Dueling Demographics

At this year’s CLOC Institute in April, the organization released a study, “The Anatomy of a Director of Legal Operations,” designed to dig into the ops demographic. A joint venture with LawGeex, an automated contract review outfit, the results made for splashy headlines such as this one from Corporate Counsel magazine: “Lawyers Continue to Dominate Legal Ops Role.” Using the LinkedIn profiles of 235 current legal ops directors, the study showed that close to three in four legal ops directors hold a law degree. That caught our attention. The annual survey of hundreds of chief legal officers from Altman Weil also digs into ops demographics, but to much different results. The CLOs queried by Altman showed 22% of ops leaders with a JD (see chart, below). That’s quite a gap. What gives?

Maybe it’s the language used. CLOC/LawGeex specifically looked at ops director profiles, while Altman asked a broad cross-section of CLOs, “Do you have an administrator or other business manager who manages law department operations?” That likely sweeps in smaller organizations that may have ops managers and/or administrators but not director-level ops staff. Still, that’s a big gap. We decided to do a quick and very unscientific reality check. We searched out ops directors on LinkedIn and checked out the first dozen we found, from companies such as MasterCard, Avis Budget Group, AIG, WeWork and Novartis. Interestingly, only 4 of the 12 have a JD. New headline: “Lawyers Fail to Dominate Legal Ops Role.”