"Legal Operations" didn't exist as a job title in 2007. Today it's a $7.3 billion US market projected to hit $13.1 billion by 2033.
No vendor created it. Corporate legal departments accidentally built an entire category before anyone thought to sell them software. The playbook is backwards from every category creation strategy—and that's exactly why it worked.
How Categories Usually Fail
RegTech tried the standard playbook in 2015: build product, invent category name, educate market, capture demand. Raised billions. Created conferences. Built analyst relations.
The category never materialized. "Regulatory technology" described what vendors wanted to sell, not what buyers wanted to solve.
CLM (contract lifecycle management) succeeded with the opposite approach—vendors named specific workflow pains instead of an aspirational vision. CLM became the largest US legal tech segment at $8-10 billion.
Then Legal Operations broke both models.
The Category Nobody Planned
By the early 2010s, corporate legal departments started hiring for a role that didn't exist. They improvised names: legal operations managers, legal process leads, business operations coordinators.
Nobody was selling "legal operations software" because nobody knew what legal operations was.
CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) changed everything—not by defining the category, but by naming the problem first.
Founded in Silicon Valley in 2015, CLOC didn't build software. They built a community. Legal ops professionals finally had a name for what they did, a peer group to benchmark against, and a conference to attend.
By 2017, CLOC's Las Vegas conference drew 1,800 attendees. The Core 12—CLOC's reference model for legal ops optimization—became the industry standard before vendors built tools to support it.
Demand existed before supply.
Why Reverse Category Creation Wins
Traditional model: Vendor → Product → Category Name → Market Education
Legal Operations model: Practitioner Pain → Community → Category Name → Vendor Response
The difference? Legitimacy.
When CLOC said "these are the 12 core functions of legal operations," corporate legal departments listened because CLOC was corporate legal departments. When SimpleLegal, Brightflag, and LawVu later built tools matching the Core 12, they inherited instant credibility.
US corporate legal departments spend $90.8 billion annually. Getting them to adopt anything requires proving it solves real problems. CLOC did the legitimacy work for free.
Three Moves That Worked
Name the role before the tools. CLOC established "legal operations professional" as a legitimate function years before legal ops software matured. By 2024, legal ops appeared in 22,238 US corporate legal departments. The profession existed independently of any vendor.
Let practitioners set standards. The Core 12 wasn't marketing material—it was an operational framework built by ops leaders benchmarking their own departments. Vendors responded to defined requirements instead of creating arbitrary categories.
Build community, not demand. CLOC membership includes buyers, vendors, and stakeholders. Vendors participate in category definition instead of controlling it.
What Legal Tech Should Do Instead
You can't artificially engineer reverse category creation. But you can recognize when you're creating categories versus joining movements:
→ Are practitioners already doing the work without your product? → Do they have their own vocabulary? → Can they benchmark without you? → Would they gather without vendor sponsorship?
EvenUp created "Personal Injury AI" after finding 50,000 US personal injury lawyers using manual processes they desperately wanted to automate. The problem existed. EvenUp named and solved it.
Filevine positioned "Legal Operating Intelligence System" after finding mid-market law firms juggling 15+ point solutions. The category reflected existing behavior, not an aspirational future.
The worst category creation attempts in US legal tech share one pattern: vendors inventing problems practitioners don't recognize. The best attempts—CLM, Legal Operations, vertical AI—name things buyers already do, just without good tools.
The Real Lesson
US corporate legal departments created a $7.3 billion category by accident because they solved their own problems before asking vendors for permission.
Legal tech vendors obsess over being "category creators." But Legal Operations proves the opposite works better in enterprise: be the category responder when practitioners have already created the category themselves.
Find US legal departments doing something inefficiently at scale. Name what they're doing. Build the tool that makes it easier.
Skip the part where you convince them the category matters. They already know. They've been doing it manually for years.
