In this special CLOC Talk Live from CGI 2026 episode, leaders from Neota Logic and the CLOC Maturity Committee pull back the curtain on the highly anticipated CLOC Compass, a powerful new tool designed to help legal operations professionals measure, benchmark, and accelerate their maturity journey. Hear the story behind a vision that began as a simple spreadsheet and evolved into an interactive platform that delivers personalized insights, actionable roadmaps, and a new way for legal ops teams to demonstrate value and drive strategic growth. Whether you're a legal ops team of one or leading a mature global function, this conversation offers an exciting look at how data, benchmarking, and AI-powered insights are shaping the future of legal operations.

Mm. And could not be more excited to show the community what Neota has been able to bring to life with maturity assessment tool. My name is Kevin Bielawski, Senior Director of Legal Operations at Husch Blackwell. I'm also co-chair of the LD Map Committee with Lindsay. And yes, been on this journey for a long time, starting, gosh, four or five years ago?

And folks like, you know, Dana Harris are on board with that. Shout out to Dana and all his work over the years. But yeah, kind of where that journey went from there. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that, and I'll add some color as we go? Yeah, absolutely. So I did look back at old notes that we had taken, and it did, it was born out of the LPM committee, and really the need and the desire.

At that point, that committee was having regular meetings, and there was a lot of people, and there was a desire as we talked to our peers to really understand your maturity and to be able to quantify that and to give that to your general counsel or CLO. So one of the things that we did was we spun off and started working on a tool that would be able to quantify- Mm-hmm

how you are doing with the ultimate goal of benchmarking against your peers. Because, you know, it's great that I'm a 3.3 in financial management, but what is Netflix doing? What does that mean? What is... Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What does that mean? How can I say, "Hey, GC, this means I'm doing really well"? Yeah. Or, "Hey, GC, this means we need to put some resources into this."

Um- What did those early attempts look like? I mean, it's been in the works for so long. Yeah. So it was an Excel file that I actually still, I'm not proud to admit this, but I still use to report every six months to my GC. It's an Excel file that you pick the numbers, and you drop down, and some of our CLOC community members might remember that 'cause we went out, and we did a pilot group where we'd go through the Excel file with everybody.

And then the report that we would generate from it was all manual, corresponding to colors, to maturity levels, but it was so useful, even in that manner, just being able to show the iterations over the years. Mm-hmm. And of course, there's no benchmarking because 12 of us were using it. Right. But it was so useful and still remains to be so useful.

I can't wait. I'm gonna blow my GC's mind when I show him what the tool is capable of doing and how instantaneous that reporting and beautiful that reporting is, honestly. It was one of the early artifacts that we were shown, and just looking at the Excel and how you were doing it, it was a novelty. It was really easy for us to just look at it, understand what you guys were trying to achieve.

It was a great first stepping stone. Easy for us to just say, "Okay, this makes sense. Let's put it in Neota Logic terms and give them a digitized version." Some of our early iterations we would share at sessions at CGI and then would say, "Hey, we're gonna do a breakout session," or, "Meet us at the Clock booth and we'll share it with you."

And you get folks coming up or coming to those sessions and really wanting to dive in, and they started to see, okay, I can start to tell a story, a more robust story about the journey my legal ops team is on, and I can back it up with some data. It's funny that when, when we talk about data, because the tool, get in there live already right now, a beta version available free to members, you can get in there.

The question comes up around what about the data? I want my data in there, but I don't want it used in the benchmarking, or I do want the benchmarking, and so All these questions started to surface, and Juan Klotz was another key contributor, probably some of the wireframes we- we're gonna share later in our presentation.

Really f- the start of that evolution and getting over to Neota, what, to what it is today, and I'm like Lindsay, I'm like, "This is phenomenal. This has grown so much." And so Chris Chaz, I don't know if you can talk a little bit about the data aspect of it and- Yeah. Yeah ... and what's going on there so that members have some comfort about getting in, using the tool in a robust way and using it.

I mean, I am by training, by background, a lawyer. I'm so familiar with these concerns, the same kind of questions that I would have raised. But the way that Neota is organized and designed is secure and confidential by design. And the Compass tool, which as Kevin says, is available for members of CLOC, cloc.org/compass, you can opt in and out of the benchmarking.

So you'll always have the ability to control your data, and any data used in benchmarking would be totally anonymized as well. So there is a lot of control over that. But it was a really exciting project for us from the technical side, just because that framework i- already exists, and it's already so detailed and so thought through, and all we needed to do was take that and digitize it, which is what we do all day, every day.

