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Ep 83: The 2025 Legal Ops Playbook with Brightflag’s Kevin Cohn & Priori’s Matt Wheatley
96 Plays20 days ago
What does 2025 hold for legal tech and the legal ops profession? Will legal ops ever become a standard part of every in-house legal team?
Join us in this very special episode as Tyler invites Kevin Cohn, Chief Customer Officer at Brightflag, and Matt Wheatley, VP of Client Strategy at Priori, for a very special, no-holds-barred discussion about legal operations in an ever-changing industry.
Listen as Matt and Kevin share their thoughts on legal ops conferences, gender and wage disparities, whether legal ops is more of a legal role or an operational role, 2025’s uncomfortably tight labor market, AI disrupting the legal ops field, and much more.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-83
Topics:
Introduction: 0:00
Working with customer advisory boards: 3:11
Are there too many legal ops conferences?: 12:34
Connecting GCs and legal ops professionals: 20:10
Analyzing survey data: 34:52
Do you need a JD?: 40:28
Thoughts on hiring: 46:57
AI in the legal landscape: 53:04
Market consolidation: 57:19
Rapid-fire questions 1:04:44
Connect with us:
Kevin Cohn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinacohn/
Matt Wheatley - https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-wheatley-288146a2/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading contract lifecycle management platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues.
Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
Pay Transparency Anecdote and Its Importance
00:00:00
Speaker
I was sitting at a bar in Tokyo. I was on business. And ah someone who worked for me in London calls me and says, Kevin, disaster. I just found out that this wasn't a bright flag again. All of our customer success managers are talking to one another about how much we're paying them. What what should i what should I do?
00:00:26
Speaker
and so what do you I didn't know where to start. I was like, what should you do? Nothing. and There's nothing to do. Why are you surprised? like Why are you just discovering that people talk about how much they're paid? I think pay transparency is a great thing for a variety of reasons, including that it helps to eliminate or at least reduce bias. Yes.
00:00:49
Speaker
But also, and I mean this with all due respect, just so it cuts down the amount of time that is wasted wondering, right? So you know this is how much that role is paying. This is how much that person is being paid. And now you can get the head trash out yeah and and go on with you know improving in the ways that you want to improve so that you can grow your earnings.
Legal Tech Predictions for 2025 with Guests Introduction
00:01:13
Speaker
So that's a big part of the reason that I'm so passionate about doing this survey every year, is to empower people to be compensated in a fair way, but also to empower them to leave the head trash behind.
00:01:35
Speaker
What does 2025 hold for legal tech? How about the legal ops profession? Today we are joined on the abstract by two of my friends, two community builders for a slightly different episode. I'm joined by Matt Wheatley, Kevin Cone, if you don't know them.
00:01:58
Speaker
Kevin is the chief customer officer for Bright Flag, and I'm going to read my summary of what you guys do, but you are
Insights from Customer Advisory Board Meetings
00:02:05
Speaker
welcome to. yeah too like Bright Flag is an intuitive AI-powered e-billing and matter management solution that provides your team with complete visibility into legal work and spend.
00:02:18
Speaker
Matt is the VP of Client Strategy at Priori, a global talent marketplace that's connecting organizations with the right talent for their legal work. Nailed it. How'd I do? i mean your Your words sound suspiciously like our words. Did you take that from our websites? I might have. digitalal native over here This is going to be a little different. We're going to have a conversation about trends that we're seeing, opinions that we have, things that we're looking forward to. um And I always want feedback on these episodes. But I will also say, honestly, ah please give me feedback on this. Because if you like this, I will do more like this with other cool people like Kevin and Matt. if that Does that exist? ah It's a pretty high bar. I might have to go outside the New York City metropolitan area to find them.
00:03:08
Speaker
hello All right, let's get started. Okay, Kevin, you just got back, world traveler from Bright Flags customer advisory board meeting and yearly kickoff in Ireland. How did that go? How did that set the tone for the year? How do you feel about 2025?
00:03:27
Speaker
So, and I got the flu. Ooh. So, no. That's good, by the way. That's true. Thank you. It's it's all the it's all the makeup that that that you gave me right before we started off. No, so, you know, I travel a ton. Last year, 2024, I traveled to all but eight weeks of the year, I think. Wow. So, it was you was very intense. You beat me. It was rough.
00:03:53
Speaker
But a great way to kick off the year. So every year we bring the entire company to Dublin. And this was the first year that I also brought the entire customer advisory board. so We've got a great customer advisory board with a lot of people who give us c incredible insight and also challenge us in the best possible ways.
00:04:11
Speaker
but the actual customer advisory board meeting was the very last day of what ended up being an 11-day trip. whoa ah Normally, I travel a lot, but normally it's for one day, two days, maybe five days, 11 days, and it was after three weeks of not having traveled, the only time in 2024 when I went three weeks without traveling, and I was dragging. But I rallied, and it's great to be in a room with all of these customers you know, legal operations leaders getting this kind of feedback and also coming off of the year that we had. 2024 was by far our biggest and and best year.
00:04:49
Speaker
And so we had the entire company there, the entire cab there, everybody learning a lot from it. It was fantastic.
Benefits of Advisory Boards in Legal Tech
00:04:55
Speaker
And it didn't rain. And if you've ever spent five days in Dublin in January without getting rained on, you are winning. So that was a good time. Lucky at the Irish, one might say. I didn't leave feeling that lucky because I you know i brought brought the sick back with me. But that was a great it was great way to kick off the year. Do you all have a customer advisory award?
00:05:16
Speaker
We do. It's phenomenal. Do you bring them together? and i'm um I'll use this as a little bit of research for myself. We have an advisory board, which I view as a different thing than a customer advisory board. Do you feel like that's a useful group for your business?
00:05:30
Speaker
Yeah, yeah it's it's extremely helpful to get people who are using your product together in a place where they feel like they can be maybe a little more critical than they might be able to in just a one-to-one customer interaction so because you know they you're there to get their feedback.
00:05:48
Speaker
And I think it makes people feel like they're more part of the brand, um so you strengthen your relationships with them, with people in their network. um So it's been having a customer advisory board has been a really core part of our go-to-market strategy for the past couple of years.
00:06:03
Speaker
I think there's something to be said also for getting folks in the same room. Like when I was standing up our advisory board with other people in the business, I didn't do it all by myself, but it was we're going to bring this group together once a quarter and have them meet and have them talk to each other. I think people feel a little bit more free, like you're saying, to share things that maybe are a little bit critical about the product or What your strategy looks like and the road map looks like when they're all in the room together and sort of feeding off of each other as opposed to one person talking to the chief product officer or one person talking to the CEO or I think there's also that's that but also like they want to people want to meet each other in these settings to like it's partly about bright flag or priori but
00:06:43
Speaker
I think that there's a lot of conferences, a lot of them are huge, like thousands of people, and people who are in similar positions, it's hard to have kind of little pods where they can network. I don't know if you've seen that with your advisory board. They they like to spend time with each other in smaller groups.
00:07:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think also, so the way that we way that I structured it is there are 10 members, and it's a 12-month term, so it runs July through June. Oh, thanks. That's pretty short, actually. Yeah, and we have that gives us an opportunity to it gives us an opportunity to get different perspectives, but it also gives the customers an opportunity to say, hey, I'm entering a really, really busy period. I've got to peel off, or they might change jobs, and they're no longer a customer, or they're moving to a new customer organization.
