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Ep 49: Will AI change Legal Work Forever?: Joe Green, Chief Innovation Officer, Gunderson Dettmer
78 Plays2 months ago
How is AI going to change the practice of law? How is one of the most forward looking law firms adapting? And will the billable hour go away?
Joe Green, Chief Innovation Officer at Gunderson Dettmer and Cofounder & Director of the Open Cap Table Coalition, steered a law career starting at major Wall Street firm Simpson Thacher towards the worlds of tech and product management, with stop-offs in academia and legal publishing along the way. Ultimately, he found that his legal mindset guided him in his technical work, and his understanding of business and innovation strengthened his legal abilities.
Listen as Joe discusses strategies to shift your careers towards your passion through pro bono work, stepping into board advisory roles, parsing the influx of investment into legal tech, and whether the billable hour will really go away in our lifetime.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-49
Topics: Introduction: 0:00
Moving into a tech advisor role at Gunderson Dettmer after a career start at Simpson Thacher: 2:11
Moving away from the standard legal path at Thompson Reuters: 5:38
Taking on side hustles that pull you towards tech and product: 8:43
Founding the Open Cap Table Coalition: 11:59
Rejoining Gunderson Dettmer and moving into the CIO role: 18:04
Challenging the billable hour model: 20:56
Leading and launching innovative projects: 30:06
Shifting from a legal to a technical mindset: 33:44
Discussing the influx of investment into legal tech: 37:20
Predicting the future of legal services: 41:06
Book Recommendations: 43:41
What you wish you’d known as a young lawyer: 45:40
Connect with us:
Joe Green - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joegreen1/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading CLM platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues.
Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Most folks in practice today, especially folks who manage bills and relationships and have to get paid, know that they're not making 100 cents on the dollar of you know whatever it is that they're billing. And so to the extent that they can do things more efficiently, most practice areas are feeling some some pricing pressure. And so you know I think the ability to be more effective to show your clients that you're being more effective to create a more compelling case for why you should be paid for the hours that you spend. I think it's not as in as much tension as maybe it was and you know in the past.
00:00:37
Speaker
How is AI going to change the practice of law? How is one of the most forward-looking law firms adapting? And will the billable hour go away? Today, we are joined on the abstract by Joe Green, the chief innovation officer at Gundersen, Joe has had a super interesting career at the intersection of law and technology. He's also a co-founder and director of the Open Cap Table Coalition, which I'm going to ask him about today. He's a fund advisor to the Legal Tech Fund and a board advisor to VicAI.
00:01:14
Speaker
He was also a board advisor to Omni, which was sold to JP Morgan. That's a pretty cool company, if you haven't heard of it before. And he's mentored and taught at both Central Michigan University and Columbia. He spent four years working at Thomson Reuters, working on practical law. And this is his second tour at Gundersen. He started his career doing something different at Simpson Thatcher, which we'll also talk about. Joe, thanks so much for joining me today for this episode of The Abstract. Awesome to be here, Tyler. Thanks for having me. All right, let's start some more fun before we get serious. Is the billable hour going away, Joe? Just throw out those softballs to start, huh? I think the answer is the same as it has been ah probably for the last two decades, which is any day now.
00:02:01
Speaker
any jane at all we'll We'll come back to this, like how is the legal profession evolving? But I want to go back in time just a little bit. You started your career at Simpson Thatcher tracking your time in six minute minute increments, not working for tech clients. ah When did you realize you wanted to move into tech? Was that a conscious decision or was that just something that that sort of came about by happenstance? Well, I had always been interested in technology you know kind of in my personal life. that you know I like gadgets, consumer tech, like many people. um I hadn't really considered professionally focusing on the technology industry. And when I went to Simpson, I had a very broad practice across a whole bunch of different industries. And it was actually through pro bono work that I kind of
00:02:52
Speaker
explored this this interest and it really happened pretty organically. Simpson had weekly sessions like clinics ah where even before I was admitted to the bar, I was able to go and talk to kind of you know micro entrepreneurs opening up a cafe somewhere in New York City or you know ah basically just kind of free services. And so I i you know kind of spent this time talking to very, very early stage you know entrepreneurs and kind of helping you know just helping them guide them through bureaucracy and you know kind of thinking about legal requirements. And you know frankly, anybody with Google could have done the same thing. But I enjoyed those conversations. And then I i you know kind of happened to get on um you know a couple of other projects. One was about you know kind of microfinance, a big microfinance organization. Another was kind of a clean tech sustainability incubator that was being run out of CUNY, City University of New York. And when I got a recruiter call,
00:03:46
Speaker
that, you know, mentioning Gunderson, I was not thinking about going to another law firm at all. I was thinking, you know, a bad going house or, you know, I wasn't I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do at that point. And I frankly didn't know that there was much of a New York tech scene at the time, because it was still quite fledgling. When I got that call, I thought if I wanted to do tech, I'd have to move out to California. So it was sort of the confluence of those things, right? it was Even though it was mostly my day job was working on kind of big Wall Street deals for big established companies, I had self-selected into these you know volunteer projects that all sort of had this kind of startup tech flavor um to them and you know just seemed like the right move.
