PEOPLE, PROCESSES, DATA & TECHNOLOGY:
UNLOCKING OPPORTUNITIES IN LEGAL OPERATIONS
Agenda Day 2
8:00 am - 8:30 am
REGISTRATION & COFFEE
8:30 am - 8:40 am
OPENING REMARKS FROM THE CHAIRPERSON
8:40 am - 8:45 am
LIVE POLLING
8:45 am - 9:30 am
MENTOR MATCHMAKING
The levels of maturity within legal operations, despite its growing importance in recent years, is still very varied – while some might have just hired their first legal operations manager, others might have been working with an established team for many years. These roundtables will give you the opportunity to speak with those in a different position as you to share ideas, insights, and knowledge. Everyone has something to learn – but everyone also has something to teach.
Before the event, you will be asked which category you feel most reflects your legal operations maturity level (beginner, intermediate, advanced, or looking to develop). Attendees will then be paired with someone from a different category to facilitate novel conversation – simply look for your colour when arriving and chat with someone new! Prompts will be made available to help reflect on key areas of legal operations.
9:30 am - 10:00 am
PRESENTATION: INTO THE DISTANCE – KEEPING TRACK OF GLOBAL REGULATIONS & REINFORCING YOUR HORIZON SCANNING STRATEGY
Responsibilities will vary from team to team, and while keeping abreast of global regulations might usually be more of a task for compliance, it is important for legal operations to also maintain an eye on it and help build a proactive horizon scanning strategy. From leveraging technology to embedding cross-functional intelligence, they can play a significant role in designing and implementing a forward-looking compliance tool to keep pace with evolving regulation, monitor regulatory risk, anticipate impact and stay ahead of change.
- Understand best practices for building a scalable, global horizon scanning framework that aligns with business risk priorities
- Learn to integrate regulatory monitoring tools and workflows into your existing infrastructure
- Discover ways to turn regulatory insights into action by driving early engagement with the legal team, compliance and the rest of the business
Join this thirty-minute networking session aimed at quick-fire debate. Respond to a series of divisive prompts by physically positioning yourself on either side of the room, from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ – a great way to know where you, and others, “stand” in the debate!
With the constant influx of providers and solutions, it can often be difficult to assess which one is most suited to your needs and model, whether you are building from the ground up or adding onto your existing stack. What’s more, with capacities accelerating quickly in-house, it can be even trickier to determine whether buying offers more than building. External solutions tend to be necessary in certain cases (although there is growing hesitancy), but each situation will require a tailored solution to make sure it is just right for you and your team and aligns in the long term with your business model and goals. Join this session to consider the decision-making behind the scenes of each solution, and the implications of efficient collaboration with third parties.
- Evaluate the pros and cons of building vs. buying solutions according to a range of scenarios
- Assess the questions to factor into your decision-making when selecting a third-party provider to ensure your collaboration is as fruitful as possible
- Understand what is needed from you, your team and your current infrastructure, and build a strategy according to what you have available
11:50 am - 12:20 pm
SCENARIO BASED WORKSHOP: ADAPTING IN REAL TIME – BECOMING THE LEGAL OPERATIONS PROFESSIONAL YOU WANT TO BE IN TIMES OF CRISIS
This interactive workshop will help you leave the room with actionable insights by placing you and your team in a “crisis” situation with twenty minutes on the clock to come up with a strategy. Each team (of four or five) will be given a scenario. Think:
- Your General Counsel has just resigned, and it will be another two months before a replacement arrives.
- You are only just now realising that your outside counsel has been overcharging you for the past six months.
- M&A has triggered the need to merge your legal department with another – all your processes, teams and tools are different.
At the end of the session, each team will share their scenario and formalised strategy with the rest of the room, enabling everyone to walk away with potential solutions to a variety of scenarios.
Budget and resource limitations continue to be the prime inhibitor for legal departments. More established legal operations teams might struggle with budgetary restraints, while a budding team might not have the resources necessary for new hires. More generally, building a team can also be difficult to navigate, as the legal operations field is a notoriously challenging one: it is still quite small, for one, and companies are at varying stages of maturity, making finding the right candidate for the job a particularly tricky task. Wherever they are at in their journey, legal operations professionals must have an arsenal of strategies to ensure they are making the most out of what they already have.
- Explore techniques for optimising costs and effectively allocating budget from both a people and technology perspective
- Weigh in on best prioritization practices to enhance your strategy and reduce costs
- Understand the importance data plays in your strategy to help you align on key objectives, priorities and where to allocate the resources you already have
12:55 pm - 1:55 pm
LUNCH
Are outside counsel members of the internal team? It is certainly a debatable topic, but the fact remains that the relationship between them and legal operations professionals is vital. Nevertheless, tension can build up very easily with such proximity, especially when it comes to fee negotiations or misaligned expectations. Lack of transparency can lead to missed deadlines or inefficiencies for instance, while misunderstood timelines or deliverables may result in a breakdown of trust. For this reason, it is of crucial important to build, maintain and nurture these relationships to ensure the best results are being achieved.
- Learn to define roles, responsibilities, and deliverables upfront and clarify protocols and response times from the get-go
- Weigh in on the importance of establishing regular check-ins and status updates, and the benefits of using collaborative tools for transparency, real-time info and open (and two-way) feedback
- Discover methods for maintaining mutual trust and transparency, as well as performance management to ensure collaboration is always as productive as possible
2:30 pm - 2:35 pm
LIVE POLLING
2:25 pm - 2:55 pm
PRESENTATION: WHAT LEGAL OPS ARE DOING WRONG – INSIGHTS FROM A GENERAL COUNSEL
3:05 pm - 3:50 pm
PANEL DISCUSSION: AI AT WORK – WINS, WARNINGS, AND WHAT WE’VE LEARNED SO FAR
In the race to adopt AI, many professionals assumed AI would solve all their problems in one – there was the promise of automation, efficiency and transformation, the fear that AI would take over everyone’s jobs, conversations about the future of work. But as real-world deployments take shape, a more nuanced picture is emerging. This session takes a candid, case-based approach to understanding how AI is performing in practice: the benefits it's delivering, the gaps it has exposed, and the new responsibilities it introduces.
- Explore case studies of AI in legal operations, what has been working for your peers, what must be recalibrated and where human oversight remains crucial
- Examine unintended impacts and share practical implementation experiences, including lessons learned from pilots, internal adoption efforts, and cross-functional integrations
- Discuss evolving models, like human-in-the-loop systems and task specific AI that prioritise partnership over model, as well as the need for ambition to make your legal team shine
3:50 pm - 4:00 pm
‘THE BEST BAUBLE’ WINNER ANNOUNCEMENT!
At the beginning of the Exchange, everyone will have received a Christmas bauble. On this bauble, you will have all written the name of the person who gave you the best piece of insight (at any point during the Exchange) and hung it on the tree in the plenary room – the Exchange team will count who has the most baubles attributed to their name, who will win a surprise prize. So, make sure to stay until the end – it could be you!
