Last Thursday, a group of some 400 legal knowledge management professionals came together for the Strategic Knowledge & Innovation Legal Leaders Summit (SKILLS) conference.  Oz Benamram asked me to pull together a 20 minute recap of all of the presentations that day, and share it with the 3 Geeks’ readers. So, here’s about a 20 minute recap of the 20 presentations for that day. Enjoy!!

Jason Barnwell – Keynote

There are two things that most of us know about Jason. First, he thinks there is always opportunities for improvement. Whether that is for himself, his team at Microsoft, and especially for law firms looking to better service their clients. His takeaway quote for me was when Kay Kim asked him what are law firms doing right and what are they doing wrong?

So the biggest challenge I see is, is structural, and as much as the business model works pretty well for about right now. But it doesn’t necessarily work great for where we’re going.

The other thing that we know about Jason is that if you are presenting on innovation in a law firm, he’s going to ask you specifically “is what you are doing benefitting the law firm only, or does it benefit the client?” So, expect to answer that question… at a minimum to yourself, even if Jason isn’t in the room.

Digital Transformation – Shark-TED-Talk-Tank (Part 1)

I loved all three sessions of our Shark-Ted-Talk-Tank presentations. We were just missing the three billionaires, and the large red carpet. But, the content was all there.

Part One dealt with what many of us see as the foundation for Knowledge Management, and that is creating a process and a platform to build upon previous work. Gina Lynch and Iris Skornicki gave not one, but two presentations on this concept.

Gina Lynch & Iris Skornicki – DealSite – A Hub for Corporate Lawyers
The goal for their DealSite project can be the outline for all of us when it comes to Knowledge Management Projects:

“Our goal was to create a centralized hub for lawyers to easily access information documents and drafts from previous similar transactions as well as to memorialize key information about our lawyers current transactions, and help to manage post closing tasks to completion.”

In true KM fashion, I’ll be repurposing this talking point for my own work.

Gina Lynch & Iris Skornicki – People, Process, & Technology
In their second presentation, they turn their eyes upon the needs of the firm’s clients. Their client asked them for a faster horse, and they developed a car. Instead of focusing on what the client said was the answer to their problem, they had a discussion about the problem. From there they worked with the client, found ways to expand the technology, and created a solution for a problem rather than a solution in search of a problem.

Accelerating Digital Legal Services | Michelle Mahoney 

Michelle Mahoney of KWM understands the importance of addressing firm culture when it comes to digital initiatives. In order to create an open mindedness around these initiatives, she lists that the initiatives have to be interconnected, the process must be easier than the old way, and the processes need to nudge people in the right direction to help incentivize behavior change.

Ari Kaplan – Partner Perspectives on Legal Innovation

In all of the times that I’ve talked with Ari Kaplan or seen him present, it seems that he’s never had a bad day. His energy is contagious. His survey of 34 law partners from 34 different firms gives some insights on what they see as important to foster a culture of innovation and success. The key takeaway from what partners think drives successful innovation projects is that:

innovation is driven from the leadership level. But it is fostered among all the firm’s professionals.

To me that’s an interesting perspective that many of us need to consider when it comes to getting buy-in from law firm leadership.

Rethink your KM & Innovation Model – Shark-TED-Talk-Tank (Part 2)

Models for Avoiding Firm Constraints | Carla Swansburg

Carla Swansburg of ClearyX comes out swinging with stating upfront that success in creating efficiencies means that you need to find ways to attach these efficiencies to Fixed Fee matters. Related to what Ari mentioned before, Carla mentioned that there are methods, such as client advisory boards, of launching that “innovation is driven from leadership”, but shifting it over to being “fostered among all the firm’s professionals.” It’s a delicate process, and one that requires measuring and presenting success back to that leadership.

LIFT – a case study for successful ground up innovation | Alicia Hardy

Alicia Hardy from White and Case gave us ten suggestions for innovation success:

1. You must be clear about the problem you’re trying to fix and your ultimate objective.
2. Establish and validate your brand.
3. Clarity of mission without being too prescriptive
4. Find the right people to help
5. Be functional agnostic
6. Create distinct and identifiable activity streams, unified under your brand with clear deliverables, and allocated responsibilities.
7. Employ both a top down and bottom up approach
8. Quick wins and longer term goals
9. The power of yes and the importance of no
10. Acknowledge the things that don’t go well, rethink, take stock, and learn. Then iterate.

The Real Skills of Innovation | Monet Fauntleroy & Anna Moca 

Anna Moca and Monet Fauntleroy state that the innovations created need to meet the needs of the business. Keys to innovative team success means focusing more on specialization over generalist, and that the solutions needed to fit within the firm’s ecosystem. That meant stopping giving the quick, one-off projects, and being much more strategic in how innovation is implemented, and having very structured innovation teams.

Data Enabled Legal Practice- Spotlight on ESG  | Bobbi Basile & Sarah Happy 

In a breakout session, I mentioned to the others in the room that all I’m hearing from people who are predicting the hot practices of 2022 and beyond is the Environmental, Social, and Governmental, or ESG practices. Bobbi Basile, and Sarah Happy backed me up on this. ESG is one of those odd areas of practice because it combines the issues of legal compliance, along with the less rigid problem of reputation. Basile and Happy point to the fact that Law firms are placing bets via investment in building data related teams, and it will be our jobs to help deliver results on those bets.

Matter Profiling to Leverage Firm Intelligence | Jeannine Zito & Cindy Bare

Cleary Gottlieb’s Jeannine Zito and Litera’s Cindy Bare cover one of the elusive projects that many of us have undertaken, and that is Matter Profiling. Jeannine admits that it is easy to go down the rabbit hole if you are not careful with these types of projects, and that she learned from previous mistakes and applied that knowledge to the current project. Specific roles were created leveraging the KM Lawyers and supporting them. Sharing success and analytics with the firm lawyers as the program matures, and then expanding when appropriate.

First, always, the use case | Bill Koch & Tom Humberstone 

Womble’s US and UK operations from Bill Koch and Tom Humberstone respectively, discuss the cultural issues of KM between the UK and US approaches. KM Attorneys are a staple in the UK and allow for a robust curation of internal data. The US is not structured that way, and there are external KM data tools that may be brought in to help beef up the KM data. So the search, taxonomies, and organization of data can be very different between offices and requires a lot of planning on the front end, and communications between the tech builders in IT, and the data curators in KM.

New Intranet; New Features | Patrick Dundas

Patrick Dundas shared his experiences on creating an updated Intranet to replace the 8 year old intranet that was good… but not as good as was needed for the firm. Some of the key pieces of the new Intranet, thanks to a lot of upfront work with the users and with consultants is:

• Guided Search – intuitive processes to help users find the content across multiple indexes and databases.
• Client Pages – Those quick information pages that help attorneys have relevant information on their clients, both internal information, and external information, when they need it.
• Correspondence contacts, which tries to answer the question of who from outside the firm is related to a client or the matter.
• The working groups list uses a novel approach of using emails to identify who is really interacting with the client.

Legal Tech Hype Cycle Highlights  }| Ron Friedmann and Zack Hutto

Ron Friedmann and Zack Hutto cover Gartner’s Legal Tech Hype Cycle, and right off the bat they talk about the increase in legal tech spend by firms being up about 50% in the past four years. And is on a continued upward trajectory. External spend is also up, with Legal Tech cracking $1B last year. Three parts of the hype cycle Friedmann and Hutto left us with were:

• First, understand what problems the innovation that you are investing in is actually going to solve, and what pain points may appear along the way.
• Second, there may be great opportunities in early stage innovation investments, but those come with much higher risk. Firms seem to be better at understanding this than corporate legal departments.
• Finally, the technology might be a great tool, but if your operations are set up to provide the right environment for that technology with things like proper data capture, you may be throwing your money away.

No Innovation without Adoption – Shark-TED-Talk-Tank (Part 4)

Concierge Services for Tech Adoption | Barbara Taylor & Elisabeth Cappuyns

Barbara Taylor & Elisabeth Capons talk about their low-tech solution for tech adoption. Their brand mantra is “Helping Lawyers Practice Smarter.” And they believe that there is “no one-size fits all approach to innovation adoption.” These two concepts made them come up with a unique approach to adoption and that was to bring in a person to work as a concierge to help facilitate the adoption. Someone that would use the tool for the attorneys and paralegals until they were ready to use it themselves. So far, this has been a hit and is allowing for the specialized assistance needed to allow for a comfort level for the users to learn the tools for themselves.

Good Work Goes Virtual | Kay Kim & Nicole Bradick

Kay Kim from Simpson Thatcher and Nicole Bradick from Theory & Principle discuss a unique type of collaboration where both sides bring their expertise in legal services and software and UX design and to bring the end result to the market, rather than keeping it as a proprietary product. In this case it was pro-bono case management, but I think many of us can see opportunities when it comes to producing a product that fits the needs not only of our own firm, but for others across the industry. And, the collaboration allows the software design company to keep the maintenance of the product, which I think most of us would agree that law firms would rather not do. Having interviewed a few leaders in legal tech design, this model of shared build and then market release is something that you will see more and more of over the next few years.

Automation for Everything Else | Josh Waddell 

Josh Wadell of Siskind Susser understands that not every firm or every practice can build out a complete software solution for their practices. But, there are certain sub processes that can be automated without a major undertaking or having to hire software developers. The idea began with ideas gathered from The Checklist Manifesto. First identify all of the processes involved and detail those so that everyone understands the steps involved. This is very popular in other industries, but the legal industry can also benefit from these.

Once the sub processes are detailed, perhaps the checklist is all that is needed. But, in many cases, there may be low-code or no-code products out there that can automate those processes and speed up delivery of the services without any reduction in quality. While Josh mentioned that small and mid-sized firms benefit from these processes, I think that even the largest firms out there could also apply these checklists to automation techniques as well.

NLP in Action and Productizing Tech– Shark-TED-Talk-Tank (Part 5)

Now we get to the really geeky portion of day one of SKILLS, or what some of you may have thought as the “I was told there would be no math” portion.

The Evolution of Data and AI in Legal  | Brian Kuhn

Brian Kuhn does a great job in explaining the evolution of AI and Data processing in Legal. Brian highlights the process and ideas behind Machine Learning and AI, and the importance to prototype, test, evaluated, allow for external testing, including opening it to clients, and working with those clients and explaining what is going on in plain English so that the clients understand the value and don’t look at the tools as some kind of Black Box. And in relation to the Hype Cycle mentioned earlier in the day, does the technology really solve the problem? Do you have the support and data to maintain such a system, and are you checking your assumptions regarding the true value of the tool?

NLP for Timecard Analysis | Andy Sprogis & Matthew Dunne

There is value in the data found in time entry. But, we’ve never really had the processing power to unlock that data, until now. Matthew Dunne of Katten along with members of his team discuss their project to use the data in time entry to help them better staff matters, and set scope and matter planning for fixed fee arrangements for depositions. The trap that many of us find when it comes to time entry data is that it is unstructured, and oftentimes missing critical pieces that help normalize the unstructured data. Clocktomizer is one product that helps structure the data. Other processes are implemented, which includes a combination of machine learning and human interaction, and of course, math! In this case it was limited to Due Diligence teams and budgeting for depositions. I think many of us would like to see how this expands as we better understand how to unlock more of these data points.

Advances in NLP | Evan Shenkman & Pablo Arredondo

Pablo Arredondo of CaseText and Evan Shenkman of Fisher Phillips had perhaps the most popular program, at least based on the survey of the audience. CaseText is working with a select group of law firms on a Natural Language Processing search tool which is structured around identifying concepts of the search rather than keyword or Boolean that we’ve all become accustomed to. Full disclosure here… my firm is also involved in beta testing the WeSearch conceptual search engine as well. Evan walked through some of the data he has pointed this tool toward, including hundreds of deposition documents. The results are pretty incredible in that this type of NLP tool allows for search phrases like “I was really upset” to locate related results like “ I feel terrible, it’s horrible. It caused me a great deal of pain and anxiety. I did not like it one bit.” The power of NLP is something that may open great opportunities in search and identifying relevant information that today’s search engines simply cannot do.

Value-Add: Selling Solutions to Clients | Susan Sommers & Max Paterson

We have so many custom solutions we’ve created, but Susan Sommers and Max Paterson asked the question of how do you turn that custom solution into a standard application? Susan asks a few questions that can help guide you on determining what works best in this situation:

• Are you building this solution for your client base, or is it broader?
• How do we want to position this tool in the market?
• Do you want the result to be a big and bold project or a minimal viable product?

All solid questions to ask before taking on this potentially massive investment of time and money.

Paterson points out the planning and development process and talked about how they developed the products in modules that can be reused. They looked at the platform and environment that the product would run on. How do you keep it evergreen so that it continues to exist and perform over and over? You want to be able to move this away from the technical side of the process and over to the business side of the project. Documentation is key here. And finally, gather the data from the beginning in order to understand if the product is successful or not.

That brings my overview to a close. These 20 presentations were absolutely fantastic. I have a feeling that I’ll be reaching out to a number of you to discuss this further on The Geek in Review Podcast, so all you presenters have been warned.

This week we talk with Factor’s Ed Sohn and Michael Callier on the consulting for in-house legal teams through what they describe as New Law companies. New Law is who corporate legal counsel reach out to in order to streamline their operations and find ways of integrating themselves into the overall mission of the corporation, rather than just the department which mitigates legal and business risks. Sohn and Callier stress that New Law companies are not a threat to established law firms, but rather a partner who can help firms differentiate themselves from their peers by allowing for the consultation to clients for alternative legal strategies.

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts |  Spotify

• Aderant acquired American Legal Net
• Barbri has acquired West Academic

Marlene Gebauer  0:13

Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert  0:20

And I’m Greg Lambert. Marlene, on this week’s show, we talked with factors Ed Sohn and Michael Callier. And their take on the needs of in house legal teams to call on outside counsel as well as the expertise of what they define as new law consultants like factor to help them not just respond to business risk, but to better position themselves to avoid these risks way before they become legal issues. You know, there there were a couple of things on this that I didn’t realize until we actually started talking with with Ed and Michael. And and first of all, was that I didn’t realize that Factor had spun out of Axiom yet. And we just had axioms David Pierce on last week. So kind of a nice coincidence there. And secondly, I completely forgot that Ed Sohn and I worked at King and Spalding at the same time. So

Marlene Gebauer  1:10

it was a long time ago, right? Yeah.

Greg Lambert  1:15

It just shows you know that the legal industry, especially the legal tech, and legal upside, man, it’s a small world.

Marlene Gebauer  1:21

So stick around for our interview with Ed and Michael. But now let’s get to this week’s information inspirations.

Greg Lambert  1:33

Marlene, mine is just a little dated, but I thought it was interesting enough to talk about as my inspiration this week, of course, that was the Thomson Reuters a really bad idea to cut their Westlaw attorney Help Desk, down to essentially business hours every day, Monday through Friday, and do away with the with the value 24/7 services, that’s it’s been a hallmark of their customer relationships as at least as long as I can remember. So Jean O’Grady posted a blog post  on her on her Dewey B. Strategic blog. And, boy, the word got out. And it costs a little bit of a backlash in the law library. And

Marlene Gebauer  2:14

yeah, I was when when it first came out. I was like, Oh, my gosh, I mean, do I need to like how am I going to position this to to the attorney population?

Greg Lambert  2:22

Yeah, yeah, me, you, you, me and about 4000 other law librarians. So, you know, after a few days of grumbling from the legal information professionals on Twitter and other social media platforms, TR reversed its decision and is now reinstating the 24/7. Services beginning I believe next week. So, you know, I do want to say that I am actually hearing, there’s some other issues coming out to both inside and outside of TR. And that is, you know, more changes in the way that you can see probably a reduction in trainers, and a reduction in sales staff. And in fact, one source told me that the plan seems to be to create an online portal for clients to use instead of salespeople. And, and the person I was talking to was, was saying that, that they’re going to find it very interesting to see the reaction when law firms and others are negotiating seven figure contracts, and are just told, hey, just just go to this website and sign back up for it and not have a person to talk to.

Marlene Gebauer  3:32

Yeah, I mean, you know, I have these experiences with websites outside of law, where, you know, there’s, you just can’t get a person and, you know, there’s, there’s, it’s always a question where, you know, it’s not sort of a common thing that is just sort of answered, you know, by the chat bot or whatever. And you just can’t get anybody on the phone or anything, and it’s just so so frustrating. And, you know, again, I mean, I would I would hate to see this, this happen, particularly since West’s customer service is, in terms of their their attorneys staff is has been really good. I will take a devil’s advocate position on this. Because, you know, I don’t really know what the data says, you know, in terms of a reduction of service. I don’t know if people are calling all hours of the night and or if they really are calling mostly within business hours. Because you know, if that were the case, that would make sense. Now, knowing what I know about attorney work habits, my guess is probably not I’m sure that that that span of time would need to be extended. But I don’t know if they have a significant number of people calling it like four in the morning. But that would be something like share that be transparent about that. So that we understand the decision that being made.

Greg Lambert  4:58

Well, and I think probably in this is anecdotal, but I would say when they do need it, it’s super important. So

Marlene Gebauer  5:07

they’re calling you at four in the morning? Yes. Yeah, it’s generally really important.

Greg Lambert  5:10

Well, and the other thing and keep an eye on this is I know that some of the new head people at Thomson Reuters are coming out of Silicon Valley out of tech companies. And so I think they’re, they’re going to have an idea of how to have tech be the replacement for people. So I think, you know, people need to stay vigilant and watch if that’s if that’s important to you to call them on it just like we did for the 24/7 service. And one of the things you know, Jean O’Grady was she was on Bob Ambrogi’s Friday afternoon legal tech roundtable. And she talks a little bit more about that. So you can check that out as well.

Marlene Gebauer  5:55

Absolutely. So I’m going to talk about hot acquisition news. So Aderant has acquired American Legal Net, and yeah, this is interesting, because ALN is a litigation workflow solution, focusing on docketing. And forms and Aderant is, of course, a billing solution. So this seems to be a very good marriage, I could see how the workflow technology can work hand in hand with billing, hopefully, without a whole lot of work for employees and attorneys. And the other acquisition I was going to highlight is that BarBri has acquired West Academic. This also seems like a good marriage, as both entities are long standing players in the legal education market. West Academic will remain in St. Paul and BarBri is in Dallas. And, you know, I wonder what that saying about, you know, the Thomson Reuters strategy regarding legal education. You know, while they’re divesting West Academic, you know, which focuses on books and treatises and study guides, you know, which let’s face it are not the moneymakers for for TR. You know, it seems that there still may be close ties.

Greg Lambert  7:07

Yeah, it looks like we both kind of picked on TR a little bit.

Marlene Gebauer  7:11

I’m just commenting.

Greg Lambert  7:14

Alright, well, that is this week’s information inspirations.

Greg Lambert  7:22

Today’s guests walk us through the Legal Services of what they call New Law. These are consultants who advise companies on the processes the technology and the innovations that can help reduce legal risk for the company and improve overall workflows and find better ways to streamline in house legal departments operations so that they align with the overall business goals of the company.

Marlene Gebauer  7:46

We’d like to welcome Ed Sohn, Senior Vice President and head of solutions and Michael Callier, Head of Legal Solutions and Consulting at FACTOR. Welcome to The Geek in Review. Thanks, Marlene.

Ed Sohn  7:55

Great to be here.

Michael Callier  7:56

Thank you, Marlene.

Marlene Gebauer  7:58

And Michael reached out because they had a topic that they wanted to talk to us about. And that’s why consultants at New Law providers instead of law firms should be leaned on as trusted advisors for today’s general counsel to do better at their jobs. And in Michael think issues at the intersection of business and law are presenting more than ever, and that new law consultants are best equipped to offer sage advice. We’ll delve into that in a minute. But first, Ed and Michael, tell us a bit about factor and how you got there?

Ed Sohn  8:25

Sure, I’m happy to start out a factor is a leader in legal managed services, providing contracting and really primarily transactional services to many of the world’s leading organizations and companies. The business is over 10 years old, but the company is just about two years old. We existed inside of a larger company known as Axiom for many years, and after a series of transactions had completed, Factor came into existence at the beginning of 2020. They’re really focused on a legal managed services strategy, you know, full time, almost entirely permanent and entirely, almost entirely lawyers. The vast majority of people are lawyers, serving our clients from around the world in transforming and creating this great blend of business expertise, market know how, acumen, together with some of the virtues of new long companies like process and technology and innovation. You know, were over 600 people around the world sitting in offices in Chicago, Belfast and Poland. I came into factor about a year and a half ago or so, after a career as a lawyer as a managed services leader as a product manager as technologist and a variety of organizations, you know, King and Spalding, Thomson, Reuters, EY, and joined Factor as the head of product and solutions, really overseeing the design of what we put into the market. The ways that we solve problems for our clients, and then also influencing the way that we deliver those solutions, and really configuring them so that they are a win win for the client. And for factor. It’s a really exciting time to be in this company. And it’s we’re just seeing tremendous growth, tremendous reinforcement from demand signals in the market. And really, most importantly, sort of a real focus on relationships with our clients, putting our clients and their needs and our people that we know, at clients, really at the center of everything that we do, but also really starting to take shape is a strategy to really focus on our people, and to invest into them in ways that we think many others are not. So it’s just an exciting time to be here. This is why I joined Factor. And we can’t wait to see what’s next.

Greg Lambert  10:44

Michael D leaving thing out?

Michael Callier  10:46

Well, I suppose I’ll introduce myself, Hello, Michael Callier, I lead Factor’s consulting and solutions, architecture teams. And at a very high level, the consulting function is designed to bring, you know, the best of factor managed services, primarily around contract and in compliance to our clients, legal departments, and ultimately optimizing their legal operations. And, you know, you all know, as well, if not better than I do, that legal operations is still fairly nascent. You know, it’s kind of niche, although absolutely necessary, and I hope we get into, get into that a little bit. I’d love to share, you know, some of the pain points that we hear from clients on a regular basis and how that fits so intimately again, with the concept of legal operations.

Greg Lambert  11:41

You say that, Well, typically the general counsel’s turn to law firms for advice, you know, circumstances now call for them to turn to what you’re referring to as the new law consultants. So can you help kind of define what you mean by new law consultants, and why GCs are making that switch now?

Michael Callier  12:03

So I had the consulting group, but I love how Ed explains this a bit. So Ed, why don’t you throw throw a few lines out there, and I’ll dive in and supplement?

Ed Sohn  12:12

Yeah, so you know, at the end of the day, we help clients perceive their own needs, that’s really what it comes down to. And so that’s a very different thing, then, when outside counsel are, you know, have historically been turned to for advice, and that advice is sort of in a legal advisory bucket, you know, the kind of sacred relationship between attorney and client, the provision of legal advice in a, you know, in a way that’s regulated by the Rules of Professional Conduct and responsibility, and, you know, so like, there’s all of that, that is really turning to a legal expert around, you know, a very sticky situation, and kind of the Council of legal advice. The advisory consulting type of, you know, world that we live in bridges between, not really so much in a legal advisory capacity, because we’re not in the practice law. We’re not sort of representing people as attorneys and clients, but really, from a position of legal domain and legal knowledge, implementing consulting and advisory techniques. And so those are the types of things that help our clients perceive their own needs, right? Because there’s a, there’s a lot of business judgment in running a legal function, a legal function as a business function inside of an organization, that there’s a lot of data and information that’s required to make decisions operationally, and from a strategic perspective, and a lot of times that subject matter knowledge is is really required, but also what’s required is, you know, organizational knowledge and operational savvy and demands and a picture of an operating model and, you know, a root cause analysis that says, the things that you’re responding to, from your position as lawyers are more symptomatic than they are, you know, causal. And so the kind of deployment of consulting techniques with a strong familiarity of, you know, legal domain, and know how, as well as a huge backdrop of the body of work that new law companies are engaged in, which is very, very focused on changing the means of production in some of those legal sort of services and, you know, aimed at efficiencies and standardization and, and that entire sort of environment that we’re immersed in, that pulls together really powerful vectors that I think are a different proposition than what outside counsel provide

Greg Lambert  14:40

Let me let me follow up on that one a little bit. What do you think are some of the obstacles that a traditional law firm has that you’re seeing the the new law operations overcome?

Ed Sohn  14:56

Most law firms, especially kind of in the history of practice of law and the relationship between outside counsel in house counsel, what we’re seeing from outside counsel, you know, it can be sort of observed from the business of law. You see outside counsel, law firm rates going up, you see, practices becoming increasingly specialized, you see, law firms strategizing to really double and triple down on their strength. And all of that is good. All of that’s great, actually, a lot of the data that we’ve seen, show that a lot of clients are actually interested in the higher billing rate timekeepers at law firms, because that usually is indicative of experience and advice. And it’s sort of there’s this notion that law firms really are being consulted for their highest and best value. And so I think that makes a ton of sense. But some of that value, doesn’t translate into making really good business strategic decisions, or implementing, you know, a roadmap over process and technology improvements, or, you know, just understanding that intersection of business and legal, really working side by side and going deep in with empathy into internal clients, and data on performance, which is a really, you know, outside counsel don’t have a ton of problems around getting data around their performance, because they’re all timekeepers. And so they build time, and they track their activities and all that. But when you go in house, it’s a complete different ballgame. And so the types of things that that new law, consultants can weigh in on, because we really bridge that gap between sort of traditional law and the kind of in house function and, and kind of new law, ALSP type services, we can provide a lot more insight, you know, and the easiest way to kind of put this without using fancy words is, sometimes I’ll go into a client, and you know, an AGC or legal Ops Head will kind of look at me and be like, you know, here’s the problem I’ve got, and we’ll talk about it. And we’ll bat around all the different angles, and we’ll think about the processes and the workflows, and how can we map this bit better? And where can we do some streamlining and efficiency? And like, do you really need to get an approval from such and such person with such and such seniority for, you know, a contract that’s less than $5 million? It’s like, we love to geek out about it. And then sometimes that that client persona will turn to me and say, Well, how do you guys do this? How do you handle this at your company and your shop? I was like, Well, you know, we do it for all these reasons. And we have these SLAs. And so and he’s like, I just assume that the way you’re doing it is probably better than the way we’re doing it. Because you’re doing this type of workload for all of our, you know, all of our peers across the industry for a whole critical mass of clients. And so you’ve got insight into how this works at scale that I don’t have, I’ve got the workloads and the clients and personas that I deal with. And so that’s the best way to describe that, like you wouldn’t turn outside counsel with that question, right. And so I think we’re really uniquely positioned to kind of differentiate in that way.

Michael Callier  17:49

And here’s, if I can, how I would supplement, getting at that, that question. So I’ve been in legal for 20 years or so, and started out as a traditional lawyer. And as a matter of fact, I started working in the legal industry as an undergrad student. Because I’ve known I wanted to be I knew I wanted to be a lawyer when I was 13. And so as I evolved as a professional, and went through the various stages of professional training as a lawyer from, you know, formal education to the informal education that we receive in a traditional law firm setting, it became very, very clear to me and even more so now, you know, the primary focus of legal education is subject matter expertise, less in the delivery of that expertise, although, obviously, the delivery has to occur. But in terms of optimizing that delivery, and capturing and efficiencies. And then, you know, the only way that we can capture efficiency is ultimately to measure the delivery mechanism, through, you know, service level agreements, or key performance indicators, whatever it is, there’s a data component, there’s an information component, there’s a system component, that is not a part of our education. It’s not a part of the service delivery model traditionally, for legal, and it hasn’t been, it hasn’t had to be it wasn’t required clients didn’t require that of us. And even now, when you look at, you know, when I talked to a CEO, so when I was I had General Counsel responsibilities for a billion dollar or $3 billion company, for the better part of a year, in the last couple of years. And I talked to the CEO about the, you know, what he expects from the legal function. It is primarily risk mitigation from a market standpoint, from a PR standpoint, from a litigation and product liability standpoint. And that’s what he pays for when he thinks about funding his legal department. Now at the same time, As a part of our consulting function, we constantly assess problem statements from our clients, where’s the pain point, and what’s the root cause of those, those the pain that you’re feeling? I have not once heard from that group of practitioners, that the problem that they’re dealing with is an inability to, you know, reach the right contracting positions, or, you know, an ineffective negotiation from a subject matter standpoint, they didn’t get the deal points that they were looking for. And you probably wouldn’t hear those complaints from those folks, because they’ve had years and years of training to get there to reach that optimum result. But the pain points that I hear all related to operations, I can’t find stuff. When someone asks me to do something, they don’t provide all the information that I need to do it. I spend as much time searching for the information that I need to do my job as I spend doing my job, which is primarily associated with, you know, in our context, contract negotiation and compliance work. And so when we marry those two, you know, the idea of the vital importance of subject matter expertise, but with information, levels of information and data increasing every day, the importance of being able to slice through and sift through the noise, to get to the information that we need, in order to deliver that subject matter expertise in a way that in particular, in a commercial context, keeps up with the pace of business, that’s a different skill set and a different muscle entirely. And so what I found is, with ALSPs, for example, fat the Factors, you know, of the world, the business model itself is designed to deliver legal services, but we are bound and you know, and have expectation similar to a business unit, or, you know, much different than a law firm where, you know, there is a margin component, for example, there’s a profitability component, there are KPIs and SLAs, and so on, that have to be sort of measured, managed, so that we can continuously improve.

Marlene Gebauer  22:21

So it sounds like, you know, both you’re saying, you know, it doesn’t have to be either or, I mean, you know, GCs can rely on both new law consultants and outside councils to solve problems. Do you have any examples that you can share of, of Factor actually sort of working in conjunction like that?

Michael Callier  22:42

Absolutely. So, you know, Ed, I know you have one as well, we have a legal transactions management function, or product that factor but, you know, if I can describe multiple instances where managing the legal ecosystem is absolutely necessary. And that’s what really what we promote for a client. There are, you know, the legal ecosystem is made up of law firms, you know, ALSPs, internal resources, so the internal staff in any particular legal department, and then the tools that we have to deliver services, technology, process, data, information, and so on. And so our take is ultimately, one of the best things that we can do for clients is help them to assess and understand and properly leverage their entire legal ecosystem. For example, we’re, we’re helping a client ultimately optimize their clinical trial agreement, operating environment, this is for a pharmaceutical company, and they work in oncology. And so their ability to get from clinical trial to market with these particular drugs, literally has life changing impact. So the faster we can get to market faster we can get through clinical trials, the faster we can help folks stay alive, very important. The way that we’re deploying because this is a global organization requires localized expertise and multiple jurisdictions around the world. Now, that expertise is so niche, in some instances, you have to partner with local counsel in those in those environments. And so we’ll set up an machine ultimately, to develop playbooks and templates and other artifacts necessary to optimize clinical trials, clinical trial contracting, but that also requires that we partner with local counsel, capture that expertise and ultimately inject it into those artifacts and into our clients operating environment so that we can get to the right answer for them faster and globally. So that partnership is necessary. We invite it actually, I don’t feel at all competition, in the sense that, you know, it’s ALSPs, or law firms, I think for, you know, sort of the betterment of our clients really putting them first and has to be a ALSPs and law firms.

Greg Lambert  25:13

To me, Michael, it almost sounded like it was kind of a consulting on operations and almost knowledge management when it comes to like, you know, having targeted subject matter expertise in in the operation of the process. Is that a fair comment on that?

Michael Callier  25:36

For that particular use case? Yes. But our overall framework for consultant includes the entire operating models with targeted operating model from intake to appropriate triage and delegation to doing the work and doing it in a sort of a sustainable, structured way, escalations, execution, you know, outputs, storage, all that.

Greg Lambert  26:02

Ed, we’ve talked a lot here on this show about kind of the approaches that we need to, for lawyers to have to handle the work that they do. We’ve talked about the T shaped lawyers where they know a lot about a number, or they know a little about a lot of things. And then they’re real subject matter experts in one or two things. And then we also talked about delta shape lawyer, which is, which is that plus the the personality that you know, the, on how they handle the human side of interacting with with other people. And then we’ve also talked about the explosion of innovation programs at law schools, and some some of the other things that are out there that are helping attorneys kind of know more about the business side of the law. From what you’ve seen, how well equipped are lawyers, in dealing with the or at least the ones you’ve dealt with in dealing with innovation programs? And whether they are, you know, these these new law consultants or outside counsel? How do you see them dealing with these challenges?

Ed Sohn  27:16

So a couple things first, you know, I think that those programs, I think that the t shirt law or the Delta lawyer, I’m familiar with both of those kind of frameworks and models, and I think they’re good, I think it’s great to get that into legal education. I think that, you know, legal education from, you know, 10-15 years ago, when I was coming out of law school, was pretty different, didn’t necessarily include a lot of those concepts or theories, didn’t put a lot of emphasis in terms of how lawyers might be able to really serve their businesses as kind of well rounded business professionals. And I think that that’s crucial. For since I’ve ever started practicing, I’ve heard every GC go on stage and talk about how they need to understand the business better, how in house counsel have to enable business, not just flag risk, and everyone nods their head up and down and agrees to that mandate, however, you need to have kind of the schema or the knowledge, or the baseline or the foundations to be able to do that, you know, Jason Barnwell is a good friend. And he talks oftentimes about the value of a corporate finance course, you know, and how much that absolutely changes the way a lawyer can operate. What we’ve seen is that the practice of law that usually starts with a large law firm, or some kind of outside counsel job as a testing or improving ground prioritizes lawyers that can specialize in legal judgment and legal reasoning. And I think that that’s tremendous if your life is going to be spent in a law firm, when people like that when that talent sort of transitions into serving the business in a more rounded manner. There are definitely some transition pains. And what actually ends up happening is that the talent starts to dictate the shape of the function. And so what you’ve seen, you know, post 2008, with a massive increase in the headcount in the ranks of in house counsel, in house legal departments, is that you start to see the formation of a captive law firm, basically. And so it’s sort of like, Well, who do you have? Well, I have a woman that does Labor Employment, that she’s over there. What’s her workload? How she attack it, how she best? Well, she’s really good. Yeah. You know, she’s a really good Labor Employment. Oh, yeah, of course she is. But like, how is that you know, how they fit into the operating model of the business? Has that align with your needs the clients well, and what about your other needs? Well, I’m an antitrust lawyer over there and say, Okay, that’s like, that’s your antitrust guy. Like, okay, so how do these things how do those people and their competencies start to inform how a legal function might be able to be shaped in a way that better serves the business, right? It’s not just about deciding to do it. It’s not just an act of volition. It’s actually a matter of skills that needs to be present, frameworks and a foundation of knowledge that enables lawyers to do that. I think that we’re starting to see the tide turn. I think we’re also seeing People who are not lawyers bridging that gap. I think that, you know, teaching innovation and having a broader base of cross disciplinary competences being taught in law, law school and legal education will help bridge that gap. I think the advent of legal operations will help bridge that gap. And I think that new law has a has a role to play, and it has a seat at the table, and consulting inside of a new law environment has a really important role to play to accelerate how we bridge that gap.

Marlene Gebauer  30:29

So switching gears for a second, you know, what are some of the issues that your clients present to you when they’re looking for advice? And how do you address them? I know, you mentioned operations before, but you know, within operations, you know, are there common themes like, you know, technology, technology solutions? Or security issues? You know, or or is it more about people?

Ed Sohn  30:55

To answer your question, we believe that the number one problem is usually related to people and experience and adoption, right? These are the types of things that really take center stage, it’s not a technology, it’s not just a process, there’s always better that we can do there. But I think that, you know, the industry almost over rotated towards technology and process where it’s like, oh, you know, today, every, every lawyer is an artiston that does their own thing. It’s all very bespoke. And what we need to do is just process map it more, you know, like, what we need to do is like, enable them with better technology. And like that is for sure, it’s true, like, don’t get me wrong, like that my entire career has been in advocacy around, you know, more standardization, better workflow, documenting process, but it’s to a purpose. It’s so that you can diagnose you know, what’s happening across the organization, understand the dynamics of the systems that are in place. And usually behind that, technology success or failure rests oftentimes with people, not with technology, right? Process adoption, or failure oftentimes rests with people, it actually rests with social learning, it actually rests with how do you celebrate and story tell and create a culture that’s conducive to the adoption of technology and innovation? We believe and, you know, I know Michael agrees with this, we believe that this is absolutely the opportunity for most organizations. Many legal firms have actually invested into technology with significant budget, many organizations have invested into illegal operations, but you know, person, or staff or team, and those are all steps in the right direction. But the connective tissue that makes that work, that really lowers and dismantles the barriers to adoption, is by taking a hard look at the social dynamics and at the people and having empathy and understanding how they’re incentivized and how they’re aligned in which way they’re facing. And this is why I’m so excited that Michaels without organization is because he’s just a totally, you know, a she feel like a master at these things. And so that’s, that’s really what we think is a value that we have to offer. And we turn those lenses in to ourselves as well, like new law providers also have this weird reputation of being able to discharge workloads of low complexity that are highly scale that can be standardized, and, you know, industrialized and stamped out in a certain way. And we’ve kind of taught the industry how to think that way. But the truth is, our value gets really unlocked when our people bring those processes and bring those workloads to life, and exercise judgment and can handle variants. And, you know, when we unlock human potential, that’s really where we when we get to where we want to get to with our clients, and that that rule also applies to our clients. That’s that’s sort of our hypotheses.

Greg Lambert  33:40

So Michael, are, are the clients that you’re dealing with, are you hearing from them individually? About their about situations that are just unique to their to their own individual problems? Or are you seeing since we talked about this earlier, how you you kind of can look at these things on scale, and you’re dealing with their peer institutions? Are you seeing themes that that are emerging on on the issues that they’re addressing? And then on the flip side of that, when you’re coming up with solutions, are you having to come up with individual solutions for each client? Or are you finding that there’s some generalities that that everyone kind of needs right now?

Michael Callier  34:25

It’s a great question. And I have to say that there’s some both. So clients, you know, invite us to resolve problems that they assume we have previously resolved. And so I think their expectation is that we’ve seen it before. We’ve done it before. We’ve done well, and we can do it well for them. And so there’s always going to be some measure of, you know, previously deployed, vetted techniques, capabilities that we bring to bear for our client. Whether they’re in legal operations specifically or in subject matter, expertise, the unique component of every client, you know, sort of following on Ed’s point, it’s it’s the people. Now, there are obviously elements of people interaction, that can be generalized. For example, people fear change. And to be honest, it’s not that people fear change, it’s that people fear the loss associated with change, we change every day, we change clothes, we eat different things, we go to different places sometimes that we’ve never been before. So it’s not it’s not fear of change, it’s fear of the loss associated with change. And so in particular, with the legal industry, because, you know, there is sort of a way of doing things. And in large part, and I’m preaching to the choir here, I think with you, too, at law firms, in particular, it is someone’s experience, seniority, tenure, doing those things, oftentimes, and in this in the same way that really determines your bill rate, your level of social capital within the firm, and the expectation in terms of the value that you can deliver to both internal and external clients. And so change, I don’t think that’s really a thing in legal that we are specifically trained to focus on resolving. It’s more of precedent, what worked before, we need to do more of that in our current environment. And you may have heard this acronym VUCA. It’s something that the US military uses to define our current environment, volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, you know, that requires a different mindset, not looking back to the past as much as looking forward to the future. And so when clients call us and they ask, can you help us transform? Can you help us digitize? Can you help us optimize the change that both clients have to sort of address, deploy and overcome, and some of the fear of loss associated with it becomes something real and tangible and the way that it shows up. It’s ultimately unique for each client, although they’re similar elements. And you can find categories, post merger integration, that is a different animal than, you know, a company on a hockey stick growth curve that wants to keep up with once their legal department to keep up with that growth.

Michael Callier  34:55

Ed you’re the co author of the AltLegal column with Joe Borstein, where you cover emerging trends and alternative legal services. Since we’re at the beginning of the year, what are your predictions for alternative legal services and the legal landscape in general?

Ed Sohn  38:06

So my predictions for alternate legal services is, you know, these predictions always come out as like, we’re gonna continue to see this, we’ll continue to see that. Yeah. And that’s true. And that we will continue to see like, we’re not seeing structural barriers or pivots or the next S curve, that will kind of displace a lot of the motion that’s in place, which is, you know, moving to broader adoption across alternative legal services, moving to a variety of use cases across alternative legal services, providing more empowerment and consulting with, you know, new law providers that have, you know, very specific vantage points into the way things happen across an industry and across, you know, peers of certain types of legal workloads. And so that will all continue, I think that the thing that we’re going to start to really see is collaboration with law firms, I think you all have, you know, kind of guided the discussion around kind of contrasting outside counsel and new law. And, and that’s very much where the discussion takes place. But we’re also orienting ourselves to collaborate really well with law firms. And we see all of our corporate clients, our mutual corporate clients, together with law firms asking for this, you know, we see general counsel going on the record saying, we did an RFP for outside counsel, and there were seven respondents, and not one of them mentioned their alternate legal strategy, you know, and if any one of them had, they would have been differentiated among the offerings, they would have really sought a lot of alignment and gained a lot of empathy together with the client. And we want to help law firms do that we are not on a mission to sort of bring down law firms not at all the law firms are heading towards the direction that is a great compliment in terms of high level complex legal advice that goes to client that goes to the corporate world in so many ways that it’s needed. But where we think we can collaborate together is to provide that scale and that flexibility and that process expertise and an environment that’s conducive to the adoption of innovation and process and technology and empathy with our corporate clients that can really work together in conjunction with law firms. And we’ve done this in the history of Factor. And I think we’re going to start to see a lot more of this in the year to come.

Marlene Gebauer  40:09

Well, we’ll end on that note, we’d like to say thanks to Ed Sohn and Michael Callier from factor.

Ed Sohn  40:17

Thanks, guys. Bye.

Greg Lambert  40:20

Marlene, I don’t think you could tell after I did the edits on this, but we had a couple of technical issues that we just never seen before. And and that was that, while Ed could hear us he couldn’t hear Michael. So it really made for an interesting discussion, because we basically have to summarize what it was that Michael, it said, so the Ed could stay up with the conversation. So, but I’m here to tell you just shows once again, Marlene, that I have super audio editing. Indeed,

Marlene Gebauer  40:50

indeed, you do. We bow before you. You know, there was something that Michael hit on regarding lawyers and change. And it’s something that that, you know, I believed for years, and it’s that, you know, lawyers really aren’t big anti change people like, you know, they’ve been described as, as in a lot of the legal media. You know, Michael mentioned, it isn’t the change itself that people fear, but the loss associated with the change that they fear, the fact that we change behaviors and try new things every day was was a really good point. You know, it’s the volatility, the uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity are the VUCA as the military leadership coin, that’s unique. And that’s one of the things the new law companies seem to address.

Greg Lambert  41:39

You know, on a separate note, and, you know, the idea that many lawyers are Luddites, I recently heard, I think it may have been on on Matt Coatney’s podcast, a similar argument in that, you know, lawyers actually have amazing technology that they use, and that they’re pretty quick to adopt things.

Marlene Gebauer  42:01

They like that stuff.

Greg Lambert  42:02

They like that stuff. It’s iPhones, it’s smart TVs, it’s, you look in a lot of garages of attorneys, and there’s a Tesla sitting there. And I, I know I have at least one attorney here at my firm, who has, you know, all the solar panels and the Tesla batteries that power his house so that they will adopt technology when they see value in it, or it makes them look cool. See, a huge garage. But if you throw in a product, it’s that’s volatile, or it’s uncertain, or as complex, or there’s ambiguity around it, they will shy away from from that change in the technology. So I think

Marlene Gebauer  42:41

because this is this is their, their profession. This is their bread and butter, and so they want to make sure that that is protected.

Greg Lambert  42:49

Yeah, absolutely. So I again, I’m with you. That was a really interesting comment from Michael, on that particular issue.

Marlene Gebauer  42:57

So thank you, again, to Factors, Ed Sohn and Michael Callier for a really great conversation.

Greg Lambert  43:03

Yeah, good to have you both on.

Marlene Gebauer  43:06

And of course, thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. We need the love.

Greg Lambert  43:20

I don’t know about you, but I need the love.

Marlene Gebauer  43:24

I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,

Greg Lambert  43:27

and I can be reached at @glambert on Twitter.

Marlene Gebauer  43:31

Or you can always leave us a voicemail on The Geek in Review Hotline at 713-487-7270 is always the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you Jerry.