00:04:27
Speaker
Was it a difficult transition to make in terms of servicing or you know dealing with Gunderson's clients, which I imagine are approaching and the way that they leverage outside counsel in a very different way, maybe that and some of Simpson Thatcher's clients were, at least the clients who you were working with? Yeah. I mean, as a junior associate, the the folks at Blackstone and KKR were not super interested in my business, my business advice. um Whereas when I moved to Gundersen and working with first-time entrepreneurs who you know have engineering backgrounds or you know other backgrounds in other industries but have never started a business before, pretty quickly I knew more than they did about the things that they were going to encounter. um And being able to give you know kind of equal parts business and legal advice um was something that I was really attracted to. It was one of the things that I really liked about working with
00:05:14
Speaker
um You know, folks who have, you know, less sophistication isn't the right word, just less experience, you know, having having kind of been through this rodeo before. Right. They're founders, they're entrepreneurs, they're good at taking something from zero to one. yeah They're good at hiring a team of engineers probably or product visionary folks or not so much necessarily at like all of the operational stuff that's happening to to make that go. when You decided to join Thomson Reuters. i mean That's a really interesting move. It's not like I'm going in-house to be an AGC somewhere or work for some you know awesome GC who's going to mentor me because someday I'm going to be a GC. ah Was it was it like scary to take this non-linear move and and get off that lawyer career path? to Tell us how that came about.
00:06:04
Speaker
Yeah, you know, from the time that I was at Simpson, where, you know, I mean, Simpson's such a phenomenal firm, such an amazing reputation. and And, you know, the idea of like, what are you going to do from there? And are you kind of foreclosing opportunities and kind of narrowing what your what your possibilities are coming from this place where people go on to do just, you know, whether they they stay there, become, you know, leading partners or move you know into all kinds of you know kind of amazing positions. that's sort of been ah It's been a ah question at every so you know kind of step of of my career. The the the move to Thomson Reuters was, um if you didn't kind of know where I'd come from, it seems a little bit out of left field. um the The head of the New York office at Gundersen, when I went in to give my notice, I think was you know ready to try to like
00:06:48
Speaker
you know pitch me on why I should stay and you know you know talk about it. and He sort of had to pause and he was like, I don't think I've had anyone leave to go to legal publishing before. It's not a common path. um you know That said, Practical Law has a large law firm's worth of attorney editors who have you know decades and decades of experience. It's actually kind of an you know an amazing place. For me, the journey to getting there was you know I had decided you know Despite having practiced for seven or eight years, um I decided pretty early on that that you know being a ah practicing law firm partner was not not kind of my end goal. yeah and It took a lot of thinking and experimentation to kind of figure out what ah what I wanted to do. I thought about academia. I wrote a law review article while I was while i was a practicing lawyer, co-authored a law review article with a professor at UNC Chapel Hill.
00:07:40
Speaker
a I had a stealth legal tech startup that didn't make it out of stealth. We couldn't find a a technical co-founder. I was even applying to PhD programs in neuroscience because I thought I wanted to study the intersection between neuroscience and and and decision making and law. Wow. I was all over the place. yeah and then ah And then another recruiter happened to call with a thing that I wasn't expecting. And, and you know, practical law and Thomson Reuters struck me as this interesting combination of writing, but writing about practical things, not kind of historic academic things, but things that would actually impact the way lawyers are practicing using the knowledge that I gained through all of those years of practicing.
