Legal Ops Evolution, Tech Consolidation Shape In-House Teams

If you’ve spent any time in or around the legal industry, you know one thing has always been true: Change doesn’t come easy. For decades, legal was the department that quietly powered the business behind the scenes, keeping things running and managing risk while largely staying out of the spotlight and remaining untouched by the kinds of transformations happening across other functions such as finance, sales, or human resources.

But that time has passed.

Legal is changing, at a speed and scale unlike anything it has experienced before. I see it every day in my work, and I hear about it in nearly every conversation I have with general counsel, legal operations leaders, technologists, and innovators across the industry on my podcast “Pearls On, Gloves Off.” Legal teams are taking on new strategic roles, adopting technology at a breakneck pace, and rethinking everything from hiring models to service delivery.

Why does this matter? Because legal touches everything—every business decision, every deal, every risk, every transformation. When legal changes, it doesn’t just change the way we manage contracts or litigation. It changes how businesses move.

What’s particularly fascinating about this transformation is how two seemingly separate trends—the evolution of legal operations as a profession and the consolidation of legal technology—are actually driving and reshaping each other in ways that are fundamentally changing how legal departments operate.

Inflection Point

Legal ops has come a long way in the last decade. What started as a small grassroots movement has grown into a recognized, essential function. But we continue to be at a crossroads.

In the early days of legal operations, we built the function from scratch doing everything from finance to tech, to process improvement. And we did it while building the foundation for the role itself and evangelizing it to the rest of the world. The goal was to see legal operations as a function grow in stature, scope, and prevalence.

That can’t be and isn’t the model anymore. As Frances Pomposo from Cisco put it on episode 62 of Pearls On, Gloves Off, “We’re definitely at an inflection point. We may have failed on change management... There are areas where our messaging was not consistent with the role.”

Rather than this grassroots effort of the past, the future of legal ops now depends on institutional support: clear job frameworks, career paths, and enterprise-wide recognition. Pomposo called for working with HR standards organizations such as Radford to establish formal job families and frameworks.

Without that structure of clear roles, defined competencies, and career progression, we risk losing momentum. But with it? We unlock the full potential of legal ops to deliver measurable impact: optimizing spend, accelerating workflows, improving risk posture, and enabling attorneys to focus on high-value strategic work. It’s how we build resilient, high-performing teams. This is our moment to institutionalize legal ops not just as a function, but as a force multiplier, and we can’t afford to miss it.

The evolution of legal ops as a profession is only half the story. At the same time, the technology ecosystem that supports legal work is being completely reshaped.

Tech Consolidation

While legal operations was maturing as a profession, legal technology was exploding in complexity. For years, legal tech has been a patchwork of point solutions. Teams adopted tools one by one, solving specific problems without a broader strategy for integration or scale.

That era is ending. Legal departments are done with fragmented systems that don’t play nice. They want integrated platforms, clean data, and workflows that actually make sense. And the market is responding.

Matt Sunderman, CEO of Harbor Global, told me on episode 63, “There are 10 [legal tech providers] that have large, meaningful install bases right now ... I have a hard time looking out 10 years and saying it won’t be rationalized down to five or four.”

The focus is moving from point solutions to comprehensive platforms where solutions can handle multiple workflows, integrate across systems, and provide a single source of truth.

While it may feel like there is an explosion of new smaller players these days, the writing is on the wall. We’re ultimately heading toward fewer vendors, more integration, and higher expectations from buyers. This is a moment for legal departments to be strategic and to demand more from providers as the bar rises.

Looking Ahead

If you take these threads together, you start to see a clear picture: the rise of legal ops and the rise of consolidated tech are reinforcing each other. If we can stop treating legal ops as a support role and recognize it as a key driver of business value, and if we can move from scattered tools to smart, scalable platforms, we will have empowered teams with the right tools to thrive.

And the legal operations leaders who will succeed in this new landscape are the ones who don’t wait for change to happen to them. They’re the ones asking hard questions, building better systems, and pulling the industry forward even when it’s uncomfortable.

There’s no going back to the old ways. And thank goodness for that. We have an opportunity to create something better, smarter, and more aligned with the world we actually live in. Let’s build it.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Mary O’Carroll is chief operating officer at Goodwin Procter and host of the “Pearls On, Gloves Off” podcast. She has more than two decades of experience in legal operations and technology leadership at organizations including Google, Ironclad, and Goodwin.

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