Steve Harmon, general counsel of Elevate Services Inc.

Steve Harmon became one of legal operations' first corporate leaders when the general counsel of Cisco Systems Inc. tapped him to take on the new role more than 15 years ago.

Now, he'll be taking legal ops lessons into his own GC role. On Tuesday, legal services and technology company Elevate Services Inc. announced Harmon as its new general counsel. Harmon will replace former Elevate GC Daniel Coll, who left the company in June, according to his LinkedIn page.

Harmon said his legal ops experience will bring unique insight to the GC role, where he'll be responsible for leading the company's legal team and helping with business and client needs. He'll be able to discuss his own legal ops experiences while bringing developed strategies to his new department, as well as leadership and legal skills developed from leading a team of about 100 at Cisco. Earlier this year, another lawyer with legal ops experience, former Google in-house lawyer Tiffani McCoy, also took on a GC role at HBUS, a digital currency marketplace that opened in June.

“At Elevate, I hope to improve our internal processes, but also help tell [my legal ops] story—help Elevate's customers take advantage of the experiences that I have in my in-house environment,” Harmon told Corporate Counsel.

There's something else unique about Harmon's transition—he won't be leaving Cisco. Harmon will split his time between Cisco and Elevate. But he said he'll cut back some responsibilities from his current role as vice president and deputy general counsel, legal. Going forward, Harmon will focus on four core legal ops matters: Cisco's legal technology team, its captive legal process outsourcing, strategic innovations and knowledge management team, and the litigation data support lab.

Currently, Harmon said, there are no Elevate lawyers at Cisco. He heard about the legal service firm's GC opening through its founder and executive chairman Liam Brown, whom Harmon said he has known for years.

They met each other before Harmon co-founded the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, a networking and educational organization for legal ops professionals. Elevate has been a vendor and sponsor at past CLOC institutes, and Harmon said their shared interest in the legal ops space has in part kept him in connection with Brown.

Harmon said he plans to stay involved in CLOC as he moves into the GC role, but said “it's likely” he relinquishes his role as a board member because “there's potential conflicts of having people that are too closely aligned with one particular vendor being in a board leadership role.”

But Harmon said he wanted to take on the new role of Elevate GC because he believes there's a move in legal market toward companies that can provide a combination of consulting services, staff augmentations services, process optimization and technology services and “bridge a gap” between firms and in-house teams.

“It's really the uniqueness of this opportunity with Elevate and how it maps to my skills and how it maps to where the market is going that kind of led me in this direction,” Harmon said.