00:08:21
Speaker
getting to work in the biggest one of the biggest legal tech companies in the world and you know getting to see whether I could build interesting things that would help lawyers, which I ended up doing at Thomson Reuters. um and ah you know Frankly, just having more time to be able to kind of figure out what it is that I wanted to do when I grow up. TR really did deliver on all of those things you know for me personally. It's around that time, you know, you're at Thomson orders, you start to have like some really interesting what I'd say like our side hustles, right? Or like, you know, you're advising this advising that I guess my first question before we talk about any of them specifically is, you know,
00:08:58
Speaker
yeah is Is your mindset changing now being a little bit on the tech side about what's possible for you or what's out there or the New York startup scene is growing up, right? Tell us about how you're thinking maybe differently now about what's possible in the intersection of tech and law. When I was at Thomson Reuters, that's really when I you know fell into the world of of legal tech. um and really kind of you know got I felt like you know kind of to the center of it um in in a lot of the things that I was doing. ah My job at Practical Law was to sit at my desk,
00:09:32
Speaker
and write resources for the practical law website. That's what my job description was, and that's what most practical auditors do, and they do a you know a fabulous job of it. And they do a bunch of other things, too. I mean, they do podcasts. They do you know all kinds of of other things. um From pretty soon after I got there, I had a whole bunch of ideas, and I had a very supportive boss. um And you know the the leadership at Practical Law was supportive of this, too. um Because of my startup background, you know pursuing product ideas, frankly, like I had an idea for a whole kind of startup and small business focused suite of resources and tools that got funding and that we built out. um I was, you know, because I had been advising startups for years and doing their beta tests and, you know, kind of, ah you know, been in that world. um You know, I got involved with, ah you know, a little bit with TR Ventures, a little bit with the labs doing various POC projects.
00:10:24
Speaker
um I was writing for kind of the Thomson Reuters Institute about the legal industry and going to conferences and um and and writing things. I still had this academic you know kind of notion that you know maybe that was the direction I was headed, so I published another four Law Review articles, I think, in the time that I was at practical law. chapter about legal tech and startup lawyering all kind of focused on technology, the intersection of technology, laws of business, where the industry was headed. And yeah, I mean, that was that was in addition to taking on some some board advisor, you know, you know type of roles. Yeah, I kind of I was a little bit all over the place.
00:11:01
Speaker
that they are they were very They were very kind to indulge me in my very interests. That's a good thing. i mean that's that's how That's how you start to figure out you know what you're passionate about. But I think also, at least this has been you know a little bit of my experience too, is when you're working on two or three or four things at once and and maybe you have your hands in things that are adjacent and related but slightly different, end up being better at all of them because you you feel more creative. At least at least that's my experience. I don't know if you're the same way Yeah, i I have found that I have a lot of really varied interests that end up, funny enough, kind of benefiting from one another, like yeah pulling these different kind of threads together in interesting ways, you know, has led to some very interesting opportunities. And I think that having the flexibility to do that, having the time to do that, I mean, it was one of the things that I struggled with as a practicing lawyer was just that, you know, I mean, it doesn't leave a whole lot of time for for anything else, unless you're very, very intentional about it.
00:11:59
Speaker
I am really curious about one of these, and it's not something that I've researched deeply and know a lot about, which is the open cap table coalition, which you help start. can Can you tell us about that? Tell us about the mission. Yeah, absolutely. so I guess for for listeners who may not be you know as familiar with kind of the the startup law space, um you know every every startup company out there has to keep track of who owns the startup. If you've ever worked at a startup and you've gotten stock options, you know that we need to keep track of that. and Historically, it was law firms that did that. We used to just do it in Excel. And we had you know kind of complicated Excel models. And then you know a decade plus ago, Carta came onto the scene and ah you know more and more startups and and their law firm started managing cap tables on a software platform.
00:12:44
Speaker
um And that has expanded. There are other players in the market that happen, been even with predating Carta. But you know that's become the norm now. And one of the challenges you know in the market is that different law firms have different ways of doing things. Different platforms have different ways of doing things. Everybody wants this stuff to work better and be more seamless ah so that you know the technology can be more enabling of you know handling this kind of administrative work just you know more easily, more more cost-effectively. And one of the biggest challenges with it is that there's no standard for what a cap table is. and So a very small group as it started out, you know, me and ah two other folks, a colleague of mine who was a former colleague of mine who was at Latham at the time and has since returned to Latham, and one of the co-founders and CEOs of of one of the cap table platforms.
