Bonus Episode: Legal Ops Is Having A Moment

AI is already reshaping legal work, and the truth is that “waiting to see” is its own decision. I just got back from CLOC's Global Institute, where legal operations leaders, in-house counsel, and firm attorneys focused on this question: how do we deliver better legal services as technology accelerates and client expectations keep rising?

In this bonus episode, I walk through what I heard about AI in the legal profession, including the move from basic AI features to autonomous agents and the growing need for real AI governance. 

Then I zoom out to the bigger operating model shift: legal ops is now strategy, leadership, and change management, not just efficiency. I explain “right sourcing” and why it matters for quality, cost, and morale, and I get candid about what legal ops teams want from outside counsel--and more.

If this helped you think differently about your practice, subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a review so more lawyers can find the show. What part of your work are you ready to redesign first?

Find out more at https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilystedman/.

Transcript

Welcome And Why Clocks Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everyone, welcome to the Grace Period. I'm Emily Studman, your host. I'm a big law commercial litigator and advocate for mental health and well-being in the law and building a sustainable career in big law. Today I'm here with another and potentially my final bonus episode for a long time for some time. I've had quite a busy quarter one and quarter two of 2026, which has brought me some opportunities to share some extra nuggets with you outside of my normal schedule and content. Some of you know that in May of 2026, I got to attend the Corporate Legal Ops Consortiums, Clocks, Global Institute in Chicago. And it was a four-day jam-packed conference where I met some really incredible people, attorneys and legal professionals who care about legal ops and operationalizing and making more efficient and more effective legal services. Now, most of those folks are in-house, but I believe a lot of this can be applied to how we run our teams as outside counsel. And then of course, because our clients think these things are important, we should think they're important too. So today I want to give you a recap of Clock's Global Institute. There were 2,000 people there from over 25 countries, and we were all there to talk about the future of legal, the future of legal operations, and quite literally the future of the profession all together. And I think a year ago we were all thinking about AI as this fun thing that was coming down the pipe. And now it's here and it is transforming our practices. It's transforming the profession, and we need to be ready. So I'll talk a little bit about that in today's bonus episode, as well as

AI Moves From Novelty To Necessity

SPEAKER_00 1:45

all the other fun things I learned. In every room and at the top of every vendor's mind, a clock was AI. And at the conference, we moved past should we use AI to everyone's using it, how do we use it safely, ethically, responsibly, and strategically? And how do we do that without losing what makes us valuable as attorneys? Zach Cass, a former OpenAI leader, he gave the opening keynote and he laid out his timeline. And this is something that really stuck with me. So back in 2022, we were talking about enhanced applications. So technology with AI bolted on. Maybe some of you had started using Chat GBT. Now in 2026, we're moving towards more autonomous agents that can connect and run tasks and use apps across our systems. And then where are we headed? By 2036, Zach Cass predicts that we will be looking at natural language operating systems, meaning there will be things we won't do. Our agents will do them, like browsing the internet. He literally said, and I quote, we're about to rewrite the fabric of the internet. Now, that could be some classic tech evangelism, but he also said something that really resonated with me and that I'm still thinking about today. And that is this question. What does it mean to be a human in a world where we can outsource everything and what will be revealed as the things we really care about and want to do ourselves when we can outsource everything? And that's an inherent tension, right? As legal ops professionals, the job is to protect lawyers' brain power and capacity for actual legal work and judgment. And how much of that are we willing to outsource? Where's the line on what we're willing to outsource? Because on the one hand, lawyers and legal ops professionals who use AI and use it well will replace those who don't. That's going to be the market dynamics of a legal profession. But there's a line. AI can't do everything. There must always be a human in the loop. So even though adoption is lagging in some spaces and in a lot of the legal profession, we have the AI tools. They're here, they're coming fast, they're changing daily. And we have to change our behavior to match. That is what our clients are going to expect from us. Lawyers are socialized to be cautious, but also to say yes to clients and never say no. Innovation also doesn't come naturally to this very traditional profession. So what do we do? One, we embrace AI. It's happening. It's unrealistic to think it's not happening. So our firms and legal departments must build governance frameworks around AI. What can AI access? What can it not access? How is it monitored? And how are the firms and leaders alerted to issues? Second, AI is like a thought partner. It's like an assistant. Talk to it like you would a human assistant. Ask it to confirm where it's getting the information, where the information came from, and use it to ideate, to review your processes and managing workflows. One thing that stood out to me recently is that you can tell AI what you do and then ask it, what's the busy work? What can I automate? What can I pass along to you so that I can focus on the things that really matter most to me. Third, if you're using it, if you're a power user, socialize how you're using it. And socialize, tell people how you're not using AI. Your early success stories with AI should be shared, should be normalized, go where there's interest, build momentum, and help others see it and use it how you are too. The firms that figure this out first, the attorneys that figure out this first, those are the ones that are gonna have a massive competitive advantage. Next, legal ops is taking a leading role in the legal profession. It's a role that Legal Ops has been pushing for for some time, and now it's here. Mary O'Carroll led a community conversation where she talked just about this. She described it as legal ops is having a moment, and legal ops is transformation, legal ops is strategy, legal ops is leadership, and legal ops is change management.