00:07:30
Speaker
but meets once a quarter and one of those four times a year, we do it in person. And so what I have felt from the very first time that we did it was a sense of ownership and being on the journey that you know I feel from customers pretty regularly, but not to this degree. And on this day in particular, so it was this past Friday,
00:07:53
Speaker
There were conversations about what we can do to put what bright flight can do to put itself in an even stronger competitive position. And normally when you're having a conversation with customers, they're actually coming at it from the perspective of what can you do to put me in a better position, which is what I want to focus on is how to make them more successful.
00:08:13
Speaker
But it crossed into a different kind of ownership in this setting, which you know was rewarding for me. I think it was rewarding for them. I'm sure it was, because they all emailed me afterwards. So yeah, strongly. I mean, you know if you don't have a customer advisory board, I think that you're missing out, because there's so many benefits from it.
00:08:32
Speaker
It's on our roadmap. Maybe even doubly so now. Yeah, I'm committing to it publicly now. I would definitely recommend it. I'm curious, when you think about like content and programming for your advisory board meeting, one of the things we think about is how can we make this broadly interesting for them and not just purely about priori or Bright Flag? Was it all Bright Flag content all day? Jeez, you're going to make me give up all the secrets now. That's why you're on record here. So ah we start off the same way every time.
00:09:03
Speaker
First of all, I said there there are 10 customer members, but then there are four bright flag members. So I'm the permanent member and then there are three rotating members and that gives me an opportunity to expose other people on the team to that kind of a setting and to expose the customers to other people on our team.
00:09:21
Speaker
ah So the first few minutes are spent with introductions and and maybe an icebreaker. um ah Then I give an update on what's happened with Brightflag. This is a safe space where I can say, you know this is how we grew. These are some of the customers that we added. These are the some of the some of the people that we added to the team.
00:09:42
Speaker
And then we ah have one or two focus topics for the meeting. It depends on how long the meeting was because it was the start of the year and we had more time. We did a deep dive on our product roadmap for 2025.
00:09:55
Speaker
And one of my learnings from that is I probably should have shared a little information ahead of time so that the conversation could have been even more productive. It was a great conversation, but it's a lot to take in. And of course, I'm there like, you know, heaving and trying trying to be heard. During our kickoff a few days earlier, I actually had to use a microphone, which, wow. You guys know me. My voice shocking my voice carries and I don't like using a microphone, but I get up there and I'm like,
00:10:25
Speaker
Hi, I'm going to use a microphone this time because you know you're not going to hear me otherwise. So I did a deep dive on the product roadmap and then I had a few members of our product team join for about an hour and they did a discovery workshop on a major new feature that
Trends and Networking in Legal Ops Conferences
00:10:42
Speaker
we're developing in the first quarter of this year.
00:10:45
Speaker
And so that that's sort of how I try to do it So I start off all of these meetings by saying this is an extremely selfish thing for us Like we're getting the value out of this and I really appreciate your time I appreciate your contributions and I hope that I end up being wrong and you actually also get value out of it too But just in case you don't Thank you in advance and they've all been thrilled to do it and and then they do come back and say look it's the Connections that we get that are very very valuable but also in the course of talking about this feature You know for example they were all able to give input, but they also said wow listening to you know this person and that person and I didn't realize that we could approach the problem this way. And so I think they're getting they're getting quite a bit out of it as well. I think more people in the legal community, legal ops and GCs, in-house lawyers, want to or are interested in product development than we might expect.
00:11:45
Speaker
I think that it is easy to say, I don't know, they're just interested in the outcomes, but I actually think that a lot of them almost wish they had a way to kind of like dig deeper or scratch that itch or yeah get themselves more involved. because They just don't always know how to do so, right? You gotta give them the outlet or design the outlet for them.
00:12:03
Speaker
Yeah, they're because they're smart people who are curious about a lot of different things who just happen to decide to go to law school. like right Too many smart people decide to go to law school, and their talents are kind of wasted, I think. in But, I mean, like present company excluded.
00:12:18
Speaker
I'm probably a pretty good example given that I went to law school and I'm no longer practicing. But yeah, I think that like lawyers are really, really smart in a lot of different ways, and legal operations professionals, and they have a lot to add when it comes to things like product design.
Market Demands and Evolving Role of Legal Ops Professionals
00:12:34
Speaker
Okay, switching gears. You mentioned conferences, Matt. Events you're excited for this year. Events that you are dreading, that you know you're going to have to attend. Maybe for Kevin, that's based on the length of the flight. 16 plus hour flights.
00:12:52
Speaker
yeah yeah ah Yes, looking forward to a lot of events. I don't travel as much as Kevin, but I'm on the road at least once a month. um ah Looking forward to any events that can bring together. I care a lot about legal operations professionals, and I care a lot about in-house lawyers. um and Anything that brings those two groups together is something I would be particularly excited about. And I think the conference that has done a good job with that, in particular, is running Legal Like a Business. I haven't been to that one before. It's good? It's good, yeah. It's it's it's big, but not too big. They are trying to bring in in-house counsel, um to bring in just different different voices. um So I'm looking forward to that one, but I'm i'm looking forward to smaller events, customer on-site visits.
00:13:40
Speaker
um you know It's really good to go to 2,000, 3,000 person conferences, but I like the smaller events, the more i that I go to conferences. what about What about you, Kevin? I think there are too many, because people don't have budget to go to anywhere near as many. like the The market demands cannot support three Clock, ACC, running legal like a business, legal operators, Conceiro, and, and, and just too many. acc So, yeah, so, you know, I think the L Suite and Link coming together, for example, yeah good thing for a number of reasons, one of them being that there's a little consolidation in my mind, so right? But, yeah, people end up having to choose between do I go to clock,
00:14:30
Speaker
because that's where I know I'll see the most people and also have a good time probably. But maybe I won't learn quite as much versus do I go to something that's more focused, whether it's illegalops dot.com, regional events, or um you know something else like spot drafts, upcoming summit, and the learning might be deeper, yeah ah but the network building might not be as big.
00:14:55
Speaker
But there's also a bit of a false choice there because I don't know a lot of people who go to clock who aren't very early in their career and come out and be like I met a lot of new people who are actually going to really help me. It's usually like there are a lot of people. I had a good time. There was a party.
00:15:10
Speaker
So I think that that's part of the reason that clock is maybe it doesn't have quite the hold that it used to I feel like clock for a lot of people and I've only been to two or three clocks myself But I have this experience from my prior sort of life working in privacy Which is the first time you go to this IEPP conference it's fantastic and you're learning and you're meeting all these people and you get to meet all the other customers and clients of your law firm that you've never met before. And then by the fifth one, it's like, okay, well, there's like another session over there. And that's great. And like, I'm sure it's an interesting conversation on stage. But the real conversation is happening outside the Starbucks yeah know across the street, yeah where all the people who've been around for many years are are talking and sharing and learning from each other, as opposed to learning from the keynotes or the panels or what have you. It's back to like the smaller groups, customer advisory boards, groups like TechGC that are a little more tight-knit. I think there's a lot of value in that. i mean yeah Everybody goes to clock. so that's you're You're getting that same crossover. But I think a lot of the more senior people are going and probably not going to many of the sessions. They're just there to hang out with each other. I don't even know how much how much business is being talked talked about a lot of the time. It's just to see see people that you like and that you've gotten to know over the years.