00:13:39
Speaker
got together and ah you know just started thinking about well what you know what would benefit this industry is having some kind of standard that allows everyone to you know be speaking the same language, move data from one system to another, um and especially for different you know reasons. you know You may have your cap table on one platform, but you may want to conduct a tender offer using a separate software provider. Sure. um And so being able to you know kind of have that flow of data you know more easily ah you know was something that was an obvious pain point for everyone kind of involved in the industry. And so from there, we kind of you know started reaching out to people that we knew, engaging their interests, and you know ended up getting a ah kind of initial founding group of 10 of the
00:14:22
Speaker
top law firms you know kind of who have most of the market share in the capital space and the biggest platforms, Carta, LTSC Equity, and and Morgan Stanley shareworks at the time um to be part of this founding group, um which then grew to you know about over 50 members. We recently just became a ah trade organization, a 501c6 trade organization, so now it's a trade organization with dues-paying members. It includes the vast majority of the stakeholders in the space. And there's been real outputs. We've created a JSON data standard, open source data standard, that you can find on GitHub. You can get there from opencaptablecoalition.com. And people are contributing to it outside of the dues paying members. People are building whole cap table platforms on the standard. We've also built an Excel based standard that we call OCX. The JSON standard is called OCF, open cap format. So a lot of work has been done, a lot of engineering hours from all of these different organizations, lots of hours of fair subject matter experts from these firms. It's really been kind of an incredible thing. I sort of have to pinch myself. This started with just a few people just kind of having a conversation, saying, hey, there's got to be a better way to do this.
00:15:40
Speaker
Was aligning all of those stakeholders challenging? i mean and you know Law firms are not necessarily known for wanting to work with each other super well. or and I guess it's a little bit different, but you see folks trying to do this around, say, like standard contracts between like Let's have a standard template for an NDA that all businesses use and then we don't have to negotiate or data protection, addendum. or and to be i mean I think that those efforts are great, but like those haven't really taken off maybe in the same way that this have. Slightly different scenario, but like was actually bringing those people together easier or was it pretty challenging? Yeah, surprisingly easy. um But I think that's not necessarily transferable to some of these other these other initiatives that you've that you've spoken up, which I'm familiar with too and and you know think are great. yeah The coordination challenges of doing something like you know trying to get every business or every big business to agree on kind of like a standard form of of and NDA.
00:16:36
Speaker
Is is massive right i mean there's just so you have to kind of like pick an area right the the places where this sort of stuff has been successful at least in the legal context i think of the nbc a venture financing yeah agreements as being an example of kind of a standardization you know. ISDA in the derivatives ah marketplace. And again, I think it's when you have a a somewhat smaller group of core stakeholders, um and there's really sufficient alignment that everybody kind of feels this feels the pain and sees what the value proposition is. nothing I think that's you know kind of what we experienced is that in having these conversations with the the law firms that were initially part of the coalition and the platforms, like nobody needed to be sold on why this is a thing that was a problem that needed to be solved. And then the actual solving of it, you would think, like, you know, for a bunch of lawyers, I mean, we were meeting, you know, every other Friday for, you know, two years, debating, you know, what should be included in a cap table and, you know, just like, the dorkiest things imaginable. We all had a really good time doing it. And it actually turns out, like, you know, because we all have kind of felt the pain of, you know, doing this the way that we've been doing it.
00:17:44
Speaker
And there there are just way more similarities than differences. And so it's actually been it's actually been kind of like an amazingly harmonious experience for them so far. But yeah, I think that some of those some of those bigger, ah you know kind of broader initiatives to standardize you know kind of contracting across the board or writ large, but it's a much bigger endeavor. Tell me a little bit about the decision to rejoin Gundersen and what brought you back to the firm. but also When you were hired, it wasn't for the CIO role, so how that sort of came about and and evolved to to get you to the seat that you're sitting in now.
00:18:20
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So when I was at Thomson Reuters, I mentioned I was writing a bunch of things about about the legal industry and and you know really just kind of like a sponge just soaking up everything that I was learning about kind of you know trends in the industry, where things were going. And from that perch, from that view, you know it was really a 30,000 foot view I was looking at from you know, solo practitioners and the products that they were, you know, ah buying and the kind of you know issues that they were facing all the way up to the largest global law firms. And, you know, kind of what, what the trends were, you know, kind of in that, um you know, throughout the industry.
