By Rob Hewett
This week, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) – the largest professional association for legal operations professionals – announced plans to establish the Legal Operations Certified Professional (LOCP) credential. LOCP will be the first independently verified professional certification for legal ops professionals. Legal IT Insider spoke to Carl Morrison, CLOC’s certification advisory committee board liaison and senior manager, legal operations at Otsuka Pharmaceutical Companies about this latest development.
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Morrison told Legal IT Insider that this idea had been brewing for a while, “because of the maturation of the legal operations profession […] and witnessing the need and requests from individuals for standardisation and a certification programme.”
Noticing these signals from the industry, CLOC surveyed 530 global participants, discovering that 53% of respondents explicitly identified “skills-based credentialing or micro-certifications” as a high-value future offering essential to their professional growth. Furthermore, qualitative feedback suggested that, in the absence of a standardised credential, scope creep and ambiguity in legal operations professionals’ roles has occurred. CLOC intends to fill this gap and help to establish standards in the profession for both employee and employer to recognise where individuals have “gone above and beyond what’s required of them to do the job”.
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CLOC has brought in external consultants, Assessment Systems Corporation and KaWest Partners (including a psychometrician), to aid with the development of an exam. They will help with the “full analysis of job tasks as we develop the certification” given that the scope of a legal operations role can have huge variation across organisations and sectors. CLOC intends for the certification exam to lean into its “CLOC Core 12” skills – the areas in which a legal operations professional should have capacity to perform, whether it be at a firm, in-house team, or vendor. These include areas like technology, financial planning and training and development.
Although the LCOP is in the “beginnings of creation”, CLOC says the credential will not be static, given the rapid evolution of the legal industry. The intention is for the first cohort to take the certification process – “beta-testing” – at CLOC’s annual global institute in Las Vegas in May 2027. Furthermore, CLOC expects to pass on this certification to an independent board given the importance of having validity around the exam.
LITI will stay abreast of any further updates as the LCOP continues along in its development.