(Photo: Khakimullin Aleksandr/Shutterstock.com) (Photo: Khakimullin Aleksandr/Shutterstock.com)

A new webinar from the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium engaged in a fair amount of myth-busting on Thursday. "Building the Future of the Legal Function" was part of CLOC's ongoing "Innovation Series," designed to fill the hole in the calendar left by the organization's annual Las Vegas Institute, which was canceled in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Panelists talked for over an hour on the challenges facing legal operations professionals trying to drive change within legal departments and the danger of innovation for the sake of innovation. "Too often it is the case that many movements towards change are led by technology, and that doesn't always make sense to lead with technology as a silver bullet or a push-button solution," said Ed Sohn, a panelist and writer at Above the Law.

So where might legal departments be overestimating the impact of tech? The use of data to push decision-making could be a double-edged sword absent a clear understanding of the variables and context involved. Sohn alluded to a faux belief among legal departments and elsewhere that any conclusions derived from data are true.

Panelist Jason Barnwell, assistant general counsel with modern legal at Microsoft Corp., seconded the potential threat at play. "The thing that we observe about data is that it tends to help you ask better questions, but it is often the case that data doesn't actually answer any questions," Barnwell said.

Panelists applied similar logic to tech in general: Without a bigger picture or strategy in mind, it doesn't really get you anywhere. But to chart a course, legal ops professionals first need to know where their destination lies, which often involves having a very frank discussion with corporate business units about what the organization ultimately defines as a success.

"Without context, without direction, I think what we have is a lack of coherence because as said, tech is not a panacea. It is not a silver bullet. It really is a tool… [Tech] is a means to get you to an outcome," said panelist Jae Um, director of pricing strategy at Baker McKenzie.

When it comes time to actually implement change inside of an organization, that's where the real work begins. Some employees may be more open or receptive than doing things differently than others, but panelists cautioned against some "pockets" of a department to get further ahead than others.

"When you have pockets of excellence and only pockets of excellence, that gets more intense over time because of some of the hardships, the emotional labor that goes into functioning with a different mindset or a different approach than everyone else in your ecosystem," Um said.