Connie Brenton, NetApp. Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM

The founder of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), an organization that provides education and networking opportunities for legal operations professionals, has resigned.

Connie Brenton, the senior director of legal operations at NetApp Inc. and CLOC's founder and now-former chairman of the board, resigned Wednesday. Executive team and board of directors member Jeff Franke, who was the assistant general counsel, legal operations, at the company formerly known as Yahoo Inc., also resigned from CLOC.

“This organization was put together with the passion and the commitment and the vision, the combined vision of all of the participants. And it has taken participants from the entire legal ecosystem,” Brenton said. “However, we are at a point now, we're exactly three years old, we're moving in different directions now. The board is more interested in moving the organization to a caretaker role versus that dynamic and growing organization and that isn't as much fun for me.”

She said she wanted to implement new lines of business for CLOC, including starting a training program and creating law firm membership options.

Brenton founded CLOC as a book club in 2010. The group had around 40 members in the Bay Area when it incorporated as a nonprofit in 2016 and has since grown to about 1,500 members worldwide. She said post-CLOC she is “looking forward to having one job” but plans to stay closely connected to the legal ops community.

Remaining CLOC leadership team member Mary O'Carroll, who leads legal ops at Google, declined to comment on specific reasons for the resignations, but said Brenton and Franke have “been a tremendous asset to the team.”

“Connie's original vision of forming a thriving network of legal operations professionals brought together a small group of friends and fellow legal operations leads in the Silicon Valley. The group's charter was to support each other, to establish best-practices, and to share our collective experience with each other and our peers,” CLOC said in a statement Thursday.

The statement also said, “CLOC is poised for future growth and we look forward to continuing our focus on collaboration across the legal ecosystem. The CLOC board could not be more excited about what 2019 holds in store for our community and for our members.”

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CLOC's remaining leadership team members include O'Carroll, Facebook's head of legal ops Brian Hupp, Oracle VP of legal ops Christine Coats and Lisa Konie, the senior director of legal operations at Adobe Inc.

Steve Harmon, vice president and deputy general counsel, legal, at Cisco, will also stay on the leadership team “until we get through a transition,” O'Carroll said.

In November, Harmon took on an additional role as GC of legal services and technology company Elevate Services Inc. and said it was “likely” he would relinquish his role at CLOC because ”there's potential conflicts of having people that are too closely aligned with one particular vendor being in a board leadership role.” Brenton said members of the board disagreed on how involved Harmon should be in CLOC as GC of Elevate.

The resignations come less than three weeks before CLOC's 2019 London Institute, the organization's second annual U.K.-based conference focused on building legal ops in the EMEA region. Brenton said she won't be attending the London conference but that “the event will be flawless.” O'Carroll said changes to the institute in the wake of the resignations will be “nothing notable.”

“We're moving forward as planned and it's going to be great,” she said.