Small talk: Beware the missing barrier and don’t go completely insane!

By: Tom Rice and Alex Herrity

Sharing here the outline of our “legal hack” talk at the CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) EMEA Summit in London, where we took our routine personal conference catch up to the stage as part of a wider series of more intimate talks that attendees could enjoy (or lambast) over drinks at the end of the first day.?

Small talk “live”?

We both believe that the real magic of conferences often happens in the margins - those serendipitous conversations that unfold between sessions, over coffee, or during chance encounters in the hallway. These impromptu exchanges tend to be where the most candid insights and innovative ideas emerge, stripped of the formal presentation polish but rich with practical wisdom and shared curiosity.

We've found this particularly true in our ongoing dialogue. We share what might be called an "unhealthy" curiosity for exploring the implications of emerging tech on our profession.?

We hoped to capture some of that energy in our short talk.

Where’s the barrier to enter?

One thing we love is nostalgia. You will often find us lamenting the days where requesting developer support felt like entering a mystical raffle where the only prize was "no" - but you had to wait 6 months to find out if you'd won??

It is wild to think how far we've come. Today's reality of quick deployments, no-code tools, and AI-assisted development makes those days feel like ancient history. (Though we suspect somewhere, in some enterprise, there's still a JIRA ticket from 2018 collecting digital dust…)

We spoke of a CLM implementation taking 4 weeks at the back end of 2022, to the core workflow (underpinning the decision to buy) now being capable of being 80% built (as an Artifact in Claude) in less than 30 minutes.??

What does all this mean?

We hypothesise that creating a culture of research and development and a way of working that promotes agility and experimentation is the new gold standard for legal operations (far exceeding any shiny single piece of tech; or specific legal ops vertical expertise).?

The end of “one shot” solutions

We went deep on the idea that we once trained our brains to problem solve by identifying the specific struggling moment and the best people walked back from that to solve it in quite a user orientated, defined and structured way… but the limitation of most technology products were that they were “one shot” at solving a particular problem at a particular moment in time! They didn’t necessarily evolve with the problem (and if they did, you were part of a standardised cohort of customers experiencing the same product improvements slowly and incrementally).

Is this all now a bit static? With AI have we even got close to pushing the boundaries of the possible? Do we actually need to build a better discipline for:

• Understanding problems as they might evolve? And a new approach for understanding behavioural risks and opportunities real time across our organisations?
• Getting interventionist where we can reasonably anticipate issues?
• Building solutions to problems that are more malleable?

Freeing and liberating? Maybe.. but there’s potentially years of unlearning to go at here!?

Don’t go completely insane!??

Just because you can build an AI-powered doorman, doesn't mean anyone needs one!?

(We did, at this point, go on to explain the “doorman fallacy” to the live audience..)

Creativity and imagination > mere adoption

Finally we provoked the audience to consider that getting AI right might not always be about adoption - rather our creativity and imagination.

We've seen or heard of both in-house teams and law firms rushing to "turbocharge" existing processes with AI, layering new technology onto old frameworks and often it can be like strapping a jet engine to a family car and expecting Formula 1 performance. Sure, you'll move faster, but you're still constrained by a chassis that wasn't built for the journey ahead.

The teams we believe that are making (or will make) real progress are asking a fundamentally different question.?

Not "How can AI speed up our current workflow?" But "What outcomes could we deliver if we weren't bound by yesterday's constraints?"

This shift in thinking reveals that AI might not just be a tool for acceleration - but an opportunity to reimagine how legal expertise flows through an organisation or a system. Consider how:

• Knowledge sharing could become ambient rather than transactional
• Legal guidance could be preventive rather than reactive
• Access to expertise could be continuous rather than gated

We both believe that the future of legal services won't be built on faster versions of old processes. It will emerge from teams brave enough to question every assumption about how legal work should be delivered.

The real challenge isn't technical - it's conceptual. And that's exactly where lawyers and legal ops pros should excel.

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Small talk may well be coming to a conference hallway near you... Just look for two people gesticulating wildly about API integrations while trying not to spill their coffee, and do get involved if you fancy joining in…

#CLOC #LegalInnovation #FutureOfLaw #LegalOps #Smalltalk