While I spent years developing substantive experience as a legal practitioner, I have not been a career-long operations professional. I have seen the patterns, inefficiencies, and the endless cycle of “we should really fix this,” but there simply wasn’t enough time in the day to find solutions.
Stepping into the world of alternative legal services and legal operations this year has allowed me to assess the landscape with clear eyes and ask, “Are we delivering legal work to our clients in the smartest way possible? Are we providing strategic guidance that aligns with our clients’ interests?”
Let’s talk about where we are in legal operations in this pivotal moment. Legal ops sits at the intersection of structure, efficiency, technology, and the beautifully complicated world of legal and compliance teams. It’s the connective tissue that turns intention into operational reality.
A few observations:
1. The Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) tech scene is crowded.
This Wild West moment has yielded many software platforms in the CLM space. Too many vendors. Too many “top-right quadrant” diagrams. If you tried to demo every CLM in the market, it would become a full-time job. (And you’d still miss the one that launched last Thursday.) The volume alone is overwhelming, and that’s before you factor in everyone’s claims of being “AI-enabled,” “AI-driven,” or “AI-adjacent.”
Which brings me to the other elephant in the room: AI.
2. Practicality and AI need to be brought together.
We need more practical use cases, not more puffery. Much of what’s being marketed as “AI” is really just dependable automation. Which is great! Automation moves work forward, reduces bottlenecks, and saves legal departments from drowning in repetitive tasks. But calling something “AI” doesn’t make it magic.
3. Time and effort spent on AI readiness will reap short-and long-term dividends.
Here’s the truth no one glamorizes on conference panels: AI isn’t possible without a lot of decidedly unsexy readiness work.
Start with intake. Who is asking for what? How much? How quickly? How are we categorizing that work? Is the right person, firm, or vendor performing the work at the right rate? Without basic triage and tracking, AI cannot help you. It doesn’t know what to predict, streamline, or automate because you don’t have the inputs defined.
The same applies to data migration. You cannot have a successful CLM or AI implementation without getting your data centralized. Full stop. Data migration isn’t glamorous, and maintaining it is even less so. There is no keynote titled: “The Thrilling World of Metadata Cleanup.” But these foundational steps are the price of admission. Only after the homework can you begin to take advantage of the tools everyone can’t stop talking about.
4. Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) need a perception shift.
Another observation from my year of Legal Ops immersion: we need to redefine ALSPs. Too many people still hear “ALSP” and think low-skill offshore labor model. That era has long been over. ALSPs are specialized, tech-forward partners who understand the tools, workflows, and processes in ways most in-house teams simply don’t have the bandwidth to master. This is not about replacing lawyers, but operationalizing them and ultimately increasing the value and efficiency of the legal function.
This year also reminded me of the consulting reality no one says out loud. When one of the big firms hands you a beautifully bound strategy book, the technology inside will often be obsolete by the time you’re ready to implement. What legal departments need is a nimble, knowledgeable, and tech-savvy, yet tech-agnostic, partner. The best ALSPs are those that know the landscape, can move with intention, and adapt as the market changes.
Legal ops brings together everything I love: technology, efficiency, systems that work, and teams that are committed to doing their jobs better every day. 2025 was the year I stepped into the world of legal ops and I’m not looking back.
Valerie Charles is VP, Legal Operations at Integreon and has 15+ years of experience advising corporate clients and improving in-house legal department operations and compliance programs. She received her Juris Doctor from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.