Notes From CLOC 2024 -- Jetlag Edition

Making sense of an AI packed week in Vegas

Hey there, I’m Zach Abramowitz and I am Legally Disrupted! When I started writing this newsletter installment, I was suffering from deep jetlag. Not the kind of sleep-during-the-day-up-at-night variety. No, this is the intense bodily fatigue that makes you perpetually exhausted with no end in sight (and as you’ll learn I’m about to jump on a plane and do it all again). But, I’m more honest when I’m tired, so I thought it would be a perfect time to put pen to paper on a few of my still hazy takeaways from this year’s CLOC.

If you haven’t read it already, I suggest opening a new window and checking out my notes heading into CLOC. Um, let’s just say, they were prescient.

Now, for my 2 immediate conference takeaways:

Takeaway #1

I didn’t want to go to CLOC and I advised one of my clients not to go. But, I’m glad I went and I’m glad my client didn’t listen to me because we would have both missed out.

Cards on the table: CLOC is not my style of show¹. Like Vegas, CLOC is big and flashy, which I find overwhelming. Also the fact that it lasts the entire week makes it difficult for me to be present. I happen to be in a very busy work stretch at the moment, but several times during the conference, I had to lock myself in my hotel room and work. Recently, I attended conferences that were more of a one day single-track conference including Future Lawyer UK and ILTA’s EVOLVE conference, and I will be chairing the private practice day at the upcoming Future Lawyer USA in Boston on May 30/31 (one day for private practice, one day for in-house attendees). I find that at the smaller more focused conference I attend more of the sessions, am generally more present and have deeper conversations with conference attendees. You can still register to attend Future Lawyer USA in Boston https://www.futurelawyerweek-usa.com/

I am sure there is good content at CLOC, but it’s like the movies on an international flight. I usually find myself scrolling through everything and ultimately falling asleep before I either fall asleep or settle on watching Veep for the like the 100th time. Same thing with the sessions at CLOC. There’s just so many of them, I have trouble deciding which, if any, to attend.

So yes, CLOC is over the top. But after missing last year’s event, I have reverted back to default attending, so I look forward to seeing everyone in Vegas in 2025. And here’s why: everyone goes to CLOC. CLOC may not be growing in numbers like it did between 2016 and 2022, but it still draws a serious crowd. Magnetism of that kind is hard to come by. The biggest companies in the world still send delegates from their legal departments, not to mention the CEOs and senior management of the tech companies/vendors who are exhibiting at CLOC.

I have a lot of friends and contacts in this industry and it feels like I got to reconnect with so many of them, even if it was just a quick hug or, in other cases, a deeper conversation. And because everyone’s there, when you get the right subset of people together, you can really hit the jackpot. Shout out to my friend Alma Assay, the Chief Innovation Officer at Crowell Moring who hosted a bunch of us in her poolside cabana on Wednesday. That may have been the best non-session-session I have ever attended at CLOC. The discussions were chocked full of real insights, the kind which folks may not be comfortable discussing on a panel.

The “everyone is at CLOC” effect also means that, despite the passing interactions, I was able to get an incredible snapshot of what’s going on in corporate legal and in the tech companies selling into corporate legal. Over the four days I was there, I felt a little bit like a large language model (which makes sense because I’m a big human and I consume a lot of content) ingesting reams of data and then creating a vector embedding of “legal operations in 2024.”

Takeaway #2

AI is Eating Everything Including Conference Content

I’ll have a LOT more to say about this in the coming weeks, but AI is all anyone can talk about and for good reason. I saw one post on LinkedIn from Kelsey Berteaux on LinkedIn that was critical of CLOC on this point.

Many of the CLOC Core 12 were never addressed. I personally pitched two session subjects, one about how to start your budgeting journey and one about data visualization--both rejected, both subjects not remotely represented in the lineup. I suppose next time I'll throw the word "AI" into the subject and then it'll get traction.

Kelsey’s right on the facts, but I take issue with her on the merits. I think the fact that AI is replacing other legacy topics is entirely rational. Legal ops folks won’t want to hear me say this, but the ROI of AI for in-house legal is greater than the ROI of traditional legal operation roles. As Cat Casey said on-stage at the EVOLVE keynote roundtable a week before in Charlotte, “It’s time to throw out the old playbooks.” The innovation J-curve, change management, incremental progress etc. These are all legacy terms for technology that, like CLM or Matter Management, was marginally beneficial, especially given the long and painful implementation cycles. AI is an entirely different universe, and many of the old rules don’t apply. Robin AI had this right in their messaging.

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1. Let the veiled Vegas references begin