Legal Ops Strategy And Right Sourcing

SPEAKER_00 6:05

It is about fundamentally rethinking how legal work gets done. Yes, primarily in-house, but these same concepts can be applied by outside counsel and how we run our matters. At the same time, in-house legal departments are facing a very increased demand on their services, but at the same time, their budgets and headcounts are flat or even decreasing. In that situation, legal ops becomes the bridge. Legal ops becomes the problem solver, helping those legal departments figure out how to do the most they can with the resources they have. This turns on trust, this turns on clarity, and this turns on a growth mindset. And growth can happen at every level. Whether you're in LegalOps in-house or you're leading teams as outside counsel, can you identify those high potential individuals? Can you create stretch opportunities for them? Can you figure out how to track skills and goals and then with those right people in the right spots, do the right work that's effective and efficient for our clients and our teams? This is called right sourcing, not outsourcing, not insourcing, but right sourcing. The right work with the right resource with the right amount of time to get it done at the right cost. That is legal ops in a nutshell. When you get it right, you reduce costs, increase productivity, and you future-proof your team. You make them integral and invaluable, which overall improves morale. So again, these are all concepts that apply to legal ops in-house, but these are things that will also improve how you work with others at your firm and manage your teams. Now let's focus on outside counsel. What do we as outside counsel still not understand about legal ops? I got to lead a community conversation about just this. The relationship between in-house and outside counsel is shifting from transactional to a partnership. And that partnership is often run by legal ops. Yes, it is important for the partners at firms and attorneys at firms to have connections and relationships with the attorneys in-house, but it is often the legal ops professionals that are in charge of monitoring and managing the relationships with outside counsel. Some of this is going to seem obvious to you, but what I heard is that a lot of outside counsel still aren't doing these things. So you need to follow outside counsel guidelines, you need to involve your pricing teams, you need to make sure you're efficiently using your internal resources, you need to think two steps ahead, and you need to take a beat before you try to upsell your in-house teams on more work. In-house teams and legal ops actually want a partnership, not just execution. They want cross-introductions to your relationships and your networks. They want you to understand the corporate lingo and culture, and they want you to provide training to the in-house teams on things that are relevant for their learning and growth trajectory. They want outside counsel to have the right experience and be creative problem solvers. And above all else, they want transparency, particularly around AI use and its impact on pricing. Pricing is very important. And as AI becomes more ubiquitous in the profession, in-house teams and legal ops teams are gonna expect outside counsel to adjust their pricing accordingly. In-house is going to, our clients are going to be looking to pay more for our thought and our substance, the so what of what we do, and they're gonna be less interested for paying for the execution of that work. And building trust around pricing is really at an inflection point. The billable hour maybe won't work anymore. Maybe it will, if there are those transparent conversations about what that hour is actually capturing. And quite frankly, as outside counsel, we simply need to know that legal ops exists. Again, that comes back to not just dealing with the attorneys, but dealing with the attorneys' support teams. And one of those teams is Legal Ops, who is there to solve their legal department's problems, which is very similar to what outside counsel is hired to do to solve the legal department's or the client's problems. So that makes it a natural relationship to work with the legal ops department as you're progressing on a matter for your in-house attorney contact. I also attended a really interesting session on mental

