.
The new community offers law firms the opportunity to show their in-house clients that they are delivering legal services efficiently and to collaborate on shared initiatives.
“CLOC has always been a group that believes in embracing the legal ecosystem and bringing all parties of the industry together, whether it’s legal departments, law firms, law schools or tech providers,” says Mary O’Carroll, CLOC president and head of legal operations at Google.
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“We are really trying to bridge the divide. We’ve always believed that the future of the industry will be much better if we collaborate and work together toward a common goal. This is something we’ve always wanted to do. It was just a matter of time and having the resources to be able to support another community,” she adds.
Participation in the new community is open to legal professionals who devote most of their focus to legal operations or business management and are employed in a private law firm.
“Law firms have been asking for a seat at the table and to be a part of the conversation in driving change in legal operations,” says Mike Haven, CLOC board member and AGC and head of legal operations at Gap Inc. “The new law firm community is designed to encourage collaboration and sharing between all facets of the legal sphere in order to transform legal operations.”
Law firm business professionals participating in the new community can join discussions on legal operations, successes and challenges, and they can engage with in-house legal representatives. CLOC members from the in-house side can participate with their law firm counterparts and discuss overlapping issues such as diversity and inclusion or billing, for example.
“We really encourage our members to opt in and be a part of the conversation,” says O’Carroll. Within two days of launching the new community, 40 law firm professionals had already signed up, and O’Carroll expects to see that number climb rapidly. “It’s growing by the day, so we’ll see where this takes us,” she says. In three-and-a-half years since its inception, CLOC’s member base has grown to 2,500 from 40.