In an AI World, Legal Ops Needs to Keep Rewriting Its Playbook

In 1999, I wanted a better way to track contract expiration dates, so I built a Microsoft Access database from scratch. It was my first real toe-dip into what we’d now call a contract lifecycle management system, though I didn’t use that term at the time.

In an era when email was only beginning to take hold, this was considered fairly high tech. It also elicited a few raised eyebrows from colleagues who found my efforts unnecessary. To me, though, it was simple common sense: If a process could prevent last-minute panic, why not put one in place?

I only later realized this was the essence of legal operations: seeing the system, not just the task, and learning our way toward better processes. I wanted to make things work better, and the experience left a lasting impression. It taught me that the most meaningful education in legal operations comes from applying what you know, refining it through practice, and continuing to learn as the work itself matures.

Legal operations is about seeing the whole system. Good legal work comes from understanding how processes, technology, data, and people fit together.

The work has evolved, so learning must evolve with it. When I moved into legal operations full time, the field didn’t have a clear definition. I spent almost as much time explaining my job as I did performing it.

Today, legal operations is a core pillar of legal departments. Many organizations now have chiefs of staff or legal chief operating officers, directors responsible for technology and process, and specialists focused on data, billing, vendor management, and analytics.

A few years ago, process mapping was the capability I prioritized on my team. Today, I look for professionals who can connect processes with data fluency, systems thinking, and business context.

Roles that once relied on expertise in documentation and workflow now require the ability to evaluate tools, interpret analytics, assess risk, and anticipate organizational impact. The field and the skill sets have evolved, but not the education that supports this field.

In-house lawyers need broader skills. Today’s legal roles often require comfort with data, technology, and business context, in addition to legal expertise. The way in which future legal professionals are educated today must change.

The gap is most visible in law school. Legal training often doesn’t reflect how in-house legal teams work today, especially around operations and artificial intelligence. This is most evident by how some law schools are approaching training in operations and AI fluency.

A recent Bloomberg Law commentary emphasized how a lack of AI training fails future legal professionals and why law schools must better prepare students for the realities of legal practice. Separately, Bloomberg Law reporting has highlighted cases where judges acknowledged that staff-generated court rulings contained factual errors after relying on AI tools including ChatGPT and Perplexity, underscoring how misuse or unvetted use of AI can lead to serious mistakes in legal work.

In one case, a judge explained in response to Senate Judiciary Committee oversight that a law school intern had used ChatGPT in drafting an opinion, and that his chambers maintain a policy prohibiting generative AI use.

But the judge’s policy misses the mark. Restriction doesn’t build competence, just as simply ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. Education, on the other hand, does build competence.

Even if future lawyers never hold a legal operations title, they will work in environments driven by data, technology, and cross-functional decision-making. They deserve an education that reflects that reality. Law school must proactively teach future lawyers to understand the systems within which they operate—and this includes legal operations.

The pace of change outruns traditional training. Learning never really stops. As tools and workflows change, legal operations depends on ongoing learning rather than one-time training.

We talk about technology as the catalyst for change in legal work, but it’s really the relationship between process and technology that drives improvement. Applying modern technology to outdated processes only magnifies problems. I’ve watched teams race to implement platforms without first understanding the workflows underneath. Shaky foundations spur frustration as the tools exacerbate problems.

I’ve rewritten my own multi-year technology roadmap more times than I can count—not because of mistakes, but because the environment keeps shifting. In a landscape this dynamic, education can’t be static.

Let go to move forward. Some capabilities that were once core to legal operations, such as knowledge management, are evolving. Knowledge management used to focus on storing and organizing information. But thanks to AI, real value lies in knowing how to connect information, apply it, and evaluate its reliability. While the work doesn’t disappear, the skills required to do it well are changing.

This is maturity. And it isn’t unique to legal. Every operational discipline at some point evolves from defining the work to optimizing the work to reimagining the work. Legal operations is now in the reimagining work phase.

When I built that database in 1999, I wasn’t trying to challenge the legal profession. I was trying to work smarter. That instinct—a commitment to continual learning and evolving—still drives legal operations today.

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

Stacy Lettie is a board member of CLOC, the peer-driven, not-for-profit community for legal operations professionals, and chief of staff to the general counsel at global health-care company Organon.

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