The growth of corporate legal operations has been a common discussion topic in recent years, one that's been felt from tech providers to law firms and more. Still, to Brad Blickstein, the publisher of the Law Department Operations (LDO) Survey, which is now in its 10th year, the ops explosion is still awe-inspiring, given that he was calling in personal requests to take the first survey in 2008.

“I feel like normally, the number of people who took a survey isn't a terribly interesting data point. But to go from 34 to 128 in 10 years says a lot about what's changed in legal ops over that time,” Blickstein said in an interview with Legaltech News.

The 10th anniversary LDO Survey, available for download through Above the Law, focuses largely on the differences in law department operations from 2008 through now. For instance, the survey analyzed the top challenges faced by the operations office: In 2008, the top two challenges were positioning oriented, namely how to identify opportunities for business improvement (67 percent) and show the value of the position to the corporation (53 percent). Now, the top two challenges are more business oriented, namely how to drive and implement change (42 percent) and to contain costs (32 percent).

“The challenges today look a whole lot like the challenges that every business unit faces,” Blickstein explained. “Legal ops people, they're brought in to bring business discipline to law departments. If you look at the challenges for 2017, you could talk to the leaders at any department in a company, and those are the kinds of things that they would say.”

That theme of being integrated into the wider business of the company is one that runs throughout the anniversary survey. Another figure compares how often operations personnel felt they were involved in corporate strategic initiatives: In 2017, 50 percent said “frequently,” compared to just 28 percent in 2008.

According to Blickstein, this reflects how what's asked of the modern legal operations professional deals with more than just the law department. “Legal ops is the perfect person to go to for privacy and data security, but that's not an issue that's owned by the law department alone,” he said. “There's issues like that, reputation issues and other things, that are pervasive.”

But of course, not every legal operations function is mature, and many legal ops professionals are still working to be integrated into the business. That's reflected in the salaries reported by the survey. While 17 percent reported having a salary over $250,000, more than double the percentage in 2008, the proportion with a salary under $150,000 (58 percent) has also increased.

The stratification, in Blickstein's opinion, is reflective of what businesses are asking of their legal ops personnel, and how many elements of an organization their day-to-day job touches. “There are a bunch of people out there that are highly strategic, highly valuable and critical elements of a law department. And then there's also people that are just doing a function, and that's all that law department is doing. I think that accounts for the stratification quite a bit,” he explained.

Still, legal operations has come a long way in 10 years, and it will continue to grow moving forward. One figure that might not get as much attention is how many legal ops folks feel in control of their company's e-discovery process—it has consistently stayed above 60 percent since 2008. But Blickstein said that lessons can be taken from e-discovery's growth, since it was largely “the first area of law that became process-oriented” in a cost-efficient way that is now reflected in modern operations.

“I feel like that's where we are at legal ops now,” he added. “The companies that were good at e-discovery tend to be good at legal ops, so we just have to keep pushing in that process, project management, cost-focused direction, which is what happened in e-discovery. I think what we're going to see over the next couple of years is an analogue, where what happened in e-discovery will happen throughout the law department.”