The legal press frequently covers the travails of BigLaw, where partners worry that their highly profitable enterprises might go the way of Dewey & LeBoeuf, Heller Ehrman, Howrey—the list goes on.
What is not well-understood, however, is that a substantial part of this unease is traceable to people like Brenton. General counsel are increasingly giving senior “legal ops” professionals the authority to improve legal department performance, including the hiring and managing of outside counsel. When this happens, outside law firms have to justify how they are providing greater value than the dozens of other law firms and new law service providers that are dying to get in the door.
Over the last couple of years, I have picked up clues that legal operations is becoming a high-impact movement with several epicenters. One of the biggest is the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, made up of several dozen legal ops professionals at Bay Area companies, including Adobe, Cisco, Google, NetApp, Oracle and Yahoo. There are similar organized groups in the Midwest and on the East Coast.
