It’s been just over a year since I launched Legal Ops Career as a spin-off from The Legal Technologist. There have been successes over that time (and failures too) but most importantly there have been lessons learnt!
What went well
Mentoring has been one of the things that has gone really well this year. Seeing two of the mentees find themselves in the jobs they were looking for was highly fulfilling. As mentor for one of those two it was great to see the hard work of the mentee pay off. They had to build up their network, learn and ultimately persevere despite setbacks.
Mentoring will now be the only paid subscription on the Legal Ops Career website and more details for that and how to sign up can be found here.
The other thing that went well was the Careering Ahead webinar series. Each webinar has had more and more sign ups and people that have attended seem to have enjoyed them. They are ultimately there to focus on different facets of the legal ops career – and most importantly they are there to provide some practical takeaways that can be used.
There is a webinar every month – feel free to subscribe to our newsletter or follow our LinkedIn company page for details of the next one.
What hasn’t gone so well (aka failed!)
The first thing that hasn’t gone so well is the Defining Legal Ops Career project. This isn’t so much a failure of those that got involved – there were definitely people that were interested in the project and what it aimed to achieve. I am also still invested in what the Legal Ops Career as a concept to be promoted at universities as an alternative legal career.
The issue perhaps is that I tend to spread myself thin and I haven’t given this project the time and effort it deserves. The second issue is that my hope for the end result is that it has solid impact – that it is useful and instigates positive change as far and wide as possible. I think for that to happen it requires partnerships (e.g. with higher education) that affirm the end result and in effect provide a stamp of approval.
It isn’t the end of the project but I think the lesson learnt is that I probably need a team of people and funding to make it a reality. (Big thanks to Nina Hastik here for offering her time to get involved with the management of the project).
The other thing that didn’t go too well was the Circle community space. I had (perhaps naively) imagined that having a no-selling closed space would allow people to talk about career-related topics. That didn’t really work out and I couldn’t really get engagement in a space that people probably don’t use in their day-to-day (e.g. LinkedIn, etc). So that’s been closed down but perhaps in the future something similar could be set up again when the need arises.
Lessons Learnt
The main lesson learnt is to simplify the offering towards the things that people want – which to me are mentoring (so people can break into legal ops or progress in their careers) and webinars (so people can learn from thought leaders in the space).
Big impact needs to be aligned with a big budget to achieve it – and I think I’ve broken some golden rules in trying to go big from the outset (ie ‘keep it simple’ and ‘start small and build’). The hope is that the webinars build momentum – and with a refined focus doing a few things well is better than doing lots of things poorly.
The commercial offering will revolve around mentoring only with content being free to view. I’m hopeful that people will share their career stories or career advice more now that the content isn’t paywalled.
It’d be great if you could..
Legal Ops Career is a community project that isn’t profit-making. So please do take advantage of the mentoring scheme as a mentee and that will keep us going and the lights on!
My reasoning for starting up Legal Ops Career has nothing to do with financial gain – and everything to do with helping people. I’ll keep it going as long as I know that it has a positive impact. With that in mind – please do get in touch with me if you’ve got value from the things we offer. It’s always good to know that has helped in some way!
This is a space for the benefit of the legal ops community so if there is something we should add (or you’re interested in getting off the ground) then also feel free reach out to me.
Marc May
Founder
Legal Ops Career and Legal Technologist