The Future is Now: CLOC President Jenn McCarron Discusses Legal Ops 3.0

In a LinkedIn article, CLOC President Jenn McCarron discusses Legal Ops 3.0, her manifesto for the future of Legal Operations. After building tech-savvy, data-driven Legal Ops teams at companies like Cisco and Netflix, she is ready to take her industry leadership to the next level as president of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) Board.

McCarron unveiled the new framework in her keynote speech at the CLOC Global Institute (CGI) on May 6, 2024, where she rallied for collective action, inviting others to join her on this journey.

“As some of you know,” she wrote in the article ahead of CGI. “I’ve been working hard with the CLOC Board, staff, and with inputs from you, the community, drawing up career frameworks for our industry.”  Her message resonates with a call to embrace boldness and readiness for transformation.

According to McCarron, Legal Ops 3.0 is focused on technology, data, and storytelling. 

• Legal Ops must prioritize technology, resource allocation, agency, and priority. Without the proper technology function, budget, and empowerment, transformation will be slow. Legal Ops should be funded and operated within the legal department for speed and impact.
• Legal Ops should focus on leveraging data from technology to drive innovation. With advancements like AI, the volume of data available is unprecedented, requiring the industry to adapt to new patterns and innovate. This involves true transformative disruption rather than incremental changes, necessitating flexibility and readiness from legal professionals.
• Technology and data serve as tools to fuel innovation, leading to storytelling as the ultimate goal. Storytelling requires individuals with both analytical and creative skills to derive meaningful narratives from large data sets. Effective storytelling can unlock the massive potential of the legal industry, connecting it with new opportunities beyond its current scope.

She envisions Legal Ops 3.0 going beyond legal to become Strategic Ops where operations professionals can go directly to the C-suite and use the data from legal to drive business-accelerating change.