Greg Lambert  43:43

Thanks Jerry. Alright Marlene, I’ll see you later.

Marlene Gebauer  43:47

Okay. bye.

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

• Emphasis on creativity and great imaginations
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Transcript

Marlene Gebauer  0:15

Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert  0:22

And I’m Greg Lambert. Well, Happy New Year, Marlene and

Marlene Gebauer  0:26

Happy New Year.

Greg Lambert  0:28

I have to say I am very happy to have left that previous year behind. I won’t even say what

Marlene Gebauer  0:34

my god yes.

Greg Lambert  0:35

And so looking forward to

Marlene Gebauer  0:37

the year that shall not be named.

Greg Lambert  0:40

The first rule about 2022 is we don’t talk about other

Marlene Gebauer  0:43

you don’t talk about other years.

Greg Lambert  0:44

Yeah. So so how did you enjoy your winter break?

Marlene Gebauer  0:49

I enjoyed it very much. I got to spend some time at home in New Jersey with friends and family. I had a lovely spa day in Edgewater, New Jersey. So I highly recommend SoJo, if you haven’t been there before, fantastic. All I’ll say is an infinity pool overlooking the Hudson overlooking the New York skyline.

Greg Lambert  1:12

That’s not bad.

Marlene Gebauer  1:13

You know, I didn’t I didn’t get to see everyone I wanted to see because of the many many COVID exposures that popped up between when I got there and just a few days later. But we did connect via phone and text and video. And I did not set any resolutions. I don’t do resolutions. But I did set some mindfulness intentions, like, you know, remembering to move around during the day, I tend to basically plop myself down at the desk and not go anywhere for the entire day. Writing in my gratitude journal and carving out time for more experiences. So I already did a night kayaking trip, which was pretty cool. And I did a visit to some historic areas around Schulenburg, Texas. I’m also trying to be more mindful of the time spent on social media. So you know, you may see me less on there. But you know, when I do post, I assure you the content will be fabulous. So how was your break?

Greg Lambert  2:15

Mine was pretty decent. I before we get to mine, I do want to mention that you are the second person today that I heard well actually third person today, that said they don’t set resolutions they they set intentions and it’s the difference between what you want to do and how you want to live. So yeah, so maybe maybe this year also I’ll set some intentions as well. So but over the over the break, I get to go out to a friend’s wedding in New Orleans. So that was a that was a lot of fun. Did some dancing and

Marlene Gebauer  2:53

I saw that

Greg Lambert  2:54

Yeah, I danced all night and with him by all night. I mean we left at 10.

Marlene Gebauer  3:02

That’s that’s how all night goes.

Greg Lambert  3:06

At my age 10 o’clock is all night so but I was also one of those unfortunate people who while being fully vaccinated and boosted still somehow or another contracted COVID over the break. And I’m telling you this this Omicron variants super sneaky. But luckily I think because being fully vaccinated and boosted I had super mild symptoms, and I think most of the rest of the family got got away from contracting it. But the good side of that was while I was isolating I got to read and I read a lot of old comic books that I always wanted to read like Alan Moore Swamp Thing, but never actually

Marlene Gebauer  3:50

Is Swamp Thing from New Jersey something

Greg Lambert  3:52

no he’s a Louisiana so I think there’s two variations one he’s in Florida one he’s in Louisiana, but

Marlene Gebauer  4:00

I’m trying to figure who I’m thinking of. Maybe a Toxic.

Greg Lambert  4:02

Maybe me Man Thing. Yeah, the Toxic Avenger?

Marlene Gebauer  4:07

Man Thing? What’s Man Thing?

Greg Lambert  4:08

That’s a Marvel DC thing.

Marlene Gebauer  4:08

I didn’t know that.

Greg Lambert  4:11

We don’t even have enough time to get into but yeah, the Toxic Avenger that sounds like a New Jersey superhero.

Marlene Gebauer  4:20

Yes, it does.

Greg Lambert  4:22

So like like the story says, you know when the world gives you lemons, you know, go read some comic books. Well, this week we talk with Axiom’s David Pierce about his work there at axiom as well as who he predicts will come out of the pandemic and the great resignation better position to handle the legal marketplace and the demands from across the spectrum of legal talent. You know, I do love the fact that he invokes the the great philosopher Yogi Berra, when he says that prediction is really difficult, especially if it’s about the future. So but I have to say I think he’s pretty spot on on what he Thanks, it’s gonna happen.

Marlene Gebauer  5:03

We’d like to welcome David Pierce, Chief Commercial Officer at Axiom. David, welcome to The Geek in Review.

David Pierce  5:09

Hey there, Merlin. Hey, Greg, excited to be here.

Greg Lambert  5:11

David, I want to just start off because as we were prepping for this, I was telling us that people, either a really know Axiom, or they kind of just know of Axiom. And so before we dive in it, can you just give us a little bit about your role there? And maybe even just a little bit of history of Axiom itself?

David Pierce  5:34

Totally. I’m happy to do I have to say, I really enjoyed hearing prior versions of this podcast. There are a number of them. Greg, I listen to the one that stands out is the one we talked about working the mainframe computers and the giant red button. You were always super tempted to press.

Greg Lambert  5:50

Yes.

David Pierce  5:51

I didn’t even know what that button was. But But by the way you described it, I really want to address it. So anyway, happy to be here.

Greg Lambert  5:57

It just said press me.

David Pierce  6:00

That’s all it had to say, fan of the program. So let me answer the questions in reverse. If that’s okay. The axiom stores a little cooler than my own personal stories of how I got there, and into the role I’m in so cover my own background quick. And then we can get into the fun stuff. So law school is the only grad program that I know of where you don’t need pre-recs. You can just apply so I was a bio major and I was in farming. After college, I was always kind of drawn to law. So I took the LSAT and applied and I graduated law school with a full loan package just like my wife did. So we did what most law students do when you have to pay down heavy debt. We went to big firms. So I was at O’Melveny. She was at Gibson. And that was right before the dot.com bust, I should say that was right in the middle of the dot.com, boom, mid 90s, there was a great time to be a lawyer. Because mid level associates were dropping right and left to take flyers on startups. And you got to step in a really cool work with big invisible clients. I know you both remember those days because I think we’re all kind of contemporaries. Yes. So a few years in, I went in house to an imaging company in Silicon Valley and infuse after that I went to Lucasfilm as the GC of the tech.

Marlene Gebauer  7:11

I have so many questions. We’re gonna do this offline.

David Pierce  7:15

I know there’s so many we could we could spend the whole hour on that. I used to say to people that it was a movie magic division, Lucasfilm, and I still kind of believed that. So then I switched from a GC role and look at Lucas on THX to a GM role. I was running the business for a while. And I did that for five years. I’m going to skip a really interesting startup adventure in the year 2009. And tell you that I heard about Axiom in 2010 from a search firm, who said they were looking for someone who knew something about business and legal, and would be interested in a new kind of law company. And I met the people. And but then I met nearly all the people because we were really small back then. And you know, and the rest is history. So I started as a practice leader in SF, then I moved into a management role on the west coast and in North America. And two years ago, I stepped into a global role as Chief Commercial Officer. And in a few months, I will have been here 12 years. Time Time flies,

Greg Lambert  8:10

it adds up doesn’t it?

David Pierce  8:12

It adds up, you blink. So now we can get to the fun part unless unless Marlene, you really want to ask about Lucasfilm or farming because we could do that so that I can get

Marlene Gebauer  8:20

you get the actual story. First, we’ll see how much time we have at the end.

David Pierce  8:25

Yeah, okay, we should budget accordingly. So there was no such thing as an ALSP. In the year 2000, I think both of you would, would attest to that. There were firms that were in house departments. But even those departments were sort of a fraction of the size that most in house departments are today. And the law firm model had not really evolved in a century. We used to say that law firm and client equation was broken, meaning that no one in the formula was really as happy as they should be, except for the partner who’s making bank on armies of associates. It was back then sort of medieval fiefdom, more or less mahogany walls, instead of stone castles, but the economics are kind of the same. I think we could all stipulate to that. So axioms mission was to give clients and great lawyers a better bargain. That’s how we described it. We had a lot of expressions that we use, we said we were a law firm in a wind tunnel. We said we were a modern interpretation of a firm. But the heart of it, we were just trying to give clients great quality, legal professionals with more cost efficiency, and more flexibility. And we were trying to give lawyers a way to practice with great clients without a forced compromise in how and when they worked or who they did that work for. So there was a ton of skepticism. That should probably shock no one, and ours is not an industry famous for quick or rapid movement. And I still tell us the story of a meeting that our founder led with a GC of a Fortune 500 company, I think it was 2001 I wasn’t there, but I tell it like I was which always makes had more fun. And he sat across the table from this GC was very polite gentlemen. And they had a half an hour discussion. And at the end of it, so maybe a week later, our founder who is Mark Harris got a letter from him. That was it looked like it was typed up and and dictated by him to its secretary. So this is, you know, this is a different era, it’s probably was probably issued on a word processor, or a typewriter. And the letter said, Dear Mark, and it was very polite. Dear Mark, thank you for spending time with me and sharing your vision for axiom. While I appreciated the time, and I think it said exactly this, I don’t have it. I’m not reading from it. But I remember well, it said, he said, I just don’t see that any self respecting lawyer would ever choose to practice Axiom’s life. True story, verbatim. So here we are 20 years later. So we’re at 6500 lawyers and legal professionals on three continents we serve, not just that Fortune 500 company, by the way, but half of the rest, all the top 10 Sorry, all top 10 of the world’s largest financial institutions, life sciences companies, 1000s of in-market businesses, I don’t think a lot of companies can say they were category creators, and market leaders 20 years after the fact. So it feels kind of special to say that, and obviously, you know, you can imagine we’re always trying to improve and perfect the experience that we get clients and lawyers. It is not either one for us, it’s actually a really important point, in my view, it’s not either client or lawyer, you have to equally prioritize both to build the kind of business that we want. So I can pause. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but I can kind of get one level deeper into I think, Greg, your real questions what we’re doing today, I’m happy to keep going,

Greg Lambert  11:40

Although I do want to make the comment that I bet the attorney that wrote that letter, has completely forgotten about that letter and tells everyone I was there when they first started off, and I helped kinda guide their success.

David Pierce  11:56

Well, you know, you know, it’s funny, I hope he does. But in many ways he really did inspire us. Because when you get the kind of skepticism, it just really dig in.

Marlene Gebauer  12:06

I’m going to show that that’s incorrect.

David Pierce  12:08

Yeah, you dig in. Yeah, how many great victories and advances were done? Because someone wanted to dig in? You know? So on the client side, just to kind of come back to your question, Greg, we give clients access to in-house lawyers on a flexible basis, which I think most people know us for. But we also work with them the way that a law firm would, by connecting them to subject matter experts in a range of disciplines across just about every major practice area, either on an hourly or matter based structures. You I think, you know, many companies know us only for flexible talent that we pioneered way back when but the law firm level work is a growing part of our business for super obvious reasons. The work isn’t shrinking, and the budgets aren’t getting any bigger. So I said, if nothing else, if I had a chance to speak with someone who was asking about Axiom, and really want to know what was new, I would talk heavily about that, because I think most people get, we have great high caliber lawyers, and make them available to clients on a flexible basis. So that’s the client side. On the lawyer side. We get lawyers the way I think about it the way describe it if given 30 seconds in an elevator, is that although no one’s in elevators anymore.

Marlene Gebauer  13:20

30 seconds on a Zoom call.

David Pierce  13:20

30 Seconds going from living room, the bedroom? Yeah, yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Someone said to me the other day that they every time they leave a day of Zoom, they feel like they’re exiting a matinee blinking. Like there’s a really great way.

Greg Lambert  13:33

That’s a perfect segue. So

David Pierce  13:34

So wasn’t it, wasn’t it that that person, by the way, was our senior client advisor named Charlie Sandel, former GC of a big public retailer, we were talking yesterday and I said, Charlie, I said, I’m going to use that line. So there you go, Charlie, that ones for you. So we give lawyers and legal professionals access to great work and a means to practice the way they want. And a route to that, to do those things beyond the traditional realms of law firms and, and full time in-house roles. Right, and we’ll have hired about 1,000 lawyers by the time the year is up. And even notwithstanding that, we’ve kept the bar on quality really high. We had a run in walkthrough, one in 20, who apply almost 1000 come from AmLaw 100 firms, 1500 of them have Fortune 500 in-house experience. And you know, I think it’s really important to the lawyers and legal professionals that are with us that we keep that bar high. You know, we are listening, I won’t get into kind of competitive positioning. This isn’t an Axiom commercial. I get it. But But I feel one thing that sets us apart is that we are we are the only company of our kind that is purely totally focused on legal talent. We’re not opening up delivery centers and low cost locations. We’re not going to start slinging technology off the shelf and license it in a box or through a download. Right? We are purely talent focused business. We are using technology to drive that value proposition. I’m sure we get a chance to talk about that later. But it was like to say that, because I think it’s a commonly, I think people sometimes take for granted how pure our focus on talent is.

Marlene Gebauer  15:07

So David, the sort of theme of this loosely, this podcast is about talent management, particularly now after pandemic and the Great Resignation. So I did a little research before the podcast. And so this past September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 4 million Americans quit their jobs in July with a record breaking 10.9 million open jobs at the end of July. And I don’t think the great resignation has gotten any better since then. So you know, what are you seeing as the trends?

David Pierce  15:45

So first of all, I totally agree with you. I don’t think that the story has been fully written. I think it’s not over. I think a lot of people are totally still reflecting on what comes next for them. I think you probably saw the news about PayPal’s GC, resigning and how she framed that. I also think, you know, it’s funny, I think resignation, the Great Resignation is I think one way to put it, I always think about it as the Great Reflection. Because people are taking longer and harder looks at their careers where they are, where they’ve been where they want to go, you know, who they want to be at any stage of career and resignations, the byproduct of reflection, right. So like, I think about it as a reflection, and then it a resignation triggered as a result. I think the only thing Marlene that would screech, the trend to a halt is just a massive swing in the economy and in the job market. Because when things get bad, I think we all know people generally lose the guts to leave the shore. And you know, look for new horizons. So by the way, there’s a sailing analogy for you, I get carried away with analogies, sometimes the growth area for me, and you’ll know that by the end of the call, I’m sure. But I would say this when it comes to trend the remote this is this I feel really passionate about the the remote on site thing totally get it kind of very played out. Everybody gets it. People want more freedom. They want to work where they want to work. Some companies will offer it some companies won’t sometimes we’ll make kind of Solomon like declarations to split the baby on hybrid interior approaches based on job types and already role but but this is the thing that I really like this point I really would love to make. It seems ridiculous to me that think that the sum total flexibility that people want, comes down to where they sit in a chair. You know what I mean? That there’s so many more dimensions to flexibility and autonomy than that. Where do you want to work? Who do you want to work with? What kind of team what kind of industry? You know, what kind of manager? On what schedule? When do you want to be busy? Why do you want to take a break? Like and obviously, you know, Axiom exists to help solve for these sorts of things to give people means to get that autonomy on all those dimensions. But I think more companies are going to start doing that. And that’s a really great thing for not just kind of the legal profession, but every workforce, people want more autonomy than they’re getting. And I believe that the companies who get this right, are going to find the keep the best talent and the ones that don’t or I should say the opposite might also be true.

Greg Lambert  18:04

Yeah, so

Greg Lambert  18:05

Absolutely.

Greg Lambert  18:07

It makes perfect sense. Yeah, I did want to follow up with you on a couple of things. We thought it was really going to be hard, leaving the office and going remote in March of 2020. And but I predicted months ago that it’s going to be so much harder, coming back to the office and trying to reestablish that. You know, looking at your experience on this. I just want to say, you know, what, what are some of the things that you were set up to to handle and and what were some of the things that maybe you had to you had to really kind of struggle with and make sure that you maintained while everyone was working. And now as we’re trying to get back to some sense of what’s next?

David Pierce  18:57

Yeah, it’s such a great question. First of all, to the beginning of the question, Greg, I think that we were all far readier to be productive remotely, than I think most pundits predicted. Right? It was relatively easy for lawyers are doing really tricky, complicated big deals, you know, from their pajamas, you know, in their home offices, if they had a home office, and even if it didn’t, you know, in a local, you know, local spot where they could do some work. I also agree. And by the way, our own business proved that we saw a lot of clients who had insisted on on site as a requirement and move quickly and with no friction to remote engagements. On the other part of your question. I totally agree that there are a lot of challenges that people have not been prepared for, you know, and it’s part of this is just like the obvious stuff, right? Who knew that you would have to navigate really tricky vaccination requirements, or plexiglass, or you know, have to discover and share health and information that would otherwise have been a HIPAA violation, right and how to navigate. That’s why so many of our clients are asking us more and more for labor and employment help the kind of a typical get go, you know, to outside firms, and no one right now, no big company that I know of has enough L&E lawyers on staff to tackle the wave of questions they’re getting, you know, so. So preparing for that is just one thing that companies are doing to kind of navigate the return to offices or return to work as you want to put it. But I’ll tell you this, just speaking from personal experience, at Axiom, I think, you know, we have gotten very focused on tons and tons of real time updates, communication. You know, we and I think this is such an obvious statement, right, Greg, and Marlene, but it has to be really clear to your employees, to your talent, that you’re going to prioritize their safety and health. First, foremost, full stop. Has to be super clear, has to be clear in the words but in the actions, you know, and I think there are basic, you know, logistics decisions that people are struggling with, do you open up an office and ask people to go back if you all have to be masked up? Do you wait, you know, how do you ensure that someone who chooses not to go into the office isn’t hurt career wise, or impacted in terms of promote ability? As a result? How do you how do you handle support, navigate, you know, help people who are struggling with all kinds of, you know, life events, or circumstances that the pandemics kind of full grip has amplified? So I feel like all those things, you know, it’s really probably gonna send a pattern with me a lot of the stuff that we talked about, it’s really just kind of common human sense, right? Like when we talk about trends in the industry, what people want, what kind of work they want, you know, people want to work with good people, they want to do work that interests them, they want to be challenged in the right way. They want to have a good leader, they want to connect to the mission of a company, and they really want to understand the part they play in bringing the mission to life. Now, I don’t think you need an MBA or a JD to nail all that stuff. It’s just it’s hard work to get it right, though. You know, it’s simple premise, hard sometimes to execute anyway. long winded.

Greg Lambert  22:06

So I know in the legal industry itself, I mean, we we consider ourselves unique and special. And and we’re the snowflakes. No one can do it quite like us. But I would say as as we’re looking at return to work. What do you think that what do you think is going to be kind of the thing that or the trait that a really good law firm or legal service provider is going to do well? And what do you think we’re obviously just going to screw up?

David Pierce  22:50

Really tempted…

Marlene Gebauer  22:51

You can answer any way you want.

David Pierce  22:52

I think a lot a lot of what we talked about, right, I think it’s a lot of the common sense stuff, the over communication, the meeting people where they are, the transparency, the clarity in the minds of your talent, that you are going to prioritize their health and safety first, the granting of autonomy, you know, the the commitment to ensuring that people have the tools, they need to do the job, they have to do all that stuff. So I feel like, I feel like that’s kind of obvious. But again, kind of rubber meets the road. That’s when it becomes hard. I will say this. So Greg, I feel like when I’m looking at uniqueness and trends, I think that I think even within the legal so let’s talk about legal versus everybody else. Even in legal, I think the spectrum of trends is super wide. Think about the way most tech companies are handling remote work and return offices versus the way manufacturers are doing it. Life Sciences, companies, financial services, all those companies have legal teams, right. And most of them have general counsel, even within the tech industry, I think you both remember this, even within the small circle of trillion dollar enterprises. We’ve seen a range, some companies were super quick to say, hey, it’s the end of 2020, we’re coming back. That’s where we’ll be most productive. Some company said, we’re pushing it out. And I’m making a decision. Some company said work from home forever. And those were a bit the outliers but even within tech, there’s a lot of descrepancy. So I think it’s really it’s challenging to make big kind of calls on industry approach. I don’t want to generalize too much. Some of this comes down to CEO point of view, you know, state policies where the headquarters are located industry specific stuff. But but but here’s the other thing, I would say this comes back to the unique this point Greg GCs to me. So first, I know that I’m a lawyer. And I do I do think it’s a really noble profession. I think. I think the things that we stand for advocate, pursue, they’re all really important and I don’t just mean lawyers, I mean, legal professionals, knowledge managers, you know, like you both, legal ops professionals. compliance professionals, ethics officers. So I feel like we the GCs that I engage with, and legal leaders everywhere, I think we’re very quick to explicitly and loudly prioritize the health and safety of their teams. And to make sure that it was really clear, that was the thing that we’re solving for. So I feel like in many ways, our industry was a little unique, because there was never a question that we were going to do that. And I think that.

Greg Lambert  25:29

Now we’re going to get to the fun part, but what are we going, what are we just gonna screw up?

David Pierce  25:34

Okay. What are we going to screw up? You know, it’s really fun. I got one, I got one, Greg, we’re going to screw up making predictions that we’re really competent about. There’s this quote, I love when Yogi Berra he said, predictions are really hard, especially when they’re about the future. Such a great quote. And I think that the worst thing we could do is be rigid and inflexible. And this, by the way, just like soars right into Axiom’s, Mantra theme, you know, core principles, you have to prepare for change, you have to navigate and be ready to navigate and more change comes back to the Labor and Employment example. I’ll give you another one. What legal department 18 months ago, thought they would have to renegotiate and reassess their entire office footprint? Do you think that you did you have enough real estate lawyers on site to do that? Or did you need to go outside, if you hire a real estate lawyer to do that, you may not need that person in a year and a half. And then you’re gonna have to have an unhappy exit or ask that person to retrain and learn an entirely new skill, which they may or may not be interested to do. If you go to an outside firm that focuses on real estate, you’re going to spend a ton of money and your CFO is going to be pissed. So I just, I think Greg, make really simple summary of this riff, you can’t predict stability, you have to predict that things will remain in flux, right? anything surprise you there will be what they’ll screw up question or

Greg Lambert  27:02

I was thinking wider. But no, I thought that was? Well, I figured that was like a super easy question. That’s like, Yeah,

David Pierce  27:14

We could get we could get a little more detailed off the record.

Greg Lambert  27:18

Yeah, well, and I think some of the other things that that I think we’re going to screw up is we’re going to, we’re going to lose sight of all of the trust that was built over the past two years. And that’s all going to fly out the window. And I think that’s going to hurt minority and female lawyers, more than more than anyone else, I think employers or employees are going to see right through employers who are saying one thing and doing another or that are making it much more difficult than necessary, say, for example, you know, it, yeah, you can work wherever you want, but then not giving you the support, you need to work where you need. Yeah. So I think I think people will see right through that.

Marlene Gebauer  28:13

Yeah, I mean, I’ll agree with with what he has said. You know, I will also say that I think there’s there’s going to be still a lot of discussion about is, you know, the health and welfare coming first? You know, I’m glad to hear you saying that, you know, you think that that is going to be the trend, but I, you know, I feel there’s still gonna be a lot of discussion about what is, you know, what that entails? Like, what, what does that mean? Because I think, you know, you have people who are saying, Look, I don’t want to go back to, you know, the office unless everybody’s vaccinated. And, you know, are we going to have those types of requirements? And if we don’t, you know, are people going to feel that, you know, whatever firms are saying, you know, is, is, in fact, you know, in their their best interest in terms of health. I also think that this whole maneuvering of back to the office is going to be a challenge for folks, in terms of you’d mentioned earlier about getting exposure, you know, how are we going to be able to make sure that folks get the exposure that they need? I know, there’s a lot of discussion among associates, you know, everybody was clamoring to get back to the office because they wanted face time. And if you know if that how do you how do you maneuver that particularly people who may need to work more remotely because of their personal situation?

David Pierce  29:38

Yeah. And people who are early in their career and really want to learn by sitting next to someone who does the job, they’re learning to do. I second what you said and I also think Greg use the word trust that kind of retain that trust. I actually I think about imagination, to Greg, we’ve had we’ve seen a lot of imaginative solutions

Marlene Gebauer  29:57

out of necessity, out of necessity.

David Pierce  30:00

Clients who believe they would need to have lawyers answer. Yes out of this? Well, you know, crisis crisis always kind of breeds innovation. Right. And, and Greg, I just think that the creativity, the the the, I guess I’d say innovation events, I think it’s a very overused word these days, the innovation unleashed by pandemic, I think it’s gonna wave, it’s gonna keep washing over legal and every other industry, by the way, you know,

Marlene Gebauer  30:25

we’ve talked about all of these, these potential considerations and trends that, you know, we’re seeing, I guess, if we’re looking at the bottom line, and we’re looking at the fact that that people are reflecting and are leaving for other types of jobs and roles. Is the turnover actually impacting business in legal?

David Pierce  30:51

Yes. Yes, it is. It’s hard. It’s really hard to lose talent.

Marlene Gebauer  30:57

Like how, how is it impacting, you know, what do we have numbers? How is it impacting.

David Pierce  31:01

That was a succinct answer, though! Marlene, you know, simple answer. Yes, it is hard talent, to tribal knowledge, you know, you’re losing, you know, people who really understand the business, you know, they know where the bones and the treasures are buried. It’s really hard to lose those people. And it’s, it’s even harder to do it when the market is as tight as it is because it takes longer to find talent. And even when you do, you’re competing with multiple other employers for that talent. Right. We see it every year right now across all your price. Yes, exactly. And other perks and red carpet kind of accoutrements. You know, we see clients who are experiencing this with junior lawyers, mid level lawyers, senior lawyers, all leaving for different sorts of reasons. We saw, as we said before, the GC of PayPal left for reasons that she described in an article I think I saw on Corporate Counsel Magazine, I think that so no question. It’s a challenge, I feel like the companies who were navigating this well are the ones who really built in contingencies. You know, they’re planning for ebb and flow and types of work. They have core groups of permanent team members, they have relationships with companies like Axiom, they have a concentrated group of traditional firms, they don’t have their eggs in one basket. And by the way, I think this is true in legal this is probably true in any industry, you have to be prepared for continued change, not just to kind of see people go, but to be ready to onboard and ramp people really effectively. You know, if you ask me what GCs thought a lot about, I think they obviously think about holding on to the people. They’re more attuned to the morale and engagement level or the teams than they ever have been. But they I think they’re also the least I think the best ones are also really focused on ramping new people quickly, immersing them in the culture, making sure they understand and feel excited about the business that they know, you know, who to go on what you know, and where, like that kind of roadmap, it’s really hard to do that when you’re not sitting in the same physical space. So I guess I’d say, yes, it’s definitely impacting legal and every other industry. But the thing we can do that we can control is you can make sure we find people that we give them quick pass, and that we’re doing everything we can, everything we can to hold on to top talent. I think that’s such an obvious statement. But I think we could all I think we’d all agree that there’s always something more most companies can do to make that happen.

Greg Lambert  33:20

Will this change the way that law firms recruit, especially out of out of the law schools, the OCIs? Which I think we’ve we’ve talked to this, about this on on previous episodes, which is a an archaic structure that is so bent toward people that are already well connected, just being getting more connected, and punishing people that normally will so I’m, you know, I’m, I myself am looking for something to disrupt that process. Do you think this will do it?

David Pierce  33:56

I mean, absolutely. I do. I still remember those OCI interviews, Greg, I remember kind of going out and spending like 150 bucks on a suit that didn’t look terrible, and showing up and convincing someone that I could do the job.

Greg Lambert  34:10

That was good money in the 90s.

David Pierce  34:12

That was that was, that was a lot back then that was like a $2,000 suit today. Yeah, I remember thinking that. First of all, OCI is really limited to grades, right? If you have certain grades and make the cut to OCI interview, and that alone is very limited. You immediately narrow the funnel of people who become great lawyers out of the gate.

Marlene Gebauer  34:30

I think and there’s studies that say that doesn’t even it doesn’t correlate and whether you’re

David Pierce  34:34

I think you know, it does Marlene. It’s a little bit of a riff here but like I list grades, academic performance pedigree, very important. And a lot of people are very focused on that. But here’s what I think, is a real litmus test for who would make a great in house lawyer and then Greg, we can get back to the law firm question. You would make a great great in hustler. If you are good at speaking plain language. You are comfortable working with people who are lawyers. You are able to act like your hair’s not on fire even what it is and you are comfortable in areas of gray. That right there is a great litmus test and also your a good, collaborative, engaging and accessible person. That’s that last part is to me like, it’s important. I think some people think it’s a nice to have, I think it makes you a really good lawyer because that’s when you really find out what you need to coach people on. So I think that’s a great OCI. But we should invent an OCI process that tests for those things and send those people right to in house roles, or to Axiom because I think you’ve heard we’re hiring. So listen, it’s been a while since I’ve been in a law firm environment. And that was at O’Melveny, and that was almost 20 years ago, actually, over 20 years ago. And I think there are some who are doing this really well and focusing more than ever on people and people experience I think some that are continue to learn that this is important. But I do sorry, Greg, it’s a it’s a rip. But I do think that the process is going to change and not just legal. I just read an article about what the CEO of Citibank is doing in redefining the culture of the of the bankers and the early career people that she’s hiring, really worth a read anyone who wants to see kind of interesting view on people policy, in what has traditionally been a very tough industry. I think that’s really worth the read. Everybody’s thinking more about the human experience of their talent.

Greg Lambert  36:21

Well, speaking of talent and recruitment, we all know, lateral hiring is just white hot right now. And I think there, I’ve seen half million dollar retention bonuses to people to stay on. Hiring bonuses are skyrocketed, salaries are way up. But I want to I want to get off of that. And

David Pierce  36:44

Everybody knows that. Let’s talk about some new stuff. Yeah.

Greg Lambert  36:46

What opportunities are available now in in the recruitment process when it comes to talent? That may not have been there two years ago?

David Pierce  36:58

Let me try to answer that with a couple different lenses. One, I want to talk about new lawyers, early career, folks, people who are third year law students who know your podcast and are listening to this right now. I want to make sure that they get something of value in what I’m about to say that it’s useful. And second, I want to talk about lawyers who are in roles, but who want to transition skills. Because a lot of your audience, I imagine they’re not necessarily very clear, maybe their mid career, maybe they’re senior, you know, maybe their general counsel public companies. But I want to make sure that the information I’m giving you in response to that question is useful. So first of all, if you’re a third year law student right now, and you pulled me aside and said, Hey, David, where should I focus? I would say ESG, environmental, social governance, huge burgeoning area, I think ESG now is where privacy was 20 years ago. Not a lot of people are really talking about it in recruitment. It’s a headline in the journal. It’s a regulatory inquiry. You know, it could be a number of things, but there is a huge growing, swelling wave of ESG related work. Just feel in my gut.

Marlene Gebauer  38:04

You’re seeing related roles. You’re seeing those types of roles, you know, not not only for for attorneys, but also for, you know, support professional support people as well.

David Pierce  38:13

Yep. Yep. And by the way, Marlene, when I talk about lawyers and legal professionals, like I really want to, I want to think about it in a in a really broad way. I’m talking about lawyers, legal professionals, legal operations people, compliance people, paralegals, contract managers, I learned to be a lawyer in 1998, from a paralegal who taught me everything I needed to know in my first two weeks, at O’Melveny, and not everything the partners, they would say they taught me some things too, and they were right. But like I can’t overstate the importance of ally legal professionals to this industry. So saying everything I say here applies everyone who is a legal in a legal career, or in a budding one, I would focus on, I would continue to focus on privacy, because that’s not going anywhere, anytime soon. No one saw 20 years ago, how much demand we’d have in privacy, I would focus on product type counsel roles. And I think we both know what that is. But when I say the word, I mean many GCs for product launches, usually at tech companies, but not exclusively. And just to kind of bridge the question. Also m&a lawyers, if you’re an m&a lawyer right now, and probably pretty busy, that’s more of a near term trend. I mean, we’ll see if that business level will sustain. But the flip side of m&a is bankruptcy anyway, so you know, odds are if you have one of those two things, you’re going to be pretty busy.

Greg Lambert  39:25

If you got an m&a department and a bankruptcy department, you’ll never you’ll never stop working

David Pierce  39:30

Yin and Yang. Perfect supplemental staffing. But let me answer the question through the lens of someone who is mid career. So I really believe that I’m just gonna talk specifically about product counsel from it because again, I think you could both agree that word those words did not exist 15 years ago. What we saw is great commercial lawyers who knew a little bit about licensing and marketing and IP and venturing and start joint ventures and corporate work, who kind of knew a little bit about everything became very effective at helping companies launch products, because they get issue flag across a range of disciplines. That’s how they became product lawyers. So I think if you’re a lawyer right now, and you are a great commercial lawyer, and you know something about marketing, and you’ve got decent IP, or licensing background, and you’ve been adept, and robust issue spotter, you could really become a great product lawyer. And that job title is not going away anytime soon, those roles are important, and people need them more and more. So I’m saying all this stuff, because when whenever someone asked me a question like that, I just want to make sure that what I say is useful, and helpful, and actionable. Because that, you know, we all three, we three know that there is a lot of that would say, amorphus guidance on how to think about a legal career. And not all of it is super helpful and tactical. And we spent a lot of time thinking about how we can be useful to incoming lawyers to lawyers who we’ve known for a while, like I would love, I would love to think that every Axiom lawyer gets access to this kind of perspective, not just from me, but for people who are even closer to the trench than I am these days.

Marlene Gebauer  41:11

David, Axiom professes its model is a High-Tech/High-Touch service model. And I think those are your words that you shared with us can can you explain what that means and why you think it’s appealing to job seekers and clients particularly now.

David Pierce  41:29

So let’s talk about lawyers and legal professionals first, so near the beginning, we talked about our positioning for lawyers and our positioning for clients and what we give each segment of our population. So when I think about lawyers and legal professionals, and every time I say lawyers or legal professionals, Marlene just shorthand like full spectrum, legal professionals,

Marlene Gebauer  41:51

All of us.

David Pierce  41:52

Yeah, all of us high tech and knowledge managers, by the way, should have started with that one, given the audience, all of us, high tech means we give them access to the right kind of information, digitally, when they want it, right, we make it easier for their backgrounds to be discoverable for business development, and our talent engagement teams and make it easier to search and soar skill sets and experience levels. To make the right sort of matches, we make it easier for legal professionals to adjust the aperture on what they want to hear from us about, you know, what sort of work is exciting what sort of industry, when they want to work, how much, when they want to take a break, the more we digitally enable that interaction, the easier it is for them to give and get the right kind of information. So and tech makes us better able to reach out to lawyers, engage them their interest in opportunities. And then also this is a really important part, ensure that we have the fullest and most current picture of their backgrounds, a lot of that is done through human touch. But a lot of that increasingly is done through tech tools, which I think people find intuitive and you know, and easy for the business team. So for my team, you know, account manager sellers, talent, gaming specialist. Tech gives us the ability to be quicker and more accurate when we’re making connections between lawyers and clients. We have tools now, it’s actually pretty cool. And I know how many people know about this, we have tools that help us quickly sort by client background. So we know that you are working with ACME Corp. So if I’m a Business Builder, I’m working with ACME Corp. And we know that ACME Corp counts a number of XYZ alums in their in house team, or that they lean heavily on ABC firm to handle, you know, certain kinds of work, we can say to that client, Hey, did you know we’ve got dozens of alumni of those firms that are represented our talent population right now that really has helped establish credibility opens all sorts of doors. And then we have other stuff that I probably I’m not sure we have time to get into, but tools that enable our sales and talent engagement teams, to find tech driven similarities in skill sets, this goes back to the kind of translate ability between skill sets. So we may have a wonderful lawyer who is unavailable for an engagement. But these tools help us find similar lawyers with similar or translatable skill sets in our population of 6000 plus, even if human eyes might be slower to detect that connection. And I think that’s a really very tactical way to answer what we mean by high tech. So I would just say this to this is really the beginning of our journey on digital interaction. If you go to a website, and by the way, I definitely want to talk about the high touch thing because that’s part of the questions. I’ll come back to that. But if you go to a website now you’d see some things that are new, we have given people the ability to search our network and inquire about specific professionals on their own. We’ve given clients the ability to interact digitally with our legal professionals provided they register and and we established Axiom credentials. And this is, this is like the most obvious statement ever but there’s nowhere in the world where interaction is becoming more analog and less digital. Everybody wants more digital action. And I don’t just don’t think that legal be the one industry sustaining now to stave off this trend, you can pick surgeons through digital platforms right now. Right? We’re talking about people who have literal hearts in their hands. So yeah, I think at some point, more clients want to find and engage corporate legal talent, digitally, and we’re going to continue to build that.

Marlene Gebauer  45:27

Yeah. I just love the flexibility of this model. Because you know, you don’t, you don’t have that in like a firm model. It’s like you sort of have what you have. And this is like, okay, I can pick and choose based on the skill sets, and put these all together in a way that makes the best sense for me.

David Pierce  45:44

Well, it’s funny that the firm model, I always say that when we when we started at the axiom journey, we’re trying to break the lawyer law firm client equation apart, like use the pieces that made sense and reinserted those pieces into a new equation. So here’s one example where I think there’s a piece that law firms have that I think is actually really good. They have good connection, high touch personal relationships, between partner and client, you know, that client thinks I can reach this person. So so when we talk about the high touch part, we will never abandon a world where we’re focused on world class customer service, right for client and lawyer never going to happen. If anything, we’ll just keep trying to hone, and perfect that we want our lawyers to feel that we are we really know their backgrounds, we know their aspirations, were tuned to their experience. We want our clients to feel great about service level to have access to relationship owners who are totally committed to their business, and to great client outcomes. So high touch doesn’t mean doesn’t always have to mean human touch. But for large chunk of our clients, you know, human touch is really important. Greg, I hope that answered the question.

Greg Lambert  46:48

I think Marlene asked that question.

David Pierce  46:51

Oh, sorry, Marlene. It was a better question.

Greg Lambert  46:57

I have no arguments with that one. Your discussion about PayPals, GC, Louise Pentland, resigning. And basically I think she’s just going kind of on a on exploring the world and finding herself.

Marlene Gebauer  47:16

She’s going on a walkabout?

Greg Lambert  47:17

She’s going on a walkabout and God bless her for for doing that. Let me ask you personally, since this seems to resonate with you a lot, what do you do to keep yourself from reaching that point where you’re like, I got to step away from this and find myself How do you? How do you keep from being overwhelmed?

David Pierce  47:39

I’m gonna, you know, I’m going to try too hard to answer that question without turning it into an Axiom commercial, because I don’t think that your audience today.

Greg Lambert  47:46

We’ll have to charge for that.

David Pierce  47:47

That’s right, that’s right sent, please send, please send me the bill. But I will tell you, I get really energized and inspired by seeing the people that drive this business every day, by hearing the stories from our lawyers, by seeing the kind of courage and guts of our business builders to bring an industry forward. By just interacting with the people I get paid to work with, you know, from the executive team, to our most junior early career hires. And I’m always amazed by the caliber of people that continue to bring into this business. So I will tell you, this is again, sound so obvious, right? People make the difference in every business. And I think that’s really the case for me and Axiom has been a lot of businesses in the 12 years I’ve been here and I’ve always it’s been easy to stay engaged and inspire. And I really think we’ve been skating on the ice all this time to use a hockey analogy, told you my analogies were an issue. But we’ve been skating on the ice all this time to where we thought the puck was going to be. And I feel like we’re finally hitting that point. And it feels a great moment. But I will say on a more personal note. I’m actually a very introverted personality, believe it or not unusual for a commercial leader, but I get a lot of energy just by going for walks. I try to exercise, I try to constantly look at things read things, learn about things that make me feel inspired. And I think everybody would probably do well to find those things in their own, you know, professional and personal lives. Can’t speak for everyone but that that’s what worked for me.

Marlene Gebauer  49:14

That makes perfect sense. You know, I’m listening to you and I’m like, Yeah, I do a few of those things myself. So that’s great.

David Pierce  49:21

You watch Marvel movies and Ted Lasso, so.

Marlene Gebauer  49:23

I do that, and I kayak and, you know, do a few other things. And I will say it’s like I think you get jazzed about seeing people in your organization, you know, really into what they’re doing. And there’s there’s an energy there and you know that that helps. 100%

David Pierce  49:44

Yeah, and also like seeing people with problems you’re helping to solve, like that’s a great like all we want you today as professionals to feel useful.

Greg Lambert  49:51

Yes. I laughed when I was in law school. I took a tax class and I mean, I nailed it. I got a solid C in it, but

Marlene Gebauer  50:00

Well done.

Greg Lambert  50:01

I will tell you that one of the things that I found rewarding and I’ve kind of applied this on a daily basis is, every time I left that class, I felt like I learned something that I had accomplished something. And I tried to try to talk with with my staff as like, what I want is, maybe not every day, but I want most more days than not, I want you feel like you’ve walked out of here, and you can point back and say, you know, I did something today I made, you know, I made something that made a little bit of a difference, or again,

Marlene Gebauer  50:10

I made an impact.

Greg Lambert  50:27

I got recognition, I got, you know, something like that. And I think that that’s a good motivator,

David Pierce  50:39

And that you try that you exerted effort that you gave your best. And I’ve never been a great athlete, mediocre athlete at best. But I almost imagine it’s like leaving a field at the end of the game where you feel like you did everything you could do. But best thing I learned in law school was from a professor who said, Hey, you want to know something that’s really important. Yellow loading zones, you can park it on every day after sex. And all day on Sunday. There you go. I just I just I just shrunk the number of available yellow bones zones across the audience pool by a ton, but it was worth it. I hope everybody uses that. So there,

Marlene Gebauer  51:12

If you’ve learned nothing else.

David Pierce  51:14

Yellow loading zone.

Marlene Gebauer  51:15

This this is a practical, this is a practical tool. Okay, so we are at our crystal ball question. All right. So is it too soon to predict who’s winning? Regarding the management of job continuity and disruption? You know, what are the entities and people that are embracing the situation as an opportunity?

David Pierce  51:37

Yeah, I would say so I’ll keep it kind of macro and say that the people who win are the people who will do all the things that we have discussed in the prior hour, they will have great imaginations, they will make really clear to people that their health and safety will always be fully prioritized, full stop, period. They will be flexible with people who need that they will open office environments, where it makes sense and ensure that anyone who wants to be on site can where they create policy on on site remote or hybrid. They explain really clearly and transparently, why they’re doing it and no matter what, no matter what, they’re really clear with everyone on the mission of the business and the park that each person plays to bring that mission to life. The companies who nail that almost no matter industry, right? Are going to nail it. And the opposite is also true.

Marlene Gebauer  52:34

Well, I think we’ll probably leave it at that. Thank you, David Pierce for joining us. This has been a great, great conversation. And I’m sure you’re taking.

Greg Lambert  52:44

I’m gonna look around, see if I can find a yellow parking zone somewhere around here.

Marlene Gebauer  52:50

Good luck next time I drive downtown.

David Pierce  52:52

Wait till 5:59pm. Not before, because they’ll tickets you.

Greg Lambert  52:59

Alright. Thanks, Dave.

David Pierce  52:59

Great to meet you both.

Marlene Gebauer  53:01

Thank you.

Greg Lambert  53:05

Well, I think we probably could have talked to David another hour.

Marlene Gebauer  53:09

Yes. At least at least, there were so many different, you know, streams that we could have. We could have like dove deeper. And I wish we had the time.

Greg Lambert  53:20

Yeah, yeah. And unfortunately, we didn’t record our favorite TED Lasso quotes.

Marlene Gebauer  53:24

We did not we did not

Greg Lambert  53:25

We’ll have to save that for another episode, there were a couple of things that they did want to want to hash back on. And that was, I love the recommendation of the up and coming for the ESG practice in legal, I can tell you from experience, that is a big deal. And anyone that’s watching any of the articles that are coming out, that are written by law firms, ESG is taking up a larger and larger percentage of those articles. So you can tell that is the there’s a lot of discussion and work around that area. So good advice.

Marlene Gebauer  54:08

Yeah. And I mean, I liked our discussion in terms of, you know, who’s who’s who are going to be the winners and who are not? And and what are the things that you need to, you know, that you need to consider in order to do that, because I think it’s a very different, you know, some of these things we’re talking about, you know, like the health of your, you know, of your employees. I mean, that’s not really something that that, you know, not not to this extent that that firms had to think about, and they really kind of have to think about that and how a you know, hybrid sort of situation is going to work, you know, if you’re going to have people coming in, how are they going to come in? How are we protecting their health? How are we you know, how are we training them? How are we you know, making sure that you know, they have a seat at the table I mean, all of those things. It’s very, very complicated. And, you know, it is going to be a real challenge, I think for, you know, an industry such as ours to kind of get our, you know, get our arms around it.

