When I got back from CLOC last month, I was amazed at the various roles and responsibilities shouldered by legal operations staff. Still one of the fastest growing roles in legal departments, the responsibilities often assigned to these teams are varied and all over the map in terms of impact on the business, not just the legal department.
Continue Reading The Ever-Increasing Responsibilities of Legal Operations Staff

Connie Collingsworth is chief business operations officer with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Her remarks have been edited for length and style.

CCBJ: What led you to pursue a career in law?

Connie Collingsworth: I was somewhat strong-willed, always standing up for what was right, and I wanted to be an independent professional.
Continue Reading At the Table: Look Past the Paper to the Person

When you think of enterprise legal management (ELM) systems, you probably think about the ways they can make spend and matter management more efficient. But ELM systems are quickly evolving, becoming more comprehensive all the time, and today they can help optimize contract management, NDA creation and distribution, legal holds, legal service requests and much more.
Continue Reading Transforming the Legal Department: ELM Solution Puts Information at Everyone’s Fingertips

CCBJ: Akin Gump has been recognized by the Financial Times for its work in compliance and technology. What led to that recognition?

Thomas McCarthy: Beginning over a decade ago, there was an upswing in enforcement trends by the U.S. government in areas that affected our clients – particularly export controls, sanctions and anticorruption.
Continue Reading Stepping Up Service with Customized Tech Tools for Compliance & Investigations

An annotated review of Information Governance Insights columns from 2017

The scope of corporate counsel duties has changed rather rapidly and drastically in the past decade. As companies have quickly begun to digitalize nearly every aspect of their operations, digital information has become the lifeblood and primary asset of nearly all business, in every industry, in every sector. Whether a company makes or sells widgets, transports goods or people, facilitates markets or financial transactions, or provides services of any sort, in the past few years it has also become an information business. The volume of digital information flowing through companies has also grown exponentially in this same short period.
Continue Reading Information Governance Insights: Taking Control of the Data Mountains

Data migration has reached a tipping point. The vast majority of technology decision-makers (84 percent) say that their organization invested in cloud services in 2016, according to Insight’s 2017 Intelligent Technology Index report. It noted that “while only 15 percent have fully migrated their corporate application workloads to public clouds, 47 percent are more than halfway implemented in the cloud, with large and medium companies leading the way.”
Continue Reading Now That Your Data’s in the Cloud, How Do You Get It Out?

The ambitious webinar hosted by Metropolitan Corporate Counsel on September 7 took on four big topics that were filtered through surveys primarily directed at legal operations departments. The topics were information security; analytics and artificial intelligence (AI); cloud adoption; and discovery and content management.
Continue Reading Legal Ops Professionals Weigh In: Higher level of analysis in law departments drives shifts in the industry