00:16:29
Speaker
You mentioned the link acquisition. yeah I'm very excited about that. And I will say I'm biased because I worked with Karen and Greg on TechGC before they rebranded it as the L Suite. And so I have a little bit of a stake in that. I will say that. But I'm very excited about it because I want to see legal ops in conversation with GCs and in-house counsel more.
Analysis of Legal Ops Role and Impact on Compensation
00:16:54
Speaker
I think that sometimes the two groups talk past each other or they don't quite know how to talk to each other. And that's natural, right? I think that the training that lawyers get is very different than the way that lots of legal ops professionals careers evolve. But I'm looking forward to there being an established place where one of the primary goals is facilitating that sort of conversation.
00:17:19
Speaker
for sure. i mean I think that it's good for that. It's good for job opportunities, growth opportunities. i mean there's So, I've looked at the Fortune 1000 to see how many of them have legal operations functions. It's about half, a little less than half, actually. I bet if you looked at unicorn tech companies, high-growth startups, even fewer of them actually have a dedicated legal operations titled person.
00:17:45
Speaker
And I think there's probably a lot of opportunity for like a small legal department that's got a lot of chaos to hire a legal ops person. So I think it's ah it's a good growth space too for to unlock new job opportunities in ah in a kind of a tough market for for legal ops professionals.
00:18:01
Speaker
Yeah, i mean i think so anytime that you have opposites, right that they can attract, but also they can very easily misunderstand one another and repel. And one of the dynamics that I think the legal ops labor market is still in the process of working through is what is legal ops Really? like What is the terminal state going to be? Is it going to be this extremely strategic right hand to the CLOGC at one extreme? Is it going to be the e-billing or CLM admin you know at the other extreme? Or is it going to be a mix? Or is there going to be a diversity?
00:18:46
Speaker
right So not, it's doing a little of this and it's doing a little of that, but some people are here, some people are here, some people are somewhere else. And by having what has been the case up until you know LegalOps dot.com really started to take off about two years ago, and until the L Suite acquired Link, is that you had them on parallel tracks. like Never the two shall meet. Even ACC, which has historically been about you know, the the law practicing members of the team created this other event, ACC Legal Ops Con, and I don't think that it was intentional to sort of like keep them separate, but that's what ends up happening a lot of the time. And so that's not helping the industry as a whole to get to a point of resolution around how do these personas better communicate, better strategize, better execute, and ultimately deliver better results. so
00:19:45
Speaker
I think it's a great great thing that L Suite acquired. Link, I think what Connie and Jeff are doing at LegalOps dot.com is also great. ah We need more more of that. What do you think LegalOps is right now? so he' talking Talking about like what the terminus is, like what there's a lot of debate. like Is it like the the things that you mentioned? but Let me put let me put it like a finer point on that question. and i think that there's I think there's some like honest intellectual disagreement about this, and then I think there's some people who have like very, very strong, deeply held opinions about this, which they've been doing this a lot longer than I have, so that's okay. But is legal ops supposed to be a right hand to a GC or a CLO and be deeply integrated into the legal function? Is one sort of view of a,
00:20:35
Speaker
paragon of legal ops. I think another view is we should be a big part of operations for the business broadly. And our path should run potentially through rev ops or sales ops or general sort of operations function in the business. And the work that we do is less intrinsically tied to the way that lawyers think or the way that lawyers work together or the way that a legal team runs, as opposed to the efficiencies and the process improvements that we drive. I think there's big disagreement about where the legal ops space should be running. Do you agree with my framing, I guess, first of all?
00:21:15
Speaker
Yeah, so I think what I'm hearing you say is there are kind of two dimensions on which to think about this. One dimension is, and this is an oversimplification, but strategic and tactical. yep And the other dimension is legal specific or more sort of general business operations, you know, cost functional.
00:21:35
Speaker
And so I think that it's helpful to think about where you are and where you might want to be on those two dimensions. But I think it would be a mistake to conclude that legal ops will end up being a single point on that on that chart. right So thinking about revenue operations, which has existed for quite a bit longer than legal ops,
00:22:01
Speaker
you know, is in the Radford Guide. There are pay bands. There are many more people in the world doing rev ops jobs than legal ops jobs because it got started so much earlier. You can find people just as passionate as the people that we know who are very passionate about legal ops saying this is extremely strategic. It reports directly to the chief revenue officer. It's not a sales force administrator role.
00:22:25
Speaker
But you can also find people who are thrilled to have just gotten their first Salesforce administrator role. Totally. And that's OK. yeah And similarly, if you grabbed 10 heads of revenue at, let's just say, tech companies, because that's where you tend to find RevOps more often than not, you would probably get five of them saying, sales ops is different than marketing ops is different than CS ops. And you would get the other five saying, it's all revenue.
00:22:52
Speaker
why are you trying to draw these artificial distinctions? And so what I try to say to people when I have this conversation about legal ops is we don't have to choose, right we don't have to aim it in one direction, but we do need to get better at defining what we mean whenever we use the term legal ops in any particular context, right? So there isn't one definition for it,
00:23:18
Speaker
But there is a definition for it in this circumstance and in that circumstance you know and so on. so So you do think that it's important to define it? in a way Because what i what I heard and I agree with you is even RevOps has been around for a long time. It's different depending on the organization and it is to that organization what it needs to be for that organization.
00:23:40
Speaker
and And we're human, so we're going to like debate these things and fight about them. But does it actually matter? Does do does it need to be defined, or is it OK that legal ops at this company is going to be what it needs to be for that legal department because of how they work?
00:23:55
Speaker
or and It's going to be different at another organization and the right talent for that particular role is going to end up in that position. I think it needs to be better defined than it is now for two primary reasons. The first is legal ops is not yet the norm. right If you go to clock, it feels like it's the norm. yeah but You have to remember that you're at the corporate legal operations consortium annual meeting. right so You're surrounded by it. But my favorite legal ops person to meet is the person who works in a legal ops role somewhere in the middle of the country, like outside of the major cities, outside of the major legal ops hotspots at a company that I've never heard of before that's doing five and a half billion dollars a year in revenue. like I want to understand what that person thinks legal ops is.
00:24:43
Speaker
what their GC thinks legal ops is because that is ultimately the futures, like what mainstream business thinks of it as being. And not having it better defined makes it difficult to get to that point, I think. Yeah, that's fair. The other way in which it impacts negatively is compensation.
00:25:01
Speaker
because if the title, Legal Operations Manager, can mean anything and everything, if it could mean anything from your entire job is to administer, you know, Bright Flag or Spot Draft or something like that, all the way to you are the strategic right hand to the CLO and you're planning the OKRs for the entire department and you're managing the budget for the entire department and you're deciding what the promotion paths are for the senior attorneys, like that person is not, those two people are not gonna be paid the same. But right now, that is the main way that their compensation is assessed. And that's broken.
00:25:39
Speaker
I think to to expand on that too, I like the idea that we don't have to pick whether or not this leads people in a more general ops direction or it leads them in a legal specific and right hand of the CLO direction. I think that people should feel free to have either of those career paths open to them.
00:26:01
Speaker
two right So saying there is something unique maybe about legal ops that means that there should be an operations function within a legal department where the people who staff it want to work with lawyers as opposed to with people generally across the business and that's maybe required or important for success.
00:26:21
Speaker
does not preclude people on that team or in that function from saying, but ultimately, I would love to be the COO of a business, or ultimately, my career should lead in an operations direction.