Yeah, Chris was one of the main builders of the tools. I wish all of our customers were as excited about our products as you guys are. It's, it's been an amazing journey. But to speak more on the data, it's true. You can have it anonymized. You can opt in and out, share it, and it's really accessible, where maybe you're used to an Excel and you have to comb through it, and you can have typos in Excel.

Yeah. Having a digitized version allows you to easily go into the platform, go through the assessments that matter most to you, and there is a beautiful dashboard which really exemplifies this year's CLOC theme of Stronger By Design, a beautifully designed dashboard that says, "Here are the assessments I've taken.

Here's when I've taken them, Q1, the year." You can look at it over time, go in and out, look at your data, see what you've answered at when. It's downloadable. You have it either in an Excel or you can get it in a PDF format. It's yours to share, and as you said, if you wanna make it available to the larger community, it's your choice.

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Built for e-discovery scale, deployable on-prem when privilege demands it. To learn more, visit discernus.ai. Lindsay, do you wanna add the framework, the four maturity levels people can work through? I think that'd be helpful. So I think we have worked through these maturity levels since essentially the Core 12 was designed.

I think maybe one was added at one point, but the importance here is as you're assessing yourself, you can start at baseline, or you can start at and move forward, or that can be your baseline. So if you are not intending, or if it is not integral to your legal department to be advanced maturity- Mm-hmm ... in organization optimization and health because your HR department and your company really drives that, you can choose to maintain a level that is earlier on the maturity schedule, and that's fine.

One of the things that I think is, and you guys can speak to this more, that is coming, is weighted benchmarking. So if you don't wanna s- have the visual of being low on the maturity scale, you can weight that differently, and that will show in the report. And I think fundamentally when we looked at maturity levels across the industry and across what other consultants were doing, and I think enter your favorite consultant that charges law departments quite a bit for this type of tool, we really thought about the right number of maturity phases.

And I do believe we started at three- Yeah ... and then went to four because it was just important to have that captured in that way. We also had quite a few discussions about advanced. Mm-hmm. Because advanced looks very, very different for a huge corporation with a ton of resources- Yeah ... than it might look for our legal ops of one in small startups, for example.

That's such a key point. I think All attendees of CGI, especially first timers, that's what I talk about to them is like, "Listen, you're gonna see some of the best of the best out there." So they would be in that advanced area where any self-assessment, you have to have some level of honesty. So you're probably more in the, what we call the reactive.

You're waiting for things to fly at you, or there's constantly things coming at you. You haven't really emerged with a plan or some concrete specific formulaic way to move across that particular, the technology discipline within the core 12 or organizational health, things like that. And then you go into like developing, which is right before the leading framework.

But I think that framework has been thought about pretty robustly. And so- It is one of the most powerful things if I think about the whole structure is that it can be designed to be so individual to you, to your organization. And as you mentioned benchmarking, Lindsey, the ability to kind of down-weight parts of the core 12 that are not really at the forefront for you in your organization.

You can make sure that's sort of flexibly awaited in the way that you think about your maturity and- Your point earlier that you might not strive to be leading in every single area, and you're not just getting a score when you take these assessments, you're getting a customized plan that comes out of it.

Yeah. But we came up with the POC in Excel and then realized we really needed a playbook to support this tool. Yeah. Because so what if you get a 3.3? Right. What does that mean? Right. For new practitioners, you're just left in the same boat that they have been and why they wanted the tool to begin with. So we pivoted and generated the playbook, and the playbook is what feeds a lot of the suggestions and things that come out in the summary report, and the playbook was released two years ago at CGI and still utilized today.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, with some of the announcements you're hearing at Chicago, I'm already thinking about the AI addendum like, oh- Yeah ... that's now out of date. You... That now needs to be updated, which I think speaks to the tool itself that needs to be- Yeah ... it is gonna continually evolve as the legal ops area evolves.

Four or five years ago, legal engineers weren't a known entity. Maybe they were out there, but now it's becoming more of a role, a substantial role. I was in with some legal ops leaders yesterday, and they were talking about how they were completely rebranding- Mm-hmm ... their teams, not as legal ops, but more as, like, policy operations.

Yeah. And so I think the evolution that it's gotten us to this point with the Compass tool, and I look out on the horizon, and that gets me even more excited, particularly Chris, with some of the AI Technologies that are available and how are they gonna get leveraged into the tool is exciting. Yeah, we're definitely talking about that right now and looking and exploring different ways we can implement AI.

