Jeff: There is a fundamental understanding/misunderstanding by legal leaders about what operations is, how to staff it and how to leverage it optimally. We've made a lot of progress, but it's still very much an evolving role, and so I think one of the biggest struggles operations professionals have is having a really well-defined, well-understood industry role that is just locked in. There's still this notion that operations is kind of this thing you bolt on, that it's about e-billing and vendor management.

Connie: We are at a time when we are redesigning the profession, redesigning the delivery of legal services. You have to be willing to make mistakes, and we're in a profession that is judgmental. The culture of legal makes it difficult to get through the learning process. We all like being right, and we're at a stage where that will not get us to where we need to be. I also think it is one of the most exciting and one of the most influential times to be in this space. What are we stopping, what are we making self-services, and how are we now going to partner with our digital partner, a person and AI, or an agent or a group of agents?

Jeff: The entire industry has been going through change. Now, legal is seen as critical to achieving and maintaining a competitive advantage in the marketplace. But if you're going to be trying to achieve a competitive advantage, it's not just about what your lawyers are doing, it's also about what your operations people are enabling through technologies, though budgets, through process enablement, through organizational design.

Connie: AI has put a spotlight on legal operations. We're the experts in technology. We're having to develop governance models around AI. We are best situated to answer the questions that are coming up and to respond to the changes that are taking place so quickly.

Jeff: I think historically [general counsel] have gone about building their legal departments by getting headcount and adding as many lawyers as they possibly can until they don't have any more headcount or budget, and then when you get to a crunch, you turn to outside counsel and just sort of make it work. That's not the way to structure and run a legal department. These days, and this is where AI starts to come into play, we're in a world where we really can start to understand what is the work that's coming in, who's doing that work, what is it costing us and who should be doing the work. And, when the work is done, taking that work and the information that comes out of it and reusing it as necessary for intake, triage and right-sourcing. We're starting to get a much more sophisticated view of what work we should be doing, and when.

Jeff: I cringe almost every time I read a general counsel commenting on or talking about legal operations. It's a shame because fundamentally what legal operations does, it allows a general counsel to expand their scope by giving them time and tapping into knowledge, skills and capabilities that most GCs don't have. GCs are hired because they're usually good at a particular practice area. They're good leaders. They're good at managing a board, and they're capable of taking complex problems and solving those problems for the C-suite. But there's a lot more to running a legal department, especially some of these big legal departments that are hundreds or even thousands of individuals. Most GCs these days don't even think about their role as driving a competitive advantage in the industry. Law schools still teach a case methodology that's focused really on litigation — not even litigation, but appellate litigation. Most of them don't really know what it means to build a legal department from scratch, to build it from the ground up with an optimized solution. I don't think most of these GCs could tell you what the volume of work is across their practice areas and how much of that is just business as usual and how much shouldn't be done at all, let alone commoditized or in some cases sourced completely differently. The answer is always "more headcount, give me more headcount."

Connie: This is the redesign. What do we not do? What do we make self-service? Even the concept of self-service is relatively new. An NDA is a perfect example. You go to a portal, you answer three or four questions, and it provides an NDA.

Jeff: The business goes to a portal. No legal professional ever touches that.

Jeff: It's not as though this role comes straight out of law school or business school. Most of the people undertaking this role have learned what they're doing, in considerable part, on the job. They bring a business background, or a technology background, or maybe a legal background, but they're missing other parts. We're still at a point where there isn't a formal education program and a formal process for operations professionals to come to the table fully enabled. That's where our conference comes in. We try to go as deep as we can.

Connie: We have tried for a dozen years to try to build an educational program where you can have training so that you could actually walk onto a job. This next year we will be rolling out a certification program, a very deep and intensive certification program, based on a lot of the contributions that speakers are providing at the Running Legal Like a Business conferences. We don't currently have an industry certification. We're shooting for the first of the year and we will roll it out in phases.

Connie: The departments will be smaller. We will scale. We will become more commoditized. Those who have experience with judgment will be highly valued. There will be a reliance on technology that will replace the reliance — probably, mostly — on law firms.

Jeff: I don't know that departments are necessarily going to be smaller. On the one hand, AI helps you with e-discovery and all kinds of elements of efficiency in litigation, and maybe there are aspects of it that eliminate a lot of roles, but I think most thoughtful practitioners these days are saying they're expecting a ton more litigation. Now, are you going to have different types of practitioners in the legal department? I think a lot of the lawyers that we've talked about here that are not savvy about how you operationalize a legal department are going to be the dinosaurs that are going to be gone. The ones that are not AI-native, they're going to be gone. But are you going to need fewer antitrust professionals? I don't think so. Are you going to need fewer experts in corporate securities and M and A? I don't think so. I do think that there's going to be bigger legal operations groups because it's not going to be the traditional players that are doing that. I also think you're going to see a lot more lawyers in legal operations, because as I've said before, there is this combination of law, technology and business, and so it wouldn't surprise me to see more JD-MBAs that have technological fluency in these kinds of roles.