Market Trends and Growth in Legal Ops
00:26:33
Speaker
I'm testing that hypothesis with you, the two of you. I agree. I don't i don't know enough about what it's what general operations hiring processes would look like. Is is a director or VP of legal ops going to be considered for a COO position at a Fortune 1000 company. i don't I don't know the answer to that. But I think that legal is, whether it is or isn't, lawyers think that it is extremely unique. and I assume it is. i mean Just thinking about relationships with law firms and the types of technology that that lawyers are willing to use and the fact that there is a legal specific billing invoice software. Very good, bright flag.
00:27:14
Speaker
I think that there's gonna always be at some organizations a distinct legal operations function because that's what legal wants. That's what some legal departments want. So one of our, I'm smiling because one of our customers, this is a really, really large technology company. It's not a unicorn upstart. It's like they've got ads all over every airport kind of company. And about eight months ago,
00:27:44
Speaker
the CEO of the company made a decision to consolidate every ops team, sales ops, FinOps, legal ops, under a single organizational umbrella, rolling up to the global chief operating officer, I think. And so I remember the the head of legal ops of this company, you know and I'm good friends with them, said, well, this is what's happening. I don't really understand why it's being done, but it's happening.
00:28:14
Speaker
And I thought, okay, well, you know, we're hearing about things like this. let's Let's see how it goes. I caught up with them just a few weeks ago, and I said, so what's changed? I said, nothing. I have a different manager, but everything I do is legal. I put together my OKRs for the quarter, and I sort of brought them to my new manager, and the manager says, well, that's good, but you have to align them with the broader ops goals for the organization. and he's like but I'm still only supporting the legal team. Yeah.
00:28:46
Speaker
So, like in my title it's still legal operations, yeah. So, yeah. This reminds me a little bit, and we're not gonna talk about this because we don't have enough time. This reminds me a little bit of the conversation that I think that all of us contributed to six months ago about should the GC report to the CEO or the CFO or, right, I mean, that's sort of the same, yeah it's a little bit of the same thing. It's the equivalent. Right, it's the equivalent, right? Yes. Which is to say, maybe.
00:29:14
Speaker
Or maybe not or maybe right? um Would legal ops people want to be absorbed like as a the legal ops profession would they want to be absorbed into? Operations more generally is like that is that an attractive thing because I see it framed like it's kind of the next so like again like when you say legal ops people The typical legal, ah there are about 10,000 legal operations professionals, and the way I'm defining that is they have legal operations or legal transformation or legal technology in their title, and they're working in in-house, right? About 10,000 in the world. so The overwhelming majority of them started their careers as paralegals or legal administrators.
00:29:58
Speaker
yeah all right and and And there's nothing wrong with that at all. And the sooner that we all recognize that that is the future legal operations workforce, the more successful we'll all be because we'll be building tools for them, educational content to make them successful, etc.
Pay Transparency and Legal Ops Compensation Survey
00:30:16
Speaker
ah But those people, they came, those people, not meant to be pejorative, yeah they ah they chose to be paralegals. They chose to be legal admins. They enjoy legal, right? So that doesn't mean that they don't want to go and do other things and and more power to them if they do.
00:30:36
Speaker
but also more power to them if they don't. yeah There's nothing wrong with that. and I think that that's, again, going back to definitions, if you just say, well, anything could be legal operations.
00:30:48
Speaker
then you get a lot of this yeah slop, I think. Yeah. I think there is kind of a silent but probably big group of people and in legal operations at varying levels who actually don't care about any of these things either, who are just like, how can you make my job easier? Yeah, I make a good living. you know i like I like the people I work with. Sure, some of my work happens to be doing things that that the lawyers don't want to do, but I'm good with it. And they're not like grappling with these kind of questions that the three of us live with on a day to day basis because this is like our livelihoods.
00:31:23
Speaker
Yeah. i And as it relates to comp, I think ah think you're right that a lot of people, in fact, I know you're right, that most people are actually very happy with their job, with what they're earning. like It allows them to support their families, and that's the most important thing. i you know We just launched the 2025 LegalOps compensation survey a week and a half ago. and so We're in the middle of the of the drive to get people to participate. And I understand that that's a very, like we're in a very privileged position to be ay giving people the opportunity to voluntarily share the sensitive information. So we take it very seriously. And I do some like personal outreach to get those early participants going and and they're the ones who tend to promote it on social media and and drives a lot of responses.
00:32:17
Speaker
And so I texted someone, I've known this person for a long time. They've been working in legal operations for a very long time. And ah I said, have you participated yet? And they said, no. At my new job, my comp sucks. So I wasn't going to. And I'm like, well.
00:32:33
Speaker
I need that. I'm not sure what. I'm not sure what problem we're solving here. And I'm sure when you look at your paycheck you realize that this is what the market has determined the function is worth right now. Like that's the purpose of the survey. So there is a lot of noise on LinkedIn and and I you know I contribute to some of it unintentionally. Your stuff's good. but um Thanks. I like your pay transparency. People don't know about this. I remember a moment much earlier in my career, way before I was at Bright Flag and in legal, I was sitting at a bar in Tokyo. I was on business and ah someone who worked for me in London calls me and says, Kevin, disaster.
00:33:24
Speaker
I just found out that this wasn't a bright flag again. All of our customer success managers are talking to one another about how much we're paying them. What what should i what should I do?
00:33:37
Speaker
and so there what do you I didn't know where to start. I was like, what should you do? Nothing. and There's nothing to do. Why are you surprised? like Why are you just discovering that people talk about how much they're paid? I think pay transparency is a great thing.
00:33:54
Speaker
ah For a variety of reasons including that it helps to eliminate or at least reduce bias. Yes, but also And I mean this with all due respect just so it cuts down the amount of time that is wasted wondering right so, you know This is how much that role is paying. This is how much that person is being paid. And now you can get the head trash out yeah and and go on with you know improving in the ways that you want to improve so that you can grow your earnings. So that's a big part of the reason that
00:34:27
Speaker
I'm so passionate about doing this survey every year, is to empower people to be compensated in a fair way, but also to empower them to leave the head trash behind. right like The number is what the number is. If you want to change it, go and do things to change it, but please don't say, I don't know. i like Leave that behind.
00:34:53
Speaker
Was there anything surprising in last year's data? And do you have any predictions for this year's? So the most surprising thing, the most surprising thing in last year's data was that the gender pay graph grew, oh ah which was really disappointing. So we had a year in which it was closing and closing in really compelling way, I would say, especially and seeing with senior positions, it had closed quite a bit. And then last year it's like it rubber bands it back and it got worse. So that was the most surprising thing. What I'm seeing in the in the early data so far, and you know if you you haven't participated yet,
00:35:38
Speaker
I think by the time this airs, the survey's still gonna be open. So you can go to brightflag.com slash the abstract, and it will redirect you to the survey. It will be open, I know when this is gonna be released. It will be open. Yeah, so brightflag.com slash the abstract, and you can participate in the survey.
00:35:54
Speaker
What I'm seeing through the, and we've already got hundreds of of responses, is the leveling, it's confirming that on average the leveling has come down. right So when we first started to do this, it was the high point of 2021, 2022, the money was flowing, everyone was hiring the senior VP of legal operations, and it's just a ah statement of fact that those VP roles have become director roles, a lot of the director roles have become manager roles, and some of the manager roles have been eliminated.