Same thing with every other type of tool out there, but with the assessments you're getting and the outputs that you'll receive, if we can leverage AI to give you a tailored plan, I know somebody in this organization or in this vertical, might be in healthcare, legal, pharmaceuticals, whatever your vertical is, your plan might be different, and using AI to give you a customized plan and not just a static plan is a really powerful thing and- Yeah

really customize it to your needs, your organization, and just helps push the needle that much further, especially when you're presenting this back to your GCs, your leadership. It's a really tailored plan and specific to what you need to do. There is no organization that has deeper knowledge of legal operations than Clock.

I mean, the trove of materials and resources that exist within the organization, being able to sort of filter over that, search through that intelligently to pick out recommendations and insights that are so individualized to the experience that you're having in your organization, that's where we wanna go next.

And there are so many plans that we have, so many ideas for version two of Compass, and I mean, benchmarking is one piece of that. We've talked about certifications. We've talked about longitudinal tracking over time. There's so many ways that we could develop this tool because it's a living playbook. It changes all the time You mentioned on the piece being able to tap into Clocks, robust resources.

I mean, that's something that I think we've all probably gone into the resources and looking for something, and it takes forever and, you know- Oh, yeah ... kind of think today, you know, boy, we need an overlay on this. But today in the playbook, we are including the links to those resources- Absolutely ... which is a start.

Formally, you'd have to go look for those resources and determine how they apply. Yeah. And I think just having them in today's environment, just on your suggestions to move forward- Mm-hmm ... or on that summary, is a huge move in the right direction, and I think people really appreciate it. I love when I got into the tool the other day, I got into an artifact.

And the way you've laid it out, it's great, 'cause you give an indication of where that document or where that artifact is positioning you, which I think is okay. It's just a level set where I just came in through the assessment piece. So, uh, yeah, I love the design and love how it connected. I was actually a little bit taken aback when I saw how you guys connected it up.

I'm like, "Wow, they did an amazing job." We took stronger by design to heart when we were doing this. Yes. And it's what we strive for with all of our tools, but especially this. We wanna make it extremely interactive, but easy to navigate. You can start to put a lot together. There's 12 different areas, and things can get lost, and one of the things we really want to strive for is make it easy to go where you need to go, what's important to your organization, show you the best and most important information that's relevant to you, and find the resources- Yeah

that you need. We, we're thinking about, you know, who you described, Kevin, that first attendee of Clock, that new entrant into the legal operations space, and that's the persona that we want to enable and empower and give confidence and show that there's a path forward. I think you've done a great job at that, but I think when we tend to focus on new practitioners and tool for new practitioners or a session for new practitioners, I think what this also does really well is it's something for experienced practitioners.

Absolutely. Folks that have been doing this the same way, their assessments the same way, using the same resources. I think this breathes a new light into that for experienced practitioners as well in a really great way and in a way that I haven't seen. And I'll come at this from a law firm perspective because some of the most impactful collaborations we've had with in-house legal groups are when we connect with the legal ops folks on that side of the fence.

And we've often introduced legal ops teams to Clock just via the relationships our attorneys have with the in-house attorneys, and they're like, "Hey, we have this guy or his team, and-" We have this legal ops team. We're not sure what they do. But then once we connect, we introduce them to Clock, we talk about these frameworks around maturity, how you can sell value up the chain and help position your GCs in this really nice light to give them the right talking points, help direct resources to the right maturity spot on the Core Twelve where they wanna spend their time.

So if you're listening to this and you're a law firm legal ops professional, you need to share this with your partners who are interfacing with the in-house groups who the vast majority have someone in a legal ops role. That's so much value add there that is untapped in my mind, and only a few firms have really gone down that road in a meaningful way.

It is such an exciting time to be, I think, in legal operations right now. I mean, even as you look around the conference exhibit hall, AI has changed so much, right, in the last few years. So I remember coming four or five years ago, and the message has changed so much. Even yesterday, Claude for Legal being announced by Anthropic.

It's so-- such an exciting time to be living through this and to working out how we can kind of take AI into our message and our, our technology. So as we look forward and we look at the tool and we talked about how it came to be, why Neota? Neota's been around for longer than people think. Neota has been doing legal work and working in the legal technology space for over 20 years, which always shocks people.

It's always been about turning human judgment, human expertise into a digital system. And for a long time, that was using logic, using structure, using explicitness. But now with AI, you can combine the power of probability and probabilistic thinking and the natural language capabilities of AI and turn that unstructure, that mess into a structure and orchestrate the use of AI tools.

