Introduction: 0:00

• Introducing Cory Clines, Legal Operations Manager at Campari Group with fifteen years of legal ops experience.
• Starting your career as a conservatory-trained opera singer and moving into legal ops and consulting at Lloyd’s and Advance Publications, owner of Condé Nast.
• Discussing go-to cocktails and Campari’s expansive list of alcohol brands.

Training as an opera singer: 4:01

• Being drafted into opera because of his low voice.
• Studying many languages at once to understand operas.
• Sharing your favorite operas and performances.

Considering skill transfer from opera to legal operations: 12:12

• Emphasizing collaboration and discipline.
• Relying on finance, IT, and global legal teams to accomplish goals.
• Embracing consequences for team members who won’t adopt new processes.
• Thinking legal ops like putting on a show.

Moving forward by earning the trust of your GC: 14:46

• Being hired as temp, then moving up to executive assistant, then paralegal.
• Adopting a unified vision between legal ops and general counsel.
• Using data to make cases to your general counsel about major decisions.

Deciding to leverage technology in legal ops: 16:34

• Rejecting complicated, time-consuming, and expensive manual processes.
• Finding an inflection point that requires you to make a technology-forward process change.

Running RFPs from an in-house perspective: 18:39

• Defining pain points, setting objectives, and getting the right people involved. 
• Inviting as many lawyers as possible to new technology demonstrations with vendors.

Identifying new opportunities to advance your legal ops career: 22:05

• Leaving Lloyd’s after a vendor asked him to help implement the software at a different client.
• Moving into consulting in order to work around opera performance schedule.
• Coming back as a legal operations manager when the time is right.
• Emphasizing the need to be open to opportunity.

Advice to legal ops professionals who feel pigeonholed in one aspect of the role: 24:27

• Finding the willingness to change your career. 
• Building relationships with vendors and staying in touch with former colleagues.
• Relying on networks like CLOC and Legal Operators.
• Understand how to change rules, implement AI, and make an positive effort.

Considering how curiosity affects your work: 27:23

• Recognizing how much data can be pulled from a single document.
• Looking outside of your role to consider new concepts.
• Being unafraid to hear a vendor’s pitch.

Questioning the need for tech expertise as a legal operations manager: 28:47

• Understanding technology as a personal interest.
• Being clear that you don’t need to understand tech on a deep level as long as you can guide the team that does.
• Viewing project management skills as the ultimate requirement for legal ops.

Looking back at tech implementations that went wrong: 31:20

• Not wedding yourself to a single piece of technology. 
• Not relying on implementation consultants.
• Taking ownership of implementation internally and working closely with vendors.
• Working with proactive vendors that will work with you on solutions.

Building a legal ops team from scratch at Campari: 38:14

• Starting all jobs from zero in terms of tech but not process.
• Dealing with fractured processes across countries and regions.
• Making decisions from a business perspective to recoup expenses as efficiently as possible.

Using tech to drive legal ops process: 41:15

• Supporting Campari’s aggressive growth agenda by enforcing uniform process across regions. 
• Focusing on a business-forward end goal.
• Recognizing that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions across organizations.

Book recommendations: 46:01

The Song of Achilles by Madeleine Miller

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

What you wish you had known when you started in legal ops: 47:58

• Focusing on friendships with finance and IT teams.
• Not being afraid to be the bad guy and say no.