00:36:28
Speaker
you know And so still seeing that pattern in the early response this year. You already have that URL set up, the abstract? I will by the time. Jeff Soriano, man. He's got a week and a half. Two weeks. That's their marketing guy. Where did you get that haircut? Down in Soho. Jeff didn't cut your hair. I knew I had to get a fresh fade.
00:36:53
Speaker
We do a comp survey, and legal ops people were able to contribute, but it was more focused on in-house counsel, and I'm curious what you saw. You reminded me of our sort of analysis of the gender pay gap in that, and one of the things that I thought was interesting there, I don't have a good answer for why this is the case, corporate counsel, AGC level, pretty distinct gender pay gap. um Even at the GC level, a little bit less so,
00:37:22
Speaker
Chief legal officer? No, actually. um And now, you know, I mean, we did look and we wanted to make sure there's actually a statistically significant sample size for each of these, right? I wasn't the one who did that, but I was assured by the people who did that, you know, we it wasn't like five CLOs responded, right? That probably is a, I don't know, what CLO means is a little bit different than what corporate counsel means. Corporate counsel is probably more consistent, but um I thought that was interesting that sort of like at the the Would be the equivalent to the manager and director level that you're talking about ah Pretty significant gap, but at the c-suite level not quite so much
00:38:06
Speaker
Yeah, I don't have any theories on why that could be. I wonder, i mean at public companies, those those salaries are presumably reported. and see i mean i Hopefully, that's not enough to enforce people paying this genders equally, but maybe there's something something there. I don't know. do I mean, you also figure I guess someone is total conjecture, someone who's able to negotiate for a chief legal officer title probably has a lot more negotiating power, generally speaking. But these things are kind of pernicious. So there's all there's usually maybe there's there's usually a search firm involved at the CLO level. There's so there's a third party there to advise on, you know, any any good retained search firm is going to have a lot of data about what a position is worth.
00:38:49
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. i maybe just i mean To your point about the importance of this data, it's it it ultimately contributes to fairness and ideally higher salaries.
Necessity of a JD for Legal Ops Roles
00:38:57
Speaker
I bet there's findings on this. If you're working with a good search firm, they're going to have some some good comp data to maybe help with that.
00:39:04
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just thinking about t taking a step out from legal, but thinking about comp more generally. So in the you know venture backed software company space. He's recovering from the flow. Wait, wait. I didn't say recovering. I'm not using the same microphone. In the venture backed software space, like there are tons of comp benchmarks.
00:39:30
Speaker
you know But if you ever look at the interquartile range, so how much variability is there between the 25th percentile and the 75th percentile, ah you could drive a semi through it. There isn't as much consistency and compensation in sales and go-to-market roles, or in CFO roles, or in ah CTO roles, as you would think. ah were were Generally, I would say, and in the um in those sort of office in the knowledge worker labor market. We're at a point in time where the compensation is kind of all over the place. Probably not to the extreme that it is in in many legal operations roles, but
00:40:15
Speaker
Especially in the US, s I would say we are not paragons of pay consistency. Two paragons and one podcast. Wow. Are you taking notes over that? I'm intently. Hey, can I take us back to something a little controversial? I know we're- Please.
00:40:32
Speaker
I wanted to ask about this ah this JD and legal ops thing. if anybody want ah anyway i want We've got room for nuance in this discussion. ah Any thoughts?
00:40:46
Speaker
I mean, well, I don't have a law degree, ah although I think I don't correct people all the time when they assume that I And I spent a number of years reporting to GCs, working for GCs, doing privacy work, compliance work, work around data.
00:41:07
Speaker
Look, i I think that you can find very talented people who can do a lot of the same work that lawyers can do within a within a business, who may be able to flex themselves to do things that people with many years of law school plus being an associate at a firm for a while may not be comfortable doing.
00:41:35
Speaker
But I think that different organizations need to decide what do they want to hire for, for what position, what what sort of culture are they trying to build, what sort of skill set do they want, what sort of risk appetite do they want, do they want to hire someone who's going to really lean into technology and opportunity, or do they want someone who's going to come in and establish like super clear processes that no one ought to violate.
00:41:57
Speaker
So it does it it it frustrates me a little bit when I see companies who say we're hiring for this legal ops position or this privacy program manager position and we want a law degree and we think that that's a prerequisite.
00:42:17
Speaker
But I also think maybe the organization's signaling something about what they value and maybe someone who has a better bedside manner with the business isn't the right fit for that company or for that role or for the person who's who's running the team.
00:42:34
Speaker
Hit us, Kevin. Disagree. lean so no No, no, no, no. I don't disagree. First of all, I think that this entire debate is overdone. About 9% of LegalOps postings require a JD. This is not a ah ah broad-based issue. yeah It's just a very emotional issue.
00:43:00
Speaker
not only not only for people who don't have a JD, but mostly for people who don't have a JD, of which I am i am one. I don't have one. So first of all, less than 10%, right? Second of all, I think people immediately jump for that 9% to ascribe motive. They think less of the people who don't have the JD, and that's the problem.
00:43:27
Speaker
I think what's actually going on most of the time is laziness and writing the job description.
Hiring Trends and Job Market in Legal Ops
00:43:34
Speaker
It's not that someone sat down and said, I think that anyone who is going to be in a legal ops position needs to have a JD and anyone who doesn't have a JD is lesser. I think most of the people writing the job descriptions are lazy or sloppy.
00:43:51
Speaker
and i'll give you And I'll give you an example. This is my honest opinion, and I'll give you an example. So we have you know Google Alerts set up for Bright Flag. We want to know when stuff shows up on the internet. And ah got this notification. This was over a year ago. ah One of the largest insurers in the country has posted a job description for a director of legal operations. And I'm thinking, why did Bright Flag show up in this job description, I'm reading through it, and it says, you know, ah preferred if the candidate has experience using Bright Flag. And I was expecting it to say, preferred if the candidate has experience using Bright Flag, or this other system, or this other system. But no, it just said Bright Flag. And they're not a customer.
00:44:36
Speaker
Interesting. And they're not going to be a customer anytime soon. And dollar signs are appearing in cousin's mind. I'm thinking to myself, like what am I missing here? What am I missing here? Because I could send it to the sales team and say, hey, maybe they're working with a partner that's advising them to switch to Bright Flag or maybe they just hired someone who was previously a customer. But I'm thinking, but it seems weird.
00:45:03
Speaker
It seems very unusual. And I sent it to someone else on the team, and this person is like, Sherlock Holmes. And five minutes later, they write back and say, the entire job description was a copy and paste job from our other customer over here who's really small. So it's like this large insurer with a 2,000 person legal department yeah copied and pasted from start to bottom.
00:45:31
Speaker
The job posting that this actual customer had for a 20-person legal team. right yeah If that happens for you know one of the largest insurers in the country, I guarantee you there's a lot of sloppiness for the other 99.9% of postings. I just think that the temperature has to be lowered here, there are just precious few people who are not getting a job they want because they don't have a JD. It's just not the primary thing. right Now, I'll tell you one of the primary things is if you got a legal ops job in 2021 and 2022, when not just in legal, but everywhere salaries were seriously inflated, and now the labor market has adjusted, and you're still anchored up here,
00:46:22
Speaker
you're in trouble, right? But the trouble is between the ears and behind the eyes, right? You gotta catch back up to where the labor market is. And I think that that time, I have come to look back on that time where there was this, it appeared to be permanent explosion in legal ops, but I think we now know that it was a flash in the pan that was on on balance, not a positive for the industry, I think. Let's talk about hiring. Do you have a reaction to that?
