Legal Ops: Why success does not depend only on technology
*By Andrés Jara, CEO and founder of Alster.law
For those of us who promote the world of legal operations, May is a month we look forward to. The motive? It is held in Las Vegas, United States, the CGI CLOC, an annual event attended by the greatest references of this discipline and function within the global legal industry. As always, assistance is dominated by people from developed markets, particularly the USA and Central Europe + UK, however, some Latinos attend.
As the tenor of the last few months has been, the world of Legal Ops is still absorbed by the wave that brings with it the boom of the artificial generative intelligence, which is further increased with the daily launches of all the Legaltech present in the display hall about their new assistants or copilots founded on this technology. Not much different from what we saw at the end of January at the Legaltech Week in New York.
However, there are some developments that I believe are certainly worth highlighting and are not in the technological, but in the methodological, level.
We well know that the legal teams today have five major priorities, a matter that is reinforced by the data revealed by the recent report 2024 CLO Outlook published by the American Corporate Counsel Association. These priorities are based on:
- More and more complex regulation, in hand with increasingly restrictive supervisory authorities.
- The usual pressure that, in restrictive environments and plagued economies, resources are scarce and more is always called for with less.
- The need, as a result, to seek relevant operational efficiencies.
- The natural response to this need that is sought in the implementation of technology, without being so clear what to implement and how to do it successfully.
- The permanent noise that it generates in the guidelines of not being left behind in the adoption of the artificial generative intelligence as an apparent solution to the context expressed in the previous priorities.
However, much of these priorities require an initial effort that does not lie in the supposedly easy solution to its expression in technology. No, the answer to these problems lies in the methodology, something not so sexy, not so fast, which requires hard work, time of maturity and behavioral changes in teams and organizations.
It is for this reason that the two new ones that I highlight from this body flooded with new ones techIt's just not. tech, which may not sell so much and which many prefer to try to avoid. The truth is, after ten years of supporting legal operations projects in Latin America, I can say with certainty that nothing tech It's all right if we don't realize it's not that. tech The first thing to do.
Thus, the renewed and updated 12-area CLOC maturity model was revealed with bulbs and saucers on May 1, where a test and playbook has also been given access to self-assessment and definition of concrete strategies on the progress of legal operations. One of these elements is technology, but there are 11 that go much more to the root of processes, relationships, communication and aspects of those who seem not to be as striking as talking about tech or artificial intelligence.
For those of us who work by supporting the implementation of legal operations projects in organizations, this resource is valuable, since it still requires time to work on it and, specifically, it is that time that we invest and offer those who deliver a solution as a service in this area.
The second development, which I am also pleased to have come from a CLOC-related working group, is the "Legal Data Intelligence Model" initiative. This project makes available, for free, a model to be able to deal with various challenges in the management of information and data, being a correct approach to one of the most important bases of any legal operations initiative. Without information there is no technology to serve or activities in legal operations that can be successfully executed and with positive impact.
In short, the message to those who read this column is that it must not forget how fundamental it is to work on aspects of the tech before falling into the temptation of tech.
Sources: