CLOC’s annual Las Vegas conference is probably the marquee event for legal ops professionals, and as a result it’s a good leading indicator of where the legal ops industry is heading in the future. I recently attended the event for a second time, and had a few observations.
CLM vendors dominated the event in 2023, and they did it in style. At the time, my only prior experience at a legal conference had been the Legal Innovation & Tech Fest in Sydney, and in comparison the glitzy booths sprawling across the exhibit hall of the Bellagio were a shock to my modest Kiwi sensibilities.
In 2024, CLM vendors were much more muted, eschewing elaborate sets and costumed mascots in favor of a more serious presentation style. Notably, there was an absence of the lavish parties that every CLM vendor seemed to be throwing last year.
It’s no secret that CLMs have been the primary legal tech beneficiary of VC dollars in recent years; the pullback of VC funding in CLM companies and its subsequent impact on marketing budgets were felt throughout the event.
There were also indications that CLMs were losing their shine in other ways; Zach Abramowitz has previously questioned whether CLMs have reached Product Market Fit, and privately I heard similar comments both from other vendors and legal ops professionals.
These firms undoubtedly see generative AI as an opportunity to create new, more compelling experiences for users. Speaking of AI…
Venture Capitalist Mark Andreessen claimed in 2011 that “software is eating the world”; in 2024, AI is eating the software that is eating the world. Vendors seem to be hyper-aware of this new state of affairs and have started stuffing the word “AI” into as much marketing collateral as possible.
From a cursory look around the floor, the number of software providers that claimed to incorporate AI (50), were more than double the number of software companies that didn’t (22).
I’ve heard some skepticism from investors that lawyers are adopting generative AI solutions due to top-down hype-driven pressure to use AI rather than there being genuine, enduring use cases. I didn’t get the impression that this is what was happening at CLOC, at least amongst the legal operations folks I met at the event (law firms are a different story!).
That isn’t to say that legal operators didn’t express skepticism about the usefulness of AI solutions—many did, often informed by negative past experience—but this was balanced against the obvious utility AI solutions could offer against very real pain points within their legal teams.
At the 2023 event, the fresh release of ChatGPT had created enormous buzz around generative AI’s potential to impact the legal profession, but the use cases still felt speculative. Few legal teams were meaningfully using Generative AI (GPT-4 had just been released), and the interest around Generative AI was focused on how it might impact the future of the legal profession rather than immediate practical applications.
In contrast, Generative AI is now being used to solve real-world legal problems. Buyers visited our booth armed with vendor swag in one hand and a wishlist of clearly-defined requirements on the other, and they were intentionally, actively looking for solutions that covered specific use cases.
Overall, there was a night-and-day difference in the sophistication of buyers investigating generative AI solutions.
Legal teams who attend CLOC are on average likely to be unusually forward-thinking in their appetite to explore novel generative AI solutions, but nonetheless the relative increase in focus on AI—and relative decline in interest in other areas—from last year was striking.
This year’s CLOC is a good preview of what we can expect to see in the coming years. I can’t imagine a more exciting time to be in the legal ops industry!
I'm excited to share that we have raised $4.8 million and have re-launched as Ivo.
When I was a lawyer knee-deep in contract review, I had a strong, nagging feeling that things could be better. That feeling started small, but kept growing until eventually it was all-consuming. Most of my water cooler conversations with colleagues started with me saying some variation of “why doesn’t someone just build…?”
I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, or how I wanted to do it; all I knew was that I had a strong dissatisfaction with the status quo and something needed to change.
So, I took the jump, learned how to code, and started Ivo.
We shouldn't confuse the average legal professional's carefulness with technology solutions with a lack of desire for them. Legal professionals have limited patience for products that don't respect their time and just work — but we've seen first hand that if they do, users will respond with sincere appreciation.
Over the last few years, I've had the privilege of meeting over a thousand legal professionals. Lawyers have a reputation for being tech-averse, but in my experience, lawyers are more desperate for technology solutions to improve their lives than any other group of people that I know of.
When large language models entered the public eye through ChatGPT, many lawyers were rightfully skeptical. Our small team has worked tirelessly to stay close to our users and earn their trust over and over again.
For example, take this quote from Quora’s Adrie Christiansen:
“When I’ve shared feedback with the Ivo team, I can see that it’s clearly taken into consideration. Even during the evaluation phase, we felt that the Ivo team had a strong focus on continuous improvement.”
Or this quote from Formlabs’ Erica Jutras:
“We’ve been so impressed with the customer service that Ivo has delivered. Every time we have provided inputs on product updates / suggestions, they have been incorporated quickly. The speed in which updates to the product are made is truly remarkable.”
And it’s working! Take David Torchetti at Geotab, who says that he has saved an average of 45 minutes of review time per contract, a 75% efficiency gain.
“We saved an average of 45 minutes of review time per contract, which translated into 75% overall efficiency gain.”
Of course, we're just getting started — the vast stretch of our journey is still ahead of us. For now, we're at the very frontier of an exciting new platform shift that will permanently change the legal profession, forever and for the better.
Thank you to Fika Ventures and Uncork Capital for joining us as lead investors in this round of funding, and to the several new investors who have joined our cap table. And a special thank you in particular to our existing investors Daniel Gross, GD1, and Phase One Ventures for supporting us once again.
Connect with us now to learn how we can streamline your contract review process
