By Toby Weston
Oyango Snell, president and CEO of CLOC, summed up this week’s Global Institute in Chicago in a single observation. “The AI conversation has matured. Teams are now sharing what has worked, what broke, and how they are governing it.”
Stronger by Design, CLOC’s theme for the event, was chosen to reflect how legal ops teams are driving change across the industry. Over 2,400 professionals gathered across four days of sessions, keynotes and an exhibit hall of more than 100 vendors at McCormick Place in Chicago.
Announcements from the likes of Mitratech, Bloomberg Law and NetDocuments pointed less to a wave of new products and more to consolidation around a single idea. AI should no longer sit alongside the tools lawyers use every day but inside them. The standalone AI product is giving way to something more ambitious. Every major announcement at CLOC this week pointed toward embedded intelligence, workflow automation and integration as the new battleground.
Mitratech was among the most forward leaning. It framed its offer around agentic AI systems that do not just assist but act, executing multi-step tasks within governance and compliance frameworks.
Bloomberg Law made a similar push, emphasising AI grounded in authoritative legal content and capable of reasoning across workflows rather than simply retrieving information.
NetDocuments positioned its document management platform as an AI execution layer rather than a storage system. Across the board the message was consistent. The era of the point solution is ending. The race to become the operating system for legal departments is underway.
ROI of legal technology still remains a theme of this conversation. Research published by RSGI this week* and released at CLOC, found that 75% of in-house legal teams would choose outside counsel management platform PERSUIT first if asked to justify the value of a single legal technology investment to their CFO.
Zack Kass, the former OpenAI executive who delivered the opening keynote, gave the conversation an intellectual frame. His challenge to the audience was to stop thinking about what AI can do and instead focus on what humans should hold onto. A timely challenge for a room full of legal ops professionals.
That question was sharpened further by Anthropic’s decision to launch Claude for Legal this week, positioning its AI model as the connective tissue across the entire legal tech stack. The theorised orchestration layer is beginning to take shape.
But in this moment of intense noise, it is sometimes better to take a step back. CLOC’s launch of Compass is a quieter but pointed reminder that knowing where you stand now matters before you can decide where to go. Developed with Neota Logic, Compass is a maturity assessment built on CLOC’s established Core 12 framework that defines a mature legal operations function.
The question leaving Chicago is not what AI can do for legal. It is whether legal departments are ready to make the most of what they have now.
* The report was commissioned by PERSUIT, but all 25 interviews with in-house legal teams were conducted on a private and confidential basis with the RSGI team.