And I think that's really what Neota is about, and we're an organization that wants to consult and to understand processes, understand playbooks that exist, and turn those into digital systems, just like we did with CLOC, because the framework existed. The innovation was just us quickly making that sta- available at scale to people online.

So it's an amazing journey that we've been on with CLOC, and we're excited to go further into that as well. It really is a true testament of what we do every day. Like you said, the framework was there, the institutional knowledge was there, and just a couple months of collaboration with all the great folks at CLOC, we were able to extract that, work with you week after week, iterate on top of the tool, get it to where we all saw the same vision, and it was really easy to see.

And it was a fun process, honestly, to be involved and watch the tool grow and all the aha moments and the smiles that when people got in there and this is, this is what I had in my head, this is what we had on paper, and now we have a tool that actually can deliver that. I mean, one of the last things I'd love to say is just thanks to everyone who's been involved and all the knowledge we've been able to share and everyone who's tested it behind the scenes and really brought the product to life and the tool to life.

And I'm excited to see where it goes to in the next level, all the different organizations and CLOC members that it'll help and serve. And- Yeah ... it's gonna drive a lot of benefit to a lot of people. We're excited to have as many CLOC members test this tool out. We wanna get it out there. We wanna hear from everybody.

How can we improve this experience for you? 'Cause, you know, the best thing for us on the technology side, on the Neota side, is hearing a vision from folks like you and standing it up, turning around the next day and showing you this or the opportunity and the possibility of making a digital system. And development doesn't end here while we launch the product.

This is just the start. All the feedback that we'll get back, the usage over time, the scoring that we're seeing, the benchmarking that we'll be able to implement, the tool's only gonna grow, get better, serve more people, serve more members, and drive more value Yeah, and just to say, you know, thank you for, I think I said it up on the top of the podcast, but thank you for bringing this vision to life in such a way, you know, in the session we will, as Kevin mentioned, show the wire frames.

You brought this to life in such a way that our vision that we had way back when is still so captured, and I think that's really great because a lot of folks spent a lot of time thinking of different iterations. And so when we thought meeting with technology providers and doing these things, you never really get to see your vision executed in such a phenomenal way.

And Kevin, agree. Yeah. It was like we were blown away at the success of how you captured that. So wasn't involved at all in, like, the clock selection of Nyota, but was familiar with the Nyota platform. Our firm had used it for some higher education work, and worked flawlessly. It was a, a rock solid product, so I was excited to see that Nyota was being brought on board.

I'll, I'll throw a curve ball at you 'cause you brought something up that really... You talk about the knowledge capital- Yes ... that people have, and we talk about AI. One of the biggest hurdles I'm seeing, and, and maybe you've given this some thought, and I'll bring this full circle back to the compass tool because one of the big hurdles is how do you get those SMEs- Mm-hmm

to port that knowledge into a platform and give up some of that knowledge capital that makes them special? I'm, I'm- Mm ... curious if, you know- Yeah ... what your thoughts are on that because if you think about the tool itself and you look out on the horizon, you can start to see some things start to unfold that will- create opportunities for people to share that knowledge capital in a very meaningful way, but it's the human experience there is- Yeah

is interesting. It's a super interesting question. I mean, it's, as lawyers, you do build this bank of judgment and experience, and you've seen this kind of document 30 times, and so you just know where to pick up the different parts of areas of contention or things that you want to change, and yeah, it's a really interesting challenge.

I think the way that we approach this is that knowledge, it can be encoded, it can be explicitly brought forward, and the ability to scale that, to use that across an organization, to allow the organization to leverage your brilliance, your expertise, is so powerful, and it only benefits and promotes those people.

It shows how brilliant they are, and the ability for them to communicate that excellence i- is even better than the holding onto that. Yeah. But yeah, just again, to say how amazing an experience it's been to work with CLOC. From the Neota side, it's just been a absolute joy to work with an organization which is so driven to want to help the legal ops community, and it is really the easiest job in the world to take a vision as clear as you have and to make it a reality, and that's just what we do all day.

So no need to thank us. It's what we like to do. Well, we will thank you. And we will make a plea out to all CLOC members. We've talked about the benchmarking. We've talked about the data. The data's so important. Yes. We've also talked about how this can be so beneficial to practitioners individually, so our plea out to CLOC members is go take this.

Go to the compass. Go today. Fill it out. Start using it. The sooner you start using it, the sooner you can compare yourself against the prior version in a meaningful way. So we thank Neota, but also plea to all CLOC members to go utilize this tool. It's phenomenal. Take it for a spin.