The move from Vegas to Chicago almost drummed up as much buzz as the announcement of Claude Legal at this year’s conference.
This was my second CLOC, and it was, as usual, a great conference for me to check the pulse of the Legal Operations community. What were the sessions focused on, what was dominating the conversations, who was attending, and what did the Exhibit Hall tell me?
The venue was on the south side of Chicago at McCormick Place. Feedback on Chicago vs. Vegas was mixed. It was a long walk from the hotels, but for someone who loves his steps, who am I to complain? Some folks complained about the food, but again, I was taking folks out, so I cannot confirm or deny that report.
My first stop was the Exhibit Hall. AI bounced off the exhibitors’ displays on every corner. The Hall was dominated by AI for contract review, AI for CLM, Harvey, Legora, etc. I felt like I did the first time I walked into an RSA conference in SF—completely overwhelmed as a buyer. Where were the differentiators? As I talked to the Exhibitors to dive into their products and where they fit, it was interesting to see the shift from last year. The shift from explaining to workflow. I have sold software from Clearwell, Brainspace, and MARC, and there is a maturity level where you don’t have to explain what you do; you shift to how to use it effectively.
I think that is what I saw throughout this entire show. A shift of mentality. Last year it was buzz and apprehension. This year it was about excitement and usability.
The Uber session on how they built on LLM for their engineering and scientific documents, which added speed and insight that humans could not achieve, was a prime example. It took them 11 months to build, and it was a pain point to the business, but they solved it. It took Legal Ops working with quite a few internal champions, but it was a solid example of a business pain point in the Legal department that was holding back revenue generation, and the use of an LLM to gain speed and efficiency.
We in the legal industry are often considered slow to change. There is inherent risk in change, so adoption tends to move slowly. What’s changed in the Legal Ops community is that AI is bringing transparency (Claude Legal), functional improvements, and automation, and practitioners are adopting it and ensuring that end users are fully trained.
The shift from selling software and going to the next client is changing. Customer success is critical on building workflows using AI, and pouring humans into augmenting the AI is where things are today. (Harvey and Palantir are examples of combining human capital and software to solve real-world problems)
I have talked about the Strategic Inversion and how our community needs to shift from relying on hosting and reviewing spend. Professional Services will be a path to many new careers as the AI training landscape changes and adoption becomes critical for companies to stay current with AI’s evolution.
We have built the scalable digital lawyer here at Altorney. MARC is our GenAI Intelligence Platform that allows Human Review without a Human Team, before the hosted review platform ever sees a file.
It is a dramatic change to how things are being done today. But the economics, the scalability, and the consistency are beginning to show folks that there are alternative solutions.
Every Legal Operations person I spoke to is sponsoring some initiatives to drive change. To ensure AI is working effectively and driving efficiencies and cost savings.
So, yes, while Legal Operations is dealing with contract AI, CLM, Co-pilot, and other key areas of focus, the eDiscovery and litigation side does have a solution today that can drive ROI, can reduce reputational risk, and ensure visibility into data faster and more scalable than before- at a fraction of the cost.