John Elliot

Title: Manager of Legal Operations and Technology

Company: Netflix

How did you get into legal operations? 

In 2012, I was working at a law firm helping to develop their pricing and legal project management group. It was there that I started to learn about all the data in the legal industry, all the systems that underpin that data and connected Law Firm information with their corporate clients wether that was billing systems or matter management systems, and the various gaps as clients were asking for comprehensive fixed fees and all of the requests that came between the client and the law firm. That was where my education and early legal ops exposure came from. Four years later was when the corporations were really getting savvy with in-house legal operations departments. An opportunity came about to help create a legal operations group for a private equity firm. They were starting it from the ground up, and they wanted that experience with the data. They wanted insight into what law firms were doing in this space and areas to identify improvement in integrations.

When and why did you join CLOC? 

As I was more concentrated on legal operations, or more purely focused on legal operations at Ares, I needed a group that I could tap into to share learnings, ask questions, better understand the available systems, consultants, and everything as I was building up that group at Ares. CLOC seemed to be the big one.

What has been your biggest legal ops challenge and how did you overcome it?

I think my biggest legal ops challenge was and continues to be adapting, or implementing, processes in systems that are flexible enough for the varying business needs that we support. And that’s tough. That’s what I always refer to as the art of legal operations. There's a lot of legal stakeholders outside of legal operations and the business that have unique requirements that differ. So how do we as an operations team identify those and account for those while still being standardized, automated and all the fun terms that you hear in operations. That changes with every company potentially with every group and with every need. So how do you account for all of those when you're building out all these new great things? That's a daily challenge to understand the business need and implementing it in a systemized or a process-driven way.

How has CLOC helped you be successful in your legal Operations role?

I've established a pretty strong network of legal ops professionals mostly through CLOC, the regional meetings, and of course the annual Institute in Vegas. Depending on where I'm at in legal ops career or journey I'm taking on behalf of one of the corporations that I have worked for, there is a variety of questions that come up, and I often find myself asking another CLOC member that I either know for their insight either from how they've solved it, if it's a shared problem, or do they know someone that's also done this. It really is a great network for brainstorming, solutioning, and all the stuff that we do.

What is one thing you would say to inspire your fellow CLOC Members to become more involved in the development of the legal operations profession?

It's inspiring to me just see how many new legal operations jobs are out there. Wow! There's really a demand here, and it is evidenced by the number of resources, systems, technologies, and tools that corporations are putting behind these roles. I think by being very vocal about the wins that legal ops contributes to a corporation. That's either through ROI, time savings, cost reductions, with negotiated discounts with law firms or with all of the great things that legal ops does to help differentiate themselves as just a purely cost center. I think by doing that, being vocal about it, and advertising these wins; it really helps move the industry forward.