CLOC’s Adam Becker Talks Legal Ops Trends and Challenges in 2025

Adam Becker is a board member of CLOC, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, and the Director of Legal Operations at database technology company Cockroach Labs. In this exclusive interview with Today’s General Counsel, he discusses the legal ops trends and challenges that are likely to dominate the CLOC Global Institute (CGI), which runs May 5-8, 2025 in Las Vegas.

What are some of the biggest legal ops challenges that you’re seeing in 2025?

Adam Becker: On the work front, we must keep up with the changing and expanding role of a general counsel or a chief legal officer within their organization. As our bosses become more ingrained in the business and strategic components of it, [legal operations professionals] have to support them differently. This may mean understanding our company’s business plans even more deeply than we do now, taking on more of a running of a legal department to give our GCs time to focus on their new demands.

Another area is technology. Its applications to the legal world are still developing. And it’s becoming clear that we can create significant enhancements both in legal processes and certain legal technologies. It’s incumbent on us to really dig in and understand the developments as they happen. We should be able to envision how this tech will simplify or improve existing legal tasks. We should prepare ourselves, learn about new applications, and maybe even prepare to move away from what is becoming old technology. Weirdly enough, old doesn’t mean 10 years anymore. It could be more recent than that, but it’s a challenge because so much is happening so quickly, and you can be out of date six months after you start something.

Relatedly, data is more important than ever. We legal ops folks need to approach [data] differently. Understanding it, seeing the story it tells. How are we going to relay that story to our legal team stakeholders and how it will play into new technology? Strong data analysis will make newer GenAI tools work better.

I have a long list, I’m sorry. We, legal ops people writ large, we need to develop and engage an even deeper understanding of the legal principles and work that our lawyers do, so we can come up with the best solutions. We’re doing this in a lot of ways already and I think it’s time to dig in deeper. That gives our legal teams an instant trust of us and our understanding, but it also gives us insight into what truly drives decisions and thought processes when we are putting other processes into place. We have to educate ourselves on things which we need to understand deeper. Maybe in the past, having a cursory understanding was enough. Now it’s time to go deep.

What about challenges for legal ops as a profession?

Adam Becker: Like every other industry, legal ops faces uncertainty, particularly given broader economic conditions. And uncertainty is inherent every day. You feel it more when things are more visible, but that just means we must consistently prove our value and contributions. There’s been discussion about whether legal ops is becoming devalued or seen as more tactical than strategic. I think we have to remember, in any profession, no role is guaranteed. We’re doing a lot more than we used to. Interestingly enough, the legal ops role is becoming more defined, more mature within a lot of organizations, but it’s not commoditized. It’s, in fact, the opposite.

From the view of a strategic leader, we’re adding more and more to how departments and firms run. We need to proudly amplify our impact, ensure that the legal teams recognize the essential nature of our work. I think legal ops professionals must to be visible and part of the fabric of the legal team. We are, but it’s becoming more important.

What should legal ops professionals should be doing right now to put themselves in the best possible position for future career development and advancement and what kind of training and upskilling do you suggest?

Adam Becker: We must dive deeper into the hardcore part of the legal practice and there are many ways to educate yourself. A lot of it you can just, quite frankly, have conversations with knowledgeable people, who are more than willing to help you out because they want to get you where they are. For example, if you’ve been doing legal ops for five years and now you’re moving into litigation-focused roles, it’s incumbent on yourself to learn the basics, or maybe even not-so-basics of litigation in that particular industry. That’s what I mean by the deeper part. You have to understand what is a priority to the business and how that litigation portfolio fits into it. Is it a settlement? Is it a litigation all the way, trial sort of situation? How do they view it and what does that mean for how we approach operations?

When you’re working on something specific, it is always a good idea to learn as much as you can about the actual work. I’m starting to feel quite strongly about that across the board.

For upskilling, I’m focused on data. We need to understand it, how to use it, how to review it, how to audit it, how to apply it to these developing technologies. It will provide us with great insights into priority areas, efficiency targets, and will have more direct utility for our teams, especially if we’re taking on something we don’t normally do. Again, learning the process and then applying the data to it.

What would be your advice for anyone who’s looking to break into legal ops now?

Adam Becker: There are many roads into legal ops—it’s like Rome. The overall job market is tighter. The nice thing about legal operations is that it’s always drawn people from diverse backgrounds—legal adjacent, lawyers, paralegals, IT. My current advice is to learn the legal principles we talked about earlier. That should be first and foremost. If you’re going to be working with contracts, learn the general technologies out there. Learn how lawyers and businesspeople view contracting, from start to finish. What clauses matter? Why are they important?

If you’re looking to break in, hone in on the experience you have that you can bring to legal ops. Maybe it’s business administration, maybe it’s having been a lawyer. Anecdotally, I get outreach from lawyers who will say, “I’m interested in doing this, but I’ve never done anything like you.” And then maybe we’ll look at a bullet in their resume, and they have. They just have to highlight it and break it out from their legal work. Don’t overlook what you’ve done and what you can bring.

I think learning about the practice of law, learning about what’s happening in tech and honing in on the experience that you can bring to make a legal department better, or law firm, is my advice to break in.

On technology, how are legal departments deploying more general AI tools like ChatGPT and more legal-specific tools? What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Adam Becker: I like the way you asked this because it does feel like a “GPT vs. legal AI” debate right now. Maybe it’s like that in other industries too. General AI tools are helping with some basic day-to-day legal tasks. Even though I never talk about my current job and attribute anything, I’ve certainly used it for certain types of documents, and spreadsheets, charts and things of that nature. What might have taken me hours in the past, I  can do it in seconds. It’s pretty impressive.

Legal tech’s a little bit different. I’m not an expert, I’m not a surveyor, but I’ve seen an increase in use across the board and in particular in eDiscovery and legal research. It’s becoming more acceptable, especially with the right citations and references It still has to be validated and checked, but it’s happening.

Contracting is a huge area. Contract redlining has come a long way and I feel like there’s a new company every few months in that space. I heard there are now over 200 contract management vendors out there and they’re all bringing AI in. Some are starting new, native AI systems, and some are integrating AI. We’re not at the point yet where we’re letting AI write a brief, but it’s definitely helping with the blank page problem both in everyday use and in the legal context. I’ve seen things that can write policies within seconds that are compliant with the [General Data Protection Regulation], [California Consumer Privacy Act], whatever else comes out.

A lawyer may run a question through a research tool or a policy through a policy analysis, and then go have a conversation with outside counsel. They walk into that conversation prepared for what they want to talk about. It better prepares in-house lawyers to have meaningful and strategic conversations with law firms and not get overwhelmed, not get surprised.

What are you most excited about for CGI this year?

Adam Becker: I’m the board liaison to the Education Advisory Council. That council receives, reviews, vets, selects, preps all the sessions that get put on at CGI through the general submission process—there are 40-something open call sessions. The program is very, very strong this year. Our speakers are focused on presenting relevant wins, trends, and developments in creative and new ways. The mixture of people presenting is great. Every year it gets better and better. I’m looking forward to seeing how all these sessions come out and also to some of the new formats that our friends at CLOC are introducing this year—different ways of learning, different ways of sharing.

So, I think the content is strong. But honestly, I’m always excited when we get together, and get to interact in this way and hear success stories from each other, connect on the Braindate level, one-on-one and in small groups. Even in this big conference in our big ecosystem, being able to connect with people for a little while on an individual level or in small groups to talk about things that you’re working through, it’s validating. You get to see how powerful our roles are in the modern practice of law, how we are helping to advance the way legal work gets done.