00:46:51
Speaker
No, I think that was fantastic. You're just glad that I said it. Yeah, I didn't want to answer the question. I just wanted you all to talk about it. Yeah, let's talk about hiring a little bit. What are you seeing in the market beyond maybe a misalignment between the expectations that people have and the opportunities that may be out there?
00:47:10
Speaker
Do we think that the market is picking up at all? I mean, so I I have a stronger perspective I would say on the in-house counsel market than I do on the legal ops market. I think that there are some Signs of life that weren't there a year ago that are there now I also think that the more senior that you get the longer that you are unfortunately are gonna be on the bench and You write about this a bit, Matt, on LinkedIn. I think that if you're looking for a director level role, and especially if you're looking for a GC or CLO role, you're probably gonna be looking for six months at least, if not 12 or 18.
00:47:50
Speaker
Like you you need to be thinking not just about how am I networking, but maybe you should pick up a couple of clients on the side, not only for the income, but so that way you have really interesting, relevant, new things to talk about in interviews, so that way you're still sort of intellectually sharp, right? I'm curious what both of you are seeing.
00:48:10
Speaker
Yeah, how did you describe it? Sluggish, but maybe starting to show yeah signs. yeah I think I would say the same thing. And I completely agree with your characterization of as you become more senior, it's going to take longer. And again, like we'll go back to the math to explain that.
00:48:29
Speaker
In any given company, there is a maximum of one GC role, a maximum of one CLO role. It's the same thing in legal ops. There's a maximum of one head of legal operations, whether it's a manager, director, VP, whatever. There's one.
00:48:49
Speaker
right So when you start your career, whether you're in legal or in sales or in finance or whatever, you're doing a job and you've got however many co-workers, counterparts who are doing precisely the same job. Like if you're a sales rep and you're at Oracle, you're one of whatever, 5,000.
00:49:11
Speaker
If you're a regional VP of sales at Oracle, you're one of a few hundred. If you want to be the president of worldwide sales, it's only one of those positions at Oracle, and it's the same thing with legal, whether it's you know on the on the council side or on the ops side.
00:49:27
Speaker
I think people get used to their job searches being you know quick earlier in their career and the more experience
Fractional Work and Marketability for Legal Professionals
00:49:34
Speaker
you get. And especially, I work with a lot of people who are in between jobs. And if you're in between jobs right now in this market and you're a senior, it's a six-plus-month search. The Wall Street Journal did a did a study recently, it was like earlier this month, and it was If you are a white collar worker and they explicitly reference legal and you are not currently working, on average it's six months. And to your point, like if you've been a CLO in particular at a Fortune 1000 or a publicly traded company and you're looking for a new job, there's like maybe one job on the market at a time that you could be a good fit for that 100 other qualified people are looking at. And so I feel i feel for people who are you know either
00:50:20
Speaker
on the market because they don't have another opportunity or because their search has been taking too long because it is like soul sucking for people to just keep throwing their resume into what feels like a black hole um sometimes. But you just got to keep you got to keep swinging the bat. You got to lean on your network. Talk to a lot of people. Talk to as many talk to Kevin and bright flag, your law firm partner, Tyler, who talks to everybody on the abstract. You just got to keep having conversations with people. And it inevitably works out.
00:50:48
Speaker
And I think your recommendation to be doing some things on the side, not just to keep sharp, but to have more to talk about as ah as a great one, and and you make some money doing it too. How do you counsel folks around that? Because I know you've got some perspectives on standing up your own fractional practice and what that means. How would you counsel someone through that decision actually? I'm curious. like Should they hop on Priori and use Priori? Should they stand up ah sort of like business of two or three clients on the side? yeah Does it depend on whether or not they think they want to be doing that sort of work for a couple years as opposed to for a few months?
00:51:25
Speaker
It always depends. i mean if If someone's ultimate goal is to be a W2 employee of another company and they want to do that as soon as possible, you know maybe you you pick up some fractional work just to keep yourself busy, keep your your skills sharp. but You're not going to invest the amount of time that's required to really have a go at it. And there are people who are really, really having a go at it. It's a competitive market for fractional lawyers because there's been some amazing lawyers who have decided at all stages of their careers that they're this is what they want to do. i want They want to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week. They want to bill out at
00:52:03
Speaker
$250, $300 an hour, maybe higher, if especially if they're sourcing their own work. like If you're getting your work directly from a client as opposed to look priori, other companies like us, we are great for helping you scale a practice, quickly connect with clients.
00:52:21
Speaker
But like clients come to us with a particular market rate in mind. like you If you can go to your friend who's the GC at Fortune 500, they're going to pay you a ah higher ah higher rate. and so It's not a market that can be competed in in a in a real way unless you're really committed to it, but you can pick up some some work um as a seconde through a platform for sure.
00:52:46
Speaker
But it totally depends on what your goals are. that so I just but want to hear about that from people before telling them they should do a particular thing. All right. I'll take us to the last topic of conversation before fun closing questions. yeah Let's talk about the legal tech landscape and what we're seeing. Are you actually excited about AI right now?
00:53:12
Speaker
Are you worried about AI? I mean, everybody wants to ask, is it overhyped? Is it underhyped? I'm like, unless about that debate, more that more that like, are you excited about what you think AI can deliver? Are you excited about using AI? Or are you sort of like a little bit more concerned and worried about it in a macro sense?
00:53:32
Speaker
So, and and I'm very excited about it, and I use it every day myself. Every every hour, I would say. You can also be worried about it. Sure. Right? Like, you know the number one profession in all 50 states? Either of you know? No. What is it? Truck drive?
00:53:52
Speaker
drive-in for money, number one profession in every state. right Truck drivers, taxi drivers, Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, et cetera, driving you know drive-in for for your profession. so you know We've been promised self-driving cars for a while now, and we're not there yet, but it's definitely coming. right That is one example far from legal, although I can't wait to see all of the litigation. um That's a joke. ah But you know that's one example where it's clearly coming to, AI is clearly coming to fundamentally disrupt the economy, the labor market, and so like those are these fancy words that we use on a podcast to mean people's lives. yep right And that is scary because
00:54:42
Speaker
you know At least in this country, and um I would argue probably in any country, there is no idea of a plan to say nothing of an actual plan in motion to protect the citizens who are going to be negatively impacted by this kind of technology.
AI's Role in Legal Tech and Market Predictions
00:55:04
Speaker
So, I worry about it on that level, but that's a really far cry from, hey, at Brightflag, we use AI to help you better engage with law firms, right? Like, no one is losing their job because of Brightflag. Totally. Parts of their job that they hate are being automated. They're getting better insights. You know, they're having better relationships with their law firms. So, I don't worry about it from a professional perspective. But yeah, I use it every hour, every hour.