Greg Lambert  55:13

Yeah. Well, I think the the successful firms will will do well at this and vice versa. Great. Well, thanks again to David Pierce, from Axiom for coming in and having a great conversation with us.

Marlene Gebauer  55:26

Yes, thank you, David. And of course, thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoyed the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I could be found at @gebauerm on Twitter.

Greg Lambert  55:41

And I can be reached at @glambert in the yellow parking zone on Twitter

Marlene Gebauer  55:46

or you can leave us a voicemail on The Geek in Review Hotline at 713-487-7270. And, as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry.

Greg Lambert  55:57

Thanks, Jerry. All right, talk to you later Marlene.

Marlene Gebauer  55:59

Okay, bye bye!

We have a double-header of interviews this week with Marlene talking with Suffolk Law School’s Gabe Teninbaum on his new book, Productizing Legal Work: Providing Legal Expertise at Scale. Greg talks with Lindsie Rank, Student Press Counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) about the new website to help journalists answer the question, “Can I Publish This?“

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts |  Spotify

Transcript

Tropes around tech utopianism are attractive fictions that promise quick wins and deliver long-term pain, ultimately undermining our efforts at effective value storytelling (series recap, plus prior screeds against tech-fixated magical thinking here, here, and here)

A new bombshell lawsuit against a contract lifecycle management provider offers a stark reminder of the promise and peril of CLM—and therefore an unfortunate but instructive example of how tech-first solutioning can go terribly wrong.

Bad contracting processes have consequences. At the center of the complaint is a ~$5m contract for CLM services and tech. The plaintiff claim they terminated the contract early for alleged uncured breaches thereof and then mistakenly continued to make ~$1.7m in payments to defendant.

Isn’t it ironic (in the Alanis Morrissette sense of the word) that in a lawsuit centered around a disastrous effort to improve contract management, a substantial percentage of the alleged damages are due to alleged failures in contract management.

The business value of better contracting is not in question. As discussed previously, a 20% improvement in contracting efficacy has, on average, 32x the business impact of cutting outside counsel spend by 20%. Tech has an important role to play. But tech should not be the star of the show, especially in the beginning.

When tech is not the primary problem (or the primary solution). The complaint begins its retelling in October 2019 when the defendant gave an in-person platform demonstration. In June 2020—seven months later “following a rigorous selection process”—the parties entered into the $5m contract only to terminate it in April 2021, ten months post execution. Suit was filed in November—more than two years after the demo (which is unlikely to have even been the beginning of this ill-fated journey).

Important for our purposes, the plaintiff specifically alleges only one tech-related misrepresentation giving rise to their claims (the ability to “apply a single contract amendment to multiple agreements simultaneously”). Beyond that, every issue raised in the complaint relates to the enormous amount of work required to properly implement CLM.

Characterized as inadequate in the complaint:

• Staffing
• Availability of key resources
• Status tracking
• Training
• Documentation
• Discovery
• Design
• Feedback
• Data mapping
• Data conversion
• Data migration
• Data validation
• Template harmonization
• Contract sorting
• Clause matching
• Implementation
• Integration

The tech is not the central grievance. The gravamen of the complaint is the absence of expertise:

Many of these issues could have been resolved had [Defendant] provided a subject matter expert to lead discovery sessions with [Plaintiff] stakeholders.

Unfortunately, [Defendant] never provided a subject matter expert to lead a discovery session, and most sessions (led by [Plaintiff]) involved multiple [Defendant] resources repeatedly asking the same questions of [Plaintiff]. In total, [Plaintiff] estimates that at least half of all discovery session time was ultimately worthless, particularly because [Defendant] continually asked for information that [Plaintiff] had already provided or covered topics that had already been discussed.

Properly staffed discovery sessions could have prevented [Defendant]’s catastrophic decision to switch from running template harmonization and business requirements discovery in parallel to placing all emphasis on harmonization before discovery. This decision, agreed to by [Plaintiff] based on [Defendant]’s claimed experience and expertise, delayed the [contract management system] project for months. Only after considerable wasted time and effort did [Defendant] decide that its recommendation was unworkable.

The resulting extraneous effort is extraordinary. For example, the complaint alleges “Approximately 75 percent of [Defendant]’s deliverables needed reworking by [Plaintiff]. [Defendant]’s struggles with harmonization resulted in nearly 1,000 hours of wasted work by [Plaintiff] employees.”

Yet, according to the complaint, the lawsuit is all that remains of all this effort: “the [contract management system] that [Plaintiff] and [Defendant] were working to build was designed to function using [Defendant]’s proprietary software and platform; [Plaintiff] is left with nothing tangible to show for months of work.”

There but for the grace of god go us all. I have not named names because the names are not important. The kind of trainwreck reflected in the allegations is painfully familiar to anyone who has been in and around major implementation projects—with blame flying liberally in every direction. The complaint is only one side of the story.

One-sided stories can be revealing without being accurate. I don not pretend to know what really happened. But I hear these accounts all the time, all across the spectrum, from both the client and vendor perspective. I’ve lived through a few such kerfuffles myself in prior lives. We all reside in glass houses, and I am not over here throwing stones.

Yet, I could not ignore the complaint. It makes manifest a contention I was struggling to articulate. I’d written most of this already, as the second half of last post. But I split that post in two, both in an act of mercy (the word count was crushing) and because I knew I was failing to make a compelling case for my thesis that we are too quick to to turn to tech—as an avoidance mechanism for addressing process and culture. The complaint brings my thesis into the real world.

This is all too familiar. Again, I know nothing of the actual facts underpinning these allegations. But, unfortunately, I am an aficionado of the genre. The CLM nightmare is an exceedingly common legal tech horror plot device. No participant escapes unscathed.

Based on first-hand experience in previous roles, I often plead with potential customers to hold off on looking at CLM. I expressly recommend against starting with CLM despite the fact it is, literally, part of my day job to support a CLM company in going to market (Agiloft, LexFusion, and Factor were finalists for 2021 The American Lawyer collaboration award for a successful CLM implementation paired with managed services). It is incumbent upon me to ensure our customers are on the right path—we’re in the trust business. But it also my obligation to our member companies to set them up for success.

Indeed, I’ve so frequently warned against jumping straight to CLM, and had so many variants of the same dialogue, I decided I should write about it (“oh, I have a post on this” is a great way to shortcut repeat conversations, if you ever wondered where much of my writing originates—and why I consider the complaint above so impactful).

CLM done well is phenomenal. It warms my geeky little heart. But bad CLM is a Lovecraftian hellscape of needless suffering. Some differences are a matter of tech selection (problem/solution fit matters) but the most common dividing line between heaven and hell is whether the enterprise is ready for tech—i.e., whether we have done, and are ready to do, the necessary work on process and culture.

In the last post, I highlighted how our understandable reluctance to be transparent about our technical, process, and cultural debts impedes value storytelling (series recap). Herein, I want to emphasize why much our technical debt is a consequence of poor sequencing. We start with tech instead of process and culture because tech “seems” simpler.

As a continuation of last post where I tackled delays caused by onerous liability language, I again lever off the superb case study from my friend Alex Hamilton’s must-read Sign Here (reprinted with his generous permission).

Dreams are good except when they are nightmares. The second finding in the case study—delay caused by approvals, signatures, etc.—seems like a gift to legal ops nerds and in-house innovator types (you know, my people). For many, the friction of securing approvals and signatures screams out for the new hotness in legal tech: CLM is having a moment with smart money investors for comprehensible reasons. There is considerable opportunity to drive business value by making contracting tech enabled.

But as Lucy Bassli observes in her excellent four-part series on Legal Evolution introducing her own book, CLM Simplified (near the top of my reading queue): “There’s a lot to do before jumping to technology.”

Slow is smooth; smooth is fast. To put it bluntly, most current contract processes are terrible. This is often no one’s fault because it is often no one’s responsibilities. Contract processes frequently grow organically, with everyone doing their best to solve local problems as they arise. Expediency introduces kludges and compromises. Process, cultural, and technical debts accumulate and compound.

We need not blame anyone for the mess to recognize it is in fact a mess. Acknowledging the mess is a key first step. Yet acknowledgment can bring accountability. Naming a problem is an act of ownership.

Gravitating to tech-first solutioning is understandable. Tech is fun. Tech genuinely solves many problems. And centering tech can allow us to reframe our mess as a matter of absence (we need just one more thing) rather than as a morass of clutter and disrepair. And while procuring tech can be painful, procuring tech is often considerably less painful than addressing process and culture debt, especially when process and culture cross departmental lines. Unfortunately, implementation must follow procurement, and that is when our debts become due.

If we try to automate rubbish, we, at best, get automated rubbish (though, more likely, partially automated rubbish, if we produce anything salvageable at all). There are few quick tech fixes. We must pay down the process and cultural debt first and then find tech fit-to-purpose. But the inverse is exceedingly common. We are inclined to start with tech, assuming we will work out our process along the way. This is a terrible plan that tends to end poorly.

Tech magic is an appealing story. But it is appealing because the deus ex machina allows us to skip over the hard parts. That’s fine for fiction. But quality nonfiction makes complicated truths digestible rather than trafficking in palatable lies. Value storytelling is only good if it can persuade people of that which they are not already persuaded and then survive contact with reality.

Tech ≠ Process ≠ Culture. Returning to the case study. If the delay in execution is being caused by a manager studiously ignoring the approval requests in their inbox, it does not matter whether the requests came from a flesh-and-blood member of the in-house legal team or was automagically generated by a new CLM system. The request will be ignored just the same.

The process question is whether this person really needs to sign off. In a narrow sense, the answer is likely yes because that is what the approval matrix says. Digging down another layer, however, it is astounding how often approval matrices prove ill-suited to the present configuration and circumstances of a company, even when well crafted at the time of inception

But changing an approval matrix moves us from the technical to the cultural, where politics can become fraught. Some managers will be delighted by a story in which they have ascended to the point where the threshold for their attention (i.e., sign off) must be correspondingly raised. But others will be triggered by the prospect of surrendering control.

And that is if the approval matrix is the issue. In many scenarios, we genuinely need senior stakeholder sign off, and the senior stakeholder is the bottleneck. The cultural challenge becomes convincing the senior stakeholder(s) to consistently prioritize our ask over many other important items clamoring for their scarce attention. A tall, and sometimes impossible, order.

Resist temptation. So why waste a crisis? Why not use slow cycle times to bolster a request for additional resources (as we did here), especially if we are confident that a CLM project is inevitable and worthwhile? Because we are setting ourselves up for failure that could haunt us for as long as we remain in seat.

Good CLM is incredibly labor, attention, and expertise intensive. It demands considerable cross-functional collaboration. Bad CLM is not just a resource suck. It is also a branding catastrophe. The high business impact and high visibility of contracting means a CLM disaster can do lasting damage to our credibility as competent allies in driving business value.

It’s not just that it’s almost always cheaper to do it right the first time. After CLM-related trauma, the appetite to fix CLM missteps, let alone start over from scratch, is nearly nonexistent. CLM, even bad CLM, tends to be sticky. Poorly designed systems endure, causing us chronic pain. We should not start down the path unless we are prepared to go all the way because, otherwise, we may find ourselves trapped in the in-between—a situation far worse than the one we set out to improve.

Better not to do it than to do it poorly. There is nothing special about legal’s preference to seek refuge in technology in an attempt to avoid addressing entangled process and cultural debts. Legal is not the primary pushers of contract automation. The infatuation with CLM can originate with sales or procurement or anywhere else that might be justifiably frustrated with the contracting status quo.

But legal remains a CLM stakeholder. As stakeholders, our posture should be “yes if” rather than a “yes and.” Yes, we should pursue this if it will be properly resourced, including the cross-functional collaboration required to address process and cultural debt. Much of this work should precede the search for technology because finding fit-to-purpose technology requires properly defining the problems we are working to solve.

The literature on tech-first failures is ample. And the conclusions are always the same. For example, I commend this report by A21 and the accompanying presentation entitled Technology is not the answer: Why “digital” is not the most important aspect of your digital strategy. The summary: “answers as to why digital strategies succeed or fail are complex, but… people, culture, leadership, and organizational alignment are more important for digital transformation than data and technology.” (also see this report from McKinsey citing culture as the most significant barrier to digital transformation)

CLM is extreme, not unique. Bad CLM is extreme with respect to the damage it can inflict on the business and law department brand/resources. But CLM is not unique. Tech-first solutioning and the resulting trip down the innovation rabbit hole are all too common.

Again, tech presents a palatable story. The idea that we can just plug, play, and reap the benefits is another one of those attractive fictions. It enables us to perpetuate the illusion that nothing is wrong with our current state. Rather, we are simply augmenting what we already do well through additive technology that was not previously available. Palatable. Also inaccurate and on a collision course with reality.

Tech remains essential. Tech is not an essential starting point. Indeed, it is often the wrong starting point. Our penchant for technological moonshots is often grounded in a misunderstanding of the outsized impact of reducing low-end friction through low-tech solutions, like taking less onerous starting positions in our contracts or streamlining processes. But, ultimately, tech is a necessity.

The productivity imperative I outline here demands a level of industrialization that incrementalism cannot deliver, as Jason Barnwell explains in his magnificent post on Legal Evolution:

We will need more capacity and new capabilities that mere conservation of resources cannot deliver. Our evolutionary path needs improvements on how we do work today that range from whole-multiples to orders-of-magnitude. This is transformation.

Transformation is system-level change. Transformation can start with point solution investments. These help us explore, validate hypotheses, and create investment cases. But system effectiveness is limited by the least capable component upon which the system depends. If your computer has a very fast processor but inadequate memory and slow networking, the processor cannot contribute at its full capacity. Legal work has a similar challenge. We need many elements to evolve simultaneously to produce coherent complements. We must start walking in the same direction to transform.

….

As shown in Figure 1 below, treating these as compounding curves and projecting them out suggests law departments must manufacture almost 4 times our current leverage within the decade. I believe this understates the necessary leverage…

 ….

Integrating with client decision-making processes and scaling to demand is getting harder as the business substrate converts to digital and the legal substrate remains analog. Modern organizations are increasingly data-driven. This requires influencing business decisions with data and hypotheses that help ask the right questions. These businesses can generate an astounding amount of work volume built upon machine-based leverage as they transform. See Post 210 (open source practices result in 1000x gain in productivity).

Because our clients are pursuing value creation in increasingly complex business spaces accelerated by machines, the net impact on legal includes:

• Increasing work volume (number of units)
• Increasing complexity (unit cost)
• increasing velocity (unit clearing time)

Demand will accelerate because many clients are chasing an exponential growth curve. And I suspect we are underestimating the true cost of demand growth because we are not factoring in increasing complexity and the requirements for rapid clearing times. Increasing complexity typically requires more effort to do the same work because the solutions are harder. And faster unit clearing times typically require more peak capacity to allow parallel effort.

Translated to the physical realm we are trying to operate a modern city with 19th-century transportation infrastructure. This will not work.

I expect 10x leverage scenarios by the middle of the decade driven by demand with increasing complexity and velocity characteristics.

Tech is necessary. Not sufficient. But necessary.

Tech must be part of our story. Yet never the whole story, if we want the story to end well.

We talk shop with Litera’s Vice-President of Sales for North America, Ashley Miller, including Litera’s growth over the past few years, and how long it can stay in that Goldilocks’ stage of being just the right size to be a big player, yet still nimble enough to pivot when needed.

The recent Changing Lawyer Virtual Summit featured recognizable speakers like Richard Susskind and Seth Godin, but also had Litera’s traditional outside the norm type speaker with Mark Schulman, rock drummer for the likes of P!nk and Cher. Miller zeroed in on something that Richard Susskind discussed at the conference about the changes in technology adoption in law firms during the pandemic. Are the advancements we’ve seen since March 2020 really innovation, or are they really just acceleration of automation designed to keep work afloat?

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts |  Spotify

Transcript

While neurodiversity might be an unfamiliar word for many, its meaning is simple. We all have different brains. For the legal field, there is value in this, as we need to be able to look at problems in different ways and find new approaches to solving those problems. Haley Moss is an author, attorney, and advocate for neurodiversity, and is neurodivergent herself. Haley has autism, which she sees as both a disability and makes her different. But it also makes her interesting, and while she doesn’t know what it means to be neurotypical, she is fine with that and sees her difference not as a curse, but as a benefit. It is the difference in the way that she processes information, solves problems, and it is the neurodiversity that drives her and others to be innovative. She wrote her first book at age 15 and has a desire to use her experiences to help the next generation.

Haley Moss explains that we can’t just look at neurodiversity disabilities in a vacuum. After all, this is the only minority group you can join at any point in your life. The more we understand the issues surrounding neurodiversity, and accommodate for those issues, the better we will be as an industry and a society.

Publications:

• The Young Autistic Adult’s Independence Handbook
• Great Minds Think Differently: Neurodiversity for Lawyers and Other Professionals
• A Freshman Survival Guide For College Students With Autism Spectrum Disorders
• Middle School – The Stuff Nobody Tells You About: A Teenage Girl with ASD Shares Her Experiences

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts |  Spotify

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer

We are very excited to welcome Haley Moss, author of Great Minds Think Differently, Neurodiversity for Lawyers and Other Professionals. Haley, welcome to The Geek in Review.

Haley Moss

Thank you so much for having me.

Greg Lambert

So, Haley, you spoke at my firm during a diversity and inclusion luncheon that we hold each month here. And I, honestly, I was just blown away by your frankness and honesty of what you were saying what it was like to be a lawyer who was diagnosed with autism as a child, and share those personal and professional experiences as you become an author, an advocate, attorney and public speaker for the topic of neurodiversity. And, and I was really excited that or I was so excited that I actually reached out to you I think, I don’t even know if you had finished the talk. But I had already reached out to see if you would come on over.

Haley Moss

You were pretty ambitious. I love it.

Greg Lambert

Yes.  I was I was. So it’s very kind of you to take the time to talk with us.

Marlene Gebauer

He knows a good guest when he sees one.

Greg Lambert

I do.  Strike when the iron is hot.

Haley Moss

I’m flattered.

Greg Lambert

We’ve discussed neurodiversity on this show before. But would you mind just laying out some of the groundwork here and explaining what neurodiversity is, especially when it comes to how it applies to the legal culture and profession?

Haley Moss

Absolutely. So I think when we talk about neurodiversity, we’re really bad at conceptualizing it because we think this is new, what language do we use? Who is covered? What does this even mean? Because and I think a lot of this comes from the fact that neurodiversity is a fairly new term that really originated in the late 90s. So it was coined by an autistic sociologist named Judy Singer. And it was really explaining this idea that we have different brains. We’re neurodiverse as a society, we all have different brains. Wonderful. So what neurodiversity really gets that is the difference of brains is natural. It’s something that we should expect. And it’s something that deserves to be accepted and respected. So no matter whether you’re neurotypical and your brain acts in expected, normal, whatever normal is supposed to mean ways or your neurodivergent. And your brain acts outside of that box of what we’re expecting. That you still deserve that same respect, and dignity, and acceptance. So folks who are neurodivergent might include, but definitely not limited to autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, psychiatric and mental health disabilities, intellectual disability. So that’s not comprehensive. But that’s kind of the big categories. And with the legal profession, this is really important, because we’ve always had a neurodiverse legal profession, whether or not we want to admit it. And we often have a lot of stigma surrounding a lot of these different conditions and neurodivergent conditions and different ways of being in trades especially. So it’s rooted in how we talk about professionalism, who we see as being a good culture fit that there’s so much that if we really kind of extract it, and we realize that we are having these different types of biases, and things like ableism, since neurodiversity is very tied to disability. And a lot of these conditions that you might hear people go, is it a difference? Is that a disability? Is it both? Is it neither? And it’s definitely in both categories if you ask me. And we can get into that if we want to. But I know for me, autism is both disabling and it makes me different. And it’s interesting, and life is fun that way, I don’t know what it’s like to be neurotypical, I don’t really want to know, I’m fine with it, I’m at peace. I don’t really want to be cured or anything. That’s kind of my little political version of how I feel about autism, and neurodiversity more broadly. But the ableism component and those microaggressions and stigmas, I think are things that lawyers really face. And as we know, our profession has a really big initiative about lawyer mental health, but it really ignores that this is something that is natural, that there’s not something inherently wrong with you, if you have these differences if you’re processing information differently, or in an unexpected way. And it’s something that actually if we really look at it more broadly, it’s to our benefit that we do have different ways of processing information, of solving problems, and ultimately, disability neurodiversity drives innovation.

Marlene Gebauer

So Haley, you kind of touched a little bit on, you know, things that might come up in a job environment. So being quote-unquote, friendly-looking people in the eye, things like that. Is there anything in particular about the legal profession that makes it more challenging for the neurodivergent than other professions?

Haley Moss

Oh, my gosh, I think when we start unpacking so much of legal culture, we could be here all day of what makes it a barrier to access. And one of those first job interview barriers to access is those on-campus interviews that I know that many of us have loved, hated or absolutely dreaded, or skipped while we were in law school. So think about OCI and this very, stay with me for this for a minute. So, you know, OCI has a very different set of rules than most other job interviews, they might be held in hotels, you might be meeting with a bunch of different people, sometimes it’s formal, then you get taken out to maybe a lunch or a dinner. And that does not go well with this conventional idea of what job interviews are, if that you have to have these behaviors, you have to do this, you know, it’s going to be formal that it’s in an office that it ends, the minute you walk out the door, and you send your thank you email 20-24 hours later at the maximum. And there are these very prescribed rules, you know, you should be following in OCI really throws that off. And if you are someone whose brain is really dependent on that predictability on that routine, or you’re someone who struggles with neurotypical social cues, things like eye contact, and things like that, just imagine what a barrier that is not being adequately prepared for that. And I think in legal what makes that even more difficult is when you have folks that work in say, like vocational rehab, or other job coaching services that people who do have more support needs, or young adults who are neurodivergent might be accessing, they don’t have that experience either. So they can’t really prepare you for that. So I like to say that is kind of my first big one. But I think generally, when it comes to law firm culture, in particular, we really are looking for folks who are able to interact with people who are seen as personable, that do make that eye contact. And we don’t realize that those measures don’t always predict who’s going to be a great lawyer. And some of them are just our own personal biases. So I personally am not great at eye contact. Eye contact for me requires that all of my energy goes to looking at your face versus actually listening to what you’re saying. I will put that energy into looking at you to make you feel comfortable, then I’ll have no clue what just happened. And I will ask you to repeat the question. And chances are, you’ll go, but you were looking at me you were listening, you’ll be thinking that you know, and then, no. So I wasn’t always listening, because I was trying to put all that extra energy into that it doesn’t mean you can’t trust me, it means that’s not how I best can focus and process information. So I think when we talk about some of those different traits as well, that’s something that’s kind of comes down to what does this mean? Why do we think this is important? And we need to see this from a different perspective.

Marlene Gebauer

Okay, so if you’re having trouble making eye contact, and that basically forces you to expend too much energy, and not be able to focus on what the person is saying? How do you educate people about that? How do you get them to understand that no, it’s not that I’m not paying attention to you by not looking at you, it’s like, that actually helps me pay attention to you, even though that’s something that you might not be used to?

Haley Moss

it really depends on the situation. So if it’s something that I don’t know, and I don’t have that comfort level with, and I don’t want to disclose, I will just stare at your nose, and you won’t know the difference. And that will be my compromise. If it’s someone that I really do know, I might just say I, I’m able to best listen, if I if my gaze is somewhere else, or if I’m doodling at the same time, as we know, there are lots of doodlers and editors and people who always have something going on in their hands. But it doesn’t mean they’re totally distracted. And that helps them regulate their attention. So sometimes I might just lead with one of those. “I do best when” type statements. And usually, that takes care of a lot of needs that I have without having to go that formal accommodation rules are really having to say too much about my disability if I don’t want to. So I usually do that when I ask for instructions. Because you know how many times especially for young lawyers, we’ve gotten things of “go write this motion.” And you’re sitting there going, what do I do? How long is it supposed to be? What is the thing that the partner is looking for? And the first time that happened to me, I got to go write this motion. And I stared at the wall for four hours, because I just didn’t know what to do. And eventually, I ended up going back after I finally got the courage to say something and said, I work best when they give me clear instructions. I didn’t tell you that I don’t want to disappoint you that I’m scared that I have all sorts of other feelings. It just said, If you spell out what you need from me, I will get it done. And that was enough to start that process for me in an informal way that my employer felt okay with it. And I felt like I was actually able to do my job. So I think when it does come to that disclosure component and advocating for yourself, it’s very case by case. It’s how much do you want to share? How much do you feel comfortable sharing? Or do you even feel safe sharing? So when we talk about disclosure, it’s kind of a mess because it is so individualized and situational.

Greg Lambert

I was gonna follow up and say there’s a doodler on the call here.

Marlene Gebauer

That’s true!

Haley Moss

I am. I doodle all the time and the first time I ever got shamed for it was in high school US history.

Marlene Gebauer

You got shamed for it? Oh, you know, I got shamed for it too. Like the people think you’re not paying attention when you do it, but you’re actually you actually are paying attention when you do it.

Haley Moss

You see the worst is that I was an illustrator. So my doodles were really elaborate and really nice. And if I really liked it after class, I would actually try to paint it or do something else with it. So it really looked like it wasn’t paying attention because they were actually decent. Swirls and like that little S that all of my friends was, like, full-on anime characters and other stuff. And my US History teacher was like, how are you like not failing my class?

Marlene Gebauer

Right, right. Right. Yeah. Greg knows, like, same here. It’s like doing a lot of fashion designs while I’m listening. But it was really interesting.

Haley Moss

And it helps me regulate my attention because my hands have to be doing something. My hands are always doing something.

Marlene Gebauer

Yeah. But what I was going to follow up about was clear instructions. And I had to chuckle about that. Because I think so often, and I’m not going to just pick on law. But I think in any job situation, normal situation, you know, personal situations. It seems really hard for people to give very detailed, clear instructions. And I’m, you know, I’m guilty of that as well. And I’m just trying to think of, again, how best to coach people to do that.

Haley Moss

I always think about what’s the most important thing. So you obviously want a thoughtful answer to this or even that you know that there’s an argument in there that is complete garbage, and that you need to basically refute it. Please research why their argument is garbage. Especially I think about this, especially as someone who is relatively inexperienced, because we do have lots of people who are inexperienced because law school doesn’t always prepare you, the bar exam doesn’t always prepare you for that first moment when it’s like go do the thing. So I think about what would you tell someone who might not have that complex understanding, or might not be seasoned enough to kind of know what’s expected? What I always do now, or in what’s been recommended to me is, every time that I work with new people, I make a list of bullet points of things they should know about working with me. And we usually if I’m with a team, we all end up doing it. So I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you three really important things about me. I’ll tell you, I’m not a morning person. I’ll tell you that, sometimes I might forget to answer email. So it’s okay, if you follow up, I promise you’re not bothering me. And I’ll tell you something like phone calls make me anxious because then I’m concerned that I really did something wrong, or that somebody died or that something bad happened. And my immediate response is defense. So if I tell you just those couple things about me, I think, okay, so we should schedule any major meetings, Probably not, when you’re first waking up. That things that are text or email are probably a better way to communicate with you. And try to be clear about certain instructions, like that’s enough to be like, Okay, I can work with that. But everybody has those needs. And it doesn’t tell you anything about my disability status. It doesn’t tell you if I’m neurodivergent, or neurotypical, it just tells you, these are things that would make things go smoother. So I look at that as kind of a, this is something everybody can do thing. But I think it’s super helpful, especially because we do have all these concerns socially, like, if we do follow up with someone, are we annoying them? Are we being mean, are we doing something wrong? And the truth is, at least for me, you’re not, but I know that some folks have different feelings. And usually, there are ways that we’re able to accommodate them without realizing that we’re doing it and also helping ourselves at the same time. Think about calendar invites, like, it helps you but it really, really helps me. Because if I don’t have a calendar invite for something, I don’t know what happens.

Greg Lambert

But you said there reminded me. And I think it was Brene Brown that has, I forget which book it was where she was talking about that, where she would get people together and say, pick five things that are their values. And it sounds like that’s almost in the same vein as that as you’re asking people to say, pick a few things that are really important for you on how you best where you work, how you work with others. So yeah, that’s very interesting because it was funny because I actually had sent my boss, that same recommendation that that’s what we do is just to senior managers. So that was ringing a bell as you were, as you were talking about it.

Haley Moss

Everything needs to be inclusive and accessible forever. And that’s one of those ways that we’re able to kind of design with a difference in mind, but without outing anybody particularly.

Greg Lambert

That kind of runs right into the question I have is one of the issues that we have when just drafting the questions for the neurodiversity topic is being very careful on not overstepping our bounds or asking people to share more than what they’re comfortable with? So how do you, you know, set your own boundaries of discussing neurodiversity, and I would say specifically autism, with those who may interview you for a job, or your boss, or your peers or subordinates, or even podcast host.

Haley Moss

It’s so situational. So but there see,

Greg Lambert

But, law school has taught you that it depends.

Haley Moss

It depends. It really does.

Marlene Gebauer

But that’s gonna be hard to implement, say, you know, for a firm where they have to have some sort of methodology.

Haley Moss

I think about why people don’t share, because I think that’s almost easier to understand as to why someone does. So I think when people don’t share, because I know why I won’t share, I have not shared because I felt unsafe, I felt scared, I felt that this is someone who might not be in my corner. There are so many, or maybe I was at a place where I didn’t feel comfortable with that about myself. So I think when we come to that, that’s a whole other thing is how do we create that culture of inclusion necessarily? I think about that. But for me, I usually am pretty comfortable sharing but like most people, I have boundaries. So I work a lot with and a lot of my audiences are often teachers and families as well on top of lawyers and families of autistic and neurodivergent kids and family members really want to know a lot of information. Because it’s rare to them, sometimes that they get to meet an adult who has the same condition as their child. And sometimes they will ask questions that I will never, ever feel comfortable answering. So it might be that they’re asking about what my SAT scores were. Or it might be asking about something like if I’ve been in romantic relationships, and these things for me are just

Marlene Gebauer

like, I was trying to be quiet. I’m like, What?

Haley Moss

No, you really, you would genuinely be surprised by what kind of questions with a disability that people want to know. And I know this because I TA’d a Disability Studies class in college, and everybody’s biggest question every semester, was about people in wheelchairs having sex. Like that was all people really wanted to know at that age. Because people always had questions. And of course, we had to actually answer these questions as best we can, based on documentaries, in different information from self-advocates who actually had expertise in these areas. But I do realize something when you are sharing your own story, whether it’s to get accommodations, whether it’s that you want to bring your full self to work, no matter what the situation is, you really have to set boundaries. Because you could end up getting in one of those situations where you’re getting uncomfortable questions not for like, oh, one where you’re diagnosed? Or can you bring a bunch of medical paperwork questions? But actual curious probing questions, because people have that little experience or knowledge or expectation of people with disabilities more broadly.

Marlene Gebauer

So they’re not trying to be nosy. They just want to know.

Haley Moss

They genuinely just don’t know. They either genuinely don’t know, or they’re just that curious because it just never occurred to them. Like, oh, wait, there are real adults out there. So I think what disclosure for me, I look at it as how can I do this? For me, it’s almost inevitable. You google my name, you’re gonna find out. So it’s how do I be proactive about this? In a way that isn’t weird? That’s how I always see it. So sometimes, it might be even having something like my book on my resume. Oh, what got you interested in the topic? Oh, I don’t know. I can’t really lie about that one yet? No, I’m not that smart. I’m not creative enough to come up with the oh, you know, I just think it’s interesting because you will know that I’m complete, like, full of it, you’ll just know, put it lightly, you’ll know. So for me, and I think for me, especially in an interview context, you have to almost phrase it as something that’s not such a definitely have to be careful and how you phrase it cuz you don’t want to be perceived as less. You don’t want it being perceived as a deficit, you still have to be able to say I am perfectly capable to do this, I am absolutely confident, I might just need more support. So I always think that it’s very personal, how you disclose what those pros and cons are, and kind of be ready to advocate for yourself more than you probably had wanted to. And if you do get those really uncomfortable questions, I think you have to just set a boundary. And I think, especially if you’re a young person, it’s that much harder to do. And learning how to set those boundaries, even when people push back against those boundaries is really, really tough.

Marlene Gebauer

Well, I think that’s good advice for everyone, quite honestly, in terms of setting boundaries. I want to flip the question a little bit. Do you have suggestions of what boundaries are for others, the people who want to better understand proper interactions with those who may be neurodivergent? You know, what sort of behaviors should they adopt and avoid?

Haley Moss

Oh my gosh, I think avoiding is easier to start. I think first, I think treating us like people is probably the easiest thing to say. And the thing that is sometimes the hardest for certain folks. So for me, I realize that people sometimes conflate autism with intellectual disability. There are plenty of autistic people who do have intellectual disabilities, I am not one of them. And that’s not a slight against intellectual disabilities. And anything since those folks are super worthy, and valid and deserve all the love and they have that many more extra barriers in their way. But the way that people with intellectual disabilities get talked down to is completely unfair, and when it happens to me, I want to scream. I think they want to scream as well that you get the baby voice and people treat you like you’re like a little kid. And I’ve had to happen with attorneys is they don’t know how to treat me. And then they’ll like, pull out the baby voice, oh, my God. Or they’ll do this. I’m so sorry. You’re so inspiring. And I’m like, I just had a question. Like, it’s so many things that you realize don’t happen to non-disabled, and neurotypical people, but that they tend to do so I try to avoid anything that’s tokenizing or patronizing. I think that’s kind of a good rule of thumb is just that dignity and respect. I think it’s okay to ask questions. And to be curious. I have nothing wrong with curiosity. But again, when we’re talking about boundaries, if there’s a boundary drawn, that is a sign of trust, of saying, this is where I don’t feel comfortable, please respect that. It is not a personal thing. It is not personal for me, whenever someone asked me something about relationships or something, and I decide this is not for discussion. It’s not personal. It’s just self-preservation-type stuff. And it’s just I don’t feel comfortable. And that might be a boundary that I’ve set with somebody else, too. So I think what we’re talking about, I think boundaries is a big one. I think asking people how they like to be described or how they identify, I think that’s always important because I think that people have very different relationships, if with their own conditions, and if they have a disability, or if they are neurodivergent. So I know folks who have mental health conditions that won’t identify with neurodiversity, or I know people who extremely do. And I know people that like me will say that autistic people who say they have autism, like there’s no correct one size fits all approach. I also think that this goes for everyone. But communicating clearly and directly, I think, is super helpful for a lot of us. I know, for me, it’s very difficult to read between the lines. And some of those social cues. I love when people are direct with me, it’s very unnatural for a lot of people because they are told not to do that. But for neurodivergent people, a lot of us, it’s very much natural to us. So I feel like there are two different languages of social communication being spoken sometimes. And instead, we’re just expected to adapt to how neurotypicals communicate for everything. And from the time we’re young, we’re taught that the way that we naturally communicate is a failed version of that. So I think it’s important, especially when we see some of these traits as well, but are also really empathetic in that I know we have this very high ideal of what professionalism is, and all these ideas about what is expected. And I think sometimes looking a little bit deeper, and being more empathetic about that is something that we can all do, and be curious and empathetic. So I think about my friends with ADHD who are chronically late. And the first thing we think is they can’t get it together. They’re lazy. They’re unprofessional, we put all these immediate stigmatizing things. A lot of my friends with ADHD are time blind, they don’t realize how much time has passed, they might not realize that they had to leave 10 minutes ago, that they might have gotten hyper-focused on something that they were interested in or excited about, or they just got distracted with something, or their executive function just didn’t quite work and they had a bad brain day. I think that when we realize that it might be something else, not that this person is lazy and doesn’t care, that it makes us better human beings for realizing that and for being as supportive as we can. So when I know folks are chronically late and like Is everything okay? Not that oh my god, this person’s just lazy, or that they just don’t care, or they’re not making an effort. I was like, are you okay? Is something going on? Like I tried to be as gracious as I can because I know that we’re all human at the end of the day and that sometimes it is deeper, or there is something else like you might not want to tell me that you struggle with things like time blindness or executive functioning, but you might want me to know that it’s not a moral failing. And I think that we do conflate a lot of these types of things that might be symptoms of something larger as moral failings.

Greg Lambert

Interesting, interesting. So, Hayley, in instances, like in education, there are those who are classified as neurodivergent. And they can receive educational plans that legally at least theoretically are supposed to be followed. What about in the workplace? Are there legal protections that the ADA or other laws out there that legislate in provide protections within the workplace?

Haley Moss

So the big one for the workplace is still Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act. So I know we think that is still new to us because it’s from 1990. I liked to remind you that the ADA is older than me. So we’ve all had plenty of time to figure this out by now, hopefully, you would hope so. But most of what the ADA really does give guidance on is this very broad definition of what disability is. That of course, I know, courts still sometimes try to figure it out. Now they have a little bit more guidance, but it’s very broad, like this physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. And if you look at what a major life activity is, it’s pretty much very broad. And basically, what Title I says is that if you’re an employer with 15, or more employees that you can’t discriminate on the basis of disability. So you are provided to, you’re required to provide reasonable accommodations, at any point in the employment process, as long as it’s not basically an undue hardship. So basically, it can’t be impossible or inordinately expensive. So whenever I talk about this in my last firm job, my last firm had fluorescent lights, and fluorescent lights, hum, they are bright, they get migraines are many, many reasons that people don’t like them. For me, they hum and I can’t block that out, no matter how hard I try, it’s just so distracting. And every time I mentioned that somebody is like, Oh, my God, I can’t unhear that now. So I apologize, I apologize. If now you’re not gonna be able to hear that for the rest of the time we’re talking. So if I wanted a reasonable accommodation, I probably can’t demand the office switch everything over to LEDs, it’s probably not going to happen this switch out an entire two-story building, as much as I would have loved it. And maybe it might have been more environmentally friendly, I can give you 50 million reasons that would be all for it. On top of the fact they don’t hum and they don’t give me migraines. Unfortunately, that is probably not reasonable. It’s not impossible, but it’s probably expensive. And it’s probably just a lot of effort. So what would be reasonable is maybe if we had, maybe there’s some are quieter in the office, maybe there’s somewhere that didn’t have fluorescent lights, maybe I can shut them off, maybe I can close the door, or I can wear headphones. But there are so many different things that I could do that would be low cost or no cost to my employer that we can agree upon together, we ultimately agreed upon headphones, because as long as I can hear the phone ring, that was kind of the stipulation there, which I thought was fine, I didn’t have a problem with that. Because you know, there’s always calls coming in, you have to be ready. So I was able to block out the noise, which was fine. So I think about what is reasonable, and that looks different for different people. So maybe it’s being able to fidget, maybe it’s getting up a little bit, maybe it’s having kind of a quiet space that you can go run off to if you’re just feeling overwhelmed. Or maybe it’s even something with billable hours if that’s essential as part of what you struggle with your disability. So I know, at least for me, I do, I used to ask how long something should take ideally because I would get really hyper-focused that there’s something super interesting in research. And I could spend the whole day on it. But that doesn’t mean I should be doing that. Or that’s realistic for billing for the whole day of eight hours of oh, this is a really interesting rabbit hole, I’m going to learn everything there is to know about this really niche issue, that maybe it was a three-hour issue. And that’s what I should be allocated to best manage my time. So sometimes I would ask for help, but things like managing my time, so I knew what to do. And I think we have to be creative. I think it really is an interactive process, which is something that you hear people say about accommodations from an HR perspective is interactive. But I don’t think that means it has to be super formal all the time. I think that a lot of it is just being able to communicate with whoever you’re working with, and being able to advocate for yourself. So if I just say I need clear instructions, we can figure out what that means we can figure out if that means you need to write something out. If you need to give me a visual, if there’s a template, from something that’s been done before, there are many ways that you can figure out what that means. It’s just having that jumping-off point to realize what you need or what you think you might need. And I think especially coming from law school or an educational setting, that’s really difficult to do. Because in the past, you’ve probably had different teachers, different psychologists, different people assessing your needs all the time. Or you had this plan that followed you for many, many years. And you knew that Okay, since kindergarten, I’ve been getting extra time. Therefore, I will probably be able to get extra time in law school as long as that somebody says that it’s still relevant. I did not do extra time, which is why for me accommodations were always a disaster because I didn’t need it. And that was always what was offered to me and I didn’t know I had other options, because no one told me there were other options. So looking back there are things that I think I needed, but I didn’t know I can ask for. But I think in the workplace, it really is more interactive than it is when you do have things like IEP meetings and K through 12. Or if you had a 504 plan, or if you worked with a university Disability Services Center or staff.

Greg Lambert

One of the things that in you, you mentioned both here, and when you’re presenting at my firm, basically what you’re saying here is I work better when blank. I have headphones. When I do this. It reminds me of there was a study decades ago when the ADA required just the sidewalk ramps for wheelchair access. And it turned out that it didn’t just help people that were in wheelchairs, it helped. Pretty much everybody, then and I think, you know, a lot of times, we figured this out as well, that by asking people, how do you work better, and accommodating, you know, in doing the small accommodations on an individual level, it makes sense, and it makes for a more efficient workplace. So I just wanted to toss that out.

Haley Moss

I’m glad that you did because I think that honestly leading from that universal design perspective is something that we need to be doing going forward as well. So you might not need to know who is most impacted. But if we imagined and redesign things with that person in mind, or those types of marginalization in mind, we all benefit. So I think about that with not even just the sidewalks but I usually think about it with closed captions, which is when we use captions on our TV, chances are you are not deaf or hard of hearing. And that’s of course, the intended audience and who it was designed for. And think about why you use something like closed captions. Maybe you’re learning a new language, maybe you’re just very busy, maybe you’re really good with visual information. Maybe you want those extra social cues that come in there. That’s why I like closed captions because they’ll tell you if the music is really tense, really dramatic, or someone’s laughing or scoffing. So I immediately know if you’re being sarcastic because sometimes they can’t tell. So there are all sorts of different people who end up benefiting from this not just people who are deaf or hard of hearing that you have your second language learners, you have us having access to foreign language television that we might not have had before. Because we don’t speak that language. There are so many different things that come into that equation. So if we really do design our environments with more marginalized people in mind, whether it’s race, disability, ethnicity, gender, if we’re really thinking about all of these different factors, and we try to make policy and do things with people who are marginalized in mind, it ends up benefiting all of us whether or not we know it right away. And we ended up taking some of those things for granted.

Marlene Gebauer

So, Haley, we talked a few months ago with Dr. Caitlin Handron with the Ropes and Gray Insights Lab. And she disclosed to her boss that she was bipolar, and wanted to help normalize her own neuro divergence. She said that her psychiatrist was actually surprised that she would do this and worried that she was putting herself at risk by not hiding her identity as bipolar, which Dr. Handron stated was, of course, our legal right to do. You know, it seems there may be a fear of stigma for some people to disclose their neurodivergent identity and to mask their differences yet if they don’t disclose they risk losing the protections afforded to them. How do employers and employees best resolve this catch 22?

