April 16, 2024

 Rob MacAdam

Consulting trends software elm law department consulting legal operations CLOC law department

As May 6 approaches, so does this year’s CLOC Global Institute (CGI) in Las Vegas. For legal operations professionals, CGI provides unparalleled opportunities to listen, learn, and share insights about the best practices and latest innovations in the field.

To help you ‘pack for the trip’ so that you arrive in Vegas with a robust command of current, crucial topics in legal ops – trends, challenges, and more – each week leading up to CGI, we will post an instalment of our ‘Road to CLOC’ series. Each one of the posts will help you ‘pack your bag’ so that you arrive primed for a deeper exploration of topical issues. The series speaks to the industry’s ongoing evolution and draws from Elevate Experts’ work helping law departments improve operational efficiency, lower costs, and boost their department’s business and strategic value-add, including using the Elevate ELM software platform.

The topics covered will include:

AI Portfolios: What They Are, How They Help: The volume of buzz around Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) for law often drowns out crucial discussions about existing tools, their capabilities and limitations, and their current and potential ROI.  We’ll explain the importance of a diverse AI technology portfolio for law departments to harness the power of AI solutions tailored to address various legal ops challenges.

Contract Management Made Simple(r): For law department leaders, tackling contract operations – processes, tools, and more – can appear daunting, given the complexity and expense of comprehensive contract lifecycle management systems. Yet there is ‘low-hanging CLM fruit’ ripe for the picking, particularly simpler contract repositories. We will examine the essential functionality, accessibility, and user-friendliness needed for a CLM solution to reap the benefits of a simpler approach.

Spend Management: Big Savings, Now Even for Small Teams: The days of smaller law departments missing out on legal spend management tools are over. The growing recognition that not every legal team requires (or can sustain) a complex spend management system is driving the emergence of scalable and straightforward solutions tailored to the needs of smaller teams.

Legal Intake as the ‘Workflow Synapse’: Improving a department’s legal ops requires an efficient legal intake process. The best results begin with understanding how these systems function as critical connectors within legal workflows and ensure smooth information transfer across business functions.

Why do these topics resonate with my Elevate colleagues? Because of our extensive work with law departments to address legal ops challenges and make the most of opportunities for improvement. These collaborations have directed our development of the Elevate ELM platform as a multifaceted solution for the many aspects of legal operations. As never before, legal ops technology can deliver greater efficiency, reduce complexity, and enable legal teams to concentrate on what matters most.

So, here’s to CGI and Viva Las Vegas! We are excited to see you there and discuss these topics (and more!).  Stay tuned!