What Legal Ops Wants From Firms

SPEAKER_00 10:35

health and neurodiversity in the law. This was a fishbowl session. So it was a small group session led by three attorneys who self-identify as being neurodiverse. And it allowed us to have a really honest conversation around mental health and neurodiversity in the law and burnout for high achievers, both of which, well, burnout can be exacerbated by one, mental health concerns and neurodiversion, being neurodivergent. And I think the interesting thing around this, and is this is something I talk about a lot, is the focus of clock was stronger by design. And one of LegalOps roles is to design better workflows, to design better processes and systems that allow legal departments to run more effectively and efficiently. That is something that will inherently improve the workplace for attorneys struggling with mental health concerns or who identify as neurodivergent. This legal ops mindset also creates a safe space and an overarching framework and thought process where those of us who are seeking to build more sustainable careers and design more process-driven routines in our careers to thrive. It's a place we can use our voice and say, here's what I'm doing to not just protect my mental capacity and my mental health, but also to build a more process-oriented and operationalized practice. And I think that's a really interesting intersection of legal ops and what I talk about in mental health and building a sustainable career. And also, this comes down to conversations. Attorneys are notoriously bad managers. We're not taught how to manage other people, and we almost immediately are managing other people when we enter the law, whether that's an assistant, a paralegal, or ultimately other associates and even other partners. So, what can we do as managers to help design better workplaces, to design better teams? Well, we can talk to our people. We can ask them what drives you? What makes you work really well? What contributes to your success? What causes friction in what you do? How can we create an environment where you can do the best work? We can and should be having these conversations with everyone we interact with, whether they're neurotypical, neurodivergent, have a mental health concern, or don't. And why is that? Well, one, it creates a space of psychological safety where we're more likely to retain this talent. And diversity is about race and socioeconomic backgrounds, but it's also about neurodiversity of thought and neurodiversity of how our brains work. And the more diverse our teams are, the better we work, the better decisions we make, and the better our output. And that includes neurological diversity. Lastly, I'll leave you with one final framework that I

Designing Work For Mental Health

SPEAKER_00 13:40

think is really useful. At the end of the conference, Judd Keller from Wharton gave a session on market design. He was an economist. If you're a nerd like me, it was really interesting to learn about his thought process and how he applies market dynamics to hidden markets. So resources that might not be as front and front and center as you know, oil prices, which is relevant right now. Here's what he said, and I'm summarizing. Everything that is done in legal ops is about allocating resources. It's about allocating scarce resources, time, attention, money, and people. And although price is related to these things often, we're allocating these resources, time, attention, and people without using price. And we need to think about how we're allocating those and whether we're doing it equitably, efficiently, and with ease. Equity, are we treating people fairly? Are we treating our time and attention fairly? Efficiency, are those resources being used for the best possible use, the highest use case? Are we applying our time, our attention, and our people in the right way? And that goes back to right sourcing. And ease. How hard is it for our people to access these resources? How hard is it for them to think about their time, attention, and the people they serve and work with and do more with them? We can talk about this till the end of time. You know, Judd Keller's written books about this. He teaches classes on this at Wharton. But I keep coming back to those three E's, his identified three E's: equity, efficiency, and ease. And again, this conference was about legal ops, largely for in-house, but this equally applies to how we run our teams. And it has really transformed or bolstered the way I think about managing my litigation teams. I'm leading three trial teams right now. Two are in the very early stages and one is on the eve of trial. And am I allocating my resources and my team's resources fairly, equitably? Am I allocating those resources efficiently? Are my people using their time and their talents at the highest use case? And how easy is it for them to make sure that they have the time and the people and the attention to do these tasks? Thinking about the equity, efficiency, and ease of our resources, of our minds and our human capacity will help me make better, more informed decisions for my teams and I think run the teams better and in a

Equity Efficiency Ease Framework

SPEAKER_00 16:15

way we all enjoy more and hopefully makes my teams want to continue working with me down the line. So again, legal ops is not about forcing change. It is about change management, but it's about relationships and getting buy-in from key stakeholders so that you can design systems that are more efficient, that are more equitable, and are more sustainable by putting the right people in the right spot to do the right work. So let me recap my big takeaways from Clock CGI 2026. One, AI is here. We've got to build governance, we've got to socialize our use cases, and we've got to lean on it like a thought partner. If we don't, we'll be left behind. Two, legal ops is evolving. It's not just about efficiency anymore, it's also about strategy. It's about mapping the work, clarifying roles, spotting future leaders and right sourcing, putting the right people in the right role with the right resources to get the right work done. Three, our law firm relationships, our outside counsel relationships aren't just with the attorneys in-house. They're with the legal ops teams. And we are gonna have to get really clear about the value we're bringing as outside counsel and get really clear on describing that value and making sure it is a two-way street of communication on the price of that value and the longevity of that value. And those conversations happen with legal ops. Next. Mental health and neurodiversity matter, and we must create psychological safety so that all of our colleagues can grow and stay longer and have a more sustainable and a stronger career because it's designed with intention and with all of us in mind. There's a lot of change happening in the law. A lot. It's happening very quickly. I see it every day at my firm. And I truly believe that if we as attorneys start applying some of these legal ops concepts and ideas to how we build our own practice, we will be better attorneys and better partners for our clients and better managers and leaders for our colleagues

Final Takeaways And Where To Connect

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and our teams. That's all I have for you on Clock 2026, their Global Institute. If you have questions, I know I went through that really fast. It was at a very high level. I'll be talking and posting more about what I learned on LinkedIn through June of 2026. So you can find more information there. You can probably hear in my voice a smile and some hope and optimism as I really feel empowered to start thinking differently and creatively and more design oriented about how I practice litigation and how I run my teams going forward. Thanks for listening.