00:55:33
Speaker
Do you use AI? I do, yeah. I don't use it to write my LinkedIn posts, for the record. um i mean i don't know That's why you don't get any traction anymore. Seriously, what's going on with the algorithm? um i mean I don't think I can say anything like unique about AI. i I assume our society will will figure it out maybe ah like on a broader level. um But for me, thinking about the legal industry,
00:56:00
Speaker
and the space that I'm in, I'm excited about what it can mean for alternative legal service providers. um you know I think that if you look at something like Document Review, where 15, 20 years ago, that was a really big profit center for big law firms, and now they they don't do it at all. like theyve you know That's gone to the vendors. And I think that a with the help of AI and and just the evolution of the big law firm model generally, I think a lot of A lot of work is going to be shifted away from big firms to, I think, AI is going to reduce the amount of work that some firms are, like, an AMLOL 20 firm probably isn't going to be doing vendor contracts. and
00:56:45
Speaker
three, four, five years. like That is going to go to either i don't know ah a fractional lawyer who is powered by AI, who uses that technology to help with it. But I think it ultimately is good for alternative legal service provider space, because I think it's going to just shift work to a different format.
00:57:05
Speaker
You have a prediction in your list of predictions. Kevin did a blog post. Predictions for 2025. I blogged. You blogged. And I think you wrote it. I don't think AI wrote that for you. I wrote it. I wrote it, yeah. One of your predictions was more CLM consolidation. I think the other interesting, and there's a couple interesting angles on that that I want to test with the two of you. One is, yeah, probably more CLM consolidation.
00:57:34
Speaker
Two is sort of who's doing that, who's raised enough to make that happen, who's raised too much that they're too expensive to get bought. I think that's a really interesting question. Although the sort of competition antitrust constraints that might have been present the past four years seem to be gone. So maybe a sales force, let's say, or is gonna be back in the market and thinking,
00:58:00
Speaker
I don't need to worry about DOJ approval on this. um But the other angle here that I'm curious for two of your your thoughts on, especially with this explosion of companies that are small, have raised some venture money, have a sort of AI focused product, a lot of these are great companies run by super smart people.
00:58:17
Speaker
There's also a lot of companies out there that are features as opposed to sort of like systems or platforms. To me, that screams at the opportunity for consolidation, maybe not this year, but in the next few. Yeah, so you're you're absolutely right that in order to be acquireable,
00:58:39
Speaker
You need to have a valuation that is in line with your current you need to have a a sale price in mind that is in line with your current market value. Right. And a lot of companies again going back to 2021 2022 colossal amounts of money.
00:58:58
Speaker
you know, 30, 40, 50, 100 times annual revenue when the median software as a service company in the public markets now is trading at a little over 6x revenue, right? So, you're in a situation where if you want to exit, someone is, at least one person, probably a lot of people are going to take a bath, and and There's no point in doing that, so people batten down the hatches, drastically cut costs. you know Sometimes you can cut your way to growth most of the time you can't. Most of the time the only way to growth is through innovation, delivering fantastic results to customers and out executing the competition.
00:59:45
Speaker
So my view with the CLM market, but really you could apply this philosophy to any market, is it's the vendors that have raised enough money to be able to control their own destiny, but not too much that they have placed themselves in a category where They have to get to 100 to 200 million in annual revenue in order for the math to work. yes And they are disciplined enough not to go too broad. right Because at the end of the day, if you ask a bunch of buyers, do you want one vendor that provides a solution to everything, or do you want you know the um
01:00:22
Speaker
the best of breed, right and you cobble together your ideal platform. Half are going to say one, half are going to say the other. right But the ones that say the platform, they're talking about established markets, where that platform exists and the way it got there.
01:00:41
Speaker
was that vendor started by doing one thing really well. Like Salesforce started by doing CRM really well. Then they added all these other things, commerce, analytics, you know Slack, et cetera, et cetera. But that came so long after our Salesforce had already completely dominated the core market. And what I see in CLM, for example, is too many vendors say soup to nuts from intake to post-execution analytics and storage.
01:01:10
Speaker
we're the best at everything, and it's just not true with anybody. sure right So the most successful CLM vendors are the ones that say you know you have a really high transaction volume business, and and the the variability from one transaction to the next, from one contract to the next, is actually pretty tight. So it's all about intake and workflow and the playbook, and that's where we're fantastic. Those are the vendors that are, I think, having the most success in that category.
01:01:38
Speaker
and so you see you know DocuSign making acquisitions, Workday making acquisitions, we're gonna see more of that this year. Agiloft getting bought. Agiloft, absolutely, by KKR. The only thing that I would, and actually I do think i do think that one of the opportunities, maybe for companies that have, I wouldn't say raised too much, but maybe raised too much, or are finding themselves in a position where it's hard to get acquired. I mean, private equity is an option there, potentially, yeah right? I'm not a finance person, but I mean, that seems like a ah reasonable outlet. So you may see more of that is what I'm saying. You may not see one CLM buying up three other CLMs. Instead, you may see a private equity firm coming in or a consortium of investors coming in. For sure. buying up
01:02:23
Speaker
But for sure, but here's the thing. yeah The PE playbook is you know if you're acquired by private equity for, let's say, $100, right?
01:02:35
Speaker
The PE is not writing a check for $100. That's not how it works. sure The PE writes a check for $30, $40, and then a bank writes the check for the rest. And then the company is levered. Totally. right And so the cash flow has to pay down the principal and the interest. The interest rates are still really high. yeah So if you don't have an efficient business,
01:03:01
Speaker
It doesn't matter that there's a lot of dry powder in with PEs right now. right You've got to get to a point where you have enough free cash flow to cover the debt service, and that's where you start to go against investing in innovation, investing in customer success. so I think we're going to see a lot of activity from private equity this year across all of legal tech.
AI-driven Startups and Venture Funding Challenges
01:03:26
Speaker
I just think that it's going to be more the winners winning out as opposed to someone sort of vulturing up the less successful businesses. That's interesting.
01:03:39
Speaker
and To me, on the like AI kind consolidation, like we go to these conferences and just the conference floors are so crowded now with companies that I've not heard of before. i think that A lot of them don't have product market fit yet, so it's going to be hard for them to be acquired at this point. and i' mean maybe it's Maybe that's something that ah someone would take a flyer on potentially, but the ones that I talk to just don't seem like they know exactly who they should be selling to yet.
01:04:06
Speaker
Yeah you don't hear about as many acquires as you used to. yeah That's for sure. Right. You're not just paying a lot of money to bring talent into the business even if it's super sophisticated technical talent. um I think a lot of businesses are going to have that debate on some of this a build versus buy versus Find the talent outside and bring it in and because of what you're saying in the market conditions I think a lot of a lot of companies are gonna land on we need to find the resourcing internally to innovate ourselves yeah um As opposed to spending, you know 25 million dollars for seven software engineers. Yeah. All right. Did we do this pretty well the substantive part question about his pet peeves You know I thought of one not using the Oxford comma. That's a good rising crazy. Oh It's like and it's confusing too. It's there is a reason for the Oxford comma, and it's not being pretentious I think we're in the minority here though guy agree with you all
01:05:10
Speaker
ni Are we on the minority? I think we might. why i mean We might be in the minority in that we generally have good punctuation and commands of the English language. but We write our own blog posts. We write our own blog posts. All right, closing questions. Pet peeve is one of them. All right, Kevin jumped the gun on that, or you set him up. So now you've got to do that one now.
01:05:32
Speaker
Not any time that if you're in a sales-oriented profession, not thinking about something that's going to make the client's life easier, whether it's putting availability in their time zone. By the way, this is nothing that any no one on my team would ever do anything like this. But not putting something in the client's time zone. not reattaching a document if you're following up on something, when you're if you're referencing a particular thing. ah so For me, it's if you're in a customer service-oriented profession, whether it's legal tech or whatever, always thinking about the client and trying to make it easy for them to work with you.