Haley Moss

It’s a mess. I don’t think there’s

Marlene Gebauer

That doesn’t give me a lot of faith…

Haley Moss

I don’t think there’s a one size fits all answer, because it kind of goes back to why people do and don’t share. And I think a lot of employees get boxed into sharing when they are having performance issues when it needs to be known because there’s no other option. And I think there is that inherent bias that makes it very difficult to share. And especially with something like bipolar disorder, which is one of the more highly stigmatized forms of neuro divergence. So I think a lot of corporations and workplaces look at neurodiversity as kind of like acceptable neurodiversity of like, autism with low support needs, ADHD, learning disabilities, the and maybe your run of the mill type, anxiety, depression that might be seasonal, it might be something that’s easily managed. They don’t think about things that are more highly stigmatized, like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and intellectual disability, that I think it’s really important that kind of goes back to where that universal design is, is really thinking of these folks in mind when we’re doing things. But I think with that catch 22 It’s really I understand why people mask. I also understand that it’s compounded by a variety of different factors. So especially I know for me, I am more likely to mask when I feel uncomfortable. And if my personal safety I think might be at risk. I’m aware that I am also female. I am aware that there are people who might have different forms of marginalization working against them as well. So they might be neurodivergent, they might be female, they might be queer, they might be people of color. And that also impacts their safety as well and how they’re going to be experiencing the world. So I think that we have to see that ableism is a huge part of this. So I think a lot of that, at least for employers, is unlearning a lot of their own biases. I think there’s a lot of bias. I think there’s a lot of ableism, not just in the legal profession, but in most of our society. And I think sometimes it’s very obvious. And sometimes it’s very sneaky. And sometimes it’s just so embedded in our culture that we don’t think about it. And sometimes I catch it. So even with the language that we use, there are so many different ways to kind of unpack ableism as a whole. But that’s kind of my thing is when we’re disclosing, I think it’s, why are you doing this, and if you know that you might need that protection, you feel like you might have to. And also, I think when we’re sharing our stories on our own terms, it does help and that stigma to some degree, it humanizes these issues. It humanizes these conditions that a lot of us just think of as these people that are undeserving, or moral failures, or whatever it may be. So I think that openness does end up changing things for the better, but it should be on our terms. So that’s why I’m really glad that you told me about a past guest who chose to share that not because she felt boxed in but she chose to do that. And one of the best things that people say is how can we support you? Or how can I support you? You don’t have to have all the answers. Please don’t tell me you’re sorry. For me, that’s usually the easiest thing to like, avoid doing. I don’t feel sorry for me, you shouldn’t feel sorry, either. I still have the same needs and desires and things in my life that make me happy like anybody else. Like I still have people I love. I have a job I find fulfilling. I have a roof over my head, I have all the stuff that people want in life like I’m happy. I don’t feel sorry about that.

Marlene Gebauer

So, Haley, you have written it women who are autistic often have an even harder time in the workplace than even their male counterparts. Why is that?

Haley Moss

I think it goes back to that intersectionality component. So I think especially when we think of stereotypes of certain disabilities, and neurodiversity, we often think of men, especially with autism and ADHD. Women and nonbinary people and trans people and people who are not essentially cisgender men, have that much of a harder time getting access to services, they might get diagnosed or identified later in life. There are so many different things there. And a lot of these individuals are high masking and high camouflaging. So they might be working overtime to try to act in socially acceptable ways or to try to take on a neurotypical type persona. And it’s often to our own detriment. That as much as it does maybe alleviate things like bullying or workplace harassment. It also takes its toll on our self-esteem, how we feel, our own mental health. And I think that that’s something that we have to be mindful of. I kind of do worry, especially because I know a lot of folks do get missed. And then there’s this issue that that people who are gender diverse often have a well you don’t have this lifelong history. And there are so many reasons people don’t have lifelong history. But the fact that a lot of criteria do have these eight-year-old boys in mind, and a lot of these conditions are viewed as things that happen to eight-year-old boys, and not adults. I think that makes it that much harder too.

Marlene Gebauer

nobody seems to understand that the eight-year-old boys grow up.

Haley Moss

Exactly. But everyone still thinks that ADHD is the second grader bouncing off the walls, not an adult who might have attention issues or might not be able to plan through their schedule or might fall down the rabbit hole of research.

Greg Lambert

And I know you were talking about may not have a history of this. I know when my kids were in middle school, there were no female students who were diagnosed with ADHD they were all male students. So

Haley Moss

It’s because of how they diagnosed it how it’s expected to manifest like, I know if I was speaking earlier and I didn’t have a speaking delay and wasn’t minimally speaking on top or nonspeaking for a certain period of my life. I don’t know if I would have had that same diagnosis or correct identification if to be quite honest with you. And I say that because I was a good student. I did well in school, I was quiet I respected authority. You wouldn’t have known if I was struggling with attention because I was doodling or something else you would have thought well she gets good grades.

Greg Lambert

You weren’t disruptive.

Haley Moss

I wasn’t disruptive. I was quiet. I respected authority. My grades were good. Like you wouldn’t think that was a problem child or what we think is what we consider a problem child or a bad kid or someone with an emotional disturbance or any of that types of stuff. But looking back there are times I’m like there’s something that was definitely different. I mean, I’m lucky that I had a diagnosis since I was a child. And that’s a huge privilege. And I realized why that’s a privilege at this point in my life other than getting access to services earlier. And that there are all sorts of different discrepancies and disparities across race and SES and different things as well. So I think we have to really understand that these issues are intersectional. I think that’s probably the biggest thing that sometimes gets lost as we look at neurodiversity disability in a vacuum, not that this is something that can happen to anyone. And it’s also the only minority group you can join at any point in your life is disability.

Greg Lambert

I hadn’t thought about that.

Haley Moss

If you’re lucky enough to be alive for a long time, it happens to you. Yeah, or you can be or you’ll end up becoming a caregiver or like the only thing that really separates folks is about a split second. And that’s something that I saw with a video actually that was by a Paralympian who was in a freak boating accident. And she’s like, the only thing that separated me from disability was a split second. I was like, Yeah, that sounds about right. And I think about folks who would acquire things like traumatic brain injury is really developed something like epilepsy, like it’s not something they get to choose or that they might have been born with.

Greg Lambert

Well, Haley, you didn’t just begin your work by helping explain neurodiversity and living with autism after you graduated law school, I actually went out and I’m holding it up and purchased your book, Middle School, The Stuff That Nobody Tells You About.

Haley Moss

You get to know 15 year old me

Greg Lambert

I can tell you, I was thinking about that, before I jumped on, I was like, I would not want to read anything I wrote as a 15-year-old,

Haley Moss

I still, honestly, feel that way about stuff that I wrote in college because I realized how much my opinions and my worldview have expanded. But it makes me really grateful because I realized how much I’ve grown.

Greg Lambert

So I got this book for my wife, who’s a middle school librarian. And, again, you wrote this when you were 15. And you’ve written a few more books since. What is it that compels you to write and speak on these topics as you live through them? Because you’ve, you’ve written on these for half your life?

Haley Moss

Yeah. And I think for me, it’s really just about how I want to be able to help other people. I think that there are so many barriers, there are so many things that need to be dealt with. But I think it’s really powerful, that we’re able to tell these stories. And when you’re able to tell your story on your own terms, there’s something to be said for that. But I look at it as I don’t tell my story for the sake of telling it. I don’t do it to inspire people. I do it because I genuinely want to help somebody if I want things to be more accessible and inclusive. For the next generation. I want the next group of autistic middle schoolers not to have the same barriers to access that I did. I want things to be better for everybody. And that’s honestly why I feel compelled to share other than the fact I get really geeky excited about this stuff. I just think that if something can be better for the next group of young people, then I did something right.

Marlene Gebauer

Your next book, which comes out this month is called the Young Autistic Adults Independence Handbook, who is the audience for this book, and how has your experience of entering the legal profession shaped the story you’re telling in the book?

Haley Moss

I am so excited about this book because this is the book that I wish that I had when I was a young person. Especially because we assume that independence is this very big mountain, we assume that we have to hit the top of the mountain. And the top of the mountain, especially in Disability Services, sometimes comes across as you have to be able to do everything forever by yourself. That isn’t true. And when you eventually move out, or you realize that there are things that you don’t want your parents to do for you, you realize he didn’t really get the tools to do those things. So even if it’s something like managing your money and applying for a credit card, or even registering to vote, there are all sorts of different things or keeping your house clean, which is something I struggled a lot with or trying a new food or figuring out how to prioritize when you go to the grocery store all these random life skills that don’t always get taught that it’s assumed that somehow you’re going to know and for autistic and neurodivergent people, sometimes it’s really difficult to get a handle on that. Or someone didn’t take the time to teach you how to also advocate for yourself or why that’s important. So for me, that was something I really wanted to address, is I wanted to write the guide that I wish that I had had. And also what made it fun is I got to interview a bunch of different experts and people with lived experience about what they recommended. So I got to talk about some of the messier things like grief because I know especially for young adults, it’s something that we don’t talk about. And a lot of us might lose grandparents or family members or pets and I got to talk to someone who explicitly works with autistic people on grief. And things like trying new food, which is a big source of anxiety for me. I got to talk to a psychologist who works with autistic people with food issues because it’s a big thing in our community. And I learned how to try something new. And I wanted to share that with everybody. I got so excited. Like look, there’s an actual science that makes this less scary about trying something that I’ve never had before. Because I’m so scared to try things. That’s something I’m not always proud of admitting, I’m very embarrassed about it. But it’s the thing that really does impede so much of my life. But I really did want to write this. And what helps with my legal background is answering some of the tough questions for people. So I know we have lots of issues in our community that surround law enforcement, or even things like what the ADA is, and a lot of people want this information, but they don’t get it from someone who has lived experience and professional experience at the same time. It’s one thing if someone who has professional experience tells it to us, but it’s another if you have someone who also has lived experiences has interacted with the legal system in some way, shape, or form, even if it’s from our side and not on the side of a plaintiff or the side of someone who was an accused or, or a witness that it’s really important that we get those perspectives. So then folks know kind of what’s out there, too. I just want people to feel empowered, I want them to feel that the live independence they’ve been sold isn’t necessarily all there is. So if there are things that you do need help with, that’s okay, too. And know how to ask for support. Because I think as a young person, that’s the thing that I didn’t quite get that I was allowed to ask for things that I didn’t know that I was allowed to ask for things that weren’t being offered, kind of even thinking about law school, and I’d just get offered extra time or college when I got offered extra time. And that’s not what I needed. I needed a note-taker, but I didn’t know that. Because I didn’t know I would write down everything because I had no idea it was important. And then I didn’t end up listening because I didn’t know it was important.

Greg Lambert

I felt like I did the same thing.

Haley Moss

I would have benefited so much from having someone who was really good at taking notes who was able to focus and do that, like that would have been a game-changer.

Marlene Gebauer

I didn’t even know you could get that

Haley Moss

yeah, you can actually get a note-taker you can get note-taking services, or someone is required from your class to be able to share notes with you, as an accommodation that you’re actually allowed to get that. But and some professors know that that’s a thing. And I asked at the beginning of the term about a note-taker, but I didn’t know that was for me, I thought that was people who had reading disabilities. So the way that we look at a lot of these solutions kind of is very much a binary of Oh, you have this is what we’re going to offer you.

Greg Lambert

Oh, this is fascinating. Haley Moss. So we really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today.

Marlene Gebauer

Yeah, Haley, thank you so much. This has been fantastic.

Haley Moss

Thank You.

Two massive barriers to good value storytelling (series recap) are:

1. It requires hard work, taking time we don’t have
2. Even if we have the time and do the work, our current chapter might prove unflattering

Herein, I focus on #2. Ego is often the enemy and, thus, we must frequently first edit the stories we tell ourselves.

I give short shrift to #1 only because it lends itself better to books, coursework and practice than a brief blog post (or even a long blog post).

In the beginning, there was the current state. We start by mapping existing processes, capturing meaningful data, and (eventually) using that data to craft a story (last post) that resonates with our business stakeholders.

Per usual, easier said than done. The rigor and effort required to overcome inertia consume finite resources (almost no one has strategic reserves of time and attention). Mapping and measuring is often labor intensive because we don’t just need to know who does what and how, but why. And not just the surface why but the root-cause why.

It is astounding how often we dig into long-established processes and the reasoning behind a particular step turns out to be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Vestigial activities are endemic, as are kludges and compromises born from expediency (the need for speed). We are awash in technical, process, and cultural debt.

The status quo, however, rarely bears any evidentiary burden whereas proposals to improve on the status quo are often subject to strictest levels of scrutiny. We need to get our story straight, including being prepared for one troubling angle of inquiry: how did you let it get so bad? Identifying an opportunity for improvement can be flipped on its head as an indictment that persists whether or not we secure the resources required to remedy the issue. Volunteering for additional accountability is not an appealing option.

Early on, our story is rarely a happy one (and that’s ok). As discussed last post, we often default to vague stories because we have no other choice. We lack the details, data, and insights to paint a compelling picture. Resource constraints are, as always, a primary culprit—which is why we must be selective in the stories we aim to tell well. But another blocker is the forgivable fear of what we might uncover.

The excusable ambition is to tell a story in which everything legal does is awesome—with even more awesomeness bound to result from earmarking additional resources for legal. But this narrative will usually ring false. Because it is not true. Which creates a conundrum. Maximizing throughput at current resourcing levels would, at first glance, seem foundational to a persuasive story of how incremental resources will be deployed to benefit the business—i.e., use what’ve you got wisely before asking for more.

Unfortunately, there is likely considerable waste embedded in our current operating model. Even if we prefer to believe our initial design decisions were impeccable (no) and our execution thereof flawless (also no), we are confronted with the harsh reality of entropy as the world moves faster than our department ever could. The endless pursuit of optimal requires regular recalibration. True transformation requires much, much more. But telling a story in which a pivot results in a positive outcome is almost invariably an admission that, at some point, our choices and behaviors were suboptimal.

We do not like to look bad. But we probably need to look bad before we can get good.

The first step is admitting imperfection. Take, for example, this fabulous case study from my friend Alex Hamilton’s must-read book on contracting, Sign Here (reprinted with permission, of course):

That’s four very different stories.

The common Why is “because the government said so.” This Why is not fun—money spent to preserve, rather than create, value in response to increased legal complexity. But, as Whys go, sufficiently clear and compelling. More intriguing are the divergent Hows.

The companies resemble one another, from a distance. Each company is partnering with the same New Law company to tackle the same problem. Each has sufficient rigor around process and metrics to the point of being able to identify specific bottlenecks. Yet, despite superficially similar levels of sophistication, there are material differences in outcomes.

The Department of Slow. By attempting to insert a provision, not required by the new legislation, to materially increase their counterparties’ potential liability, Dept B moved 4.5x slower than Dept D. This delay cuts right to the heart of the relationship between legal work and business outcomes and why divorcing legal considerations from business value can diminish the legal function’s standing with business stakeholders.

(h/t Alex Su)

According to Gartner, when legal guidance is too conservative, business decision makers are:

• 2.5 times more likely to forgo business opportunities that legal recommendations have made less attractive
• 2.5 times more likely to suffer delays in capturing opportunities as they work through legal guidance and requirements
• 4.25 times more likely to scale down the scope of opportunities

What lawyers consider “conservative” can put a company into an “aggressive” posture vis-à-vis counterparties with whom they are trying to do actual business. Consider this entire thread  about a lawyer costing an individual client millions of dollars by taking maximalist negotiating positions in a genuine effort to protect the client’s interests.

With the thread in mind, the questions prompted by the case study include: was the attempt to contractually increase the other side’s overall liability a net positive to the business? Did it merit the increase in cycle times, and the attention costs associated therewith? Was the resulting friction in the commercial relationship worth it?

I don’t know.

I can’t know. The answers are context dependent. Maybe an inciting incident or leadership change altered the business’s risk tolerance and this repapering exercise presented an opportunity to redress their risk profile. Not my circus, not my elephants.

Facts are annoying that way. So in a display of internet courage, I will hazard a guess that this business’s raison d’etre is not to maximize its counterparty’s potential liability. Just as I am fairly confident the business’s primary objective is not to minimize its own liability (winding down operations would be the best route to unlock this dubious achievement).

From personal experience, telling a businessperson “well, there’s a risk” is essentially a content-free statement. Every business decision, every action and inaction, balances a variety of enterprise risks, only some of which are legal in nature. Attempting to eliminate risk, or minimize risk in a way that ignores net business impact, is one way the legal function becomes labeled the Department of No and the Department of Slow, with the primary complaint among our stakeholders being that in-house lawyers “don’t understand my business.”

It remains incumbent on the legal function to identify legal risks and characterize those risks properly. We need to intelligibly translate legal risk into potential business impact (probability, frequency, severity). Indeed, the dream is to price risk properly and integrate it directly into the business calculus. Which is another way of saying, our role includes helping to advise the business on taking smart risks.

Inevitably, we will still have to tell the business that which they would rather not hear—like new privacy legislation requires us to update many existing contracts. But we will find a much more receptive audience if we have consistently demonstrated we are allies invested in helping the business make money.

A credible (rather than incredible) bearer of bad news. The legal department needing more resources will be among the unpalatable truths that almost no one will be eager to accept.

Informing the business that legal has been wasting money for years will not endear us to our audience in the right way—savings-centric narratives are a dead-end path of least resistance that reinforce the attractive fiction that the company should be spending less on legal. On the other end of the spectrum, pretending like legal is eternally perched at the apex of resource optimization and operational excellence is (likely) transparently laughable.

The middle road is to do the best we can to optimize the resources we have while also asking for the resources we need. Pick the low-hanging fruit (i.e., patent, preventable waste) identified in the process mapping/measurement exercise and present the resulting improvements to support the case for more resources to move beyond incrementalism. In the case-study example, reform the delay-inducing contract language and then cite the already improved cycle times in the petition for (i) the resources and (ii) cross-functional collaboration necessary to address the delays caused by slow approvals and signatures, the topic to which we will return next post.

I know. I remain a citizen of good standing in Obvioustown. But the middle path is rarely chosen because it requires being bold (asking for more money) while also being prepared (putting in the work to get the story straight), including being prepared to recognize where we are falling short (looking less than perfect). Most departments are situated near one of the extremes—too shy to ask for the resources we need (no value stories to tell) or too quick to do so without any meaningful effort to get our house in order (our stories are vague and incredible).

Some level of humility is an important part of credibility. But not too much. Technical, process, and cultural debt are not unique to legal. The law department’s ways of working are unlikely to be the most inexplicable part of the collective goat rodeo. It often seems like the business makes money in spite of itself. Humility paired with competence and tangible progress towards improved business outcomes should be enough to convince persuadable stakeholders that additional resources will be put to good use.

Likewise, we should not apologize that increasing legal complexity drives up the costs of doing business. That’s the problem we’re responsible for addressing, not responsible for creating. Instead, we need to clearly articulate the business value at stake in a manner that reflects our roles as allies in driving superior business outcomes, including advising the business on taking smart risks. This does not guarantee we will secure the requisite resources (expect legal to still be chronically underfunded) but it does improve our chances substantially as we change perceptions about being the Department of Slow/No.

With Thanksgiving falling on a Thursday this year… wait, I’m being told that it does that every year… we decided to release a panel discussion that Greg moderated with the General Counsel from McDonald’s, Fannie Mae, Western Union, and Tyson Foods. The discussion ranges from where these GCs are expanding their search for talent, to truly increasing diversity both in their outside law firms as well as looking at their own diversity ranks, to retaining talent by improving the overall structure of the workplace.

• Desiree Ralls-Morrison, Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, McDonald’s
• Terry Theologides, Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary, Fannie Mae
• Caroline Tsai, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary, Western Union
• Amy Tu, Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary, Tyson Foods

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts |  Spotify

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer  0:07

Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer,

Greg Lambert  0:14

a member glamour. And that’s well, Marlene, with the Thanksgiving falling on a Thursday this year.

Marlene Gebauer  0:23

Yes. Every year. I’m pretty sure it’s every year.

Greg Lambert  0:27

is it every year? Oh. So, we decided that we would run a special episode this week. And a few weeks ago, I moderated a panel, with the general counsel’s from McDonald’s, Fannie Mae, Western Union and Tyson Foods, where we discussed recruiting and retaining of talent in the legal industry, kind of a big issue.

Marlene Gebauer  0:52

So with permission from Reuters Events, who hosted the event, we’re going to share that discussion with the listeners of The Geek in Review. And I want to say thank you to Reuters, because you’ve given me

Greg Lambert  1:02

Yeah, we appreciate the week off, thanks.

Greg Lambert  1:07

Good morning, or good afternoon. My name is Greg Lambert. I am the Chief Knowledge Services Officer at Jackson Walker in Houston, Texas. I also some of you may know me from my blog, Three Geeks and a Law Blog or podcast, The Geek in Review. We have a fantastic panel here today. We’re gonna be talking about cultivating the next generation of legal talent. And I think if you stick around, there will be a fireside chat right after this session as well. So make sure you stick around for that. I’m going to start off by just having the panelists introduce themselves very quickly. And just going to go with how I see you on the screen. So Terry, you’re up first.

Terry Theologides  1:49

Good afternoon, I’m Terri Theologides and I’m the General Counsel of Fannie Mae in Washington, DC.

Greg Lambert  1:56

Caroline.

Caroline Tsai  1:57

Hi everyone. I’m Caroline Tsai, Chief Legal Officer of Western Union based in Denver,

Greg Lambert  2:03

And Desiree.

Desiree Ralls-Morrison  2:05

Hello, everyone, Desiree Ralls-Morrison, the General Counsel of McDonald’s here in Chicago.

Greg Lambert  2:11

And finally, Amy.

Amy Tu  2:13

Hi, Amy Tu. I’m the Chief Legal Officer for Tyson Foods I’m calling in from Springdale, Arkansas.

Greg Lambert  2:21

Right. Oh, thank you all for taking the time to talk on this topic today. I’m going to start off with you, Terry, although we’ll probably get some follow ups from everyone else. So we’re going to be talking about things like legal skills and recruiting of talent. So what is it that today’s leaders can do to ensure that tomorrow’s leaders look and think differently than what necessarily what we look like? So what are you doing to promote diverse viewpoints and in recruiting that of the people that you oversee?

Terry Theologides  3:01

Thanks, Greg, obviously, a very important topic. And there’s really no one silver bullet, it really takes a continuous concerted effort to build sort of the team that will represent the leaders of the future in our departments. And that and my assumption is principally that I’m going to grow those leaders. There will be times when I have to go externally, for folks, but my job is developer of talent is really to ensure that we have a strong diverse bench that will make a strong, diverse leadership team of the future. And so it really does start with recruiting in at the, at the entry and in mid career levels, ensuring that you have people that are not just good in their current roles, but have the capacity, the drive the athleticism, and high potential to emerge into leaders. And if you if you’re thin on the bench, that’s where it really takes some concerted effort to bring people in and an investment of time. You know, I’m in financial services, which is an industry that struggles with diversity, I think some of the firms are making progress. But it has meant that at times, we’ve had to go outside the industry to really look for diverse talent and then build the domain expertise as we invest in people when they come into the department. And if you’ve got a diverse bench, and I think we have a pretty good one, a strong bench at Fannie Mae, then it’s really about the blocking and tackling of ensuring their development opportunities because again, if we’re not a particularly fast growing company, so we really need to manufacture those opportunities because they don’t happen organically quite as quickly as a high growth company. And so I’m a big believer in written development plans. I think that forces engagement with your talented up and comers on where they can where they aspire to develop and also where, where you can together find those opportunities. And then it those opportunities present themselves through rotations in the department special projects. But also, I’ve had some of our really strong folks rotate into the business, some of them have stayed in the business. But others, you know, they come back and it but without exception, it’s made them stronger contributors and emerging diverse leaders. The other thing I would say that’s really important, Greg is being crisp about what attributes and characteristics are going to be needed for the leaders of the future. It’s not static, right? What got me to where I am isn’t what’s going to get the GC and five years or 10 years into this seat. And one area that we’ve tried to be more crisp, about articulating is the importance for emerging leaders to have a sensibility for legal Operations and Technology, because clearly, the way we in legal departments do things, five years from now, 10 years from now, it’s gonna be very different from now. And so looking and cultivating those skills of automation, process improvement project management, the ability to see complex projects in their component parts, to unbundle them, and CO source them and use, oftentimes, innovative legal providers, service providers, all those things are going to become sort of table stakes, and you need to invest in cultivating that. Now not silo it in your legal ops function, but really recognize that it becomes, along with people management and communication and ethics, a core pillar of how to be an effective leader in the department of the future.

Greg Lambert  6:50

Terry, I appreciate you using the sports analogies, because we were joking, that looks like you’re coming from Nelson road outside the Richmond Football Club. But today, in anyone else have a follow up on that on. And I know that there’s pressure on building a diverse team. But beyond that, you know, what is it that you’re seeing is a value of a diverse team, as well. Anyone want to pick up on that one?

Desiree Ralls-Morrison  7:19

Sure, I’ll take it. So So you know, for sure, there is you know, when I think about the value that diversity brings, right, even looking outside of our team, we know that it leads to increase innovation, increase business results, right? Revenues, increase revenues and profits, we know that there’s a number of studies out there, there’s a lot of data out there. The same is true within the department. I think if you look at your diverse teams, you get more creative, innovative solutions on everything. And so you know, whether you’re talking about how to settle a case, how to think about a legal issue, how do we approach the business? How do we think and talk about risk, and risk taking, all of that is so much better, you know, when you have a diverse team. Now, it’s the diversity, but it’s also that inclusive culture, right, that allows people to feel like, I can actually contribute something different. And it’s not going to it’s going to be accepted, it’s not going to be challenged, because it’s different. And so I think, you know, for us, it’s around creating that diversity, but also the inclusive culture that has to go with it, that allows people to understand that you’re not, you’re valuable, not just because you’re a diverse individual that’s in the room. But because you’re sharing those diverse views and diverse perspectives with the rest of the room, because that’s what makes us better.

Amy Tu  8:45

I’ll just, maybe I’ll just build on Desiree’s points. I think that this is, you know, this is an external environment that is rapidly changing. And if you’re a consumer facing organization, you have to have those different perspectives, so you know, what consumers are desirous of. And so for us, I think that’s very important to be able to create that inclusive culture. I agree, it doesn’t, right, we absolutely need to have that. So you can grow that talent over time, but also just allow for space so that people can talk about their different perspectives, and so that you can walk in their shoes so that you can have a better sense of what consumers may want.

Caroline Tsai  9:28

The only other point I’d add is that as you look at human capital issues, all of us all of our companies we work at, I think the pandemic has shown, that’s probably one of the top issues that management team members are navigating and boards are looking at. And from a human capital perspective, what I find interesting is and it also gives me hope is their expectations and this new generation of employees In terms of what they expect, in terms of diversity of thought and inclusivity,

Caroline Tsai  10:06

I think that hopefully will help us actually make more progress despite

Caroline Tsai  10:10

the fact that we have not, at least in the time I’ve been a lawyer, but But I do think that, because it is such an important issue across industries. And because I think I would say all executive team members, and boards are very focused on it. And we think about retaining and keeping the talent you need to actually ensure you have an innovative culture and you have the talent, you need to move forward. That’s where this is probably one of the number one issues that all management teams talk about.

Greg Lambert  10:52

Weekly. Good, good comments, all. One. You know, one of the things that I know as on the law firm side, we’ve gotten a lot of pressure over the past decade, decade and a half, to be much more, you know, efficient and innovative in the way we deliver services. And that’s coming from pressure from our outside counsel, who are getting pressure from internally to also to meet those demands. And to not just be the legal department that stands alone in its own silo, but rather to be an overall part of the company that you represent. How are you haven’t needing to change the the playbook. When you meet with your business partners and those new demands in how are you passing those skills down and training the next generation? To meet the new expectations? And, Emile? I’ll let you start off on that one?

Amy Tu  11:53

That’s a tough question, Greg. Um, you know, what I would say is fundamentally, as in House lawyers, we have to be business partners, we have to deeply understand the business, we have to be able to see around corners, and we have to help find solutions. So you know, as we’re thinking about the technologies that enable our business, there’s no doubt that as lawyers, we have to evolve to what worked in the past is not necessarily going to work in the future. And so it’s getting lawyers, my own team included comfortable with using technology, we’re seeing that our business partners are using all types of technology to better understand what is happening real time to have live data so that they can make decisions quickly. That means lawyers also need to embrace that technology, and find better ways of, you know, addressing challenges, finding solutions. And so that may mean something like a Contract Lifecycle Management System that we’re implementing, and going live next year, which should help from an AI perspective in terms of reviewing contracts, so that our lawyers can start working on higher value issues so that they can have time to work on strategic positioning for the company, as well as looking around the corner and see what could be a disruptor. Next, but I really, I mean, I think that in this day and age, that we all have our iPhones or Samsung’s with us, it is just a different world. And we have to be as fast as information travels.

Greg Lambert  13:33

Anyone else?

Desiree Ralls-Morrison  13:37

you know, I try to think about, I try to think about our department as running it like a business. And so you know, we just happen to be, you know, business leaders that happen to have the legal expertise, but really thinking about it and running it like a business. And that includes many of the things that Amy just mentioned, you know, having very clear objectives that we and metrics that we measure ourselves against, and hold ourselves accountable for, it’s making sure that we have a different sense of fiscal responsibility than maybe we have, you know, previously. But also, you know, really ensuring that we are challenging ourselves around constant improvement and continuous improvement. And that means, you know, agility, that means the latest technology, different areas where I think as a department, we’ve traditionally been a little bit more static, but kind of challenging ourselves to be as competitive as we want our business partners to be in the legal profession. And to me, that’s been very, very helpful in terms of a completely different perspective. Terry?

Terry Theologides  14:47

Yeah, yeah. You know, I see the same thing. It’s really interesting when I look at, you know, the people who are kind of doing an exceptional job and in my department, oftentimes it is not for sort of that pure Legal acumen or analysis or something like that, it’s really for being able to collaborate on an interdisciplinary team and solve a problem or improve a process and, and be a business partner. And yet, there’s a little bit of a disconnect, I think, and I’m guilty of it when we recruit in we sort of principally from law firms are looking at kind of the skills that make people successful in a law firm, which is a little bit more as a hired gun, as opposed to somebody as an enduring owner, and collaborator in a process. So I think one of the things is, you know, there may be different paths that may not be out of the AmLaw 100, into leading law departments, because I do think there’s starting to be a little bit of a disconnect in the skill sets that help someone succeed in one environment versus the ones that all four of us see is so critically important to success within a law department and accompany

Greg Lambert  15:58

Carolina, are you seeing the same thing with recruiting, looking, looking at more, or a hybrid of business skills as well as legal skills,

Caroline Tsai  16:07

I actually go back to like two traits that I think remain true and have never changed on a spotting amazing talent and in the law, the permit, and that would be excellent judgment, and second curiosity and a curiosity. I think with those two components, I stand firm and strong believe that you can cover any of those any substantive area in house, because that coupled with Amy’s point about truly understanding the business. So to tie back to technology and talent, I would say, especially being in financial services, what I’ve seen is if you have those components, and there’s so many spaces that are facing so much obstruction, but there are new areas of law, right, and so you if you have that innate curiosity to learn about digital currency, or to understand and work closely with, let’s say, our technology, or to our chief data officer to understand the capabilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning, to help improve our processes, and then connect the dots to customer experience. That’s, that’s the rising star in the law department who goes above and beyond their day job, because let’s be clear, it’s not like I have a job description that says you’re the expert in AI, machine learning, or digital currency, you’re actually hired perhaps to be a business legal lawyer or to be an IP lawyer. But it’s that talent who comes in kind of always curious, always reading, and always coming up to say, Hey, I, this is what I see going around the corner, and then building that relationship with a business to say, hey, you know, these are some of the emerging risks or, and opportunities I’m seeing. So that’s what I see, that actually excites me, when I see rising stars come in, they’ve got this curiosity, and they’re just in absorb mode, reading all day count.

Greg Lambert  18:02

I like that dovetail Desiree in your, I think it was Desiree that, you know, give them space to actually give those thoughts out to have that curiosity, not just internal, but to share that diversity of thought as well. Good. Good. Points. Desiree, I’m gonna, I’m going to come back to you on this next question. And obviously, with all the things that have gone on the last 20 months or so, with the pandemic, with, you know, the racial reckoning of the United States and beyond, you know, there’s just this expectation now that the corporations are going to, you know, they’re just gonna have to take on more of a value of the society. Would you mind just briefly describing what your corporate values are, you know, how does your legal departments support them externally with customers? And then also, how do you support them internally, with your employees, especially in this way, most of us are still in this kind of hybrid motion where we don’t have necessarily the everyone in the same room where we can we can talk to them. So how, how have things been over this this time for you?

Desiree Ralls-Morrison  19:15

Yeah, sure. Thank you. So So first, I will say I been at two different companies in the last 20 months. Right. And so it’s been an evolution, but it also a change, which has been very interesting for me. You’re absolutely right. I think, you know, people are expecting companies to really step up. And you know, what we’re realizing in the businesses is that this is not just a social imperative. It’s actually the smart thing to do from a business standpoint. We mentioned already, you know, deep what we know about diversity, we also know that environmental instability affects the top and the bottom line. And so it’s very, very clear that there’s this mandate for us to do something I think Here at McDonald’s, our corporate values are embedded in everything that we do. And at least they, we try to make sure that they are. And we try to make sure that they’re certainly embedded in how we approach ESG issues. So serve is one of our we have, we have five core values serve is around, we are giving back to people, we’re doing what we should with people. And that includes internally and externally, we are in the service business, we’re in the business of, of people. And we really want to make sure that we we show up for our people, I will tell you in my department, what that means, in part is that I listen. And I spend a lot of time hearing what the people in my group are concerned about what’s on their mind, what their challenges are, what their issues are. And I sort of think about most of us, as leaders, we’re service, we’re in service of the people that we lead, and that and that’s kind of how I think about it. Inclusion is another one of our core values. And we’ve talked about that one already. But we look at that inside the department in terms of creating that inclusive culture, but also outside of the department, with respect to our vendors and our suppliers and the law firms that we utilize. And that means making sure that we are have a diverse set of external suppliers that we use, but also that we hold them to the same standards. And so we do a number of things like mutual commitment to diversity, where we with our vendors are agreeing that we’re going to have diverse slates and we’re going to have diverse teams. But we really want to partner with the the companies that we work with. Because we’re we think we’re in this together. And we want we have similar goals and objectives. I would say, you know, the other the other. One of our other goals is around community. And that’s being a part of the communities that we are a part of. And you know, pro bono is one area where I would highlight here are where it’s a big part of how we interact with our community, we saw an impact during the pandemic, but for us, it was a positive impact, because we were able to find many pro bono programs that were virtual. And so it increased the number of lawyers at McDonald’s that were able to participate, and were willing to participate. And that’s something post pandemic in a hybrid world that we’re hoping to continue. We in fact, received three pro bono awards this year, because of how active our employees were in that space. So you know, for me, I’ll just say that I came to McDonald’s, just in April. But a big part of me coming to the company was because of the values. And because of how those values are connected to the work that we do. And because you know, with an iconic brand like McDonald’s, everything that you do in this space gets seen and heard. And being able to pull back on those values and honesty and transparency really is critical to how we do our work. And I think and I think ultimately in terms of our success.

Greg Lambert  23:17

Karolina I’m going to put you on the spot here Desiree had mentioned that it’s not just the values of what they’re doing internally, but they’re also putting some demands on their vendors, I would imagine their outside counsel to also meet certain thresholds, as well. Are you seeing that happening in with you and your peers? And are you able to actually hold these vendors? Are there any consequences if they don’t meet your values?

Caroline Tsai  23:51

I think I’ll answer it. This way, I’ve actually been involved, you know, 1015 years and all the various initiatives of external counsel programs, in large part because I worked in two very large legal departments, and we had the punch and the and the wallet to say, you will do XY and Z. And then with the punch of our spend, we could also bring other law departments along my privatization actually, when I joined Western in as general counsel, was actually to take a different approach, which was before I go out there, saying X, Y and Z, why don’t I get my own house in order? So I actually focused first, on the diversity of my talents, his team, and to build internal programs to make sure I was focusing on empowering, developing talent. I set the tone where the mission was to create an innovative strategic law department that had a focus on cultivating talent with The starting point being anyone who was direct report to me, it was assumed first and foremost, you were actually a very good lawyer, otherwise you wouldn’t be there that you would be valued first and foremost on how you actually empower and develop your team. And so we’ve been working through that. And I’m actually very proud with the diversity of our team. And now this year, we’re actually turning to those initiatives. So I actually would be the wrong person to talk about what we’ve done X y&z Western Union, although I’m very familiar with all the various programs, have you done?

Greg Lambert  25:36

That you’re the right person to say where the floor should be? Amy, any, follow up on that?

Amy Tu  25:46

Um, you know, I think just from the standpoint of, you know, our own initiatives here at Tyson Foods, look, it’s hard to attract talent to Arkansas. Although, you know, with COVID, I think it’s, it’s been helpful, because people want a little more space. But, you know, I think what’s important is to make sure that we have a strategy. And so, you know, we recently launched in the, in the department, a strategy to drive positive outcomes from a DNI perspective. And that’s, that’s value-driven, right? I mean, we have our own set of values, but values also means, you know, diverse perspectives. And so by driving the strategy, we’re looking to, you know, get our house in order, internally, whether it’s diverse slates, diverse pools, making sure that we’ve uncovered every under every rock, you know, every potential candidate out there who could bring a different perspective, but it’s also the external vendors and making sure that they we are partnering with them. Because I think that many of the vendors, our outside counsel are on different tracks, they’re there for some are further along. Some are not as far along. And so while we will put objectives in front of them, I think we also need to do a bit of education as well, in terms of bringing along the partners that we have externally.

Greg Lambert  27:13

Well, Arkansas, one Oh, but it’s beautiful. So, Terry, how about you?

Terry Theologides  27:18

Let me just add one other. I mean, I agree with everything that the other panelists have said, I’ll say one other thing about the ascendancy of ESG. And I noticed in our most recent survey of employees include, you know, the law department that the law department was sort of off the charts in terms of understanding how their works support the company’s mission. And in financial services that made a lot of sense to me, because I look at a lot of our ESG initiatives on the environmental front, like green bonds and social bonds. I mean, really, the lawyers are at the forefront, doing the most creative work at structuring those, those deals on affordable housing and some of our other mission oriented work. Again, the innovation is very much part and parcel with the expertise of the legal term. So teams, so we just came out, for example, with the ability for the first time to use people’s rental payments in underwriting them to be able to provide the liquidity for their mortgage, which, you know, it sounds obvious, but really, that was off the radar. And now we were able to develop a way a compliant way to capture it. And again, members of my team just did very creative work to, to break through some of the barriers on that. So I do feel that, you know, our profession is very social justice, civic minded, pro bono oriented, and, and so ESG, I think, is an opportunity for legal to shine in many ways.

Caroline Tsai  28:47

As a perfect example, from a talent perspective of this evolving area, where your talent, I think they kind of gravitate towards it. And companies have different approaches as to who leads ESG. But what I’ve seen just across companies is the value the legal team brings in connecting the dots kind of having that end to end, holistic look, trying to connect your ESG strategy to your values to the going forward. A strategy of your company, as well as keeping an eye on how it connects to risks. And to Terry’s point, I think the D IPs for many companies is a passion for many law departments for us. We have employees in 120 countries, and we do business in 200. And so, it was very, very quickly when we looked at our three core pillars, di fundamentally had to be one of them. It just, it just is his defines this company. And then the other two actually, you can see why lawyers add value because we’re in financial services. So we’ve got a pillar called integrity of money movement, which I love because it, it weaves in our values and integrity versus all the complexity of compliance. And then we’ve got inclusion and economic Novick prosperity. So I think the lawyers, no matter what company you’re at, they’re the ones at the table helping connect the dots, helping also assess from a material reality perspective, what makes sense for the company, as well as teeing up the discussion for the board.

Desiree Ralls-Morrison  30:38

And if I could just add, I, you know, I love what Caroline just said, around, you know, the the risk piece, because I’ve seen as many of us in these in these roles, I think, this transformation of, you know, being very concerned about the risk with some of the reporting and some of the, you know, the kind of where we are, right, and then kind of getting comfortable with this idea that we need to be transparent if we want to if we want the end goal, right, which is, if we want to do what’s right, by by way of the climate, if we want to do what’s right, by way of D and I, then some of that is about being honest about where you are today. And being transparent about that, so that you can be held accountable for it. But then also clearly stating where the gaps and the opportunities are. And that’s a very fascinating transformation to watch. The lawyers get to, in my view, it’s it’s been it’s been great, you know, to see, but it’s it’s certainly something that we’ve had lots of discussions about, I think in the legal industry.

Greg Lambert  31:45

Yeah, it’s good point, you can’t really measure your change if you don’t have a baseline of where you are when you start. Good points all the way around. So Caroline, want to I want to come back to you the you know, the, again, the past 20 months with COVID-19 has really kind of put us in this really interesting spot with going remote and then going hybrid. And now everyone just trying to figure out what does 2022 look like? I would think you know, as far as office, I think we’re all in the office. But I imagine that we have a number of people that we supervise or report to that are not. And I just want to know how that has impacted the mentoring and the relationships that you have with the people that you oversee and mentor. And not just the new people that are coming in, but even the even the well established people. So you know what, what are you doing now? And what’s your kind of plans for mentoring and keeping the stability going forward?

Caroline Tsai  32:52

If anyone has a magic answer, I will take it. I would say that definitely the last couple of years, you’ve seen that, which is concerning seeing the disparate impact on communities of color and women, in large part because of the caregiving responsibilities, whether it was young kids or elderly parents, I mean, I actually am so fortunate that I happen to be an empty nester and I didn’t have to worry about those issues. I worry about the future in terms of how do I make sure we have the same opportunities, engagement and mentoring. When I think about our team, for instance, I’m sitting in my office, we’re not all we’re actually open, and you have the ability to come in, but we don’t actually have a set date yet. And it’s ultimately it’s going to be a hybrid model where it’s going to be part at home part in the office. But when I think about some of our meetings now where we have, you know, let’s say 50% of people on Zoom and 50% are either in their offices or in conference rooms. The dynamic definitely is different. And so one thing we did at our company is there are a couple of programs and initiatives that I think leaders believe really make a difference. For instance, I truly believe a very dedicated mentorship and sponsorship program, at least in my experience really helped me when I was starting out in my career. And so this year, we recently launched a new mentorship program and we’re actually piloting it in certain areas of the company, including the legal department. So the audit department is involved as well as one of our regional operating centers in Costa Rica. And what I like is their partnering, mentors and mentees that are not necessarily in the same unit or function. And it’s all about a focus on growth. And what they want to get from each side of the table. And, and I think the important piece is an effective mentorship program really needs that alignment engagement on both sides of the coin. And so we, we recently launched that. And then from a program perspective, we found that during the pandemic, one of the initiatives we have launched years ago called Women at Woo, which were essentially listening circles, that we ran across the company really provided a different support mechanism. So I’ve kind of borrowed from that idea. And what I do is, I, I take my time going through my team, and I’ll set up now I’ve realized that 3045 minutes is I’m never going to get through my team. So it’s now 20 minute check ins. And I will just make my way around the world just to see how people are doing. My EA has creative, creative ideas where she’ll just call it you know, virtual coffee chat with Caroline, she’ll just come up with a random sampling of employees, and just throw them into a chat with me. And I think that I found to be the most effective just to take time, and have absolutely no agenda. They’ve been funny in the beginning. People show up like, is there? Is there something wrong? And I’m like, No, I’m really just here to chat.

Caroline Tsai  36:33

You’re doing? And I think that

Caroline Tsai  36:35

that connection, at least from my perspective, gives me a pulse on how people are feeling. That’s right.

Desiree Ralls-Morrison  36:44

Yes, I completely, completely agree with that. I think that, you know, making sure that you have those touch points where people don’t look at you as like the boss or the boss’s boss, but really just having conversations, I often say it’s not my department, it’s our department. And what you know, helps us to figure out where we’re going, or what we need to do is how they want to shape how we want to shape the department moving forward. So I completely agree with Caroline, I think nothing is more effective than those touch points. The one thing I do worry a little bit about with our, with us is the remote working, I don’t want our department to be seen as just kind of transactional, right? What’s worked really well. And I with I think the best legal departments is, when you’re really a part of the business, the business values you they value what you bring to the table. And so what we want to do is to make sure that the pandemic and remote working doesn’t create this, this, this sense of we’re just transactional, they just need the lawyers for a signature, or for an approval. We like that relationship that you get from real partnering.

Greg Lambert  37:56

And Terry, anything keeping you up at night on this.

Terry Theologides  38:00

I’ve been taking notes from what Carolina and Desiree, were saying but yeah, I think that that extra effort, you can’t just rely on what used to be the organic walking, managing by walking around as being another sort of touch point to stay connected and kind of keep people in the culture together. So I do think those very purposeful, you know, coffee talks, or whatever help, I struggle really with the mentoring, you know, the stuff that used to happen when the meeting would break up. And as you’re leaving, you’re sort of gret refresh your coffee and debrief a little bit. And now I feel like people go from zoom call to zoom call, or teams call the team’s call, and, and we lose that. And honestly, other than sort of having agreed on the problem as a leadership team, we haven’t really come up with sort of a scalable way to try to replicate that. And I think that’s going to be you know, a challenge when we think about how to develop talent and help people feel connected, integrated with the business. Like what Desiree was, say all of that, it’s going to be a challenge. It’ll be a journey.

