What members prioritise informs the organisation’s focus, the org’s Australian group co-lead says
Anna Golovsky recalls when Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) Australia began with around 20 people gathering in Telstra’s Melbourne office.
“We realised that there were people within all of these other different entities across Australia who were grappling with the same questions and problems. We realised that we could actually share and collaborate together, and that was the genesis of CLOC”, she told Australasian Lawyer.
Golovsky has watched the organisation grow significantly in the 10 years since. In August, CLOC held its legal operations innovation summit with the theme Stronger By Design, which Golovsky said represents how a deliberate, design-led approach “makes each of us stronger and more successful in delivering on our roles as legal ops professionals”.
“I think the biggest impact that CLOC has in Australia is providing a place for legal operations professionals to come together as a community to share learnings, to drive collaboration and innovation in how legal departments are transforming the delivery of legal services”, she told Australasian Lawyer. “We can leverage global perspectives through the CLOC organization, but we can also create our own local centre of excellence really as a community”.
As one of the three co-chairs of CLOC Australia alongside Matt Duncan and Petra Stirling, Golovsky loves being at the helm of the organisation during this important time. The organisation’s priorities, she said, are informed by what its members prioritise.
“In our first quarterly meeting for the year, we surveyed our members, and the key priorities for the year were clearly AI deployment, knowledge management and vendor management. There's a lot of focus in our market amongst our members on uplifting their panel arrangements, using data and analytics to drive better understanding of their panel and the panel spend”, she told Australasian Lawyer.
She explained that CLOC’s co-chairs aim to keep providing “relevant, in-region-focused content that can allow our members to learn, to upskill within their expertise as legal operations specialists so they can take back that knowledge to their organisations”. She pointed to networking as a key part of the organisation’s priorities; an event like the innovation summit brings together law firms, service providers, technology partners and CLOC’s own in-house members.
“That's a key focus of ours — having content that's specific and delivered just to the in-house community, and then allowing our in-house community that ability to network amongst the full community”, Golovsky told Australasian Lawyer. “I get a lot of stimulation and professional satisfaction from working with my peers in CLOC and networking with the broader community. There's always such a learning and collaborative spirit in the room, and I think that in turn drives innovation and change and gives confidence and stamina and resilience to the group to continue to keep striving to change. That's what I take from it and want to give back to it”.
