The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium headed to the land down under earlier this month for the organization's first Australia institute.

What they found was a legal ops market still in its early stages, but growing fast, with in-house professionals eager for more change.

“It was an amazing event,” CLOC chief executive officer Connie Brenton told Corporate Counsel in a recent interview. “It was an amazing group of people in Australia, many of whom had not heard of legal operations prior to this.”

Brenton, who is also the senior director of legal operations for NetApp, went to the institute with a number of other CLOC leaders, including Google's head of legal operations Mary O'Carroll and Mike Haven, head of legal operations at Gap Inc. CLOC started in the U.S. about seven years ago and has since spread to other parts of the globe.

CLOC's beginnings in the U.S. have given American law departments a head start in developing legal ops functions. O'Carroll said that in contrast to U.S. events, the Australian institute focused more on the basics to lay the ground work for larger scale legal operations.

Many attendees were in-house lawyers, including GCs and CLOs, who are not dedicated solely to legal ops.

“The vast majority of companies out there either were not aware of the [legal ops] role or were stumbling around to prove its impact,” O'Carroll said. “This was a critical event in the phase of that market but will allow them, like EMEA, to leapfrog ahead.”

Haven said that while tech innovations like artificial intelligence and blockchain might be shiny and interesting, in-house leaders should answer why legal operations is important to their department and how it would work in practice first, before focusing on these innovations.

The institute still walked attendees through some technology. Haven said “fundamental technologies” such as ebilling and electronic signatures were two points of focus.

Most presenters were from the U.S. or Australia. O'Carroll said that having U.S. legal ops professionals who had already tested industry strategies and techniques was helpful because they were able to provide insight on what works and what doesn't. There are already best practices and a community in place, so legal ops professionals in the region have a guide and — importantly, according to CLOC's leaders – know that they're not alone.

“I would say it's different because when CLOC started in the U.S. we were all new to this,” O'Carroll said. “Whereas we went into Australia saying, 'Hey we've been doing this for over ten years, here are the playbooks, here's what you need to know, here's who to talk to. It was sharing and willingness to bring everyone up to the same level.”