Greg Lambert  39:08

And I think that that goes back to something I think Carolyn touched on is that you want to make sure that you’re not in inverted birtley, punishing people for not being not being in the room not being able to do say, what their male counterparts who don’t have to take care of family. And I think I’ve read where this really shows up at year end evaluations. And that, you know, people look at this. So I’m just wondering, Amy, any, any other follow up?

Amy Tu  39:42

Sure. I mean, I think the last 20 months have just been really tough, has been tough on everyone. And I think that the, you know, I think we need to recognize that our team members, you know, they need a little mental health break, right? And so whether it’s those through those creative have outlets as you know, having a coffee chat or virtual coffee chat? Or, you know, for example, we we did this, we did this thing on teams where we said, what are you eating? What Tyson product are you eating tonight? And so we had people putting selfies on teams and say, This is what I’m making, you know, tonight with our Tyson grilled chicken, right. I mean, so it’s I’m just allowing for a little bit of levity, as well, as you know, I think as leaders, I’m being a bit more open, what, what I have found is, is that if we open up, then they’re going to be allowed to open up to. And, and that’s, that’s a bit of a departure. I think, for me, in particular, given the industries I’ve been in. But I’ve just found that, you know, with the team that I have, they really, they really just need a, you know, a little bit of time, a bit of empathy, and lots of flexibility. But at the same time, I think it does raise point, they need to also be business partners, and see what value they can contribute to the overall company goals. And I think that, you know, recognizing people for that contribution, but also being very, very empathetic to their situations, I think is just something we have to do these days is it’s just been such a tough, tough year.

Greg Lambert  41:24

Yeah, there was, there was a comment in the chat that said that, Caroline, your meeting method works would work really well for introverts to be it be in the room where they may not necessarily?

Caroline Tsai  41:38

Introverts, actually, and I’m an introvert as well, I actually feel in the Zoom meetings is almost like, he felt more equal. And I actually saw people shine during, during the last year and a half, because everyone was just the box on screen, and in many ways presentations, and they had more visibility to the executive team than they probably otherwise wouldn’t. And I would say one more thing, which is, I do think it is different when you can actually connect and speak to someone in person, you know, I see it. When I run into people I haven’t seen a year it is so good to see somebody in person. It’s just different. So it’s funny because there’s so much dialogue and all this discussion about what the new generation or different generations want in the workplace. And I, I’ll give you an example. My son and his girlfriend, they had their virtual internships to big companies in Chicago this summer, and they’re starting. And it was very interesting to see their perspective because one person I won’t disclose who had this great onboarding, you know that the class onboarded and they felt welcome. The second it was very sterile. No, there was no protocol. So the entire internship never saw the real person’s face. It was this. It was you know, the name. And I remember just this conversation. Well, that’s not, that’s not what I envisioned work to be. How do we build relationships? I don’t want to be at a company where it feels like this. Right. And so it’s, you know, interesting, because there’s this new generation, including new generation of lawyers who will graduate and probably start with Sue, right. And it’s just not the same that people contact.

Greg Lambert  43:23

Yeah. Well, I think you just queued up my last question we have, we have three or four minutes left, is speaking of the new generation, we’ve all probably been reading about Generation Z, who are just now graduating the first line, I think 1998 is the established date for them and who are just now graduating from law schools. This is what I refer to as the See Something, Say Something generation that when they see something that’s not right, then it’s there. They’ve been trained, and their responsibility is to point it out and to make sure that it’s fixed and those folks are coming into I know they’re coming into law firms now, though, they’re probably coming into your offices as well. Are you finding that you are having to adjust any expectations or the way that you the even onboarding and training of folks that are just coming in? Terry, I’ll have sex. Have you started off on that?

Terry Theologides  44:33

You know, we’ve had a limited experience with it. I think we’re tending to pull people out of the firm’s after 678 years. So we do have a small summer program and you know, did really I give some of my team members credit for trying to make it engaging and I thought that, you know, it felt fairly normal but I’ll defer to my other panelists on the Gen Z question.

Greg Lambert  45:01

Anyone else? It may be too early for the conversation that anyone else finding that a change in attitude coming in? Amy, you’re nodding.

Amy Tu  45:13

Yeah, sure, um, I guess what I’ve observed is that they have a sense of purpose. They want to be part of something bigger, which is why I think companies have to deal with social issues. And when do you speak out? Is it going to have meaning? Is it something that the stakeholders want? So, you know, I think what we’ve had to adjust to is really bringing people into the fold and say, This is our, this is the company’s purpose, and you have a purpose, and you have value here, in and so I think making them feel like they’re a part of something bigger is something that we are trying to cultivate and adjust to it no longer is it okay, just to say, alright, here, job. You’re the you know, you’re the ex lawyer, and you’re going to do X things. They want to feel like how am I how do I connect to the bigger picture of this company? How can I contribute? So I think it’s definitely a different moment for companies. But that’s, that’s what I’ve seen.

Greg Lambert  46:16

Great. Well, thank thank you all. We are just running out of time. Thank you very much for such a great topic and  . Thanks.

Terry Theologides  46:24

Thanks.

Amy Tu  46:24

Thanks

Caroline Tsai  46:26

Thank you.

Greg Lambert  46:29

So we hope you enjoyed this special, The Geek in Review episode. And thanks again to Reuters for letting us share this great panel discussion.

Marlene Gebauer  46:37

And of course, thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoyed the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,

Greg Lambert  46:50

and I can be reached at @glambert on Twitter

Marlene Gebauer  46:53

Or, you can leave us a voicemail on The Geek in Review Hotline at 713-487-7270 and as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DiCicca. Thank you Jerry and happy Thanksgiving

Greg Lambert  47:06

Thanks, Jerry and Happy Thanksgiving to you Marlene!

Marlene Gebauer  47:09

Happy Turkey Day to you too Greg. Gobble Gobble!

Alex Babin, CEO at Zero, says that the beautiful part about automating processes is to make the machines work the way the lawyers work so that you get a Return on Invest starting the very first day. For many of us, Alex brings up what we might think as the Holy Grail of implementing change in a law firm, and that is to allow the attorneys to continue working the same way and have the technology do the administrative tasks in the background. With little to no interaction from the attorneys. He says that the best product is the product that doesn’t have to be implemented. The best software is no software so that you don’t have to teach them how to use it. Babin’s product Zero for email compliance, along with the new mobile time capture Apollo is designed to reduce the time spent on these non-billable, administrative tasks for lawyers.

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts |  Spotify

Marlene Gebauer  0:07

Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert  0:15

And I’m Greg Lambert. Marlene, I have to ask you the most important question of this time of the year and that is, have you even started your holiday shopping yet? Because I have not. And luckily, my wife doesn’t listen to the show. So I can be totally honest about my lack of gift purchases at the moment.

Marlene Gebauer  0:36

Well, I guess I’m sorry to say them that I indeed have started. I have a secret Santa at work. So I’ve been at work on that. And also, I’ve gotten my kids to submit their lists. Well, at least one has. The other one just says money. So he’s going to be, he’s gonna be disappointed.

Greg Lambert  0:56

Well, my money is always a good gift. I will tell you, I came from a family that we were not too proud to just give money to people,

Marlene Gebauer  1:04

except people would always lose the money, right? And then you’d have to go through all you’d have to go through everything that you threw out all the boxes, all the wrapping paper in the garbage, you would have to go through and find it because somebody inevitably would lose it.

Greg Lambert  1:16

Actually, I will say, I did see that there was a print catalog that was laying out on the table this morning. That said, Mom Look at this. And then there were all kinds of things circled inside. So I think we have some suggestions. Well, this week we bring in Alex Babin from zero to talk about some automation processes. Fascinating really, really cool stuff. Cool. I love that his thing is always talking about the best processes, no process or the best software’s no software so exciting stuff. So stick around for that. But let’s get to this week’s information inspirations

Greg Lambert  2:00

Well, Marlene might inspiration has nothing really to do with legal other than maybe some of the the legal battles that they had

Marlene Gebauer  2:07

makes two of us that’s good. Good. We don’t do this on purpose. We really don’t.

Greg Lambert  2:13

My favorite podcasts duo our back and kind of where they originally started off, Brittany L:uce and Eric Eddings formerly of The Nod which I’ve had as an inspiration before, they’ve returned to their original podcast. And they also left behind that mess that was there, gimlet media and Spotify, and are now at Stitcher and on the Sirius XM platform. I’m gonna put a link to their FCN podcast in the show notes. But the backstory with Brittany and Eric is fascinating on how they played a part in exposing gimlet media’s problems that they were having and and how they treated their podcast host and creators, as well as their experiment at Quibi, which you may remember Quibi which, of course, collapsed last year. So their podcast continues their discussion on black culture in their own nerdy kind of way. And the first episode back is a bit of a self reflection on how they’ve come back to their beginnings, but as much more experienced adults this time. So I absolutely love the storytelling and honesty that they bring to the show. And even as a, you know, 50 year old plus CIS, male, white male, they still have things that they can teach me about humanity. And I’m hoping that they have much better luck this time around with their podcast, because they certainly have earned it.

Marlene Gebauer  3:42

Well, you know, I think anybody that tells honest stories, you know, is worth listening to. And I think everybody gets something out of that no matter who you are. So I found a story, Greg, that has just about everything I like, it has a scrappy hero. It has AI, it has the weaving business. Now I’m stretching this to the knitting business based on my family history. It has dessert and curing cancer,

Greg Lambert  4:09

all the good stuff.

Marlene Gebauer  4:10

Are you intrigued?

Greg Lambert  4:10

I am intrigued.

Marlene Gebauer  4:12

Yeah, I was too. So this is in The New Yorker. And it’s long form and everybody should read this. In the Ueno train station train station and I have been there. There is a pastry shop that recognizes your pastry by sight when you check out. So it sees your pastry and can determine if it’s a bear claw or a jelly. And you say, Oh, this is neural network, right? Well, no, not exactly. It’s something based on BRAIN, which is invented by Hisashi Kamabe. In the 1980s. Yes, the 1980s, to identify complex patterns in weaving. Now BRAIN was used for other seeing projects so rendering Kanji characters on computers, was used as a tool to for engineers to build bridges. Then came The bakery scan project in 2007. So we’re still in 2007. All right, this is still before neural nets. People like their pastries unwrapped because they looked fresher. So there’s no barcode to scan and you know, really who wants the cashier to handle your pastries like eww, David. Kamabe bet the farm on this project and there were so many considerations they had to think about. So the lighting for example, that changes all day in a bakery, so shadows interfere with seeing if two pastries are put too close together. So they look like one big one would cause a problem. So Kamabe developed a backlight and an algorithm to identify. I love this “Bakeness” to color. Okay, so resolve some of the issues they faced, you know, you think it could have just ended it that but in 2017, the Louis Pasteur Center for Medical Research and Kyoto approached BRAIN to develop a version of bakery scan for pathologists. So they’re looking at cells instead of baked goods. Other domains soon followed. So distinguishing pills and hospitals, counting the number of people in an 18th century Ukiyo E woodblock print, which I got to check out. Use to label charms and amulets for shrines and to detect incorrectly wired bolts in jet engines. So Kambe said that there are still areas where deep learning neural networks are still impractical. So if a bakery introduced a new variety of pastry every week, the deep learning system would require 1000s of examples. If you show the bakery, scan a pastry that’s never seen before on Earth, it will recognize the next one at 40%. And at five viewings at 90%. Plus, this hard engineered system, results are more articulable than a deep learning system, you can actually understand why the system misidentifies as opposed to kind of the black box of neural networks. So, you know, it’s very rare to see this sort of development now. I mean, it’s it’s truly artisanal, like bread. You know,

Greg Lambert  7:03

I see what you did there.

Marlene Gebauer  7:03

Yeah, you do. You know, deep learning takes a lot of the work around the parameters out of the equation, you know, I’d be actually very curious to hear what our neural network expert friends have to say about this. What made this project successful in its day in and you know, to this day is is a focus on a specific task, and a specific set of data. And the last thing I want to say is, I do like this one quote that Kambe has in the article, it’s “Being a good company is more important than becoming a big company.”

Greg Lambert  7:34

That’s wise words.

Marlene Gebauer  7:36

And that wraps up this week’s information inspirations.

Greg Lambert  7:44

Today’s guest discusses what I think would be the holy grail of the legal industry and creating change without attorneys actually having to change the way they work. This type of automation seems to answer a lot of the issues that most of us run into when we’re bringing in that change to the firm.

Marlene Gebauer  8:04

We’d like to welcome Alex Babin, CEO of zero to The Geek in Review. Alex, it’s really good to have you here.

Alex Babin  8:10

Thank you, Marlene. Great to be here.

Marlene Gebauer  8:13

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to your current position?

Alex Babin  8:18

Well, we’re a Silicon Valley company, and, you know, startups being founded in Silicon Valley, the idea comes to someone’s mind, and then you start sharing it with friends. And if they feel like it’s a good idea, they start joining you. That’s the same story happened here. We didn’t start in a garage though. Like like Apple. There were many other companies. We were starting in a nicey nice cozy office. But it started the same way. I had an idea of automation to be applied to knowledge workers. And that was the fascinating problem to be to be solved and really hard one. And I started showing it to a couple of my friends and they join me as a co founders. And here we are six years later, 75 people believing an idea and building this company.

Greg Lambert  9:09

Every time I think of Silicon Valley, I think of the HBO show or Showtime, I can’t remember where where they’re like in a in a house in a garage. And I think that’s what everyone thinks of with Silicon Valley. I did want before we dove in to the conversation, you’ve been doing something that I’ve enjoyed, and I think a lot of people have enjoyed. And that is during the pandemic you actually establish this monthly comedy night. And you had one of our favorite past guests on the show Eugene Cipperoni. And yeah, he’s great. In fact, I thought, you know, he was supposed to be like the the warm up act one one month and I think he kind of like, oh, no, this show he stole the show.

Alex Babin  10:01

That was intentional!

Greg Lambert  10:03

Good, good, good. So how did you come up with that idea?

Alex Babin  10:07

So it’s all started was into going virtual, in the middle of pandemic. And we picked up the sponsorship for a comedy show, which was basically the last one left. And no one knew how this virtual event would, would work out. So we decided, like, why why wouldn’t we do something that we can basically contribute back to the community, because seeing all over again, those peaches from different companies about the products might be a bit boring, especially when things like COVID happening around. So for us, getting something to make people smile, one smile at a time was something that we actually wanted to contribute to. And actually there was accepted so well, so we decided to have it on a monthly basis, inviting different comedians, and then we realize we’re surprised to realize how many of legal professionals are actually into comedy, and the willing to step up and do the part of a show. And I think it’s partially because they consider part of the work, they’re doing kind of a bit boring. So they need to substitute with something more, more enjoyable, something to enjoy with. And that’s the comedy, and we keep doing it. Well, that’s our giving back to the community. Once my audit time.

Greg Lambert  11:34

Yeah, we have to laugh at ourselves, because otherwise, we would just be crying all the time.

Alex Babin  11:40

You’re right.

Marlene Gebauer  11:40

And I can say I know more than one litigator who’s who’s basically turned to stand up. So not not surprising at all, that you have so many, so many comedians in the legal community. So I want to switch more to the main topic of our interview. And I’ll start with this question. What’s the key pain point for lawyers in their day to day work, Alex,

Alex Babin  12:03

besides not having enough comedy? Yeah. Well, I would put it this way, I kind of understand that. People who spend a lot of time getting into the profession, which is really, really requires a lot of knowledge and a lot of practice. They never thought how much tax I mean, that productivity tax, everything they’re doing on a daily basis would take. So no lawyer went to law school to file emails, little did they know how much time it will take them every day, the same with time capture. And if you talk to any legal professional asking for three top things that they have to do everyday, but they kind of don’t like doing and that consumes a lot of the time, that will be probably email management, time capture management, time management, and document review. Right. So document review is a separate topic, it’s more of a practice of law, but email management and time capture, it’s a part of a business of law that we try to automate. And those pain points they accumulate into basically, to build eight hours, you have to work 12, right, or to build to build 12 hours, you have to work much more. So actually, that creates an enormous tax, both on time and on health and kind of a joy of life for legal professionals, we know they burn out really quickly. We see this enormous hours, associates have to work. And that’s what needs to be changed. these pain points are really it’s, it’s not like a scratch on the knee. It’s like feeling like an axe stuck in the back.

Greg Lambert  13:54

I remember years ago, I had a I had one of my researchers who was entering in his time. And then he very sincerely asked me he’s like, Well, can I enter in? Is there a time entry I can enter in for my time entry?

Alex Babin  14:13

Well, that’s exactly it is. That’s the tax.

Greg Lambert  14:16

Exactly. Exactly. Well, in so I know, I know, that you focus in on the business side of law, not necessarily the practice side, but just that amount of time that we have to spend, and, you know, filling out the paperwork, getting time entry and filing those emails, as you said, and so and I know that you do a lot with with automation with Zero. Now I know there’s a lot of automation products out there that are focused on creating workflow efficiency, you know, what’s the focus the Zero has an in you know, what’s your way of distinguishing yourself from from the others.

Alex Babin  15:03

That’s great question, Greg. So you’re right. There’s so many automation, not just products, but also techniques. There’s business process automation, robotic process automation, Intelligent Automation, all that stuff. If we look at this whole picture from like 10,000 feet view, we’ll see that there are processes of a high volume that can be easily automated, like taking data from one place and putting data in another place. But there are proper processes that require mimicking the decision making process of a human being. It’s called cognitive processes. And these processes are really hard to automate. And typically, those processes have a high value, not high volume, like with other type of automation. And I’ll give you a couple of examples. But just to set the, the framework here, if you can imagine a Venn diagram of three circles overlapping. One circle would be high value processes. Another circle would be repetitive processes. And third one would be cognitive processes. So what Zero is doing is in the middle of those three circles, overlapping, and it’s called productivity automation, because most of the productivity tools and techniques they are focused on taking on the high volume processes, that basically connecting different systems and taking information from one place to another, or well defined processes like workflow automation, when you have defined steps. But what’s really, really important and that was the blessing and the curse, once we started building our solution is that there is only one thing that is in common for every knowledge worker in the world might be accountant might be lawyer might be consultant, anyone. Only one thing is that we all work differently. For the high value processes. One lawyer might be doing his time or her time differently from another lawyer in the same firm, daily basis, weekly basis, grouping things, breaking them down into smaller items, describing it differently, and so on, so forth. And I can go on and on with differences. And that’s the only common thing. So basically, you cannot build an automation technique automation tool that will feed all one feed old doesn’t apply here. Because attorneys are highly trained professionals. And if you try to make them work differently from how they’ve been trained themselves to, that’s a recipe for disaster. That means the automation that you bring in should be ideally invisible. No tricks to don’t new, learn new tricks to learn, adaptable, it should be adopting itself to the way professional works not trying to adapt the way the professional work to do the new technique. And that creates a lot of lot of problems when creating this kind of a platform, which we’ve spent six years building. And that’s why it’s called productivity automation, because it elevates the productivity of each individual professional while working with a different legacy systems. Instead of connecting to legacy system, we focus on the knowledge worker, and then high value processes that that knowledge worker is involved with.

Marlene Gebauer  18:33

So Alex, you touched a little bit on some of the themes of my next question. You know, automation tools have been historically hard to implement. You know, based on the tech itself, again, if people have to learn something new, then the resistance to the need to learn a new way of doing things. So how have you and your clients combated this?

Alex Babin  18:58

Yeah, that’s that’s great question. And it’s a well known problem for the whole industry. It’s not the cost of the product that scares clients. In many cases. It’s the cost of knowledge to change management. The Change management is what constitutes basically of those enormous processes inside the law firm once the product is being deployed. So there are many great products on the market, but then it basically heats the reality of the product hits reality of internal culture and resistance from lawyers to adapt new techniques, new new software and everything else. And it just breaks down into pieces, right? And in physics, for example, we know that from physics we know that the ideal machine is the one that doesn’t exist, but the job is done. So we have similar concept. We believe that the best interface is no interface to best software is no software, imagine the work is done. But you you didn’t do anything to make that work done. And it’s not applicable most of the cases to practice of law, but we are touching the business of law only imagine those 1/3 of your time as a legal professional that you spend on doing those business of law processing processes, just disappears, that and you can spend that time on billable activity. So in this case, all these processes that consume a lot of your time can be done by a machine. And if you combine it with a cognitive component, which mimics the way you work, and that’s where the magic is being unlocked. Because the machine works the way you would work. I’ve been talking recently to one of the attorneys and Emma 100 and asked her like, what would be your ideal situation? And imagine you have a magic wand, Harry Potter’s or whatever, a magic wand and you can do your magic trick and make yourself productive. What would would that be? And she said, I would clone myself, I have someone like me working for me. So it’s like, well, it’s unachievable, but we can solve a partially like a portion of it for you, helping you with a machine that will be mimicking the way you work and doing those administrative tasks for you. So that’s the way the the tech industry should go. We should not be introducing new software, no new interfaces, no change management, we just need to help legal professionals to do the work better and faster.

Greg Lambert  21:44

Alex, when you when you say for example, when you talk to this, this partner and you tell her that you’re going to automate it, how do you approach it in a way that she understands what you mean by automating the task? Are there some simple examples that you use?

Alex Babin  22:03

Absolutely. So actually, the simpler it is, the better it is. The first question is like, what is it you don’t like doing every single day, but you have to, and typically 123 processes come up as a on the top of the list. And at least two of them can be automated with the products we have. So basically, we always start with a problem that the end users have. And once they realize that they don’t have to learn new tricks. But it can be done. And it can be effectively automated. And the analogy we’re using is saying like, basically, imagine you have an AI assistant, that works the way you want it to work 24/7 Not taking breaks, not being paid, and doing things the way you would like to be done. That’s exactly what Intelligent Automation and in productivity automation is. And then once they start seeing the results, and typically ROI is on the first day, once you turn on the solution, it starts filing for you start doing your email management, it starts capturing your time. And then typically, both firms and users, they come back to us say Hey, can you automate this? And that? No, of course, we have to triage it. Because not everything needs to be done. Not everything can be automated. And not everything should be automated. But in many cases, they’re the full bucket of things that end users want to automate.

Greg Lambert  23:36

Is there typically top one or two things that that they come back to you and say, These are my pain points?

Alex Babin  23:44

Yes. And actually, that’s how our whole suite of productivity tools has been built. We started about five years ago, with one we entered the legal market with a very simple but powerful tool of email compliance automation, where each email in your Outlook has the client and matter prediction, and then being filed into management documents. So you don’t have to do it manually. So and then we started getting the feedback from users. In the second the most requested thing was time capture, can you guys do the time capture for us because we spend a lot of time doing it. And the accuracy is not very high and we’re being under pressure for billable hours and so on so forth. So we did build it we build it on mobile first. And recently we released the product called a polo which kind of have 300 360 degree view now on everything a legal professional is doing both on mobile and desktop. And another example is wrong recipient detection when attorney might be sending an email to someone accidentally adding opposite console or someone else another John Smith, and realizing it only hit like once or clicking this Send the button. And that can be easily prevented with, again, with security, automation, all kinds of things that surface up while working with our clients.

Greg Lambert  25:11

Or if they’re like me, you don’t figure it out until you’ve hit Reply All about three times.

Alex Babin  25:16

Oh, you know what? No. Reply All is the most expensive button in the world. It costs so much money.

Marlene Gebauer  25:26

That’s that’s a true statement right

Greg Lambert  25:28

there that sure is. So I’m glad you brought up time automation, because I think that that’s something that a lot of attorneys think about they want but I think it’s hard for them to kind of wrap their head around the process of that. So what have you found that works best for this type of time automation capture?

Alex Babin  25:50

Actually, let’s go back to a couple of minutes ago when we were talking about the invisible automation. So the best one is the the one that basically you don’t have to interact with original interface, just do your work, you will you do your viewable work. And then you see everything magically appear in existing system. So there are two components. One, it should be non intrusive for the end user. Again, no learning new tricks, no new buttons, no new software, we all hate it. I’ll just attorneys. We all hate it. But another hand, we have existing law firms infrastructure that has been there for years, and a law firm might be spending millions of dollars on setting it up training people, making sure everything, everything works fine. And then if you need to change it to something new, that’s typically really hard to, to do. And in our case, it’s both non intrusive for the IT and the management of the firm. Because as automation, Apolo in all our products, other products live and sit on top of existing systems, never replacing anything but enhancing things. It’s think of it as a intelligent layer between the legacy system, any of them, and the end user. And that intelligent layer produces the the work that the end user, a lawyer, at the end just reviews and says, Well, that’s, that’s fine or changes things, and then the system learns from it. So it should be non intrusive and invisible, both for the user and for the infrastructure. And that’s the beautiful part of automation, because it can be set up pretty quickly. And you start getting ROI on the first day. And it’s less risky. Because asking a law firm to change Time and Billing system to something new. Well, it’s really, really hard, but enhance it. That’s much easier and less risky.

Greg Lambert  27:53

Do you have any type of metrics on on the ROI? Is there a percentage of time capture that you’re catching the normally been missed?

Alex Babin  28:03

One of our clients recently published a case study with Weinstein available on our website. Once they launch our product, they, they found over 20 hours, new billable hours for timekeeper per year, and the number keeps growing, the more the more the product, and the system is being adopted more people using it more time is being captured. And that’s being done without any efforts from from the end users from the attorneys.

Marlene Gebauer  28:35

Yeah, that is fantastic. Because, you know, we’re talking about pain points, you know, this is a pain point attorneys consistently, you know, don’t get their time entry in it’s like, you know, there’s, there’s always memos going around, make sure you get your time and make sure you get your time. And so you know, that they’re not capturing this, like every day every second, but yet, this is a product and this is a tool that can basically do that for them, and they don’t have to think about it

Greg Lambert  29:02

correct. And I’ll say one other thing, because I kind of brought this topic up to a friend of mine to say, is this something that would just aggravate the client? And because there’s like, oh, well, there’s this time I wasn’t built. And he actually came back and said, No, actually, the the client is fine with this because it gives them an actual more accurate time capture in entry. So they know exactly what’s going on. Whereas before, it may have been, you know, the bulk bill and, you know, or just some generic entry on there. So, you know, his approach to it was they don’t mind because it actually gives them a clearer picture of what’s what’s going on.

Alex Babin  29:50

Yeah, and the ability

Marlene Gebauer  29:53

you know, it certainly helps the firm’s sort of figure out I mean, if they’re trying to do you know, different types of pricing, that they have a real true picture of what that you know what that costs? Correct. Alright, so Alex, you had mentioned Apollo, tell us a little bit about it and how it works.

Alex Babin  30:12

Apollo is an extension of our mobile time capture, it’s basically utilizes the same AI engine that we’ve been building that understands what client matter project, anything each piece of information belongs to. And then it has the component activity capture component, which looks into what is being done. And combining those two engines that understands what you’ve been doing, and then understanding who you’ve been doing it for what client that matter. And then utilizing the natural language processing to actually create the description, the narrative, the way you would create it, using the same words that you’ve been creating, historically, looking into the billing guidelines and understanding how client would love to see it, and creates the final time entry. In existing system. Let’s say you have an add on Item key pour in tap or car PDM. This system, the legacy system stays the same, those time entries are being auto populated into existing system. And let’s say you’re your, your attorney go you go into your item keep at the end of the day, and you basically see your whole day being described as time entries. And if for example, and here is here is the power of automation. Let’s say you worked on the email for five, you read an email for three minutes, it’s below the the threshold for being captured. Typically, you will not spend two minutes describing the creating the time entry for three minutes that you read an email, you typically jump from one to another, but then you download an attachment from that email and you spend another three minutes reading that attachment. And then you skipped it and jump to another task. So our consumption is really really fragmented. Even if we try to kind of streamline it have it in, in chunks. It’s still fragmented. And it’s impossible to capture all that time. But in case of a polo, it will combine those elements into one time entry, which belongs to one client and one matter, it will capture that email activity, it will capture that reading the document Word document, even if you had a call after afterwards, just to discuss that document with the client, it will also be combined into one a one time entry. So it will give you not 1000s of tiny fractions of time during the day, but beautifully created and structured time flow. And that requires few clicks and few interactions later to actually understand what is what is you want to build for or not so

Marlene Gebauer  32:53

and I imagine the doing it that way it reads better for a client as well. Because it’s not all these little bits and pieces, it basically puts it all together. Well, yeah, I was gonna ask about you know how it differs from some other tracking tools like element 55. But I think you’ve explained that. And you’ve also mentioned that it integrates with time entry systems. I mean, have you gotten any pushback on that?

Alex Babin  33:17

Not at all, actually, when we started working on our platform, and not just a poll, but all the other Automation Components. We were talking to many firms trying to understand how they would see the ideal product delivered. And you know what they told us, the best product is no product. So we don’t have to implement it, the best interface for our attorneys would be no interface. So we don’t have to teach them how to do that. New new things. And we implemented all those techniques when we started building our products. And now we have few push backs on. Sometimes there are technical issues. For example, a law firm might be using some technology that we do not support yet. But it’s it’s coming into, into the kind of family of integrations we have. Right now. We support most of the systems that are available in the market. But sometimes there are technical issues. But those are really easy to solve. It’s just the new integration that being added to automation suite.

Greg Lambert  34:20

We’ve talked a lot about automation of time entry and email filing. What are some of the unique things that you’ve been asked to help automate?

Alex Babin  34:31

Well, couple of things. And right now we’re working with a couple of our partners. And one of the examples I can bring in is court notices, automation of court notice intake, and then creating the tasks out of something that clients asked to do to do. So basically, if you look into the whole suite of things that knowledge worker or legal professionals doing during the day, it consists of information intake and information we send out and processing this information and in between. So both parts of intake and sending the information out, can be automated. And beautiful example is court notices. They’re getting in 1000s of them in, then this coordinate does need to be profiled and need to be put into DMS, they need to be taken care of, and so on, so forth. And that’s a high value process. If you miss one, that’s where it can be costly. So all those things are really the target of productivity automation.

Greg Lambert  35:36

Well, Alex Babin from Zero, thank you very much for taking the time to come in and talk with us.

Marlene Gebauer  35:43

Thank you, Alex.

Alex Babin  35:43

Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Marlene. My pleasure.

Marlene Gebauer  35:49

Well, I always love talking about automation and improving workflow. And so you know, Alex, it both of those those points.

Greg Lambert  35:58

Yeah, I think is his idea that being able to have the attorneys just continue to do the things they always do without changing. It’s kind of like the Holy Grail of, of the legal industry when it comes to automation. And so it’s, and I know, I, for one think that the attorneys would love to for that.

Marlene Gebauer  36:17

Absolutely. Like, and I like that phrase, what is it the best solution is no solution, right? Absolutely. Yeah, the best solution is no solution. Yep.

Greg Lambert  36:25

Yeah. Well, thanks again to Alex Babin, the CEO from zero for taking the time to talk with us.

Marlene Gebauer  36:32

Yep. Thanks, Alex. And of course, thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,

Greg Lambert  36:47

and I can be found at @glambert and on Twitter, or you

Marlene Gebauer  36:51

can leave us a voicemail on The Geek in Review Hotline at 713-487-7270 and as always, the music here is Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you, Jerry.

Greg Lambert  37:02

Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene. I will talk to you later.

Marlene Gebauer  37:06

Okay.

Start with Why. Value storytelling is essential (series summarized here). But, as storytellers, we’re not experimenting with the form. We should tell simple, compelling stories with no mystery as to the What, How, and Why.

What is outputs. How is inputs/process. Why is purpose, outcomes, and value.

What, How, and Why all matter. But, for our business audience, legal’s What and How are inherently uninteresting. Always start with their Why.

Why is the subject of the previous post. Business value is the one true Why. The call to action. The hook. The propulsive force. But the framing of Why is context dependent. The way we talk about business value will often need to be calibrated to our subject matter and our target audience—identifying our target audience and understanding what messaging resonates with them is quintessential to mastering our own context.

The stories we tell must cohere with the stories our audience tells themselves about their own starring role in the business’s journey. We must present ourselves as allies in the same cause. Which we are. This sense of shared purpose is most crucial when we are engaged in productive disagreement and accountable for persuading our allies of unpalatable truths—whether seeking to rejigger their perspective on value preservation (e.g., refining their legal-risk/business-reward calculus) or recommending that finite resources be allocated to the legal function despite the very real opportunity costs.

I recognize this all sounds quite theoretical, ethereal, and squishy because it is ultimately about soft skills. First, soft skills are wildly underrated. Second, fair enough.

(h/t Alex Suv)

Real fake examples 

Common: Head of Sales complains to GC that legal review is the bottleneck for revenue contracts. GC responds that the legal team is drowning and needs more headcount.

Uncommon: The GC approaches the Head of Sales and broaches the backlog of revenue contracts. The GC offers kudos, observing that the Head of Sales’ new strategy has caused a spike in contract volume—a wonderful “problem” to have. Last year, volume was 40 contracts per week. Now, volume is 65 contracts per week. On average, the law department turns 1.7 contracts per FTE per day, and there are 5 dedicated FTEs supporting revenue contracts (or 42.5 contracts/week). Last year, the team was right sized, but, today, the backlog only continues to grow (22.5 contracts per week above capacity). The GC asks the Head of Sales to support legal’s request for 3 additional headcount so resource levels are commensurate with the required service levels (i.e., capacity increases to 68 contracts per week).

The Why: accelerate speed to revenue

The How: by having sufficient FTEs to

The What: move revenue contracts through legal review in a reasonable timeframe

To be clear, I do not love this. I am allergic to throwing bodies at the problem (we can again they are likely to be having the exact same conversation again soon). Yet stockpiling bodies is what we do. From astronomical bonuses from law firms desperately looking for laterals to the continued upward trajectory of in-house departments, more hours from more lawyers is the lens through which we frequently view the delivery of  value. The above is far from perfect but disappointingly close to accurate (and, at least, more productive than centering “savings” in our value narrative).

Indeed, the second scenario is only slightly more sophisticated than the first—and yet materially different. From a metrics perspective, the law department only needs to know its headcount allocation and contract volume. From a storytelling perspective, we only need to situate these in the most basic business context. Relatively simple and yet surprisingly uncommon.

A more complex, real fake example. Same hypothetical. Head of sales complains legal review is too slow and a bottleneck for revenue contracts. Many (not all) law departments react with variants of the following:

• Anecdotes about how the legal professionals who review contracts are doing their best but are overburdened (probably true)
• Anecdotes about how the sales professionals engage in behaviors—unauthorized concessions to counterparties, last-second requests—that exacerbate legal’s resource constraints (probably true)
• Vague suggestions that various technologies could improve contract velocity (probably true)
• Vague commitments to pull some people off other items, try to work harder/faster, or innovate—cobble together process/tech improvements (probably true aspirations)

Nothing factually wrong. But not a compelling story.

The preceding list ignores Why completely. Instead, it jumps directly to How—and then lacks the requisite specificity. It also makes promises to do more with the same level of already overburdened and exhausted resources. Service levels are inextricably tied to resource levels.

There is a better path. But it is a rough slog.

• Acknowledge the centrality of Speed to Revenue to the business generally and the sales function specifically with a deliberate emphasis on how sales professionals are mission-critical to the success of the business, as well as how committed the law department is to enabling that success.
  • Identify a legitimate Why that rings true with the specific audience
  • Communicate real understanding of, and support for, the business objective
  • Lay a foundation of shared purpose
• Start with the business drivers of revenue-contract volume, velocity, and variety, including any lumpiness thereof (e.g., acute peak-load problems at the end of months, quarters, or fiscal years).
• Present law department cycle times specific to revenue contracts along with the estimated impact of improved legal cycle times on Speed to Revenue.
• Detail the steps in the current workflow and, where necessary, explain the reason for legal’s involvement in specific steps (i.e., where and how legal adds value).
• Call out the primary constraints and other rate-limiting factors in the current workflow, including those originating outside the legal function.
• Offer a target operating model that optimizes the workflow through a mix of improvements/additions in personnel, process, and tech. If possible, move upstream, painting a picture that extends well beyond legal—a business-level, systems-oriented view in which legal is a key contributor.
• Breakdown the target operating model (which is a program) into constituent projects with expected impact, costs (money, attention, implementation dips), timing, and ROI.
• Delineate projects legal can accomplish on its own (with proper resourcing) from projects that will require considerable cross-functional collaboration.
• Express a view on the optimal sequencing of projects, including potential pilots, starting with the primary constraint(s).
• Request support from the head of sales in winning key stakeholder support, obtaining resources, driving cross-functional collaboration, and spreading the gospel of patience.
• Where possible, explain how particular improvements will make life better for sales professionals in addition to the positive business impact of increased Speed to Revenue.
  • Tie How directly to Why
  • Translate real understanding of, and support for, the business objective into tangible options for improving business outcomes
  • Build on the foundation of shared purpose to recruit an ally in the internal competition for finite resources as part of broader effort to foster cross-functional collaboration
  • Establish mutual commitments contingent on obtaining sufficient resources and collaboration

At this point, I suspect my own audience breaks down into three camps:

1. Legal innovation enthusiasts who never had much opportunity to get an inside view of law departments. You are thinking my candidacy for Mayor of Obvioustown is looking strong. This all seems so self-evident.
2. The tiny subset of experienced, successful outliers. You find my lack of sophistication amusing (like when a dog wears pants).
3. The remainder of the in-house community. You are either (i) wondering why I woke up and chose violence, or (ii) daydreaming of a timeline in the multiverse where such superhuman exploits are conceivable. But mainly you are bewildered as to how anyone could be so naïve as think you have time for all that.

Almost No One. Recall my rhetorical question from the conclusion to last post, “But when only 16% of law departments track surface-level Cycle Time, how many have done the deep work to demonstrate the effect of contract-type-specific legal cycle times on Speed to Revenue and the attendant business impact?”

Our ceiling is 16%. Only 16% of law departments track some form of cycle time. What share of that 16% also:

• Are conversant with the business?
  • How the business currently makes money and plans to in the future (model/strategy)
  • The business value of specific legal workstreams
  • The business drivers of specific legal workloads
  • The attendant business metrics, and the impact of law department metrics thereon
• Have mapped and measured their processes to the degree they can project the impact of re-engineering?
• Have developed target operating models with the attendant ROI estimates, resource requirements, sequencing, step plans, and technology roadmaps (that not only take account of, but take advantage of the existing corporate tech stack)?
• Have attained cultural fluency and are aligned with their key stakeholders to the point they can successfully code switch in packaging the above into salient, salable stories that win friends and influence people—i.e., increase the law department’s ability to secure sufficient resources and cross-functional collaboration in order to drive better business outcomes?

Almost no one. Including me, except in very select circumstances.

Work Must Be Sorted. You likely know the old joke about law firms specializing in door law.

Under the new world order, that punchline applies even more to law departments than law firms. But ratcheting up effort levels to quickly turn around whatever crosses our desk is untenable. Budgets are not keeping pace with ever-increasing demand. We cannot avoid, either by commission or omission, allocating scarce resources. Optimal allocation will not occur by accident. Legal work must be sorted, including being ranked by business value.

Work sorting has all manner of implications. Deciding what not to do (the essence of strategy). Unbundling. Insourcing versus outsourcing. Internal resource allocation. External supplier sorting. Target operating models and roadmaps, including identification/prioritization for automation and self-service. Dashboarding/metric selection. The list goes on.

For our purposes today, however, some surface-level work sorting is often required just to decide where to start. My complex example above sits at the extreme end of the “so much easier said than done” spectrum. The notion that a law department will achieve enlightenment on all their workstreams simultaneously is nonsense. We must choose which stories are worth telling first—i.e., size the prize.

And, even then, we continue sort and prioritize. We don’t have to do it all. Leveling up to the slightly more sophisticated version in the opening hypothetical above is still a material improvement on the status quo. This is not about being perfect. This is about getting better. My complex example is not intended to be an ideal end state (it is merely a composite of approaches that have been effective in specific contexts). But even if regarded as the apex of a maturity model, it can still be broken down into small steps, each of which constitute valuable progress in their own right. Our story does not have to be complete to prove persuasive.

Yet, because we are so committed to accomplishing everything asked of us, selecting which stories to focus on can seem daunting. And it probably is, some places. But, usually, the initial triage—as opposed to the subsequent deep dive—does not require much detective work. The biggest problems tend to be glaring, persistent, and obvious, especially to legal’s primary business stakeholders. If you are unsure, just ask—uncomfortable though it may be. The business stakeholders may not be well positioned to recommend a treatment plan, but they rarely struggle with symptom identification. They knew where it hurts, even if they don’t exactly know why.

We will touch on more detailed working sorting in a later post on supplier sorting. Next post, however, we’ll address how work, once sorted, should broken down, measured, and reassembled into a story—and, more specifically, why fear of what me might find is often an impediment to action.

Matthew Coatney, CIO at Thompson Hine, and author of The Human Cloud sits down and talks about what he sees as the transformation of how we work. According to Coatney, freelancing and project-based work (The Human Cloud) combined with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (The Machine Cloud) will soon disrupt the way we deliver work. Law firms will not be exempt from this disruption. Matters are really just projects.  Contract attorneys are freelancers. According to some experts, 80% of work to be done by organizations in the 2030s will be project-based work. And AI and ML will eat into the other 20%. Coatney says that we are missing out on an opportunity if we are not preparing for this reality.

We asked how life as a CIO has changed over the past couple of decades for a CIO in a law firm and Coatney says that a CIO of 2000 would have culture shock if they were to be transported to today. CIOs are still the brand ambassadors of the IT departments, but Chief Technology Officers and Chief Data Officers are making their way into the fold to help offload some of the overwhelming responsibility that many of today’s CIOs find falls on their shoulders.

Matt also co-hosts The Human Cloud Podcast with Matthew Mottola where they put out twice-weekly episodes diving deeper into these topics. Go check out “The Matthews” on their own pod if you’re curious about how the structure of work is going to change.

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts |  Spotify

Information Inspirations

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer  0:12

Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer

Greg Lambert  0:19

And I’m Greg Lambert. Well, Marlene, we decided to take last week off in you get to go. Let’s spend the weekend in Santa Fe. So how was that?

Marlene Gebauer  0:29

That was great. I very, very, very much needed a break to keep my sanity. So it did that.

Greg Lambert  0:36

Yeah, there’s, and I’m sure there’s nothing that a little silver and turquoise jewelry can’t fix right?

Marlene Gebauer  0:44

Well, I’ll say that it’s it was more the great outdoors that I got to experience that really, really helped.

Greg Lambert  0:51

Good. Well, I’m glad you had a great time there. And before we get to this week’s guest, let’s talk about our information inspiration.

Greg Lambert  1:05

So both of our information inspirations this week are actually from other podcasts that we’ve done this week. So we took a week off for ourselves and did two other podcasts, though. So I get to completely geek out this week with Keith Maziarek and Chad Main on the Legal Value Network’s Off the Clock podcast. And we talked a lot about the increase in legal vendors allowing API access to their data, and how that could play a role in positioning firms into better predicting how they need to react to their own clients’ need. So I’m not really sure how Chad got our over, I know, it was over an hour long conversation that we had, he got it down, I think to about 30 minutes and did a great job distilling that into just the relevant pieces of information. But it was a lot of fun. And I really think that for those of us that are either in the law library or marketing, business development, technology, pricing practically any of the business support divisions of a law firm, these API’s, they’re going to offer a lot of opportunity here in leveraging that external data with our internal data. So and I say this in the podcast, if you like jigsaw puzzles, and putting them together, especially really hard jigsaw, jigsaw puzzle, then I think I think this podcast is for you. And these API’s are for you as well.

