"If lawyers are so smart, why is contracting so inefficient?"

This question followed me through Axiom, Meta's 2,000-person legal team, Coinbase, and now SpotDraft. A decade later, the answer hasn't changed.

The tools evolve. The principles that drive efficiency don't.

‍Three Eras, One Framework
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Legal Ops 1.0 was survival mode. We were scrappy underdogs trying to prove operational efficiency mattered as much as legal expertise. The fight was simple: prove our value or disappear.

Legal Ops 2.0 was the build era. We layered structure onto chaos, technology stacks, workflows, metrics and slowly transformed legal teams from cost centers into strategic partners.

Legal Ops 3.0 is where we are now. Strip away the AI hype, and the work still revolves around the same three levers it always has: People. Process. Technology.

Only now, technology isn’t software. It’s intelligence.

‍The Holy Trinity Evolves (But Doesn’t Change)

Here’s the original playbook:

• People brought judgment, collaboration, leadership.
  
• Process created structure, consistency, scale.
  
• Technology accelerated it all.

That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is how fast we can move.

• ‍People: We’re not just supporting anymore. We’re enabling. Legal teams now include prompt engineers and workflow designers. We measure outcomes, not hours.

• Process: Perfection is out. Iteration is in. Our human–AI workflows break work into predictable stages — intake, drafting, review, approval, learning. Routine goes to machines. Judgment stays human.
• Prompts: What were once templates became playbooks. Now they’re prompt libraries. The infrastructure mindset didn’t vanish — it just grew sharper and faster.

What Remains vs. What Accelerates

Unchanged:

1. Judgment, context, and risk still need people
   
2. Clear leadership and processes still matter
   
3. The mission stays the same: enable business, minimize risk
   
   

Accelerated:

1. Execution velocity (months → weeks)
   
2. Knowledge decay (annual → quarterly)
   
3. Value creation (efficiency → intelligence)
   
4. Junior lawyer focus (routine → strategic work)

‍The Paradox of Progress

The best legal ops professionals I know aren’t great because they chase shiny tech. They’re great because they master fundamentals and adapt them to whatever tool comes next. AI didn’t invent workflows, it exposed which ones actually matter. Prompts didn’t create knowledge management, they made bad knowledge management expensive. Automation didn’t remove judgment, it made it more valuable.

‍The Future Is Human

So when people ask me what Legal Ops 3.0 really means, here’s my answer: it means what it always did. We orchestrate people, process, and technology to make legal more strategic, efficient, and valuable to the business. We just do it faster, smarter, and with sharper focus now.

The fundamentals won’t save us from change. They’ll guide us through it.

‍The playbook hasn’t changed—but the way leaders run it has. See how they’re doing it today here.