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.
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