Marlene Gebauer  2:37

Yeah. And so what I did is I hosted in moderated and ILTA panel podcast covering how virtual hearings altered the fabric of dispute resolution. So I talked with Florida Circuit Judge Christopher Christopher Sprysenski, Jeremy Cooper, trial consultant with Paul Hastings, and Richard Howell partner at Jackson Walker, whose name I got from you, Greg, thank you. The three panelists talked about their personal experiences of online trials and what they liked and didn’t like about the process. It was really interesting to hear the three perspectives and some of the lessons that each learned as they went along. You know, of course, since I had them together, you know, I had to see if they had any funny stories to share. We all remember the poor Texas lawyer who turned himself into a cat, right.

Greg Lambert  3:25

I’m here judge, and I’m not a cat

Marlene Gebauer  3:27

and I’m not a cat. They had a couple good stories to tell people who didn’t know they were on camera and some prop failures which required quick sewing repairs.

Greg Lambert  3:36

Yeah, that was interesting that he had a sewing kit ready to go.

Marlene Gebauer  3:39

I love that he had a sewing kit.

Greg Lambert  3:41

Well, you know, Richard is like he said he’s a partner at my firm. And I love the comment that he made about online trials taking away this advantage of him being a six-foot eight-inch tall person in normal life.

Marlene Gebauer  3:58

I never would have known that unless he had I never would have known that. He dropped that.

Greg Lambert  4:02

Well, I can tell you standing next to him. He’s quite an imposing character when you right next to him so

Marlene Gebauer  4:10

And that wraps up this week’s information inspirations.

Greg Lambert  4:18

Marlene due to a scheduling a snafu. I got to do this interview by myself. But I will tell you, you were definitely missed here.

Marlene Gebauer  4:29

Yeah, I listened afterward. It’s really a great interview. It’s like that they did that was a lot of fun.

Greg Lambert  4:35

So I sat down with Matthew Coatney and talked about his work as a CIO as the Thompson Hine and about his book and podcast with the same name, The Human Cloud.

Greg Lambert  4:48

We’d like to welcome Matthew Cody CIO at Thompson Hein. Matt is also the author of The Human Cloud and has a podcast with the same name that he co-hosts with Matt Mattola. So Matt, welcome to The Geek in Review.

Matthew Coatney  5:03

Thank you, Greg, it is wonderful to see you again and to be able to connect,

Greg Lambert  5:07

Before we jumped on we were talking about your podcast and we will circle back to that as well as the book. But I’m going to hit you with kind of a big question right off the top here. I have some friends that we talked about, you can you could take a lawyer from like the late 90s and plunk them down in, in today. And other than maybe updating some of the technology, they pretty much operate as they did 20 years ago. Now, a CIO. On the other hand, let me throw this situation to you. If you take a CIO from, say, the early 2000s. And you were to take them out of time and plunk them down today, what would be the biggest difference that they would quickly discover?

Matthew Coatney  5:53

Yeah, well, I think that would first be a culture shock, like no other. It would be,

Greg Lambert  5:59

it’s not all dudes?

Matthew Coatney  6:01

Well, that too, thankfully, thankfully. And much more. I mean, just totally, totally different world than it was 20 years ago. And I think there are a lot of differences. And we talked about a few but the one that comes to mind, I’ll give credit when credit do is do the current CIO of WilmerHale, Adrian White, who was my boss, when I was there, many years ago, he labeled this the big shift. And he’s a funny guy, when he’d said he’d sort of take a pause for dramatic effect and say, the big shift … the big shift, and it was, and he talked a lot about and then, you know, that’s, that’s a lot what I’ve seen and, and helped with, as well as this pivot from what was plumbing and infrastructure and computers, right, you’re the, you’re the IT guy that fixes the computers, much more into a, you know, trying to not use too many trite buzzwords, but sort of the, the strategic enabler, right, you’re the person that is helping law firms, hopefully, to your point, make it so that it is harder for a lawyer from the 1990s to drop into a law firm of today and say, What have I got myself into? So it’s a lot around digitization and, you know, search and knowledge management data as a tool, and really driving a firm more toward a streamlined process-oriented technology-enabled organization. And that’s a big shift. That’s big. That is a big shift.

Greg Lambert  7:32

Yeah, cuz I mentioned back in the day, it was you were more about, you know, network and storage that this is a repository.

Matthew Coatney  7:40

Yeah. And it wasn’t, those weren’t table stakes back then. I mean, you could get it really wrong. And there were firms that had real big problems that that disrupted the practice of law. But that has changed, and so much of what we can provide now, it’s not easy, but it’s well, well known. Well tried.

Greg Lambert  7:59

You think a lot of a lot of that is well, I think it’s it, there’s probably two sides of the story, but more of the adoption of cloud based technology and storage, rather than everything having to be on prem is that?

Matthew Coatney  8:14

Yeah, definitely, definitely. I call it moving up the stack. And I’m a software developer as well. So you sort of move up the stack to more abstract concepts. And I mean, there are there are many firms and other organizations that had to worry about, you know, how do we get heating and cooler how do we get cooling into a data center room? How do we have fire suppressants for our servers I’m very, very important but minutia kinda decisions all that’s taken care of now. Yeah. And you don’t have to worry about it

Greg Lambert  8:40

man that brought back some memories, because I was I cut my teeth on an old IBM 9000 IBM mainframe. And so that was one of the things we had to do was we had to cool the room. We had to have a fire suppression. There was a big red button behind glass when you walked in, that would shut off all the power. And it was so cool. It was so tempting to press that red button. It was just

Matthew Coatney  9:06

to see what happens. Yeah, I will tell one brief back in the day story that I worked at a startup where our my office was a high bay garage with the air conditioner backed up to it so the door didn’t close all the way. And I’d be sitting there working as a as a young developer and like literally several times a squirrel would run up look at me, I’d look at it. And then it scurry back off under the door. But our server room I’m doing air quotes for those that are listening. Our server room was a closet and the AC went out and we actually had to add an Engineer Engineer reroute some air conditioning from another part of the building through the ductwork and down into the server room. So

Greg Lambert  9:46

yeah, down into the closeted server room. Yeah, yes. Yeah. Well, I’ve got my my squirrel story off the air, but I will say when I was at OU, there was a suicidal squirrel that jumped into it. transformer and caused all kinds of havoc. So let it I think people can probably fill in the blanks from there. So yes, you kind of touched on it a little bit in your answer on this. But where do you see the role of CIO in IT as a relates to things like knowledge management, you know, you get innovation and analytics, you know, what, what should the traditional IT department do today that they haven’t been doing?

Matthew Coatney  10:30

Yeah. And, you know, and this plays out in both my current role, and then in a prior role, I was consulting into and serving as a sort of a virtual or fractional CIO for many firms than in a consulting capacity. And first off, I’ll say that those table stakes I mentioned, no less important, they’re not as snazzy and they often don’t get paid a lot of attention outside of IT, but you absolutely have to like that has to work, this stuff has to work and work 100% of the time, or everything else you try to do will be for naught. And so having a strong team that finds that important and does a good job is critical. One, I’m thankful to have such a team here, but the role is definitely expanded. So in addition to that core, a lot of its centers around two areas. One is what you just mentioned, which was the data and information side of the house. And if you think about that, as everything that is structured and unstructured that a firm creates, in some way or another traditional CIO used to just provide the backing for that. But increasingly, what we’re seeing is with software and machine learning, and everything else sort of coming to the fore, we need to provide more than just that foundation, we need to provide the tools and the capabilities and the access and almost like the governance and sort of curation and adoption of both tools and data. But the other side of that is not everything that is innovative has to be you know, a really snazzy AI tool, it can, it can be as simple as just doing something smarter and cheaper and easier than you did a day ago. And so a lot of that’s like it’s adoption, it’s project management, it’s business analysis. It’s a lot of sort of core corporate transformation skills that I see increasingly in IT departments and firms.

Greg Lambert  12:26

Yeah, yeah, I think I had a similar conversation this week with my CIO. And, and we both agreed that not everything has a technology answer. And

Matthew Coatney  12:39

100%

Greg Lambert  12:40

Shouldn’t have a technology answer, there are just some things that you just need to be doing. Smarter technology may be a part of that. But you know, not everything can be automated, nor should everything be automated.

Matthew Coatney  12:52

That’s right.

Greg Lambert  12:53

On the flip side of that, are there some things now that you that you should not be doing and just let the practitioners do instead?

Matthew Coatney  13:03

Yeah, I do think and we’re, we’re still a little bit in the bubble. Like, we’re not the technology’s not quite there yet. But I think within the next few years, it will be and it’s the whole citizen, developer, citizen data analyst, whatever you want to call this citizen data scientists, there’s so many different terms for it. But it’s basically, I think that IT can provide, again, moving up the stack a little bit more of the plumbing around the tools that let people analyze their own data, create value, create mini applications, without it being the bottleneck. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s just a capacity, you know, there’s way more things to be done, than there are people to do it. If you can distribute that, and give them guardrails and tools to do it safely and effectively. Great. I’m all for that. And we and we I’ve done that at other firms recently, and, you know, exploring that where I am now.

Greg Lambert  14:02

Do you think CIOs are ready to give up? Give up? Well, and I think it’s so much I don’t think it’s so much an ego thing is just it’s it’s a worry of, you know, like you said, the table stakes now are you expect stability, you expect the network to always be going, you expect the email to flow the like I’ve said for years, the the the network is your work, if you want to meet your neighbor, that you haven’t seen in a while, watch the network go down, because everyone then drifts out into the hallways and start seeing seeing each other for the first time. Except for the COVID stuff. So let me talk about you a little bit here. So you can spend Oh,

Matthew Coatney  14:47

yeah, sorry, but before before we go there, I think that that is worth you know, there is around your comment about there are things that Is that something the CIO is willing to let go of? And I will say that this the CIO as it’s envisioned in the current and most firms, it’s a pretty expansive role to pretty daunting role. And it’s the expectations that are lobbed on those individuals, you have to have a fairly sort of unique, very multidisciplinary background in order to pull that off. And I think that’s a hard ask, especially in today’s, you know, labor demand with so many technologists that can move out of industry. So my point being is that I think that we could get to a time when we follow what other industries have done and actually break out the CIO and what’s called the CIO and CTO not talent, but technology, the Chief Technology Officer, someone that runs security on the back end. Yeah. And then you have an information officer that does more of that, or a Data Officer or whatever you’d like to call it. Right. We talked about it, but that,

Greg Lambert  15:55

that, and I think there are some firms doing that already, aren’t there?

Matthew Coatney  15:58

There are, there are, Yes. Dynamics on the market. Yeah,

Greg Lambert  16:03

that’s right. There’s, there’s, there’s, you know, only so much capacity that one person should be able to really take on. In that same vein, and then I’ll get to you a little bit does. Are we now looking outside the industry at talent to come in as the as a CIO? Or are we still looking for someone that was, you know, at another peer law firm to come over?

Matthew Coatney  16:31

There is still a bit of that for sure. Because, in many ways, the CIO is still the chief ambassador for IT throughout the firm. And so you need someone that understands what a practices and how it operates, and how lawyers are different than others. But I will say I think, I think professional services like management consulting, I have known some that have come out of industry and been successful, including my predecessor at another multiple firms. So I do I think there’s a track record there. I would like to see more of it. And I have started, I have been for a while hiring from the management consulting ranks for some key innovation and adoption roles. And it does I mean, you know, Greg, what it’s like, it takes some time, there’s a bit of that culture shock of like, what is a law firm and what’s going on here, but once you, you know, get immersed into it, maybe a year or two in, those folks become really, really valuable.

Greg Lambert  17:29

That makes sense. So And speaking of other experiences, you actually spent some time of your professional career outside of the legal industry. You know, what were some of the lessons that you learned from your experiences outside of law firms that you were able to bring in and apply inside of law firms?

Matthew Coatney  17:52

Yeah, yeah. One one you actually alluded to earlier, I, when I was younger, and my career was as a software developer, so the world was a a nail, and I was a hammer coming after it no matter what. And yeah, I quickly learned after well, not too quickly, I’m a slow learner. After many failures, I realized, hey, this really isn’t working, let’s take a pause, let’s approach it differently. And so a lot of the change management methodologies, project management, sort of the core skills that I think everybody should have going forward, those are harder to find in law firms. And so that’s, that’s number one is just bringing that kind of discipline, sort of a corporate way of looking at things into a law firm has been hugely helpful. That’s a mindset and a set of tech tools. And then beyond that the management structure of a professional services organization, particularly looking at the transition they went through from the KPMG s and the Arthur Andersen’s of the day to now Accenture and Deloitte Consulting and sort of all the spin offs that happened as a result of conflicts of interest. They were sort of forced to shift into a very different model very quickly. And I do think, the, the path they carved and they had to learn a lot of things the hard way, I think you can look at some of those organizations today and pluck out what’s working for them. And that’s things like a strong centralized culture, strong, centralized corporate core, with a much more adaptable periphery for the practice groups, right? So there’s, it’s not as much of every practice group sort of does their own thing with light core. And the larger firms are doing this already, as you know, so it’s building more of that strong core, but then giving capabilities Best Practices templates that practices can use more repeatedly, so that they can grow more quickly without reinventing things every time. And that’s, I mean, that’s the crux of knowledge management and process improvement, all that kind of other good stuff is really about that in my mind.

Greg Lambert  20:00

What would be some of the biggest differences between the, you know, the Accentures out there? And the large law firms? Is our technology and, you know, the IT groups, Are they set up internally more to service on the office level, the practice group level, the client level, what are you seeing as work and how things are structured?

Matthew Coatney  20:24

Yeah, it’s much less practice group driven. So it is similar to a law firm, where you have more of a centralized corporate IT back when they had offices, they would have, you know, local IT within each office. But it was very much centralized. I think the difference had more to do not on the core technology, but on the information side of the house. So A, the kinds of things that we’re used to in a law firm, such as an enterprise search tool, or document management, or portal, those kind of things. They had all those, they were just much more heavily invested in much more central, much better adoption. And it really was the lifeblood, particularly of an organization like Accenture, where I think they do it better than anybody else. And so you do you see a, it becomes part of the fabric, there’s a lot of thought and care and structure given to those things that we try to do in a law firm. But I just think from an investment perspective, it’s not quite there.

Greg Lambert  21:25

Without trying to get you into trouble. What do you think is the key motivation on the professional services side versus what the motivation is that creates a difference on the apps?

Matthew Coatney  21:38

And I, I do, I think, on this a lot, and it, it feels to me, although I don’t know what the right, I don’t know what the right outcome is the right path. But those organizations are, you know, generally public concerns, their focus are growth, their focus is on growth and on sustainable scalable growth. So that is an engine that drives the necessity for a lot more ingenuity to propel that kind of like, you can’t just sort of do what you did yesterday. 3% better, and everybody’s happy. And, and there’s nothing but again, there’s I don’t think there’s anything wrong, because you do see practice, you see private professional services groups, like accounting and advisors and others that are very similar to law firms in their growth approach, slow organic, partnership models, and it’s hard to argue that that’s bad, as long as it still works. But to me, that’s the big difference. Yeah. And when it doesn’t work anymore, we’ll see the change.

Greg Lambert  22:43

Yes, yeah. Well, that’s kind of a common thing is when something is on fire, then you will see change.

Matthew Coatney  22:52

We’ve been talking about. We’ve been talking about it as an industry for 15 years. And we still haven’t seen it yet.

Greg Lambert  22:59

But I’m sure once the pandemic’s over, everything will change. So you’ve written a lot and talked a lot about just the future of work and things like how freelancing or project-based work more generally, and things like artificial intelligence, are impacting on how we’re getting work done? Are those really relevant in our industry setting? Or? Or do they apply more often outside the legal?

Matthew Coatney  23:33

I feel like they absolutely apply in the legal profession. And we just, we’re actually doing a lot of it now. We just call it by different names. And because of that, you would just

Greg Lambert  23:48

stick the term legal in front of it. Project management? No, it’s legal project management.

Matthew Coatney  23:54

legal project management, spot on spot on. And it’s, I think, the challenge with doing that I understand because it makes it maybe a little bit more palatable to the profession to say, Well, we do things differently. So we need something tailored to us. But then we lose out on all of the other innovations and advancements in those other industries that just call it by what it is, you know, a matter is a project and contract attorneys are freelancers. So, you know, we’re doing so much of this right now. And artificial intelligence or machine learning. You know, there’s much to say that the things that we use today in email and document management are getting close to that if not there already. So it’s it’s pervasive in what we do. I do think that there isn’t, there is an opportunity. I was actually just we’re chatting on our podcast just before this about with someone that is in the project management consulting space, and he works a lot with Harvard Business Review. So he’s connected in that industry. And the estimates for project based work in organizations going forward 80% of work to be done by organizations in the 2030s. And beyond 80% will be project driven. And AI will quickly sort of eat at the other 20% that’s not. And so I think we’re missing out on an opportunity to say, how are we? If we think about this, not differently, but the same as what other industries are doing? What can we leverage to optimize and improve upon what we have today?

Greg Lambert  25:29

Well, let’s, let’s talk briefly about your book. So you wrote a book called The Human Cloud, and you also have a podcast, I want to get to the podcast here in a minute. But so what was the motivation behind writing the book? And? And tell us a little bit about the theme of that?

Matthew Coatney  25:50

Yeah, yeah. So I’ll start with the theme. And then I’ll do a quick origin story. But the theme is everything that I that we really just talked about its future of work. It’s, it’s the intersection of freelancing, which is more of my co workers experience, and artificial intelligence machine learning, which is my background and how those two trends are coming together to disrupt the way that we deliver work. But the story behind it was I actually, we met as freelancers. So he was looking to write a report on AI, I love to I’m a creative kind of guy. I like to create things. So I was actually on a freelance platform just as a side gig to scratch that itch. And I wrote the report for him. And then he said, Famous last words, he says, I’m working on a book. It’s almost done. But I’d love someone with some street credit to come and sort of just lend your name to the book. Well, yeah, it was easy. Easy. Yeah. So like a year and a half later, and you know, numerous revisions, but it was a blast. I had always wanted to be a writer when I was a kid. This is not quite the kind of book that I was hoping to write. But I’ll take it. And yeah, so it’s been, but we actually finished it. Greg in the beginning of 2020. So it went to press, you know how the publication process works. It went to press in January of 2020, then COVID happened. And then it launched in January of this year. And so all of that, that we wrote was pre-pandemic, in my how like it’s, it’s become much more applicable, I would say now are all the topics that we said this will come in the next decade. just fast forward to today.

Greg Lambert  27:26

Yeah, I think that’s been one one of the things especially what you know, and we got to give the CIO and IT guys and, everyone credit because we could not have transitioned from March 13 to March 16. On-site to off-site if there wasn’t a decade plus worth of preparation. Alright, now comes the fun part. I’ve been I’ve been holding back on this. And, and so let’s talk about the podcast that you do with Matthew Mattola. I love that nickname. It does the podcast with the Matthews in the young one in the old one. Which one are you?

Matthew Coatney  28:12

I am definitely the old one. He is 29 Maybe 30. It’s it makes me weep.

Greg Lambert  28:22

That’s not fair.  I was much older at 29 than he is. So So I listened I listened to it. The the discussions fun you guys have have a lot of fun doing it. I thought Marlene and I had a lot of fun. But you guys really have have a lot of fun off this.

Greg Lambert  28:41

Next level.

Matthew Coatney  28:42

If someone hasn’t listened to it, and they take the time to listen to it now what what should they expect to what what are? What are the topics that you do? And who are some of the guests that you’ve had on?

Matthew Coatney  28:52

Yeah, so it’s First off, it’s like the book. It’s it’s a fair bit irreverent. And we don’t take our two selves too seriously, we goof around quite a bit. But we do try to cover some serious topics too. So we talk a lot about current events, particularly as it relates to the freelance economy, leadership, technology, AI disruption, all those kinds of stuff, but we try to wrap it in to a little bit more synthesis. And I’m I’m old even for my years because I love history. And I’m sure Matt gets tired of me. The other Matt gets tired of me going back but I’m like, well in the 1980s or in the 1700s. But we do I try to pull sort of some themes forward from the past to put what we’re going through today in some context and but we do we alternate weekly. We have both a current events, sort of just the two of us shooting the breeze. And then we have a usually on Mondays and then later in the week we release an interview usually with some kind of leader in this space, mostly friends, because it’s fun that way. It is good to have friends. You know, that’s having done this for many years now. I’m not sure what we were thinking about releasing today. episodes a week in real time. Yeah, that may change over time. It may be every other week or something.

Greg Lambert  30:05

It’s okay, that says, You know what? There’s, there’s no requirement that you have to stay the same. But I will say the requirement is that you do still have to have fun and and you guys have a lot of fun. So who, who have been some of the guests and what have you guys talked about?

Matthew Coatney  30:26

Yeah. So we’ve had, we’ve had everything from a freelancer in Europe, sort of a digital nomad that’s living on a beach off of Portugal or Spain right now. All the way through to exactly yes. We had a head of freelance economy, it’s actually coming out. Today, as we’re recording, this is the head of the freelance product team at a company called Koch Industries. That’s like a manufacturing and production stuff in the middle of America in Kansas. And we’ve had, we had a colleague of mine that now leads digital learning for Bain Consulting. So you know, again, global footprint, and we just interviewed a, he was, I worked with him at a law firm. So he did project and portfolio management, a law firm now as an independent consultant, author and musician. And so he is a brilliant guy. That’s one of my favorite so far.

Greg Lambert  31:24

Good. Well, it is it is a lot of fun. And it’s, it’s called the Human Cloud Podcast.

Matthew Coatney  31:30

That’s right. Modify all that good stuff,

Greg Lambert  31:33

all those good stuff. So yeah, if you if you haven’t listened to it, listeners, I highly suggest it. It’s very fun to listen to so well. Matthew Coatney, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. It’s been been fun.

Matthew Coatney  31:49

It’s been a lot of fun. I really appreciate the opportunity. It was good to get to catch up again.

Greg Lambert  31:58

Well, the the podcast with the Matthews, I love that. It’s a really fun one to listen to. So if you haven’t listened to it, I suggest that you do it. I wanted to somehow live like the guests that they talked about who works on the beach in Spain or Portugal. I want that job. How do I how do I get that job?

Marlene Gebauer  32:19

I think I should got to just follow that model. Yeah.

Greg Lambert  32:22

Maybe Maybe I should just move and just and then see how the

Marlene Gebauer  32:26

Figure it out as you go along?

Greg Lambert  32:28

Sure. That’s how I live life anyway. So well, in you know, in seriously, there. I think there’s a lot of opportunities, both as a worker and as a business, in this concept of looking at all work as projects in staffing accordingly to that. And I think he’s right, you know, all matters are really projects. It’s a big ask, I think for law firms to kind of restructure how they, how they look at the work. But you know, as with most change in the world, there will be those who get on board and the those who are left behind, so and there’s any time to really make that change. Now is the time to do it.

Marlene Gebauer  33:10

Well, particularly since you know, you have these large firms. You know, if you’re going to make the change, it’s gonna take some time and you know, you have to start you have to start prepping early.

Greg Lambert  33:23

Absolutely. Well, thanks again to Matthew Coatney. Cio from Thomson Hine in the author and podcast host of The Human Cloud for talking with me.

Marlene Gebauer  33:31

And of course, thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,

Greg Lambert  33:45

and I can be found @glambert and on Twitter,

Marlene Gebauer  33:48

or you can leave us a voicemail on The Geek in Review Hotline at 713-487-7270. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry Davis. Thank you, Jerry.

Greg Lambert  34:00

Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marvin. I will talk with you.

Marlene Gebauer  34:03

Okay, bye bye.

I interrupt our regularly scheduled programming—the continuing series on value storytelling—with a rant inspired by my pending Continuing Legal Education deadline.

Despite the temptation to satisfy everyone’s daily outrage quota by taking on a soft target, I consider our collective (and my personal) annoyance with CLE a minor symptom of a major problem. Our culture of learning is broken. This has all manner of downside implications, including for innovation.

But, first, a little rantastic fun. Can you spot what’s missing from this ad I received in the mail?

I am getting CLE right now. While typing these words, a CLE audio file is playing in the background on mute. I felt compelled to acquire hard evidence before launching into a tirade.

What’s missing from the advertisement is any suggestion I might learn. No mention of quality or relevance. Rather, the repeated, bolded promise of “no final exam” struck me as an assurance there would be no requirement I pay attention—i.e., I could avoid learning anything at all. A promise made; a promise kept.

The offering is both better and worse than expected. Worse because the courses are simply someone reading aloud freely available law-review articles, including all the citations in the footnotes to stretch out the timer (yes, really). Better because Ethical Cannabis Lawyering in California is genuinely interesting (I read it) and therefore more substantive than anticipated. Of course, the quality of the content is entirely beside the point. As advertised, this is a pure box-checking exercise.

CLE being terrible is common knowledge. The distinguishing characteristic of common knowledge is not that everyone knows something—technically, that is mutual knowledge. Rather, common knowledge requires (i) everyone knows and (ii) everyone knows that everyone knows, and (iii) everyone knows that everyone know that everyone knows (ad infinitum).

My tweet above about CLE having a 100% disapproval rating is the culmination of a conversation I started in a fit of pique (the fuel on which Twitter runs). My prompt elicited all manner of humorous anecdotes—that become less funny the more you think about them.

For example, my partner Joe Borstein, then at Kasowitz, established a “refugee camp” of double-barred NYC/NJ attorneys who would bring their pillows to sleep through all-day, in-person weekend CLEs in New Jersey. He was following sage, intergenerational advice from his lawyer mother, who considered CLE “a great time to nap.” While David Lat, now of Original Jurisdiction (I subscribe!), did a course on “Animal Law” during a mad dash to meet his CLE deadline while an associate at Wachtell (click the link for David’s updated thoughts on remote learning, flipped classrooms, etc.).

Joe’s and David’s stories were largely representative. Worthless content and the stratagems for ignoring it—videos, on mute, increased to 4x speed with timers set to toggle back to circumvent ‘still here’ controls. A pointless but painful exercise we mostly treat as a dumb game we’re forced to play.

But there were other stories, too. I heard from presenters who delivered worthwhile content only to be conspicuously ignored by their in-person audience (headphones, newspapers, etc.). I heard from eager learners denied CLE credit for useful content they scrupulously consumed (Lean training; substantive legal material disregarded due to lack of reciprocity between states).

It was a lively, multi-faceted discussion that was missing one key ingredient: change agents. We seem resigned to a pitiful status quo.

In defense of the theory of CLE. Three premises. Two should be uncontroversial. One merits debate.

• New lawyers are not practice ready
• Lawyers must keep current
• Mandates are necessary?

New lawyers are not practice ready. From clients not paying for first years to partners griping about useless junior associates (95% of hiring partners judge new lawyers not ready) to memelords like Alex Su triggering everyone’s PTSD of being thrown into the deep end totally unprepared, my impression is we have a consensus with respect to new-lawyer readiness. Whatever your normative position on the current state of law schools and the bar exam, the empirical reality is today’s new lawyers require various forms of effective supplementary training to be equipped to competently meet client needs. This is not new lawyers’ fault. And no one is more painfully aware of this deficit than new lawyers themselves.

@legaltechbro

3 years of #lawschool and licensed by the state bar, but still has no clue #lawyersoftiktok #lawyers

♬ Am I dumb – Rama

@legaltechbro

“What are my thoughts? Well, there’s consideration here. I think.” #lawyer #lawschool #contracts

♬ The algorithm wouldnt like the original sound name – Cursed Mashups

Lawyers must keep current. According to tech-pioneer-turned-educational-researcher John Seely Brown, the half-life of a learned skill used to be 30 years; today, it more like 5 years. Even if new lawyers graduated practice ready, continuous learning would be no less essential. Societies and economies evolve rapidly. Governments attempt to respond through laws, regulations, and administrative rules, which are changing, and accreting, at an accelerating pace. The legal market seeks to keep up, in part, through innovation in legal service delivery, including better use of technology, also accelerating and now part of the competence rules in 39 states. Again, I presume agreement. Veteran lawyers must devote deliberate attention—time is a poor proxy—to keeping their knowledge and skills current to meet client needs.

Mandates are necessary? Nothing concentrates the mind like the sight of the gallows. We are, unquestionably, deadline driven. Yet learning mandates dampen intrinsic motivation and fuel a box-checking mentality that tunes out even well-calibrated content. Several states do not have CLE requirements, presumably because they have no interest in forced futility.

My feelings are mixed. But, ultimately, I find myself sympathetic to learning mandates—with a strong bias towards accountability for learning outcomes. In part, because professionals are truly busy and requiring learning tends to be the only reliable method to drive most of us toward adequate prioritization. In part, because we often don’t know what we don’t know and are therefore poorly positioned to properly evaluate much of the learning that would deliver the greatest benefit.

I am open to differences of opinion on bar-imposed learning mandates—and recognize there remain critical conversations to be had as to how to structure these to avoid defaulting back to our ongoing obsession with wasted, worthless “hours.” But I am convinced our system, as currently constituted, is broken—and this has implications beyond CLE itself.

Quantity is lacking. While hours are a poor proxy for learning outcomes, they are crudely useful for understanding the scope of learning mandates.

Employees at The Container Store receive 263 paid training hours in their first year and 100 paid training hours their second year. That’s 363 hours in two years to work at an (admittedly awesome) storage and organization specialty retailer.

The average large company in the US has increased their average employee training to 103 hours per year.

By contrast, my state bar CLE requirements average out to 8.33 hours per year.

How many law firms or law departments are anywhere close to 300 hours devoted to getting new hires practice ready? How many law firms or law departments are anywhere close to 100 hours devoted to continuous learning? Most (not all) law firms and law department learning mandates can be measured in 10’s, not 100’s, of hours—often dwindling to single digits after the first year and then mostly focused on general compliance (e.g., sexual harassment, cybersecurity policies) and bar-mandated box checking (i.e., CLE).

While additional training is made available, legal employers are not organizationally committed to ensuring learning occurs. The reasoning is often couched in the language of surrender: the lawyers will only show up if they get CLE.

Quality is ignored. FULL DISCLOSURE: I have vested interests in training beyond meeting my own CLE requirements. Which is another way of saying I have passionately pursued making a difference.

With Procertas, I have spent years trying to convince lawyers, law firms, law departments, government entities, law schools, bar associations, and even one state supreme court to incorporate essential technology training (Word, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint) into core curriculums.

We’ve certainly had some success, which has turned my anecdotal observations into hard data: legal professional’s bare survival skills with the primary technology tools of their trade are woefully deficient. Yet Procertas’s penetration is nowhere near what is warranted by the ubiquity, severity, and materiality of what is a solvable problem. In trying to help the profession, I’ve listened to nonsense about those mythical digital natives and soothed discomfort over competency-based training (accountability for learning outcomes is surprisingly controversial). I’ve also endured lectures about the primacy of legal content.

Yet, now that I also have the privilege of working with Hotshot (LexFusion member), I have similar conversations with similar audiences and encounter similar levels of resistance—with an entirely different set of excuses, save one (guess!).

While totally biased, I am no less correct: Hotshot is the highest quality core legal training available.

Playing to our common knowledge—everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows that most CLE is worthless—Hotshot’s original tag line was “short videos designed for learning, not CLE.”

Hotshot found success because they adeptly address a genuine need. They fill in development gaps from junior through senior associates—with value for even the most seasoned attorneys exploring areas outside their existing expertise. Yet, like Procertas, Hotshot is not at the penetration levels merited by the ubiquity, severity, and materiality of the problems to which they are the best available solution.

Hotshot is from the team that built Practical Law, which I grew to adore during my in-house counsel days. Like Practical Law, Hotshot pays top dollar to top lawyers at top firms to create useful, targeted content. They then pay other top lawyers, also expert in the domain, to review and refine the content. Hotshot then spends real money (like only a scalable business would or should) on production. After months of work by multi-disciplinary teams of professionals, the output is substantively excellent bite-sized videos with high production values—ideal for just-in-time learning (for anyone thrown into the deep end) but also organized into full courses and bootcamps with training guides for blended learning (i.e., flipping the classroom to maximize the value of partner-led sessions that add gloss and secret sauce to Hotshot’s foundational content).

In my experience showcasing Hotshot, no one questions the quality (unassailable) or balks at the price (a rounding error to our audience). Rather, I have mostly encountered the line of reasoning I’ve grown most accustomed to through Procertas: our lawyers won’t do it unless they can get CLE.

But not everyone needs CLE. The ability to construct courses by assembling bite-sized videos also makes Hotshot ideal for creating tracks for allied professionals (e.g., legal operations, project managers, pricing, marketing) who often hail from diverse backgrounds and would benefit from some level of legal subject matter understanding geared towards working better with their lawyer colleagues. Yet few organizations do this—craft beneficial learning mandates for allied professionals—because: nonlawyers aren’t required to get CLE (which somehow translates into them not needing training in their chosen vertical).

CLE has completely warped our thinking about continuous learning. Checking the box takes precedence to the point of exclusion. Useless-yet-required crowds out needed-but-optional.

Recognizing this, Hotshot has modified their offering, as reflected in their new tagline: “Short videos made for learning, not CLE. Now with CLE.”

Hotshot sought and was awarded CLE credit last month. I recommend you listen at the link to Greg and Marlene’s The Geek in Review podcast with Reynen Court superstar “institutionalist” Sarah Glassmeyer, McDermott Will & Emery’s anti-boring Margaret Naughton, and Hotshot co-founder Ian Nelson.

We’re not actually that serious about continuous learning. Hotshot is now a no-brainer. That the content is good, relevant, and can be broken up into CLE-accredited bite-sized chunks for just-in-time learning also makes it likelier to capture lawyer, and allied professional, attention. But the bottom line remains: we still need to pay attention to learn. No matter how good or CLE accredited, Hotshot can only make learning better/easier, it cannot do the learning for us.

We want our learning to be like The Matrix’s upload chair. Except way easier. Instead of the brutal shocks Neo endured to mainline new knowledge and skills, we fantasize about information being uploaded while we sleep blissfully.

We forget this:

So we can skip right to this:

Since The Matrix chair is make believe, the operative hope seems to be that through some combination of osmosis and necessity, professionals will get themselves to whatever level required to be functional. This theory is not totally without merit. Most people will level up when necessary for survival—and stop there. The bare minimum is better than baseline, but not by much. This, in the narrowest possible sense, is sufficient, but it is far from optimal and should not be considered acceptable.

Again, this is common knowledge. There are widespread aspirations to develop broader, deeper, and better training curriculums. But these aspirations run into resource constraints—the primary constraint being lawyer attention.

We would like to learn but we don’t value learning. Early in my lawyering days, I had an important issue I needed to get in front of a high-ranking stakeholder. I emailed him (ignored). I requested meetings (ignored). I sent calendar invites (declined). I waited near his office and attempted some Sorkinesque walking/talking (he half listened and nodded). Eventually, events unfolded as predicted, and I was called onto the carpet to answer for not properly warning the stakeholder about  foreseeable ramifications. I pointed to the emails and attempted meetings. Without hesitation, he responded, “Regardless, it was your job to get my attention and impress upon me the importance of the issue. You failed.” To this day, I have no clue what more I could have done beyond staging a sit-in or lighting myself on fire in his doorway. Accountability without authority is excruciating.

Many lawyers have similar stories of screaming from the rooftop…into the void. As do compliance professionals, cybersecurity sentinels, privacy experts, etc. There are limits to what can be accomplished with stakeholders who simply aren’t interested, and over whom we have no authority. Attention is an essential condition, and only a few are in a position to command it.

Which is my long-winded way of saying that nothing herein is directed at learning-and-development professionals. I know many of them. I’ve had the good fortune of speaking with them at length about the delta between (i) their personal perspectives and (ii) what is possible in the environments in which they operate. They care deeply and, when given the opportunity, do great work. But they are circumscribed by resource constraints—again, the primary constraint being lawyer attention.

This is a systemic failure. The CLE system has failed us. It is learning kabuki. The only real requirement is paperwork. Even the putative hours targets are largely illusory.

This is an organizational failure. Regardless of the travesty that is CLE, law firms and law departments have a responsibility to properly train their lawyers and allied professionals. As employers, they have the authority to command attention. Even if every second of CLE was worthwhile, the modest hours requirements would still not meet our very real (and growing) learning needs. Well-run organizations make training a priority.

This is a personal failure. I am as guilty as anyone of not taking proper advantage of all the learning resources at my disposal. Most of us come up short in this regard. Most lawyers could, with a little effort, find CLE that was useful to them, and then pay attention to it. But even if CLE and our own organizations fail us, we have endless opportunities for self-improvement that would enable us to operate at the level our clients deserve, and we are duty-bound to provide. Most of us could be so much better. But few of us are willing to consistently sacrifice the necessary time and attention.

Valuing differs from wanting. Valuing is about the willingness to pay. Learning costs.

Innovation requires learning—that thing we don’t have time for. I reject the oddly common assumption that lawyers are actively anti-innovation with respect to service delivery (regulation is another story, which is one reason CLE does not get reformed) and this is somehow solely a byproduct of the billable hour (despite more lawyers working in-house than in BigLaw).

At worst, some lawyers are aggressively “pro getting sh%t done” and caustically dismissive of anything that distracts from the task at hand. This attitude, at least, is honest, if myopic.

The rest of us invoke innovation incessantly. Lawyers, law firms, law departments, and legal talking heads (it me) discuss “innovation” so frequently the word has mostly lost meaning. The ratio of words to action, however, is depressing and feeds an innovation illusion.

The constant chatter convinces those with their heads down that innovation is on rampage, elsewhere. But much of this noise comes from those new to innovation as they marvel out loud at the (theoretical) potential.

The experienced, by contrast, grumble about the prohibitive fuel costs of achieving escape velocity. Grizzled veterans are forever highlighting the importance of change management and storytelling in the service of driving adoption. Sadly, the road from realism to cynicism is short.

Indeed, the best way to appear pro-innovation and sophisticated while leaving the status quo undisturbed is to wax eloquent about adoption challenges. It can get pretentious, but, too often, proves portentous. Unfortunately, spreading doom and gloom about obstacles to adoption is the surest path to prescience—barriers to adoption are quite real and the prevalence of adoption failures has a severe dampening effect on our ability to innovate to meet the accelerating challenges of a law-thick society.

Undoubtedly, we need better products. Have you seen CoParse? Did I not just make a compelling case that Hotshot is better than what came before? Procertas has no real competitors in the competency-based training space and still has undergone a complete transformation since launch. Users deserve better.

The market should demand better products. But the La-Z-Boy version of The Matrix chair is not on anyone’s near-term product roadmap. “Everything & Effortless” is an impossible standard—and, simply put, an excuse for inaction in an environment where action is required. We’re already playing catch-up in the Red Queen’s race.

We need to be better users. We need to be better users of the process and tech we already have. We need to be better users of new processes and new tech that enable us to be effective at scale and pace. Yet if it is too much to ask for legal professionals to spend a few minutes to get decent with Word and absorb a few hours of quality content directly relevant to their practice area, how do we expect to overcome the inevitable implementation dip of the truly new and unfamiliar?

Being better users requires us to pay attention. Being better users requires us to learn. Unfortunately, our culture of learning is deeply broken. This is common knowledge.

Back in May (ep. 117), we had Bloomberg Law’s Molly Huie on the show to talk about the Bloomberg Law DEI Framework survey she and her team created and were pushing law firms to contribute. So we close the loop on this conversation by asking Molly to come back and talk about the results of the survey. There were over 30 firms who participated in the survey with 28 of those firms making “the cut” to be included in the 2021 DEI Framework results. Molly walks us through why these firms jumped onboard this inaugural survey, what issues they may have had in collecting and answering the over 90 questions in the survey, and what reactions they had to the results of the survey.

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts |  Spotify

Transcript

It feels like the WorldCC and Factor are doing me a personal favor in collecting critical data for my ongoing series on value storytelling. But I am not a solipsist. To the benefit of us all, they are seeking different perspectives on business value, including taking the vital step of asking the business itself. Please go here to take their high-impact survey and/or share the link with the appropriate audience:

There are multiple stakeholders In the Commercial and Contract Management (CCM) process who must collaborate effectively to drive value and eradicate friction. This survey, aimed at Business and Legal practitioners involved in the CCM process, will provide you with unique insights into how each group perceives the value and benefits received and the value and benefits given. You will see the position today and the desired state to deliver maximum benefit in the future. In this ground-breaking research, World Commerce and Contracting is partnering with Factor, a market leader in Legal Managed Services, to explore how business and legal functions interact while performing CCM.

We invite you to contribute to this survey. Your responses will be confidential and documented in a way that ensures they are not attributable. It will take you less than 10 minutes to complete, and you will receive a copy of the resulting report.

While I have been sidetracked as of late (see here and here), I will continue the value storytelling series soon. My thesis thus far:

Legal expertise is valuable to the enterprise. Demand is on steep upward trajectory. Budgets are failing to keep pace. We must optimize resource allocation and innovate—enhance productivity through process and tech. But, while innovation and optimization are key elements in our value story, we are still likely to need more money for the legal function to meet the needs of the business at scale and pace. Service levels are inextricably tied to resource levels—including the resources required to invest in innovation and optimization.

It is, literally, our job to ensure the legal aspects of business needs are met. Thus, it is also our job to secure sufficient resources for the legal function. Obtaining finite resources inside an enterprise carries substantial opportunity costs (alternative value the business could pursue with the same money) and therefore requires expert value storytelling, a learned skill in which few legal professionals are practiced.

The business defines “value.” Yet the number one complaint among the legal function’s business stakeholders is in-house lawyers “don’t understand my business.” Understanding—mastering our own context—is essential. We should be capable of framing our ask for incremental resources in the language and metrics of the business. Centering the creation, and preservation, of business value in our narrative is the core of value storytelling.

Business value is context-dependent, not unknowable. Conversations around the business value of, say, accelerating speed-to-revenue demand a different framing, and often has a different audience, than conversations around the business of value of complying with new privacy regulations. We should know our audience and develop the attendant abilities to calibrate messaging for maximum resonance with specific sets of business stakeholders.

Being aligned with the business, however, does not spare us from making hard choices and having hard conversations as to what constitutes value. Though it pains our service-loving souls, it incumbent upon us to prioritize activities by business impact and artfully say “no” when asked to handle deprioritized work. We should, however, capitalize on each “no” as an opportunity to build our story that additional legal resources are required to address unmet business needs.

Yet, instead of a more-with-more value proposition, we too often default to savings-centric tropes valorizing more-with-less heroics reliant on extraordinary effort and improvisational ingenuity to bridge resource gaps (excess MacGyverism). Stories about savings are easy because they are counterproductive—reinforcing the attractive fiction that the business can, and should, spend less on legal. Good value storytelling is anything but easy for the same reason it is necessary—the hallmark of successful advocacy is not a penchant for combative argumentation but, rather, our ability to persuade those who need persuading.

Richmond Law School professors Jessica Erickson and Josh Kubicki join us to discuss how they are teaching law students not only the critical skills to “think like a lawyer” but also the understanding that they are entering the world of business. Whether that is in BigLaw, non-profit, in-house, public interest, or solo practice, they need to have a baseline of business acumen to practice and thrive.

Prof. Kubicki runs Richmond’s Legal Business Design Hub that delivers leading-edge competitive skills to the law students and is part of a one-two punch created by Richmond Law Dean Wendy Perdue who also hired Prof. Janice Craft to lead the Professional Identity Formation program which focuses on interpersonal skills needed to be a successful, yet healthy legal professional.

Prof. Erickson runs the Law and Business Forum which connects Richmond Law Students with the local business community and teaches students a better understanding of what it means to be a business lawyer.

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Information Inspiration

Our inspiration this week comes from someone who we met (virtually) at the HBR LINKS conference. This fellow legal information professional mentioned that he’s listened to all 133 (now hopefully 134) episodes. That is amazing! You inspire us!!

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If you like what you hear, please share the podcast with a friend or colleague. Or, reach out to us and let us know what you think.

Contact Us

Twitter: @gebauerm or @glambert.

Voicemail: 713-487-7270

Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com.

Music: As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer  0:21

Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer,

Jessica Erickson  0:28

And I’m Greg Lambert. So last week, Marlene and I participated and under sponsored the HBR Legal Information + Knowledge Services or LINKS conference, and it was great seeing so many of you there and I particularly wanted to give a shout out to one of our podcasts mega supporters, Marshall Voizard from Hughes Hubbard in New York, Marshall jumped into the Three Geeks breakout room that we had there at the virtual conference. And he told us that he has listened to absolutely all of our episodes. And that’s just crazy amazing.

