In-house counsel and legal operations professionals seem to be looking for common languages to drive efficiency in legal departments. One group is pushing for “matter standards” to create a common vocabulary around all manners of legal work. At the same time, a Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) initiative aims to establish an industry standard to structure and define the scope of legal tasks involved in patent matters.

The latter is a soon-to-be released initiative called the “Patent Prosecution Deliverable Framework,” which has been in the works since June of last year, according to Mary O'Carroll, head of the legal operations, technology and strategy team at Google Inc., who is part of the executive leadership team at CLOC and is behind the patent initiative.

“We wanted to establish a common language” around patent matters, “so that when talking with each other about defining common scope and work, there's a common understanding,” said O'Carroll, who is speaking on two panels next week at CLOC's annual institute in Las Vegas.