Shohei Ohtani I am not.
Editor’s note: Each year, Kevin Cohn, Brightflag’s Chief Customer Officer, offers his predictions for the coming year. Catch up on his 2022 predictions, 2023 predictions, and 2024 predictions.
I’m back for a fourth consecutive year to offer my predictions. Read on for my self-scored 2024 predictions, and my 2025 predictions.
Scoring My 2024 Predictions
- Legal ops hiring (re)heats up: Unclear. More legal ops positions are being created now than a year ago, and more of them are to originate legal ops functions. That’s great. At the same time, they’re more junior on average, and therefore pay less.
- Legal ops compensation normalizes: Miss. Our legal operations compensation report is the definitive benchmark for the profession, and while this year’s highlighted a number of important trends, normalization of compensation wasn’t one of them.
- Legal looks for outside help on AI: Hit. A recent survey by Deloitte Legal. found that 95% of Chief Legal Officers are using generative AI, much of it building on tools and use cases that are already deployed elsewhere in the organization.
- The AI craze dies down (a bit): Miss. A baseline understanding of and comfort with how AI works is a prerequisite for shifting into a business as usual mindset. If 2024 has taught me anything, it’s that many people aren’t close to having either.
- Corporate legal’s remit expands: Unclear. This is tough to pin down, partly because the US presidential election has turned ESG, until recently a fast-growing area of focus for Chief Legal Officers, into the third rail of corporate governance.
- Am Law 100 rate increases slow: Miss. According to Brightflag’s recent report, Am Law 100 firms doubled their average rate increase to 10% in 2024. At some point these aggressive increases are going to backfire in spectacular fashion.
- LinkedIn launches community features: Miss. There hasn’t been any movement towards this at all; LinkedIn has kept its focus on the e-learning market, decimating Udemy’s stock price (down more than 40% this year) in the process.
- SaaS proliferation resumes: Miss. Zylo saw a continued shrinking of the average corporate SaaS footprint from 291 to 269 applications. Their trends report, which is a great read, has a hypothesis about what’s driving this…
- The CFO remains in the driver’s seat: Hit. CFOs are looking for every opportunity to shift to responsible growth, making it all the more important for legal ops leaders to write rock-solid business cases for their legal tech investments.
- Brightflag has a great year: Hit. Our growth will be about the same as in 2022 and 2023 combined. That’s on top of fantastic improvements like our all-new invoice review experience and Ask Brightflag, the first AI assistant for legal spend and matters.
Three hits, five misses, and two unclear. Shohei Ohtani I am not. Okay, let’s move on to my 2025 predictions (and hope I fare better!).
2025 Predictions
- Flight to purpose-built AI: We had a laughable experience asking a general-purpose AI product to turn a description of a workflow into a diagram. In contrast, a purpose-built AI product was able to do it flawlessly. Expect more focus on the latter.
- The year of AI assistants: Salesforce, the most important SaaS company in the world, is going long on AI agents. Brightflag offers an AI assistant for corporate legal teams, and we employ a few internally to make us more productive, too.
- Prompts become core IP: Writing a prompt is the act of building something on top of an LLM. How smart the thing is that you build depends on your understanding of the use case and how effectively you translate it into a prompt. That’s IP.
- Cloud laggards move: SaaS spending surpassed on-premises software spending for the first time in 2022, but there’s still a large portion of spend—around 35%—that isn’t on the cloud. Partly driven by AI, many laggards will move to the cloud in 2025.
- CLOs and ops come together: Historically, Chief Legal Officers have gone to certain events (e.g., ACC and TechGC) and legal ops to others (CLOC, Legal Operators). In 2025 we’ll see more mixing of these groups, with LegalOps.com leading from the front.
- Community is in: Across all software categories, buyers increasingly prefer to learn about solutions from experts. Community-oriented leaders like Matt Wheatley, Tyler Finn, Jason Smith, and Bernadette Bulacan are great examples of how to do this well.
- Customer service shines: Flying solo as a legal ops professional can be overwhelming; you need to be a strategist, tactician, teacher, and troubleshooter all at once. That’s why so many are catching on to the importance of their vendors having great customer service.
- CLM consolidation continues: Docusign acquired Lexion in May and Workday acquired Evisort in September. Although not a consolidation (yet!), KKR acquired Agiloft in May. I expect to see even more M&A activity in the CLM space throughout 2025.
BrightFlag logo courtesy of BrightFlag. - Brightflag has a great year: Success compounds; with each passing year we have an even greater right to win in the market. That said, we never take anything for granted and will continue to do our very best work for our customers.
I hope you have a safe and happy holiday season.
Join the conversation!