Marlene Gebauer  1:04

That is very impressive. And so, you know, I do want to say that we’re happy. It’s not just us who listened to our catalog.

Jessica Erickson  1:11

I’m forced to as the editor, I have to listen. So thanks, Marshall, for listening and supporting the show, and especially for letting us know,

Marlene Gebauer  1:21

We really do appreciate all of you who take the time to listen, and we very much enjoy hearing from you.

Jessica Erickson  1:26

So we’d love to give more shout-outs to listeners. So reach out to us and let us know what you like, what you don’t like, or what you would like to hear on an upcoming episode. So our contact information is in the show notes. So and thanks again, Marshall. You are very cool.

Marlene Gebauer  1:42

#MarshallIsCool

Greg Lambert  1:44

And even pod dog agrees.

Marlene Gebauer  1:46

Yes pod dog does agree. With

Jessica Erickson  1:49

Marlene, we have this great interview with two law professors at Richmond Law school in Virginia. And I want to thank Roger Skalbeck there at Richmond for arranging this meeting for us. We had such a good conversation that I think we just need to go ahead and jump right into the discussion.

Marlene Gebauer  2:06

Yes, thank you very much, Roger.

Marlene Gebauer  2:09

We’d like to welcome Josh Kubicki, Director of Legal Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Richmond School of Law. And Jessica Erickson, Law Professor and Director, Richmond Law and Business Forum, Josh and Jessica, welcome to The Geek in Review.

Jessica Erickson  2:23

Thanks for having us.

Josh Kubicki  2:24

Hello.

Jessica Erickson  2:25

So there’s a lot of discussion about how law schools can better prepare law students for the practice of law, including the business of law. And I for one also get asked a lot of specifics by what it is they could be exposing the students to while they have them. That would make them you know, more practice-ready. So I think we have a couple of law professors here who not just ask the questions, but have actually put some practical skills teaching into practice there at Richmond. So Jessica, before we get into any specifics of what you and Josh are doing there with your different programs at Richmond, can you tell us what you saw as was either missing or needed some kind of adjustment in the legal education to better prepare your law students for the you know, the real world of practice?

Jessica Erickson  3:12

Sure. So I’ll actually go back about five years, and say that, at that point, many of us on the Law Faculty, and I’d really give credit to our Dean, Wendy Purdue, who said, we know that law students, our law students need a broader set of skills. We have a general sense as to what they are. But candidly, I mean, most of us are traditional law professors. We teach doctrinal courses, we’re in clinics, we teach legal writing, we couldn’t exactly pinpoint, at that time, exactly what the set of skills were. And we recognized our own limitations there. So what happened was about five years ago, the dean put together two committees. And one committee was what I would say is more on the business side of the law, and one committee was on I’m gonna use a term that I hate, but on the softer skills, the question was, within each of those buckets, what should we be teaching? And how then should we incorporate those skills into our, into our curriculum? And those committees each spent a year separately and often talking to each other along the way, but really doing a deep dive and we looked at a lot of surveys of law firm partners, we looked at the client-side of things, we looked at what other law schools were doing, it was really a pretty comprehensive review, trying to build out what are the precise set of skills that we thought that our law students needed, and none of this was to say they don’t need what we were already teaching them. We think they need legal writing, they need legal doctrine. They need the skill side that we were doing across the board. But we had the sense that there was something more and at the end of that year, both committees came up with pretty lengthy reports that went into a lot more detail about what we thought our students needed. And on the business of law side, we thought they needed more Around business and finance, more around understanding the industry, more about understanding project management process improvement, how legal services are delivered, how they should be delivered. And so we were able to come up with a pretty robust set of skills that we thought our students needed. And we did the same on what we started to call our professional identity formation side, that students needed to be able to determine the values of the profession, understand what their own values were, in connection with the profession, understand and cultivate skills, like empathy, and active listening, and leadership skills. We then came up with this long list of skills and realize that, frankly, they weren’t being taught as systematically as we would like through our curriculum. And that doesn’t mean they weren’t being taught at all they were, I mean, certainly, if you look at, look at our clinics, they teach a lot around active listening. And those skills just as one example there, but you know, the clinics were doing a lot of the heavy lifting on this. And we decided to build it out more systematically. And so we hired two new people. We hired Josh to run our legal innovation and entrepreneurship program, which is now legal business design. And then we hired Janice Craft to run our professional identity formation program. And so the students start with what is now we required one-credit class in their first year on professional identity formation, thinking through the values of the profession and their own values, and developing some of those other skills. And then we have this panoply of electives in the 2L and 3L years, both on the professional identity side and then also on the legal business design. So that’s where we ended up I will say, it was a little bit interesting to go through that process as a faculty and realize at the end of the day that what we had thought law students needed was pretty darn close to the Delta model.

Jessica Erickson  6:47

Yeah, I was gonna say it was you are as you are listing it out. That’s exactly what I was thinking.

Jessica Erickson  6:52

Yeah, that reassured us a lot. But I will tell you, our process was separate and from theirs, and we got to the end and saw other people, people got to the same conclusion. So that was reassuring. That’s probably more than you wanted.

Marlene Gebauer  7:05

I was going to say, it’s like, you’re going right into my next question. So you know, we’ve interviewed several guests who, you know, are promoting innovation in law school, and you mentioned the Delta Model. So we’ve had Cat Moon and Alyson Carroll on discussing that. We’ve had Jennifer Leonard, discussing Penn Law’s Future of the Profession Initiative, Nicole Morris highlighted or TI:GER program at Emory. And, Anne Tucker and Ben Chapman talked to us about Georgia State’s Law and Business Analytics program. So Josh, and Jessica, you know, where do you think your program fits into this world of law school innovation programs?

Jessica Erickson  7:41

I’ll do the, I’ll tell you broadly how we saw it as we were building it, but then I’ll really turn it over to Josh, who was much more, you know, in the thick of this. For us, when we were crafting it, we talked to many of the people that you just mentioned. So Cat Moon, Alyson Carrol, Nicole Morris, they were all really helpful to us, as we tried to figure out what we wanted to build. I think what makes our program unique is that we were not just on the business side of law, nor were we just on the professional identity formation side of law, we thought it was very, very important to launch both programs at the same time, we thought, I want our students to have the business side, I’m a corporate lawyer myself. So that’s my doctrinal area of specialty, I very much believe in it. But I think the professional identity formation side is just as important. And vice versa. We didn’t want to start that side without getting to think about the industry more broadly. So we launched these together. And our hope is to really build out a robust set of courses that starts with a required course in this area, and then build out for lots of electives for students to explore their particular passions.

Josh Kubicki  8:42

So I will add there, where we fit in sort of the ecosystem or spectrum that you guys have sort of outlined for us. I think we fit a very unique, yet complimentary place, I don’t think we’re trying to do something different for different sake, I think we see an opportunity in the market where others haven’t, or others haven’t taken action yet. And that is really sort of on equipping our law students with the business, not just knowledge, but actual skills to go design businesses. And by the way, a business can be nonprofit, a business can be public interest, it can also be their own practice. In big law. One of the things we start in the legal business design hub is with the recognition that legal services, no matter what type of organization, they’re delivered through a business model. So it’s incumbent on future lawyers to understand at the granular level, what a business model consists of. And one of the things that we teach always we touch on this in almost every class that I teach is, if you’re going to design a business, you’ve got to do three things really well. Design it really well for your customers or clients so they’re getting value. Design it for the business so that you’re generating value, you don’t want to be losing you don’t be losing money year after year, because that’s not a sustainable business. And you want to be designing it for yourself and your employees and everyone who’s delivering that, right? What does that worker experience? And just to take it back to professional identity formation, it’s interesting because Professor Craft and I hired at the same time, the Dean and Jessica and other sort of key faculty have given us lots of room to sort of discover our law students meet them where they are, and sort of design the curriculum around them and Professor Craft and I continue to sort of meet on the sort of central themes, and that is, make sure that the lawyers are leading, or can lead healthy, personal lives, professional lives, and business lives. And so Jessica, yeah, you said sort of the soft skills. But that’s where sort of this really meets the road, we want to, we don’t want to be putting law students out there who are solely focused on just being amazing lawyers, which is great. But we also know that in a profession, when you put your personal health aside, or you put your employees well being aside, we get into some of the troubles and some of the themes that we’re discussing now for the first time in a long time, in industry as a whole. So our programs are really sort of designed to mitigate that and hopefully eliminate it in future lawyers

Jessica Erickson  11:22

And Josh mentioned this in passing, but I wanted to kind of clarify, I know a lot of programs, you know, it’s pretty easy, I think to set them up as though most of your students are going to go into big law. But I imagine Richmond is kind of like my old school Oklahoma where Yeah, there, there’s probably you know, 10, 15, 20% of the people that will do that. But you got 80%, that’s going to go somewhere else. And your programs are focused across all of the future places that your students land?

Josh Kubicki  11:56

Absolutely. In fact, just this this semester, I’m in the midst of teaching a building blocks for small and solo practices. So these are those lawyers, who, what I would say are already there. They’re going to be entrepreneurs, who happened to be entrepreneurs, as lawyers, building legal businesses, right. So it’s all around the pragmatic and practical skill set that you need to go build a successful small practice.

Jessica Erickson  12:23

Great. Yeah, that’s good, because I think a number of the programs that we’ve read about I think, tend to be very focused on the big law setting. So it’s nice to see a more well rounded program. Jessica, I wanted to get back to you because there was something that caught my eye as I was researching what you’re doing there at Richmond. And I noticed that, you know, Richmond, there participates, or as one of the initial schools participating in what’s called the Institute for Future Legal pPractice. Why did you guys pick that to participate in that? And I and from what I’m reading, it’s a boot camp model. And can you tell us what what are some of the benefits of having that boot camp model?

Jessica Erickson  13:07

Yes. So IFLP (iFlip), as I think it’s often called has changed a lot over the years. And so when we first started to participate in it, we were one of the initial schools we we I would say we fought a little bit to be part of that those initial schools because we saw it and we’re really intrigued by it. So what it was originally and and Bill Henderson and others created this, was that students would go and do a three week boot camp, either and I think Chicago, Boulder, or Toronto, on these business side of law skills, what they call the T shaped lawyer, and those skills across the top of the T that lawyers need a little bit of exposure to but not to be experts in around, you know, business process improvement, etc. They would do that three week boot camp, and then they would do a 10 week paid internship with a company or a law firm or a nonprofit that was interested in having interns who were trained in these topics. And so we had students at Bryan Cave, we had students at CISCO, we, we had students really some great places. The first year I believe we had five students, I think we had the second highest number of students in that program. And it was fabulous for them. I mean, I can’t emphasize it enough. I actually have a student who then went back into the seven month advanced program the following year with Cisco. She just started working for them full time. I mean, it worked for her. And then we had students who said this was the best professional experience I ever had. I mean, it was truly fabulous. I was so interested in it. I was just frankly the coordinator of it on the Richmond side. I didn’t do any of the building of it. But I actually went out to the boot camp for three days and sat in Chicago in the classroom with the students because I wanted to see what they were learning and how they were learning it. I found it fascinating. My understanding is that over time IFLP’s business model became tough to sustained. It was tough to put all of this into place as a law school. We weren’t paying for any of it. And so it has, it has shifted, and Josh could talk more about what it looks like today.

Marlene Gebauer  15:10

Hey, I wanted before Josh, before you start, I just wanted to ask, how did they match students with organizations?

Jessica Erickson  15:17

Yeah, that’s a great question. So what happened was that, essentially the schools were able to nominate people, this is how it originally started, the schools were able to nominate, I think we got to nominate five people, that number could be wrong. And once we once they went through our screening process, they were put into a pool of essentially, screened applicants. And then IFLP did some screening on their end. But then the employers would do their own interviewing and hiring from that pool. So the employers got to pick who they wanted. But we found that our students did pretty well, in that process. The second or third year, IFLP, opened it up not just to that first set of law schools, but to lots and lots of law schools. And I think then, that it was a little bit tougher, you know, for everyone. I mean, from a school perspective, I could put in my time on it, if it meant we had five students going through this experience, if we’re gonna have one student putting the restraints, it’s probably not a great use of my time. So became a little bit of a harder sell as it went on. But Josh could talk about what it looks like today.

Josh Kubicki  16:19

Yeah, I mean, for those interested it’s it’s been an interesting journey for IFLP and and the reason why I would speak on their behalf, I’m not formally associated with them, I mean, I guess maybe I am. So when they, they launched the the modern law practice certification classes and curriculum, which is five modules, about two hours each. I’m one of the instructors for one of those modules on legal business design. So we worked with the organizers of IFLP, Bill Henderson, Kevin Colangelo, last year, maybe longer, I don’t know, my timeline is all skewed, to basically help them launch the online certification program. And so anyone can sign up for that I forget, quite honestly, if there’s a cost or not, you go through the five modules, and you get a certification from IFLP. From my understanding real quickly, there are plans to relaunch the boot camps and internship opportunities next year. But I’m not exactly sure what all the details are there.

Marlene Gebauer  17:23

So what type of feedback that students you know, an organization’s kind of bring back? And, you know, because I’m just sort of curious, it’s like, well, you know, did they offer feedback? Was that acted upon? You know, maybe is that part of the reason why it’s coming? Why the boot camp is coming back?

Jessica Erickson  17:41

So I will say is it participating school, we didn’t see a ton of the feedback, you know, our Our job was primarily to recommend students to enter the internship pool. And from there, it was a private employment relationship between the students and the employers, along with that three week boot camp. So we did not see a lot of feedback about it. And for us, we only had, I don’t know, seven or eight students total go through the program over the over the two years. And so we couldn’t really track over time that we didn’t have enough to do any big study. Maybe IFLP it as a whole. I think what it did is it broadened students lens, you know, students are very much in the law school mentality of thinking about legal doctrine and thinking about the writing side and the skill side, they are not thinking about the profession generally. And they are not thinking about these other sets of skills that they need. And I think IFLP through the boot camp in the internship very much put that on students agenda. And it was right for Richmond, at the same time that we as a school were thinking about these additional skills. So it was a great way for us to kind of get it, get a window into this process, and then come back and try to build our own program.

Jessica Erickson  18:48

Well, anything that bill Henderson and Kevin Colangelo, work on I have great faith that it’s a great program. So Josh, I want to talk to you because I was talking to a friend of mine there Richmond, and he kind of told me some stories of of your travels literally, between the time you you were hired a couple of years ago, and now and that, that you’ve been traveling back and forth from Cincinnati to Richmond. First of all, how to how do you do that? And second, I’m sure there’s some stories to tell. Along the way here.

Marlene Gebauer  19:22

How long have you been doing this? Because I mean, when you’re doing this during COVID, you know, how did you handle it?

Josh Kubicki  19:27

Well, we can thank COVID for that commute, because that wasn’t the original intention. The original intention was to move to Richmond, and given the great pause on everyone’s life that COVID introduced. And certainly everyone was infected and I’m certainly families were impacted much more negatively than mine. Mine just happens to be. We are not there in Richmond right now. And so I have been doing the commute which is seven and a half hours one way every week. It’s a it’s it’s, it’s I will say it is pressed my cognitive ability to turn 15 hours of driving into productive time and everyone’s like, have you thought of podcasts Have you thought about Of course I

Jessica Erickson  20:17

was gonna suggest this really good podcast you can listen to.

Josh Kubicki  20:21

I’m familiar with your entire back catalogue. Um, you know, it’s like I can go deep on any audio material. So it’s, it’s a struggle, but I will say all kidding aside, my first adjunct teaching was at Michigan State with Dan Katz and Renee Knake and I drove four and a half hours to teach a class and then I drove back. So apparently there’s something about me and teaching law students I’m willing to drive ungodly amounts of time. I don’t know it’s worth it but

Jessica Erickson  20:53

what what kind of car do you have that you put in all these miles on

Josh Kubicki  20:57

Ha. Funny you asked. I bought a Ford F 150 to make that drive.

Jessica Erickson  21:04

Nice and fuel efficient.

Josh Kubicki  21:06

The size you know, you want to feel like you’re like, you know, part of all the truck traffic out there. So

Marlene Gebauer  21:12

it’s almost like you’re driving in your house in an F 150

Jessica Erickson  21:15

It’s funny because when I moved down here to Houston in 2002, I would travel every week back to Oklahoma because we hadn’t moved down here yet. And I had a Ford F 150. And it was a seven and a half hour drive. So I think I feel your pain. Yes on that. Any any? Any tickets? On the way to and fro

Josh Kubicki  21:38

Real quickly. Yes, I got like one of my first jobs

Marlene Gebauer  21:42

You don’t need to answer this.

Josh Kubicki  21:45

I pled guilty, I paid the fine. I was fine. So now I know it’s you know, nine is fine and 10 your mine right? So you’ve got to go nine miles over on cruise. Let’s see I’ve, I’ve hit a deer. So I’ve got that. So I hit a deer while moving into my apartment from my bed was full, literally with my bed and other things because I’ve rented an apartment there in the rain hit a deer. And let’s let’s keep the stories at that. I don’t need anything. I like long boring drives.

Greg Lambert  22:14

There we go. There we go.

Marlene Gebauer  22:15

Alright, so we’ll get we’ll get back to the Richmond Law and Business Forum. So Jessica, you run the Richmond Law and Business Forums, can you explain the mission you have with this forum? And how it interacts with students overall education?

Jessica Erickson  22:29

Sure. So this section a little bit separate than what we’ve been talking about so far. So we’ve been talking about Josh’s program on the legal business design side and Janice Craft’s program on the professional identity formation side, my program, the Richmond lawn Business Forum is separate from those. But I think it’s related in the sense that it recognizes that there is this broader set of skills that law students need. And for me, I see our programs a little bit on the career development side, I noticed that we kept telling students, you need to get out there you need to network. And I have to imagine that if you’re a law student, there’s almost nothing more annoying than hearing professors and others say that because they.

Marlene Gebauer  23:09

Come on, hustle. Be hungry.

Jessica Erickson  23:15

And they think to themselves, am I just how many cold emails can I send to people saying you don’t know me, but I’d like to take you to coffee, right? So what I wanted to do was to basically curate networking opportunities for our law students, create opportunities for them to meet and talk to business lawyers. And I wanted them to do that for two reasons. Number one, I wanted them to start to build their own professional networks and get used to thinking about their networks and how they’re going to cultivate that network over time. And second, I really wanted them to get a sense as to what business law practice was like, not just the law as we’re reading in the case books. But what do business lawyers actually do on a day-to-day basis? Is that something that aligns with their own professional goals and their own personal goals? And to think about when somebody says, do you want to be a business lawyer to understand what types of roles are under that umbrella? How an IP lawyer is different from a securities lawyer is different from a real estate lawyer. So we created this forum. Ironically, as when Dean Purdue and I were first talking about it, I said, I want to have a series of dinners where we can sit down. Not these huge events in big classrooms where it’s a lot of students sitting passively in an audience, I want people around a table talking to each other. And then COVID hit and we launched this program in the middle of COVID, where the idea of sitting around a table all of a sudden felt really dangerous. So so we launched the program in January of last year, all of our events in the spring, we’re on zoom. And every single time you know how it is when you log into a zoom event that you’re throwing and you think I’m going to throw in a zoom party and Will anybody show up and every time I would log on and there’d be 50 students there 60 students, if we kept attendance, it would fill in 90 minutes. And it made me realize, like students were hungry for this. This fall, we are back fully in person. So we’re having in person events. And we’re having everything from what we’re calling our business law over dinner series, which is we have three lawyers, five students and me. And we sit around a table, we pick a particular area of law. So last week, it was intellectual property. Tomorrow night, we have one on mergers and acquisitions two weeks from now commercial real estate. And we just talk about the practice of law in that area with students who are interested in it or potentially interested. And then we have other events as well. So we have one, for example, on how to read a balance sheet. We have one on representing small businesses on the startup community in Richmond, just things were at, you know, sort of the broader perspective that they may not get in some of their classes.

Greg Lambert  25:45

So how many students are showing up for the events now?

Jessica Erickson  25:49

Yeah, so it’s interesting. So we are right now one of the largest student organizations at the law school, even though we launched 10 months ago. So we have 115 members. At our first event, I had the first event which was on venture capital and private equity funding, I had us in a classroom that held 50 people. And while I was waiting for our speakers, one of my student organizers came out and said, Professor Erickson, we just filled the room. And luckily, I had booked a bigger room. And so we made everybody shift down, we probably had 70 people at that one. So what I’m learning is there’s a lot of student appetite for this, and candidly I think there’s a lot of appetite for them to meet each other. We were in person last year, but the building was weird, right? The building didn’t have the same energy. I’m finding a lot of our 2Ls are just as are our two L’s are just as excited to meet each other as they are to meet the lawyer. So I think that’s contributing as well.

Marlene Gebauer  26:41

Josh, for the legal business design hub, what’s the process for the selection of an innovator in residence? So I think you’ve had a couple now, right?

Josh Kubicki  26:52

Yeah, we had Baker Donelson last year, our first one, and we have Troutman Pepper coming up in 2022. And so the main role of the innovator in residence has to do with our legal business design challenge, which is an actual business challenge that’s embedded in a full semester course. And so that’s where the students are working literally, side by side as part of a team as part of a cohort, with practitioners, and business of law leaders and managers of an organization. In this case, it was Baker Donelson, and now we’re going to be traveling pepper, they have to actually surface a real business opportunity. This is not purely vanity, this is not just something made, we make up we literally spend time with law firm leadership, to unearth, some opportunities in the marketplace that the firm might want to pursue. And then we spend the majority of the class with students and practitioners and business leaders of the law firm working to really stress test that, validate that, and then ultimately sort of present that to law firm leadership. So they have a clear sense of what is the possible business impact? What’s the possible client impact? And what would we actually need to do to go pursue this? So to answer your question, how do we sort of select the innovator in residents? We have to find an organization that’s willing to invest time, actual human beings, right, that understand that they’re going to be opening up to some degree, you know, the curtain on their business model, on their culture, on their strategy. Now, we don’t ask for client-sensitive information and data or anything like that. But they have to be willing to have frank, candid conversations with the students. Because at the end of the day, to stress test an actual business opportunity, you have to know what the firm is capable of doing and not capable of doing. And so that’s sort of the best way to think about what goes into an innovator in residence. Now, the model will change based on the organization we’re working with. Baker Donelson, Troutman Pepper, both larger law firms. Yes, they tend to have more resources, by the way, which is why they might be good fits here. But that doesn’t preclude us from working with a legal aid association or something like that downstream. It’s just really an intentional commitment on part of the organization to advance an opportunity that they’re sensing in the marketplace.

Greg Lambert  29:22

You mention that each year is different I know you did Baker Donelson the first year and Troutman is it Sanders or Troutman Pepper I can’t remember.

Josh Kubicki  29:32

Now Troutman Pepper now Yes.

Greg Lambert  29:33

Okay. All right. All right. What was the what was the difference between the two programs What did you do the first year and how is that different than the second year?

Josh Kubicki  29:43

So there’s there’s a number of ways to sort of cut it that one though the caveat is is we have yet to launch the Troutman Pepper one. So they’ve come in, in January now we’re working with I’m working with law firm leadership now to sort of set the stage and all that and prepare for the actual course, but they become the the innovator in residence, creating the relationship with the law school in January of 2022. So we really haven’t gotten that one off the ground, or fully designed it. But to answer your question, some of the changes that I’ve made already is, so let’s just back up. I just became a full time faculty member, before that I was an adjunct. And life is different as a full time faculty member versus adjunct not better, not worse, just different. So I became

Greg Lambert  30:30

very politically put, Well done, well done.

Josh Kubicki  30:35

And I did this at the height of COVID. so and so. So first time, full time, fine, full time faculty member, first world pandemic to be sort of involved in in living through, and I decided then my very first class, I’m going to launch the legal business design challenge. The students did not know who Professor jasika picchi was, at this point, no one knew what an innovator in residence was. And yeah, somehow, I thought this was amazing, great idea that I could pull off. Thankfully, I did. But I probably created so much more work for myself, it was insane. But it was successful. So the things that I’m going to change lessons learned as one, it was a lot for my law students, right? This, this is the thing about teaching that you truly can’t appreciate. Until you’re standing in front of a group of law students, and you take responsibility for their future livelihood and their development, you own that as part of their teacher and professor and I realized, the way I presented the material, I was taking way too much for granted, especially at the time of COVID, when everyone was max stressed and all that. So I’ve redesigned the curriculum, to assure the students into it in a more organic way, instead of and I’ll be honest, I was probably forced feeding a little bit too much, and expecting them to connect the dots. They are students after all, Yes, there are. Some are second careers, some are straight out of undergrad. But they’re in that academic setting. And part of the legal business design challenge is to put them ground them in business reality ground them in the practical life, of being in a business that delivers legal services. But I can’t like just go to the edge and push them over. So this I’ve I’ve, I’ve desired

Greg Lambert  32:21

You’re a much nicer professors than the ones I had.

Josh Kubicki  32:26

Yeah, well, I can’t have this, it takes a different mindset for the law student like they, they’re coming to me. And they’re usually coming from the more traditional loss law school classes, which are very valuable, but it, it requires a different way of behaving and thinking when you step into the business context, especially when you start putting the lens on legal service businesses. So I had to understand that. So I redesigned sort of their experience. I’ve also made it four credits instead of three credits to represent sort of the the heightened nature of the work and all that. And obviously, I’ve changed for the innovator and residents role making their role more organic and immersive right alongside with the students

Greg Lambert  33:04

about how many students do do you have in the program each year?

Josh Kubicki  33:07

Well, in the legal business design challenge, the first semester, we had 11, my goal is to get at least 12, I think I would have to be careful about going above that, because the work is the work for me is high, and I love doing it. But there’s enormous burden on me to make sure the students are maximizing their learning, not just keeping busy. And I’ve got to manage a law firm, lawyers and business leaders on the law firm side recognizing their time constraints, and all that. So there’s a lot of sort of management on the back end that I’ve got to take care of.

Marlene Gebauer  33:42

It’s a labor intensive on both sides. And you know, in order to get the best possible outcome, you really do kind of have to limit it.

Greg Lambert  33:48

Yes, yeah. Yeah, I was thinking as you were saying they were coming out of a more traditional classroom and into your program. I imagine a different part of the brain lights up under a CAT scan if if you hadn’t had them scanned on both classes. So yeah, it may take us a few minutes for them to to adjust. So Marlene, and I did this online conference recently, and with HBR. And their CEO Nick Quil said something there that really stuck with me and and that was when it comes to innovation. And he was talking about law firms, is saying the attorney is the innovation and meaning that no matter how much you may have an innovation plan in a professional services industry like like the law, if the lawyer doesn’t actually implement or apply the innovation, it might as well not even exist. So how is it that you train the law students there to understand that innovation isn’t innovation until you actually put it into action?

Marlene Gebauer  34:54

or to even be open to it? Yeah.

Josh Kubicki  34:58

You want me to go first on that, Jessica? So, yeah, oh, it’s a fair observation, I would disagree with it to some, although I know Nick personally, and I’m friends and respect him, but I won’t unpack where I disagree with some of what he said, but to the point that you’ve just made first and foremost, yes, it’s everything’s at the human level, which is why design is part of the program for us. Okay. And this is not design thinking, Okay, that’s a that’s a subset of design. So design is really a human interaction with something a service, a product, a technology, another human? How do we actually create that interaction in a meaningful and authentic way? Right. So when we think about sort of innovation in law, and Nick’s right, a lawyer at some point in time, because lawyers are the only vehicles outside of Arizona and Utah right now, in the states that can deliver legal services. So ultimately, a lawyer must be involved in integrating using or otherwise adopting innovation. So if that’s the case, then we simply have to embed in our students minds. First of all, that’s okay. Like, that’s okay, changing how things have been done, not for the sake of change, but for the sake of improving a client outcome, a client experience, your personal experience lawyer in your daily life, or the experience you’re creating for your employees or peers, like if we’re improving that, that’s okay, like that, that should be part of our daily work, just going around and being good lawyer. So it’s about really embedding that mindset. And the second thing is, actually give them the skills and toolkit so that they can do some of this themselves. We all know from change management, if something happens to you, that’s quite a different feeling, than you helping to create the change itself. If you’re part of the conversation, and you feel smart and equipped to do that, not put into the deep end, not being told, just go innovate and come back to me with something like, that’s unfair. So how do we sort of create this awareness and skill set where lawyers actually feel fully capable of doing this? And we don’t have sort of any of the, what does that curve the Dunning Kruger curve? where we all think we’re experts immediately, and then we fall into the pit of despair or whatever. So which happens a lot, by the way, when we talk about innovation in law.

Greg Lambert  37:33

Now, to be fair to Nick, this, that was just one part of a larger saying, but that was, that was one part that stuck with me. So I wanted to have as much to argue with him about.

Jessica Erickson  37:46

So the only other thing that I would add there is that to me, it really does highlight why I think our two programs that we launched at the same time are so important to be together and why they are synergistic in that way. I mean, what we’re really talking about is, is listening to people, and connecting with people and making sure that you have cultural competence and empathy and all the other human skills to make innovation work, make it actually happen, right, we can send our own offices and come up with the best possible business design. But if you can’t actually get people to adopt it, if it doesn’t resonate with them, it’s not gonna work. And so part of this is really figuring out where are the lawyers? Where are the clients? What do they need, what do they want, and being able to connect with that human side of the law?

Marlene Gebauer  38:29

Alright, so I’m going to go back to my my measuring questions. Again, it’s at this time, I’m sort of applying it to, to your programs, there at Richmond. So you know, how are you measuring your your progress and success, you know, with the programs? And what is the feedback you’re getting? And like, how are participants applying what they’ve learned?

Jessica Erickson  38:53

So I’ll get to this one from sort of the the administration side of things and and I don’t actually administer these programs, but at least for me, one thing I would really emphasize is just how new these programs are. These programs both launched in the Fall of 2020. Right in the state of the world with that is, so to me, at least I’m not at the stage of saying, Can we exactly measure the outcomes? I think we’re still in the stage of figuring out exactly what it is that we’re trying to achieve. Because remember that the people you had designing this were largely doctrinal law professors. We said in our report what we thought it should be, but we weren’t the experts. And we recognize that right from the get go. We have brought in two experts who are themselves figuring out law schools and law students. So I don’t want us to start measuring things until we know what it is we’re trying to achieve. And I think we’re still I want us to be deliberative and contemplated about that. And I also think, I don’t think this is something where you’re going to have really hard metrics in terms of we want to see 5% of our students getting prosthetic up. regular jobs in this area that, for me, at least is not the goal. I think the goal is that they would go into a wide array of jobs and bring this skill set and deploy it in predictable ways and perhaps unpredictable ways as their careers in the industry evolve. So I’m not sure exactly what the precise measures would look like. But Josh, well,

Greg Lambert  40:19

Before we get to get to Josh, I wanted to add something because a couple couple episodes ago, we had a couple of people that wrote this, this legal design book. And one of the things that that they said, and again, they were talking more about law firms, but I think maybe law schools fit this as well. are you measuring enough now to determine once you have the change? So in other words, do you have a base that you’re kind of measuring, that you can look back on. So as you go through the, if you go through these these programs, you’ve got at least this is where we started, we may not know where we’re going to end up, but at least we know, we’ve measured something at the beginning. Do law schools do that?

Jessica Erickson  41:05

No. Just candidly, no, we really don’t. What we measure are the inputs. We don’t measure the outputs. In other words, we tend to measure what what learning students are being exposed to, right. So I will be able to tell you how many courses they were taking in this area versus before versus how many they take, hopefully, when we build out both programs to their full capacity. That’s just measuring kind of what went in, what then comes out? No, I don’t think we do a very good job of measuring it

Greg Lambert  41:36

other than bar passage and higher hire rates.

Jessica Erickson  41:39

Exactly. And I’m not sure that this will directly feed in there, maybe it will, in some unexpected ways. But clearly our goal,

Greg Lambert  41:45

well, well, maybe, maybe, maybe it will shock the system enough to say, Okay, well, look, let’s, let’s look back, and you know, here, here is our base model, and then we can go forward, so just yeah, I

Marlene Gebauer  41:59

mean, here’s the base, and like, it’d be interesting, like in five years to kind of have an alumni, you know, just sort of have an alumni models like what, you know, what are people doing? And, you know, how have they applied it in different, you know, you know, different different roles? Okay, sorry, Josh, we we gotta let you talk now.

Josh Kubicki  42:13

No, no, that’s fine. I think you guys have just summed up the the part of my journey, and joining the law school faculty, right. So you just heard Jessica talk about measurement and all that or lack thereof measurement on the front end. And I come from the business side, where I’m always measuring out the output, the outcome. There’s no reason to do upstream activity unless we’re measuring something downstream. And so yes, while the programs are new, you know, I’m already thinking about how do we actually measure this. And so a couple of points, I just want to bring out one. So one of the things we haven’t talked about, which again, differentiates our law school, Richmond from others, is that in our career development office, we have a role specifically for emerging careers in the law. Notice I said emerging, we don’t we don’t say alternative. We don’t say anything like that we say emerging, right? And it’s really meant to help facilitate the dialogue, the awareness, among students, amongst alumni in the market, that there are new roles emerging for JD graduates. Right. And that’s, so that’s part of our program here. We’re all sort of focused on that. So yes, an easy measurement might be, let’s define categorically what a traditional employment situation looks like for a Richmond grad, a year out, or two years out. And let’s start measuring and see how many now that’s, that’s not causality like, because if the world is expanding in emerging roles, we may not be creating that demand, but we’re creating sort of supply of talent, which we should, by the way, we should be doing that. But Marlene, to your point, one of the things that I think is an advantage of the legal business design challenge part of our program is it does create a very unique student experience. And to your point of alumni like there is a plan to create a legal business design challenge alumni or participant network, where we like Baker Donelson, like they’ve got a they’ve got a very they’re not done. Like they now have a relationship with the school, they they are now going to start recruiting, they weren’t recruiting our grads before, and they’re going to start recruiting the emerging role, too. So now we’ve got a law firm that is now more invested in students and I hope Toutman Pepper does that too. So we bring back Baker Donelson, we bring back Troutman Pepper and the students in a year or so. And yes, we have the discussion. How do we measure this? We we do grab the anecdotes and the stories and all that and we start to pull that stuff together. It will take time. But I do believe there’s a strong narrative here. I don’t think there’s gonna be a lack of measurement. I think there’s just enough data when do we have enough information and data to create a meaningful measurement.

Greg Lambert  45:00

So, Josh, other than moved to Richmond and resting your Ford F 150. A little bit, what kind of plans do the two of you and I guess also Janice Craft as well in her program, what’s on the horizon for the next year or two?

Jessica Erickson  45:18

So for me, it was one of the things Josh and I have talked a lot about is building in layers. I think it’s really, really tempting when you start a new program to do all of the things, right to just start building in every direction all at once. And I think that’s a bad idea from a number of levels, but especially right now during COVID, with all of its limitations, for me, I would love to see us. Let’s figure out, you know, what, what is our first layer? Let’s really get set, what is what is the course piece of this? And what courses do we want, then we can start building out in terms of more Co-curriculars. And more, you know, classes being taught by adjuncts who are coming in, because I think I would love to see us have lots of courses in this area. Josh is only one person, Janice is only one person, right? So how do we how do we build out in other directions? For me, I would love to see these two programs be real keystones to the school, to be something that, you know, every Richmond law graduate has these two sets of skills along with all the other traditional skills. It’s gonna take some time to build out that program in a really full way. But I can’t wait to see it happen.

Marlene Gebauer  46:25

That sounds great.

Greg Lambert  46:26

And Josh, how about you?

Josh Kubicki  46:28

I’ll just second what is what Jessica just said. I mean, it’s it’s it’s challenging to check yourself. And I’ll say course design again, going back to new faculty, designing a course. I mean, there’s no textbooks for the stuff I teach. There just aren’t Yes, there’s lots of people have written books. And yes, we of course, Richard Susskind and all that kind of but I don’t I don’t use those books. What I’m teaching is a lot more practical to be completely blunt, and completely attached to understanding how business operates today and tomorrow. So I’ve got to create all of the content, all the all the curriculum, and quite honestly, one thing we didn’t touch on is what is the learner’s experience? What is the student’s experience in my classes and so, you know, COVID taught us well taught some people a lot of things I happen to work this way beforehand, being an entrepreneur working remotely embracing digital technology. I’ve been embedding that into my classroom, right so the students have living breathing, digital workbooks, that I pre populate and then they have to work to expand over the course of the semester. You know, I complement my classroom experience with short bursts, videos and short excerpts of content and all that kind of stuff. So we’re not just talking about the content and the substance we’re talking about the student experience as well and how do we sort of put all that together. So to answer your question, continue the testing continues sort of making sure we’re adding value to the students lives day one, and really focus on finding the right pieces of curriculum to be sort of building this program around and it sounds like it should be easy. I’ll just tell you it’s not it’s not easy to do this it’s challenging for me anyway.

Greg Lambert  48:15

I bet it is not. Well, Josh Kubicki and Jessica Erickson from Richmond Law School we really appreciate you coming in and talking about your programs there.

Marlene Gebauer  48:25

Yeah, thank you so

Jessica Erickson  48:25

much. Thanks for having us.

Marlene Gebauer  48:30

So that was a great conversation and I mean they’re just I just made was I was making notes about like all the things I liked about it. So you know I love this whole and this is that separate program about sort of comparing your values to the values of the profession. I think that is so important because you know I don’t know about you but I you know, I didn’t have any knowledge of law firms I mean, we didn’t have any lawyers in the family and so I kind of came in very you know open like okay like LA Law that’s what I that’s what I knew about law and and so I think it’s super important for students coming in to really get a sense of Okay, this is what law This is what the business of law is all about you know and compare that to what your values are, you know to make sure that that you’re comfortable with that the other thing I liked it it was in the same industry relation to that doing things that are manageable basically teaching students to you know, engage in your profession but in a way that’s manageable and you know, all I kept thinking, it’s like, yep, it’s a marathon it’s not a race. And you know, this is something you want to do long term and if you you don’t take those things into account, you know, you burn yourself out. Oh, I liked the creating of network opportunities. You know, as someone I mean, I think to myself in law school, I mean, I was very quiet, very shy. I know you’re shocked but it’s true, and and having something like that, I think would have helped you know, me kind of interact. And I think you know, anybody that’s in that position, you know, it’s like you don’t know people and sort of having that opportunity presented to you, I think is wonderful. And the last thing I had was measuring output. I think this, this has come up in other podcasts we’ve talked about with law with law schools, once the students leave, the job is not done. I don’t think. And I think it’s really important, as Josh mentioned, like it, you should be measuring outputs, because that just ties back to your program and makes your program better. It’s sort of like when you when you finish a project, you kind of have that that exit meeting, it’s like, Okay, what happened? What are the results? What should we change? What should we adjust? and that type of thing, I think is critical for a successful program.

Greg Lambert  50:48

Yeah, and just a couple of things that caught my attention during this is one, just the practical business application skills like Jessica, teaching the students how to read a balance sheet, because like we talked about previously that even after four or five years of practicing law, some of these attorneys will never have any business experience. And so you know, being able to teach some of the things there. And the other thing which was funny, because it kind of tied back to our CLE episode was when Josh was talking about putting in short videos into the the training of the students again, that adult learning through short, precise, small tasks like that and teaching through videos. Perfect, perfect. So thanks again to Josh Kubicki and to Jessica Erickson. from Richmond law for sharing all of this with us. It was that was fantastic,

Marlene Gebauer  51:43

great show. So pod dog is going to help me do the credits. Thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast.

Greg Lambert  51:51

Whether you’re a longtime fan, like our friend Marshall, or if this is your first time listening, we’d love to hear what you think. So embrace your social media presence and send us a note.

Marlene Gebauer  52:01

If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter.

Greg Lambert  52:09

Snd I can be reached on twitter at @glambert.

Marlene Gebauer  52:13

Or you can leave us a voicemail on The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you Jerry.

Jessica Erickson  52:24

Thanks, Jerry. Alright Marlene, I will talk to you later.

Marlene Gebauer  52:27

All right, bye bye.

As we move toward the end of the year, or as in Texas, the end of a lawyer’s birthday month, there becomes a mad scramble for completing Continuing Legal Education (CLE) courses. Has CLE become more about checking the box than about enhancing/maintaining a lawyer’s skill? Why is it that CLE credits are based on time, rather than knowledge? Is there a better way? Our guests this week certainly think so.

Ian Nelson, co-founder of Hotshot, a company whose business model is based on short instructional videos, originally without CLE… is now offering CLE credit with some of their packaged videos. This is a crack in the foundation of the traditional CLE model, and one that Sarah Glassmeyer, Legal Tech Curator · Reynen Court Inc. and Margaret Naughton, CLE Manager · McDermott Will & Emery hope continues.  Margaret did point out that not all CLE is boring, especially if you can kayak and learn.

Join us for a roundtable discussion on the potential for the next generation of CLE where the focus is more on true education, learning, and skills. Perhaps we can look outside the United States at places like the UK, Canada, Australia, and others where there is more focus on an educational plan than there is on the rigid structure of sitting in a seat and listening to a “sage on the stage” talking for 30 or 60 minutes.

Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Spotify

Information Inspirations

Jessica Gore, 3L at University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law has an attitude of “if nobody else will do it, allow me”… And she proved that by producing a better design for understanding the Federal Rules of Evidence.  She joins us, ironically on the same day as her Evidence mid-term, to talk about how she knew she could design a much better rules book than what was on the market. Her method of using Twitter to gather feedback and improve upon the prototype is exactly what we discussed in last week’s episode, so she is definitely our inspiration this week. Check out Jessica’s IP Illustrated tools website as well.

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer  0:16

Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer,

Greg Lambert  0:23

And I’m Greg Lambert.

Marlene Gebauer  0:24

We brought back Ian Nelson the co-founder of Hotshot to talk about some changes in MCLE states about the approval of continuing legal education programs. We thought we make it into a somewhat of a roundtable discussion. So we brought along Sarah Glassmeyer from Reynen Court, and Margaret Naughton, CLE Manager and McDermott Will and Emery to bounce some ideas on what CLE should look like, and about some of the major obstacles we struggle with today.

Greg Lambert  0:49

So Marlene, normally, we try to hide all of our technical difficulties that we have in the magic of post editing. But man did I have some serious technical difficulties during this interview. So I am really glad and thankful that you’re ready to step in and take over most of this interview. So thank thanks for covering me on this one.

Marlene Gebauer  1:13

Yeah, no problem. That was that was pretty, pretty terrible. Really

Greg Lambert  1:17

Very frustrating, very frustrating. So we’ll stick around for that. But let’s get to a special presentation of this week’s information inspirations.

Greg Lambert  1:32

So I ran across a really neat Twitter thread last week, and it made me go out and buy this book that and then ask the author of the book to come in. So Jessica Gore is a three l at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law. Jessica, you wrote this Federal Rules of Evidence, the 2021 edition. And as you put it, it is designed for lawyers in in 2021, not 1921. So what inspired you, first of all, welcome. And second, what inspired you to write this less than 60-page Rules of Evidence book?

Jessica Gore  2:10

Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. That was awesome. My first official podcast,

Greg Lambert  2:15

I’m sure it won’t be the last

Jessica Gore  2:16

This is exciting. I know. This is awesome. For starters, I did not write the book of the Federal Rules of Evidence, it’s more of a just a moderately edited version of the Federal Rules, just want to make that clear. But the Why is pretty interesting, before law school, and just so most of you guys know, I’m quite non traditional student, my mid 30s. I have a three year old, I have had several jobs. My bachelor’s is in music technology, I was a game sound designer for video games for a long time. And then I switched to marketing, branding, design, which has always kind of been a really big thread in my life since since high school, really, the and then I went to law school. So obviously trademarks found me. I noticed from day one, I mean, even through the application process, that design is not really a priority for a lot of people in the legal profession. I come from the field where it’s my job to make people look good. And to make information be well read by people, or easily read, you know, the foundations of marketing is, can they tell what you’re selling and like one sentence or one picture or one logo? It’s frustrating, honestly, you know, when you get these books, and you’re like, What are you saying? What are you trying to say here? So that’s the kind of stuff that instantly I noticed, was combative, to my background. And it was I knew there was area for improvement, but I just didn’t know how. You know, the further I went in and got more into design and trademarks, actually took art law and my one and only large official paper and in law school was on fonts, naturally. So that’s kind of why I mean, that’s what inspired me nothing was out there that I wanted, personally as a student.