01:06:08
Speaker
favorite part of your job i so I think I have to say getting to be in front of our great team and our great customers so frequently. so you know Being on the road constantly, it's exhausting.
01:06:27
Speaker
and i you know I'm not old, but I'm obviously older than I used to be. That's the way it works. and And I have started to feel the age a little bit more, but it's still the case that 99% of the time when I'm able to be, I'm i'm a people person, I'm an extrovert, I go to the office every single day that I'm in the city, every single day. Monday, Friday, it doesn't matter, I'm in the office. I had to be working from home earlier this week because I was sick and I hated it. So that's probably the best part of my job is being able to get in person with so many great people.
01:07:04
Speaker
so i am I'm a recruiter at heart. i that's what i really I like connecting people with new jobs. yeah that's That's for me the best part of what I do, whether it's connecting them with a new W-2 job, a new fractional engagement. yeah i mean um When I first interviewed at my old company,
01:07:25
Speaker
they said They asked me, like why would you want to do this? And I was like, I think it'd be kind of cool to help people find a find their find a new job, because it's so's so important to people, obviously.
Closing Thoughts and Career Reflections
01:07:34
Speaker
And I remember after the fact, they they extended me an offer, but they were like, that's that's kind of a cliched answer. yeah And i've I was like skeptical of my own feelings at the time, but that is over at being in in this space for almost 10 years, that's still my favorite part of it is is working with the talent. i love I love our clients. I love working with legal departments. ah But to me, it's about helping someone find a job. that's That's motivating to me. It's so odd that they would have sort of like poo-pooed that in answer. Isn't that exactly what they should want to hear from someone you know applying for a recruiting job? For the record, they definitely want that to be part of it. yeah But I think that that it's, a I don't know, if you if you all a lot of people have are skeptical of recruiters. um and I'm skeptical of you, does that count? It does, it does.
01:08:31
Speaker
and i Because I think that people think that they're only in it for themselves, and of course there's like the commercial value of the thing, but like I don't know. ah For me, it's that's part of it, is being able to work with people who are looking for new jobs. Hey, can can we can we turn the tables on them here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do that. Hi, I'm Tyler Finn, and this is my classic closing question. Tyler, book recommendation.
01:08:58
Speaker
Actually, I have two, and they are topical. A year ago, I read a book called Fire Weather about the huge fires that consumed the Canadian oil sands and the town there. Amazingly, everyone escaped the town.
01:09:16
Speaker
The whole town was burned to the ground, fire tornadoes, like a firestorm like no one had ever seen anywhere before. And then the fire burned for like many, many weeks through the boreal forest and was seen from space.
01:09:32
Speaker
um And I say that because you read that about what happened there and then you look at some of the weather that's happening around the world and I look specifically at like the recent fires in l LA. If I'd been in l LA where I used to live in my apartment, the mandatory evacuation zone was across the street. like So I would have left 500 feet away. you pack You pack up your stuff and you go. You don't wait for the notification. Correct.
01:10:02
Speaker
That's an amazing book. It's very well written. It's in three parts. I've been recommending it to people. I say read the first two parts. The first two parts of the narrative about the fire. The third part is a bunch of data on climate change. It's interesting, but it's not really the crux of what makes that book so compelling.
01:10:17
Speaker
And then the second book that I read this past weekend, ah because I've been wanting to read it and it seemed very apt, is called California Burning and it was written probably almost 10 years ago and it's basically about PG and&E and the history of PG and&E and what to do about the fact that we have this now very changed climate and we have lots of utilities and I'm sure there are other contexts for this, right? like important infrastructure that's going to be implicated in huge disasters, and California has some unique laws that puts companies or utilities like PG and&E at risk of insolvency. um Other states don't have the same laws, but
01:11:02
Speaker
ah Those two books I would say kind of bookend both what climate change might portend and make something like what happened in l LA a little bit less surprising and then raises the question of what are you supposed to do afterwards? Because clearly saying we can't have electricity or right you're not gonna stop the winds, you're not gonna stop the drought,
01:11:30
Speaker
ah at least for a long time. A little light reading that was like reading. That was a sunny answer. I should have asked him about his biggest pet peeve. What's your favorite Harry Potter book? yeah And why is it the first one? That'll teach you to turn the question back on me. I know. I consider myself taught.
01:11:50
Speaker
and You wanted to offer a movie recommendation instead of a book recommendation to the audience did i it's not so much that I wanted to offer a movie recommendation as that I did not have a book recommendation um movie recommendation or a podcast Movie recommendation so okay but I have I have not been able to actually whittle down my favorite movies to the top five Okay, I've got a top seven But i actually, now that I think about it, it's it's ah an odd continuation of your focusing on ah natural resources and natural disasters in the LA metro area. Chinatown is one of my favorite movies ever. That's a great movie. Love that movie. And I think you're not supposed to love it anymore because, you know, Polanski got canceled. Yeah. But um fantastic movie. And I was just thinking of watching it tonight. So I might. ah Wow. There we go. There you go. That good. Yeah. Watch it twice.
01:12:57
Speaker
Our listeners aren't the only people being inspired by this podcast. yeah I might watch it. Book recommendation, podcast recommendation, movie recommendation. i Kevin didn't say this, but he I'm not a big reader to be honest. I used i used to read more. um movie recommendation I don't even know I watched American primeval on ah Netflix recently I haven't what's that one about it's a series actually so neither a book or a movie recommendation but my very good yeah it's a late a Western a Western series highly recommended all right the final question
01:13:38
Speaker
Well, you were a lawyer once upon a time. Usually I frame this as, you know, back when you were a young lawyer, but for you, Kevin, it's, you know, back when you were getting started in business, right? The elder statesman. ah
01:13:55
Speaker
12 years older than this guy. How did that happen? You don't look at... How did that happen? Something that you know now, that you wish that you'd known back then.
01:14:09
Speaker
You want me to go first? Yeah, go for it. um There is a lot that you can do with a law degree. ah So I mean, for me, graduating from law school, and i I really just wanted a job as a lawyer, ideally. And I didn't think about any any of the other options that might be available. um And I kind of just stumbled into this path that I'm on now. and um it Thankfully, i figured I learned that, and I didn't learn it at ah ah too late, but I could have done it sooner. um and so Yeah, I think that, look, don't go to law school if you know you don't want to be a lawyer, but if you went to law school and you're you've been a lawyer for X amount of time, you may have to make some trade-offs, but you can do other things, and you can be on an upward trajectory doing things that that you might like more. so
01:15:05
Speaker
I know there's a lot of happy lawyers, but if you're an unhappy lawyer and you want to do something else, there are options. That's great. I would say think outside in instead of inside out. So, for example, part of my job at Bright Flag is to you know grow our revenue, grow our business. Nowadays, I think about it in terms of how can I make the customers is successful? And if that happens, then Bright Flag's success will follow.
01:15:37
Speaker
But earlier in my career, much earlier in my career, I would have said, how can I get as much revenue from this customer as possible? right That would have been my starting point. So that's a very inside out way of thinking. I wish that I had learned the benefits of outside in thinking even sooner than I did.
01:15:56
Speaker
That's a great way to close. Kevin, Matt, thank you so much for- Tyler, Tyler. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of The Abstract. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks Tyler. And to all of our listeners, thanks so much for tuning in and we hope to see you next time.