We’re just twelve days away from the CLOC Global Institute Conference! Here’s the CLOC 2023 Word Cloud to give you a sense of the topics being discussed!

Corporate Legal Operations Consortium’s conference – CLOC 2023 – will be conducted May 15th through May 18th. It will be held at the Bellagio in Las Vegas and is a fully in-person event again this year.

As I like to do for conferences like this, I took this year’s schedule of events and ran the session titles and descriptions through a word cloud generator. I then reviewed the first cut of it and removed some obvious words from the list (counts in parenthesis): legal (235), operations (59), ops (31), session (49) and join (32). The CLOC 2023 Word Cloud shown above is the result I got.

Here are some notable terms that occur frequently:

• “Contract” appears the most with 46 hits.
• “Law” (which I perhaps could have excluded) appears 41 times.
• “Business” and “Management” appear 39 times.
• “Teams” appears 33 times (mostly as “legal teams”, one occurrence of “Microsoft Teams”). “Team” appears another 26 times.
• “AI” appears 32 times (but zero hits for “artificial intelligence”), followed by “Technology” at 31 times.
• “Change”, “Value” and “Departments” appear 28 times each.
• “Data” appears 27 times, “Share” and “CLM” appear 25 times each, “Time” appears 24 times and “Department” appears 21 times.

As for terms related to eDiscovery?:

• “Discovery” appears 8 times (only one of those is “eDiscovery”).
• “Governance” appears 4 times (but zero hits of “information governance”).
• “Cyber” appears twice (no hits for “security”).
• “Privacy” appears once (as a hit for “data privacy”).

You might think that means it’s not a conference for eDiscovery professionals. Think again. I counted at least 22 eDiscovery software and service providers that are sponsors and exhibitors at CLOC 2023. That’s a lot! And there are several others that I know which will be there unofficially for meetings, etc.

Additionally, CLOC did something in their schedule of events I thought was really interesting – identify the CLOC Core 12 functional area associated with each session. So, I decided to count them to see how many there were of each functional area. Here’s what I got (number represents the number of times listed as a CLOC Core 12 functional area covered):

• Technology: 39
• Strategic Planning: 17
• Organization Optimization & Health: 13
• Business Intelligence: 8
• Firm & Vendor Management: 7
• Practice Operations: 7
• Training & Development: 7
• Program/Project Management: 6
• Service Delivery Models: 5
• Financial Management: 4
• Knowledge Management: 3
• Information Governance: 1

That’s right, Information Governance is the “Rodney Dangerfield” in terms of respect at the CLOC 2023 conference (at least in terms of mentioned CLOC Core 12 coverage)! As for Technology being (by far) the most, a lot of that may be due to the large number of “solution labs” being conducted by sponsors. Many of them involve technology solutions (hence categorized as “Technology” as their CLOC Core 12 functional area) even if they don’t explicitly state the word “technology” in their session description.

Hopefully, the CLOC 2023 Word Cloud gives you some sense of what’s being covered at this year’s CLOC Global Institute Conference – a lot of contracts, quite a bit of business and management, some AI and technology and less of eDiscovery, security, privacy and governance. I’ll highlight some notable sessions as we get closer to the conference. Stay tuned!

So, what do you think?  Are you planning to attend CLOC 2023? I’ll be there! Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.