Greg Lambert  4:01

So what is it about this book then in the way that you’ve set it up, that makes this version of the Federal Rules of Evidence unique and as you say, in tune with how people digest information today?

Jessica Gore  4:15

It’s funny because it’s not even to me it’s not rocket science. But you know, I did you know, you notice I tossed it out there and everybody was like, Oh my gosh, somebody finally did it. You know, it’s just small things, right? It’s just not you know, using a sans serif font, you know, very modern fonts that are easier on the eyes. You know, as law students and lawyers and legal professionals, professors. Were just constantly, constantly looking at dense content. And that was my the one goal because I’m in Evidence this semester. I don’t even know if I’ve made that obvious but yeah, I actually have an evidence midterm due tonight. My professors are listening, I wrote you a book. So it’s so easy to make this better. So modern fonts, spacing of the words is really important. There’s really Small changes you can make and design or decisions in design that you can make that affect how people digest information. But they’re kind of subconscious. Spacing between the paragraphs between the, between the words, text, this in bold, the indentation of the outlines, it sounds very meticulous, but it is. And as designers, we noticed these things. But somebody that’s not familiar with that is just gonna say, Oh, my gosh, this looks so good. This is so much easy to read, but they can’t really articulate why,

Greg Lambert  5:28

Yeah. So how’s the reaction been?

Jessica Gore  5:32

Like I said, I’m here on your podcast. It’s actually been awesome. It’s been really cool. You know, recently, in the beginning of the summer, I launched a kind of a similar ish thing called IP illustrated. And that was also a result of frustration of the lack of just modern legal tools online.

Greg Lambert  5:52

Well, let me ask you this. I found it really interesting. The fact that you know, here you are a law student taking a class that you found something that was frustrating that you knew you could do a better job, and then what was on on the market right now. So you’ve got a platform here, if there are other people listening, and they know they’ve got kind of the same itch that they see something that’s broken, they want to fix it? What’s your advice to tell these law students or lawyers? How to attack that?

Jessica Gore  6:23

Yeah, I love this question, by the way, and I probably wrote the most notes on it. I love giving back. I’ve had some awesome mentors in my life. And I take every opportunity I can to tell people about stuff like this. So the biggest thing is, if you are bothered by something, even if it’s outside the legal industry, if you’re bothered by something, chances are somebody else’s, too. And the easiest way these days is to just ask people, and you know, obviously Twitter is a great platform for that to say, like, Hey, what do you guys need, I’m currently working on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the same format as this because I know that that’s needed even more than this based on based on feedback. And the thing about the internet, I think that’s cool now, too, is that you don’t even have to do a whole project, you can just do like a sample and throw it out there and see if people like it. I think perfectionism holds a lot of people back from trying things. And you don’t have to be perfect. And people understand they get it.

Greg Lambert  7:23

Our guest last week, kind of said the same thing with the especially in the legal field. We don’t like to prototype things, we’d like to put something out perfect. And I think you just you’ve just hit it on the head that then you can put samples out there, you can prototype something. And the reason you do that is so you can get that feedback without investing so much time in something that people really don’t want.

Jessica Gore  7:47

So yeah, exactly

Greg Lambert  7:48

So, way to put it into practice.

Jessica Gore  7:50

So yeah. And then you have to be passionate about what you’re doing. Are you burnout, yeah, just be passionate about what you do. And I think people people feel that they they see that, and they get excited about it.

Greg Lambert  8:01

So I’m pretty sure, Jessica that everyone’s listening to this can feel your passion behind this project as well. So well, I want to I want to thank you for taking a few minutes to talk with us about this. You got the Federal Rules of Evidence 2021 edition. It’s I know I ordered mine on Amazon. I’ll put some links out on the show notes as well. So Jessica Gore, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us.

Jessica Gore  8:26

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Marlene Gebauer  8:29

CLE’s are known for being boring, rigid, and last minute for most participants. We thought we’d bring in three forward thinking colleagues to talk about what they’d like to see in the next generation of CLE courses.

Marlene Gebauer  8:45

We’d like to welcome Margaret Naughton CLE manager from McDermott Will and Emery Sarah Glassmeyer, legal tech curator at Reynen Court Inc. and Ian Nelson, co founder at Hotshot to The Geek in Review. Welcome, everybody.

Ian Nelson  8:57

Thanks. Great to be here.

Greg Lambert  8:59

So we had Ian on the show before but we’re going to be talking with him and the others about some developments there that Ian had at Hotshot. And we thought we’d bring in Sarah and Margaret as well to kind of have this roundtable conversation on CLE in general and what what we really need to be doing going forward in the CLE world. So I guess the first question Ian is, can you tell us a little bit about what hotshot has been doing to kind of morph some of the CLE practices?

Ian Nelson  9:33

Yeah, of course. And just a quick thanks to you all, for being on this podcast and talking about the issue. I think it’s a really interesting and important issue and exciting time to be talking about it. So thank you, everyone for being part of this. So it Hotshot we have had some developments recently in the world of CLE. And it’s been interesting reception we launched CLE a few weeks ago and to explain that I suppose it’s worth just a half step back as to what we’re all about, which is really short, very practical videos on a host of various legal business and tech topics. And when we started Hotshot, really, we were not going after the CLE space, we wanted to make content that was just really designed for learning for associates and students and lawyers, and we didn’t want to be constrained by CLE rules. We want things to be as short as possible, which unfortunately, wasn’t really designed to be CLE. Rules. Yeah.

Greg Lambert  10:32

Succinct and CLE are not in the same category.

Marlene Gebauer  10:37

No.

Margaret Naughton  10:39

Not quite

Ian Nelson  10:40

No. So over the years, we got to the point where we have about 250 of these short videos now. And the reception has been great. But of course, lawyers need their CLE and law firms have been asking over the years, when can you do CLE? If only you can do CLE? The lawyers love the content, but CLE would be good. Yeah. And we say yes, CLE would be good, but we really can’t, because we want to keep the essence of the videos make them really short. We launched something just a couple weeks ago, where we were able to put together collections of short videos on particular topics that people could watch whenever they want, and once they hit an hour, they’ll get their credit. We really think it’s the best of both worlds. It’s very short videos designed for learning that also now have CLE if you were to watch all the videos in a particular track, so that’s how we’re able to manage the CLE it’s not as though one 10 minute video on its own gives you credit period full stop.

Marlene Gebauer  11:35

Which is too bad but

Margaret Naughton  11:37

That’s very intersting.

Marlene Gebauer  11:38

And I understand Ian that you can kind of mix and match to you don’t have to have an on a specific track. Is that right?

Ian Nelson  11:45

The CLE tracks from Hotshot do cover discrete topics. So it’s attract might be on litigation, or track is on M&A or tracking is on accounting for lawyers. So within a track, things are related. So at this moment in time, it’s not as though to answer your question, you could take one from one video from M&A and one from bankruptcy a month from accounting and make your own hour long. We did organize things. So they’re curated playlists, if you will, that qualify for credit. And we have credit in almost all MCLE states, we’re just waiting on a handful of some states is still a brand new feature.

Marlene Gebauer  12:19

And you’ll customize to for different firms. Is that right?

Ian Nelson  12:23

Yeah, some firms have asked for special learning tracks. So we’ll work with various firms that say, well, we would like to track for first years that cover XYZ in corporate or in litigation, or we want an accounting bootcamp track. So we are doing those custom tracks for firms, some not even with CLE really, there might be summer associate tracks or tracks for law schools out of the world of CLE. So it’s still what’s great about it, it’s still designed for the, to the learning that people need, rather than just for the CLE, the CLE is is an extra side benefit now. So the sort of marketing sort of smart ass marketing line is short videos made for learning not CLE. Now with CLE.

Greg Lambert  13:04

Now with CLE!

Ian Nelson  13:05

That’s how we present it to the market. Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer  13:07

Well, cuz I mean, that’s that’s been a problem, I guess for a long time, I guess with what CLE is that people take it because they have to, not because they’re actually learning anything from it. You know, we all joke that with towards the end of the of the year, when you know, your license is up, you take anything, it doesn’t even matter what it is, as long as it has points to it.

Greg Lambert  13:30

Yeah, in Texas, we have communications with attorneys that we haven’t had all year at the end of their birthday month, because that’s how you do it here. And so we can always tell when when somebody has just celebrated a birthday because they start asking us where all the CLE credit is.

Ian Nelson  13:46

Exactly. But you think about now especially people record remotely, these associates need to learn things on the job very quickly, right? An associate might be asked to due diligence or draft an interrogatory. And they have to learn how to do that. So it just seems natural, they should get credit for that and not have two mindsets. Like Where can I get my credit? Where can I learn what I need to do to do my job? They’re not always one of the same. Sometimes they are, but not always. So we’re trying to marry the two.

Greg Lambert  14:11

And, Sarah, I’ll bring you in on this. Having worked previously in places like the ABA, where you’ve had to deal with setting up classes for CLE getting accreditation, I guess, in a way even kind of looking looking at the rules. Are we at a point now, probably thanks to things like the pandemic where the industry is looking to a different way of producing education for continuing legal education?

Sarah Glassmeyer  14:42

I really. I hope so. I mean, because that’s the thing. It’s what you asked me to be on this program. I thought oh CLE that’s a pretty simple topic. Very nice, very smooth, very no controversy there whatsoever. Then I woke up for about five minutes and I was like, Oh no, this is terrible. So many things I hate about this subject. Yeah, so that’s a thing like my path towards realizing that CLE was kind of a broken system was back in like 2008, 2009. When I was a baby librarian, I got contracted to do a CLE for things like MBI or something like that, like you got to go to a hotel conference room and Lobel for two days. So it was very exciting. But that was a thing like I, you, I submitted my program, I submitted my outline my slides, everything is great. And then I did it and I was hyped up on coffee. And so I took 45 minutes instead of 50. And so then like, the next day, I got this email from the organizer saying like, oh, we’re in trouble now because you didn’t go the full hour. I was like, I but it’s the same content like it’s everything was there is just I was hyper and I spoke really fast. And there was a note and I was like to like write something certified yet. So I was like, This is so dumb. But yeah, and I think because, you know, again, like also, when I saw this topic, you I thought about for more than five minutes, I realized, oh, are we talking about CLE? Are we talking about like the skills that lawyers actually need to learn to continue and others in the legal profession to continue to excel and deal with the changing landscape of law? Because you I

Greg Lambert  16:09

Wait, wait, you’re saying those aren’t the same thing?

Sarah Glassmeyer  16:11

I know. We can merge them. And I think even you know, this year, one of the things is ABA model rule 1.1, 8, which most states have adopted now, which includes as part of being competent, and which no one ever says exactly, it outlines exactly what you have to do to be quote unquote, competent, you have to have technological competence. And that’s the thing like not, oh, I’m gonna say like eight or 10 states have included I haven’t looked at this for a year now. But not every state even like includes a technological competency as part of the requirements. But you know, just the variation, we don’t know what it means to be competent. We don’t know what classes you need to do it. That’s the thing, like CLE just ends up being, oh, my God, it’s December, and I need to get my professional responsibility, what hour and I need to also get 12 other credit hours. So I’m just gonna take real estate law that sounds exciting. And it’s free. That’s it my firm, lunch room.

Marlene Gebauer  17:04

I the right place in the right timeframe. It’s like, yeah, let’s Yeah,

Sarah Glassmeyer  17:07

But yeah, I’m thinking now that we can’t really do in person things. And that we’ve proven that the technology is there that you can do either on demand, or even just a virtual, you know, login and do things, I would love to see more, especially when you’re doing things like technology skills, which, you know, there’s knowledge we can get with sage on the stage, listening to hour presentation, and slides. But like so many things you need to have hands on, like, actually do this, like, push this button on your computer, and you’ll get the skill, learn how to do this activity, you’re going to have to have more interactive, more digital delivery of educational content. I’m an institutionalist, that deep down. And so I love what you do I understand we have to have some way of us certified or understanding what people are doing to continue their education. But the way we do it currently is broken. And if there’s a way we can figure out how to ensure that people are continuing their education are gaining new skills to deal with the rapidly changing world. That would be wonderful.

Greg Lambert  18:06

Yeah, well, I’m gonna put you on the spot real quick, Sarah and just say, if you had to pick like one thing that you would start with the fix, what would you do?

Sarah Glassmeyer  18:19

I would go with different delivery methods. And as far as not requiring it be our based on hours in the chair, you know, somehow certified competence in any other measurement, but hours.

Marlene Gebauer  18:34

Why do firms have such a fascination with hours? Like it has to be hours, so hours of CLE hours of billable time? What is it about hours?

Sarah Glassmeyer  18:42

And it’s such a weird measurement that because everyone is so different and variations of speed, you know? And like when you first do a contract, you know, it takes you how so many hours to do it, but like you get faster and faster, faster. But you know, it’s Yeah, it’s the worst metric in the world to measure anything. And we’re tied to it.

Greg Lambert  19:02

I would say especially with with educational material. Sorry, is it me that slow?

Marlene Gebauer  19:09

Alrighty. Let’s see. Let’s see, see frozen, frozen. Oh, he’s gone. He’s gone. Alright, well, let me ask if I was gonna ask Margaret, a question to what, what, what we were talking about a little bit early. So, you know, Margaret, what do you think about this new type of model that Ian is talking about where they’re sort of bite sized, you know, maybe more adult learning compatible types of format that, you know, really addresses competencies. I mean, you know, how, how, as a CLE professional and you know, a big law firm, you know, how do you think that’s, that’s gonna help?

Margaret Naughton  19:50

Me I think it’s really interesting what Ian and Hotshot are doing. Certainly, when I first heard that they were offering CLEs, I was thinking of you know, they have their 10-15 minutes snippets? How on earth are they getting this accredited? And tell me because I’m jealous, I want to figure out, you know, how can I make that work because so many times it has to be minimum half hour just to get a half hour credit. So the idea of taking these snippets that focus perhaps on a specific competency and building it into an hour program, I think it’s going to be really interesting and beneficial to associates, if they’re able to have these mini curriculums, it seems like to be able to talk about the basics of a deal through going through the deal. I mean, I think it just is, there’s a lot of different ways that they can be able to start with the basics, and lead up to something more advanced within an hour. I think that’s going to be something that definitely resonates with a lot of associates, and even more experienced attorneys looking to get a refresher, I think there’s still a drive where people would love to have something that’s a little bit more in line with adult learning today, which is, you know, having those short bursts of learning, you know, it’s just the world of CLE is not there, as we were discussing, it’s still very much time based. And from what I’ve heard, that’s not going to be changing anytime soon, unfortunately.

Marlene Gebauer  21:14

I’m wondering if you can kind of weave something like this into, like internal core competency requirements, you know, and make this sort of this is this is part of the education plan for and professional development plan, you know, for newer attorneys, if that’s a potential solution.

Margaret Naughton  21:33

Yeah, I certainly think that there’s a potential there, and the ability to take, as you said, some of these nuts and bolts type topics, and provide them in snippets that, you know, I can, you know, focus on this, that first digest that come back later, after I’ve gotten to possibly practice that a little bit. And then, you know, over the course of, you know, starting and stopping, you eventually get the hour of credit. Because again, the nice thing too is you don’t have to sit there in the one hour start to finish, you can take breaks and stop and restart, which I think would also really help if you’re focused on a specific document or memorandum or something, and you want to be able to focus on what is it about this that I need to really know and learn, Practice it and then come back and say, okay, like that was only 10 minutes, I’d have to rewatch a 60 minute program to see if I got that right. Or if I was understanding that correctly, I can rewatch this 10 minute portion, and then continue on to the next level. So I think that’s really interesting. I think there’s a lot that can be done with that. I think it opens more doors than people may realize.

Marlene Gebauer  22:39

Well, we’ve had Cat Moon and Alyson Carrel, on who talk a lot about the the Delta Model Lawyer and you know, it seems to me and you know, Ian I’ll throw this to you that this, this could be a good delivery model for the type of instruction that they might need with CLE built in, you know, you can tell us sort of what you’re offering. You mentioned a couple of the tracks. But do you have things on the business of law? Do you have things on technology in the law? Or is it more just legal application?

Ian Nelson  23:12

Yeah, it’s a bit of all of that, really. And just to go back to something Margaret said, that’s the use case we’re seeing play out now. Exactly. Right. So so we’re working now with a whole bunch of firms on their fall onboarding, and building these CLE tracks into their junior associate onboarding programs. And the other cool thing too, is as more firms are embracing the blended learning flipped classroom model as a way to make trainings more engaging. They’re using these short bite sized videos as the pre work for the flipped classrooms, but watching the videos will get them credit for CLE. So it’s all these multipurpose uses now that we’re seeing and whether it’s a Hotshot video or not, right, I mean, there’s just so many great things out there that could be used in these in these new ways. But yes, on the content question, we are covering we’ve really expanded so now we have things on accounting and finance for lawyers and how to use Excel and data analysis and to do valuation models in Excel in addition to all the the practice area stuff, so we’re starting to get out there in terms of breadth and depth of the content.

Marlene Gebauer  24:15

So Sarah, I’m not to take away from what Ian has done, but but there are certainly other resources out there that sort of have a different model in terms of of learning. Can you tell us a little bit about those?

Sarah Glassmeyer  24:28

Yeah, one that I think this is also you, Casey Flaherty, and I think he still was partnered with our Darth Vaughn that might be something we might need to double check fact check that he started Procertas Legal so he would he was at KIA General Counsel. He tested his outside counsel for basic skills and like Word and Excel and found that lawyer is gonna do it. He’s like, I’m not paying for you guys figure out how to use Excel. And so he started this company to do training on basic office technology, which We don’t teach in law schools. But it’s something that you use every day. And it’s an interactive tool. So it’s not as you watch a video or listen to a lecture, it’s that you really download the software and you are in native Word. And you’re going back forth and trying to figure out how to do these various skills. It’s hands on training. Another one, I really was surprised by how good it was. with LinkedIn learning. It was, this is for the librarians out there. It was LYNDA, l y n d a dot com, which a lot of public libraries had

Marlene Gebauer  25:31

LYNDA, oh my gosh, I forgot. I haven’t heard that in forever

Sarah Glassmeyer  25:36

Yeah. And so it was purchased by I can’t remember if it was purchased by Microsoft. And then when LinkedIn became part of Microsoft, it came net or

Ian Nelson  25:43

LinkedIn

Sarah Glassmeyer  25:44

directly. So they have a ton of your basic kind of office skills, as far as again, the word the Excel, the how to do basic HTML, but they have really expanded as far as your things that I really think lawyers could use as far as like, what is artificial intelligence? How do search engines work? What is blockchain? You know, because these basic things that we kind of hear about, especially if you are now like trying to find legal technology that it’s not directly made for like, this is artificial intelligence for lawyers. But it’s applicable very much. So like when you are pitched a product that says, Oh, we use artificial intelligence to do this. You understand? Are they talking natural language processing? They’re talking machine learning? Is it really, you know, what do they mean when they say that? And that was the thing when I taught law schools, it was Do we have the less are the Lexis representatives coming to teach it? Or should we teach like basic things as far as that this is how a search engine work. And this is how you search a digital corpus of your law or whatever. So it’s that kind of thing, where it’s, it’s not necessarily specifically this is how you use this product. It’s the underlying skill set that you can get and then apply to other things. And hopefully, when your product changes the interface, you’re not completely lost because you’ve got the underlying skills understood. So yeah, Procertas and LinkedIn Learning or two, I really, really like a little bit more Kevin illegal Innovation Zone,  Bucerius Law School, which is out of Germany, but I know, uhm Professor Dan Katz, out of Chicago Kent is one of the professor’s there. But they after COVID, they start offering it for free. You know, it was a, everyone can log in and just kind of learn basic it was it was more of a course, you know, so it wasn’t just a one hour commitment. It was two or three hours a week for a couple weeks. But yeah, it was it’s more in depth learning. And it’s more of gaining skills and knowledge. But those are like, especially Procertas, and LinkedIn Learning are the ones I really, really like, as far as I was very surprised at how good they were, as far as gaining skills, not just sitting there watching a video.

Marlene Gebauer  27:51

Yeah, I know, all three of you have experience with, you know, either, you know, organizing conference programs, or developing a product or managing accreditation, you’ve all touched on this sort of accreditation piece. When you’re looking at that, what types of hurdles, you know, have you had to overcome with these MCLE. boards, and Ian I guess I’ll start with you.

Ian Nelson  28:20

They haven’t been hurdles that have blocked us from anything, I suppose. But it’s just configuring everything in the right way. So that we do get the credit that we want to be able to offer the lawyers. So what we had to do was take our course materials that we have on a video by video basis, and put them together and collate them for the whole track, for example, so that an hour has 20 or 30 pages, or whatever it has to have, as well as the proper interactive features, right? The interactive thing, it’s not that high a hurdle, right? If you think of a traditional, traditional format, which is just wait for the code to pop up, and then write it down to prove that you were there. Our videos have quizzes to actually show that you learn something along the way. And we have some other interactive elements. And interestingly enough, the quizzes are optional. That’s not a requirement for the CLE rules. But since we have so many short videos, just clicking the act of clicking to the next videos, was able to be interactive enough because you can’t get through the hour without being there and clicking to next next, next next. So we added an optional videos, but it’s not an actual requirement. That was really the basics of it and and the time, right, we had to make sure that we had at least an hour, depending on the jurisdiction.

Marlene Gebauer  29:34

Now, Margaret, I mean, I know that you mentioned that in another life. You managed accreditation at the ABA. What have you found like what are the sticking points really, in terms of accreditation, and getting programs through?

Margaret Naughton  29:49

Yeah, I kind of like what Ian said is it’s not so much hurdles. So I think the most the biggest hurdle would be the fact that there’s no single definition for what qualifies as CLE, so you have to take stock of where you want to seek accreditation and create your own baseline standards to determine based on these states and these requirements that they have for interactivity and written materials and time minimums or if there are 50 or 60 minutes state, what are the baseline requirements in order for a program to potentially get approved for credit? And once you can start training your attorneys and staff and colleagues to know like, make sure that your program is you know, the targeted audiences, attorneys and increasing attorney competency and written materials can be used as a resource for later use, not just, you know, a skeleton outline. Once you have that, in place, there’s a lot of different ways that you can look at accrediting some really interesting programs. You know, one that we did before we work together, Marlene was a harassment training for lawyers in Illinois. And that’s not something that we necessarily thought we’d be able to get accredited. But we thought, we have everything that we need in order to at least try and kind of like what Ian did and said, you know, here are all the pieces of the puzzle, we just have to put them in the right order. And we have to be able to show the picture. And once the state was able to say like, Yeah, no, that is that is learning that is going to improve competency. They were totally on board with that. The other thing that I really encourage everyone to do is, you know, build the relationships with our have conversations, to say this is what we’re thinking of doing. What what piece of the puzzle, am I missing? Or what is it that I’m not, you know, maybe understanding or what is it that can potentially cover a lot of different bases for a lot of different states? For me, the biggest hurdle, again, is the fact that you have 46 different states with 46 different requirements. And every single one of them has a different mechanism for accreditation. So really determine where you want to get credit, and you know, create a baseline standard for your shop.

Marlene Gebauer  32:05

Yeah, so I’ll follow up with Sarah about that part about again, if you’re trying to get a program developed for accreditation in multiple states. You know, with everybody having different requirements, I mean, do you? Do you sort of go to the the most restrictive, go for that? Or do you take some other sort of tact?

Sarah Glassmeyer  32:24

My experience was we kind of just went through the ABA central office, and they then sent it out to everyone, which was nice. But also, you know, for me, it wasn’t like content as being a problem. For me, it was again, due to the physical facilities that I had, like the biggest issues. And the one thing I particularly remember, you know, we were having a, it was a conference session, and we had the room set up odditorium style. You know with the chairs, and then we had to change it. So everyone had a table and we had to give everyone a pad of paper. So they could take notes. And it’s required before they would consider for CLE. I was like well this. This is maybe not the best use of time, but okay. But now people have their pad of paper. And so. But yeah, I mean, it’s like for me, it’s always been like nitpicky stuff like that, that drives me crazy. Like I can understand content, but you want to say like, maybe we don’t feel like this is necessary for our state.

Margaret Naughton  33:23

But yeah, the written surface requirement is one of quite a few that you have to stop and think What year are we in?

Marlene Gebauer  33:33

Here’s the other one I’ll throw out there. And you know, I’m sure I’ll get some flames over this, but about requiring attorneys to have to teach the class. You know, why, why? Why do we still need that, particularly when we’re talking about things other than practicing law where you know, you may have people that are not attorneys, or non practicing attorneys, they might be the best to actually deliver the content.

Ian Nelson  34:02

Yeah, you know, when when you asked the question about hurdles, I thought I should probably say something about one hurdle being who’s creating the content, who’s best to create the content we had. Fortunately, when we were doing all of our accounting stuff, we did have lawyers involved. But at the end of the day, it’s not always a lawyer that should be teaching the basics of accounting and finance. Like we had investment bankers from places like Goldman Sachs, you know, helping us with courses on valuation. It seems a shame that that couldn’t qualify on its own unless a lawyer was involved. And then you go out into the heavy duty tech stuff and AI and things like that we’ve been discussing. It seems like it seems like a bit of a disconnect.

Margaret Naughton  34:41

Yeah. And when I’ve asked the question in the past as to, you know, why this requirement is in place in certain states, the general responses, then well, if any questions come up, that needs to be directly related back to the practice of law, that there is an actual lawyer that can speak to that. Whether or not that increases uses the benefits of that topic or you know, really helps answer the question. Who knows, I mean it, but that’s kind of the responses, you know, they want to make sure that a lawyer can speak to the legality of the topic.

Sarah Glassmeyer  35:15

Definitely box checking, like, that’s just all it is now. But I mean, I think it goes back to even law school, like where do we encourage this love of learning and in an idea that you’re continually improving yourself and in the law school experience, you know, there it’s just again, you tried to get black letter law and survive emotionally until you can take the bar exam and then it’s, at what point in time does any of that relax, relate to the practice of law where you would see like, Oh, this is a skill I need to do. Because again, like, depending on what area you are, it’s so much just churn, churn, churn and try to get through the day that you don’t have time to realize, Oh, this is something I could be doing better until unless you go to like a conference, like Clio or something. And someone say like, Hey, here’s this concept called process improvement. Or here’s this concept called design thinking. But like even that, you know, when do you have the time to then like, sit down and do it? I don’t think we do enough to encourage. And it’s a I think it’s a Cat Moon term, as you know, something about like, radical curiosity, that you just constantly want to think about how to improve yourself, how can I do this better? How can I? What should I be learning so that’s what you I kind of divide things up into like skills and knowledge, and then hands on things. And like, between all three, like maybe knowledge is something that we currently hit and CLE. But even then it’s not because I want to learn something new, where I think whatever I’m learning in the CLE is actually going to affect how I practice law or how it changed how I live my life. It’s a box check right now. And I think also like, that’s the thing like you where you have like these advertisements from bar associations or other CLE providers where it is like your December you in many jurisdictions, hey, do you have your hours in like, here’s a bunch of courses? Is it just like, it’s a wink? And a nod? Always that would no one actually cares about this. It’s always just like, just get your hours in and sign the paper and move on. And

Marlene Gebauer  37:09

here’s the ethics. Here’s the ethics.

Sarah Glassmeyer  37:15

Like in like in California, you can go to traffic court and also do like a chocolate tasting never even like thought about doing that in law. Like

Marlene Gebauer  37:23

Is that true?

Sarah Glassmeyer  37:24

Yeah. We’re on a traffic court classes and fun experiences you could do to get your points off your license, it’s,

Marlene Gebauer  37:32

We lost Greg. Greg or you there. Alright, so. So even when we talked earlier, I think you said that the new model you are rolling out, you actually, were you were influenced quite a bit from how they do things in the UK? Tell us a little bit about that.

Ian Nelson  37:53

Yeah, sure. And I’m certainly not an expert in the in the rules and systems there. So if I get something wrong, please, please forgive me. But I think I have the gist of it.

Ian Nelson  38:01

We’ll let you slide.

Ian Nelson  38:03

Yeah, please do. A few years ago, my partner Chris and I took a trip over to London and met with a whole bunch of firms, we learned a lot about their system over there. And their CPD system was very much like the CLE system in the States. And what happened was, I think they ended up dropping the current system they had because it was starting to be seen as more of a tick the box, it wasn’t accomplishing what it was set out to accomplish. Things like requirements weren’t tied to the actual practice area people are in and maybe the format of learning wasn’t quite up to date. So now what they have is, at the end of the year, the lawyers there have to certify self certify that that he or she has done what they needed to do over the course of the year to improve their practice for themselves for their clients, all that kind of thing. So when their own judgment that they seek out things that would help them as a lawyer in their practice for their clients, and anything counts. So a pro service quiz, for example, a Hotshot video, a two minute thing at the eight hour thing, learning about tech, whatever they think counts, counts, and that’s that it’s pretty loosey goosey. And I think also, to put some structure around it. I believe that the big firms are not just big firms, but firms in London have their own sort of guidelines. So firm XYZ in London may say we would like our attorneys to hit 20 hours related to your practice area could be tech whatever, and they have their own little guidelines that they’ve done. But I think they removed this sort of hour requirements that must be in person and must be this must be that and it just said you lawyer figure out what is going to be relevant for you and go do it. Just tell us that hand up that you did it. I thought that was really interesting.

Marlene Gebauer  39:41

Yeah, you know, self directed learning.

Ian Nelson  39:43

Yeah, exactly.

Margaret Naughton  39:44

Yeah, Canada, New Zealand, Australia. They’re all doing competency model.

Marlene Gebauer  39:49

And so does that work like a competency model in a firm where it’s like okay, this is we’ve you know, somebody is some entity has decided that this is what you need to do in order to be competent?

Margaret Naughton  39:59

from whatever seemed obvious with the UK and sensei staff to the credit model and moved to the competency. I’m not as familiar with it. But if I recall correctly, they basically have to come up with their own kind of curriculum plan or their own plan to say like, this is what I’m going to do this year in order to be a competent attorney. And these are the types of courses I’m going to take. So whether it’s the firm directing it or the, the the regulatory body saying, you know, you have to submit this plan and show that you completed this plan, and really put the onus on the attorney to say, I, I did what I said I was going to do, and I did it within that timeframe, they’re able to do that with quite a bit of freedom. I haven’t heard anything to say that, you know, they have to, or maybe like maybe one province might have like a specific, you have to learn so many credits and ethics or something like that. But I think everything else is pretty freeform. Again, I could be completely wrong. So I spent a little bit since I’ve had to look into the UK and provinces.

Marlene Gebauer  41:00

Well, I’m already a big fan of the chocolate tasting idea. So I hope, I hope I hope we see more of that.

Margaret Naughton  41:07

I’ve definitely heard of kayaking and CLE where you go you do you do the CLE portion, and then you you go kayaking, you go down the river a little bit, you pull over, you do a little bit more CLE but the kayaking portion is not for credit.

Marlene Gebauer  41:23

Ian, are you taking notes on this? Because I like that one. I like that one too. It’s sort of the the wellness combined with the further education.

Ian Nelson  41:33

Both sound good. Sounds fun. I once went to a CLE and ski in Utah. And that was pretty cool to like

Marlene Gebauer  41:39

very nice. Yeah, well, Margaret Naughton, Sarah Glassmeyer, and Ian Nelson, thank you so much for being on the show. And, you know, loved having this conversation.

Margaret Naughton  41:52

So much for having us.

Ian Nelson  41:55

Thank you.

Greg Lambert  41:56

I wish I had been able to be a little more involved in this interview, Marlene, but I did love the ideas being bounced around between the four of you and you know, at least what I’ve heard so far in the post editing process.

Marlene Gebauer  42:15

You know, it’s it’s, it’s really a big change in terms of what Hotshot is doing in terms of these these, you know, sort of bite size training classes being eligible for CLE. I mean, I think we’ve done sort of the bite size recordings for several years now. But we’ve never been able to get the CLE around them. And I also love that they’re doing they’re customizing it and basically integrating this into departments and firm’s own competencies programs. They have, there’s probably more to come on this.

Greg Lambert  42:48

Yeah. And I you know, I think that it really kind of fits with the way today’s learning is set up. So it makes sense that this would be the next generation of the way that we teach our lawyers and it almost doesn’t matter if if it’s new lawyers or well established lawyers that this sort of training seems to be effective. And I think it’s time for the powers that be behind the CLEs adjust to the times

Marlene Gebauer  43:16

now like short short sessions with reinforcement are really what’s what works best for for adult learning. And I mean, look, none of them none of us have four hours to sit at a time and and really focus on things.

Greg Lambert  43:31

No, we don’t.

Marlene Gebauer  43:33

So thanks to you Ian Nelson, Sarah Glassmeyer, and Margaret Norton for a really great discussion.

Greg Lambert  43:38

And thanks again to Jessica Gore for being the inspiration this week and giving us some insights on why she decided to publish a very user centric book on the federal rules of evidence. So thanks, Jessica.

Marlene Gebauer  43:50

And of course, thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you so reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,

Greg Lambert  44:03

And I can be reached at @glambert on Twitter.

Marlene Gebauer  44:07

Or you can leave us a voicemail on The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you, Jerry.

Greg Lambert  44:18

Thanks, Jerry. Alright, Marlene, I will talk with you later.

Marlene Gebauer  44:21

All right, no more technical difficulties.

Greg Lambert  44:29

Not promising!

You have to appreciate a book that discusses Legal Design and puts design concepts into action by working with a fellow designer on the layout and functionality of the book itself. The results of The Legal Design Book: Doing Law in the 21st Century is both a great read for the content and the physical interaction with the book. Astrid Kohlmeier and Meera Klemola, Lawyers and Legal Designers, join us from Munich, Germany, and Helsinki, Finland respectively to discuss their motivation in writing a book designed to raise awareness of legal design concepts and tools to the legal industry.

Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Spotify

Transcript

Business value is business centric. Law departments frequently ask me about metrics. My response is not nearly as definitive as they desire. I recommend they start with the customer—incorporating the metrics the business is already using and then proceeding accordingly to develop the complementary, internal (to the law department) metrics necessary to manage the department in supporting business objectives.

Talk to most (not all) law departments, you find the inverse. Most law department metrics are law-department centric, full stop. Most track their spend, consistent with a savings-centric narrative, the pitfalls of which I discussed last post. Spend with law firms. Spend v. budget. Internal v. external spend. Necessary. Fine. Limited.

You can also find find excellent content online on how a more sophisticated law department can, and should, measure itself. Matter volume. Matter velocity. Cycle times. Better. Rare. Still law-department centric.

To ground the conversation, we require some metrics on metrics. The most common law department metric is Total Spend By Law Firm, in use at 90% of law departments. No other metric cracks 60%. Cycle Time, by contrast, is near the bottom, tracked by only 16% of law departments. Legal Spend To Revenue is in the middle of the distribution at 29% penetration.

Critically, excepting diversity, these metrics are essentially meaningless from a business perspective. The CEO cares as little about how many matters the law department handles as they do about how many tickets the IT help desk closes, despite the fact both are essential to running the business. These are useful measures for managing workload within a specific function but irrelevant for managing the business—unless and until they are translated into actual business impact (i.e., value storytelling).

Undoubtedly, C-suites are money conscious. But while law department budgets can appear massive in raw dollars, legal spend at a large company averages about 0.5% of revenue. With internal and external expenditures split about evenly, the common ambition to cut 20% of law-firm spend represents 0.05% of revenue (yes, 0.0005) even if you assume it is pure, sustainable savings (rare). Fractional amounts of fractional amounts.

For comparison, according to the WorldCC, poor contract management costs companies 9.2% of their bottom line. That’s 184x more financially significant than the entirety of the legal budget and 1840x more consequential than a 20% reduction in spend on outside counsel. Marginally improving the legal-supported business process of contracting has a materially greater business impact than “saving” (i.e., eliminating) the legal budget many times over.

A proposal to insource work, move to managed services, or procure technology in order to save legal budget is ultimately legal centric. A similar proposal expressly aimed at, and framed as, addressing value-eroding gaps in the contracting process is business centric. The former may sometimes be successful. The latter may sometimes fail. But, over the long run, seeking to address business needs, in the business’s own language, is more likely to win friends and influence people—i.e., secure the resources required for the legal function to help create, and preserve, business value. 

Know your customer. I have vivid recall of one of my many personal failures to influence people. I crashed and burned in an attempt at ingratiating myself with in-house lawyers during a consulting engagement.

In my presentation, I made repeat references to the company’s key performance indicators. The KPIs, and I, elicited blank stares. Some (ill-advised) prodding revealed that not only did these in-house lawyers not know the company’s KPIs, they were blissfully unaware the company had KPIs. Me sharing that I had found the KPIs at the front of the company’s annual report, immediately following the chairperson’s introductory letter, won me no friends.

I failed to tailor my message to my audience. I made erroneous assumptions about my audience’s knowledge, perspective, and interests. My message did not land. It matters not that, in my subjective opinion, the in-house lawyers should have been familiar with, and fully invested in, the primary metrics by which their company measured itself. It does not matter if you want to go so far as to argue that my subjective opinion comports with objective reality—in-house lawyers should be consciously aligned with their company KPIs.

The purpose of the meeting was not to convince these in-house lawyers of the importance of their company’s KPIs. The purpose of the meeting was to secure buy-in for operational improvements that required their input, support, and (most elusively) patience. The nexus between the outcomes of the proposed changes and the company’s KPIs was intended to make the case for change more saleable. It did no such thing. Embarrassing your audience, even unintentionally, is a bad plan. Ego defense mechanisms were triggered; professional issue spotting was turned up to 11.

That private room was not the forum for me to argue in-house lawyers should be invested in their company’s public priorities. But I am more than happy to do so here.

We must be masters of our own context. Often, I feel I am campaigning to be elected Mayor of Obvioustown. But too many exchanges like the above compel me to state plainly: how our organization makes money is critical context.

This is beyond, “we’re a [blank] company.” We should have some level of understanding of revenue streams, pricing, profit margins, performance indicators, supply chains, the competitive landscape, differentiators, our business model, our constraints, our strategy,…and the vocabulary/framing that resonates with company insiders.

I stand by my position that every organization, no matter how venerable, looks like a goat rodeo from the inside. Poor strategic discipline from imperfect humans laboring inside imperfect systems leads every employee to wonder “What the frak?” on the regular. Yet cultural fluency and situational awareness often enable us to make sense of what would appear inexplicable with no frame of reference.

As an in-house lawyer, the WTF moments often come like Jeopardy!: in the form of a question. Businesspeople will ask questions that, taken at face value, are pure nonsense. Often, however, the intent of the question can be intuited by understanding who is asking and why.

Early in my career, I was regularly quizzed with variations on, “Can we do X?” and answered accurately with different flavors of, “LOL. Naw. X is straight-up illegal” (bc heavily regulated environment).

It took some seasoning for me to situate these inquiries in organizational context and recognize that “can we do X?” was garbled shorthand for “we have a nascent idea for a particular program we believe may benefit the company and are trying to determine if it is worth pursuing before we put in too much effort given how frequently we are told no.” At that more mature stage, I was better positioned to turn a narrow conversation about X itself (still totally illegal) into a broader discussion of objectives (rather than specific mechanics) and then work collaboratively to design an objective-satisfying program that passed legal muster (i.e., not resembling X).

This transformation was part of shifting from a law-school mindset of issue-spotting excellence to a business mindset of organizational enablement—evolving from the Department of No to the Department of How (except when No is the only right answer).

Again, painfully obvious, bordering on banal. Yet far less common an evolution than I would have thought—with major implications for effective value storytelling.

We should understand our stakeholders’ context. The anecdote above about in-house counsel unfamiliar with their company’s KPIs was not an excuse to dunk on people from my past. I meant exactly what I said. I failed. I blundered at crafting a message that would land with the intended audience. Importantly, the project itself was still a success because they were only one audience of many.

Corporations are not monoliths. Corporations are composites of different constituencies with their own perspectives, incentives, and politics. These constituencies comprise individuals with personal viewpoints, motivations, and idiosyncrasies. The sales department is unlikely to view the world the same way as the marketing department. And the director of sales is unlikely to always agree with the vice-president of sales.

Task conflict, as opposed to personal conflict, is natural and healthy, in the right environment. Handled professionally, disagreement is foundational to productive battles that refine ideas and lead to superior decisions/outcomes.

For our purposes, however, the heterogeneity of viewpoints means we should not presume our story, no matter how well-tailored to the broader context of the organization, will resonate with each constituency or individual stakeholder without being calibrated to the stories they tell themselves. We should endeavor to learn these stories, and determine which ones are actually important (identifying the signal in the noise is part of mastering context).

Specifically, different stakeholders will have different ideas about how the enterprise currently makes money, how it will/can/should make more money in the future, and their role in the enterprise’s success. They will have their own audiences, accountabilities, objectives, key results, and performance indicators—which they will interpret through their own distinct lens.

The business defines value (most of the time). Up top, I quipped that in-house counsel do not define “value.”

In one sense, adjacent to the current discussion, the reluctance to define value with sufficient specificity is a constant source of tension in the inside/outside counsel relationship. Both sides throw “value” around liberally but—like “innovation”—do not articulate, in practical terms, the meaning of the word.

I’ve covered in-house counsel’s inadequate efforts to define “value” for outside counsel before—see the lawyer theory of value and in-house counsel don’t value diversity (even if they care about it). I have no doubt I will again. But enough of the digression.

While in-house counsel may struggle to communicate what constitutes value externally, the key takeaway here is that, internally, defining value is primarily an exercise in understanding. Oversimplified, in-house counsel do not define value, the business defines value. It is incumbent on in-house counsel to understand how the business defines value and then align themselves to help create, or preserve, that value.

The precise definitions of business value will vary, contingent on context—different stakeholders working at different levels of abstraction. Context dependent, not unknowable.

Just ask. Most business stakeholders are keenly aware of their own context and eager to talk about the topics with which they are most intimately familiar: themselves, their team, their needs, their ideas, their constraints, their objectives, their burning platforms…

More tangibly, most departments have their own key metrics. They focus on their own versions of Total Spend By Law Firm and Cycle Time—i.e., the semi-meaningful, self-centric metrics to which they default and the more business-centric metrics that increase in salience as they grow in sophistication.

While business stakeholders may struggle to articulate exactly what they need from the law department (just as in-house counsel struggle to articulate what they need from outside counsel), they are usually more than capable of explaining what they themselves are accountable for—i.e., what they need to accomplish to propel the business forward and satisfy their own stakeholders. Savvy in-house departments translate business requirements (what drives business value) into law department requirements (how the law department can help satisfy business requirements to drive business value).

The beautiful part is that much of the math is frequently done, vetted, and accepted.

The in-house department that starts tracking cycle times likely already has broader business metrics into which cycle times can be integrated. Take Speed to Revenue as a digestible example. The law department does not need to invent, justify, or socialize Speed to Revenue. Instead, we need to deconstruct it to a deep enough degree that we can demonstrate how improved legal cycle times improve Speed to Revenue. But if we can accomplish that, the business-impact arithmetic is already settled.

Indeed, when you unpack the 9.2% value erosion figure from the WorldCC, there are many opportunities for law departments to make a demonstrable business impact.

Start at the beginning. Speed To Revenue is, admittedly, cherry-picked. The professional issue spotters reading this piece reflexively identified all manner of standard legal work that does not fold so neatly into a common, prepackaged corporate metric.

But when only 16% of law departments track surface-level Cycle Time, how many have truly done the deep work to demonstrate the effect of contract-type-specific legal cycle times on Speed to Revenue and the attendant business impact?

Can we start by doing the (relatively) easy but impactful stuff well?

Yes, it gets harder. Recall, I warned “the business defines business value” precept was “oversimplified.”

In particular, it becomes appreciably harder when the law department is responsible for helping define business value in areas—contractual protections, litigation, compliance, privacy, IP, ESG—where value preservation is prominent and lawyers (and other similarly situated professionals) must serve as domain experts.

Even the relatively straightforward value-creating contracting examples are not as simple as parroting the 9.2% value-erosion statistic and then asking for more resources to make it go away. That’s an attention grabber, not a business case. More of this next post on the hard, necessary work of work sorting.