00:18:54
Speaker
um Because I had been writing a variety of different you know articles, I got a call for a book chapter. um based just a A cold email asked if I wanted to contribute to a book on legal innovation. And I had this idea, um this thesis, that the firms like Gundersen, the firms that are you know kind of focusing on and and and you know have large presences in the you know emerging companies, venture capital space, um were going to be at the vanguard of change in the industry for for a variety of reasons. you know the nature of their clients being very tech savvy and and you know ah wanting there to be technology solutions for for everything, as well as you know cost sensitivity. i mean There's just kind of a whole slew of of reasons that I kind of had this idea. and so I went around and I talked to you know a whole bunch of ah the firms in the space to kind of see what they were doing, how they were thinking about things. and you know I wrote this book chapter
00:19:47
Speaker
And at the time, ah you know, Gunderson was having a lot of those thoughts internally. And I was still friends with a lot of the people who I kind of grew up with there. We would still have lunch, you know, for the four and a half years. And I was having lunch with people from Gunderson at least once a week, even if not twice a week. And so just through those kind of very organic conversations about all the things that I was learning and and thinking about, um you know, we sort of realized that that maybe maybe there was, ah you know, alignment for me to come back and try to actually put some of those things into action. which was very attractive. It was a place that I knew, ah people that I knew, and liked very much in an industry that I thought was really, or a part of the the industry that I thought was really ripe ah for for, you know, real change. And so, yeah, I came back. My title my title was Director of Client Experience. Gundersen, you know, was just kind of starting to dip its toes into having people who had been full-time practicing lawyers in these kinds of you know more kind of business and technology roles. and ah But you know in reality, my title my title changed a few years into the job, but the job itself you know hasn't really changed at all you know from the time that I've been back at the firm. you know This is basically what I've been doing.
00:20:57
Speaker
We're going to talk a little bit about some of the initiatives that you have underway and the resources that you've got. But I've got to ask this sort of question, which is there there is a tension between, and we can talk about this too, maybe like the traditional billable hour business model and doing things in a faster, more efficient, innovative way. At least in theory, there's a little bit of attention there. And you see... I'm assuming you have 100% realization, but yes. and And you see a bunch of law firms hiring CIOs, and I think that the this sort of leash that they're given to innovate probably varies considerably. What's the sort of push and pull like between you and the partnership? And and also maybe when you were stepping into this role, how did you know that like it was going to be for real and and you were going to get the resources that you needed to actually sort of help the firm innovate?
00:21:52
Speaker
It was a large part of my conversations in coming into the role was you know kind of how committed and how serious was the partnership around you know doing this stuff. And I and i satisfied myself that that they were serious about you know kind of making a go of it. That said, you know in coming into the role, there was a lot of ah you know kind of meeting people, talking to people, kind of you know bit by bit incrementally, building up consensus for the types of things, the types of bigger changes you know that that that we've been pursuing. um And I think you know that varies tremendously by firm. I mean, firms also vary tremendously in terms of their you know geographic complexity, their size, um and the nature of their clientele. And that's one area where we're extremely fortunate in that our clientele are tech entrepreneurs, my science as entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists. And you know these these are folks who understand technology.
00:22:43
Speaker
technology. Whereas in many other firms, when they're you know kind of key clients are very large, highly regulated banks, insurance companies, you know that those just tend to be much more conservative institutions, particularly in the way that they deal with their outside counsel. The banks are a very interesting story in that you know they they themselves have tons of you know technology, and invest tremendously in technology, ah but don't appear to trust their law firms to do that. yeah because they put a lot of restrictions um on what their law firms can do. and i think I think in many firms, that's more where the tension seems to be these days, is in coming from clients putting shackles on what law firms cant you know can or can't do yeah in ways that make it very hard um you know to innovate. you know To your point about the um you know the the tension with the billable hour. I think that most most folks in practice today, especially folks who manage bills and relationships and have to get paid, you know know that they're not you know making 100 cents on the dollar of you know whatever it is that they're billing. And so to the extent that they can do things more efficiently,
00:23:53
Speaker
actually realize that you know the the time that's spent on you know on on on those matters and then deploy those hours else elsewhere, even if you stay under a billable hour model, you know mean most practice areas most practice areas are feeling some some pricing pressure. And so you know I think the ability to be more effective, to show your clients that you're being more effective, to create a more compelling case for why you should be paid for the hours that you spend, I think it's not as in as much tension as maybe it was. and you
00:24:22
Speaker
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00:25:39
Speaker
do immediately today, but it is going to spark a behavioral change and an expectation change. And that is going to proceed, say like the efficiency gains that will come from the technology. So I mean, one sort of observation that I'm curious for for your thought on is like, do you see that? Do you think that's right? A second would be around the idea of lawyers wanting to work more efficiently and dedicating their time to other tasks or other client matters or that are more interesting or like yeah more interesting right to them or a more productive use of their time. I think that's right. I think that that happens at the top end of the market, though, because it assumes that demand is like pretty inelastic for legal services. right like there's there's yeah yeah and And so Gundersen is going to thrive in that world, whereas maybe
00:26:31
Speaker
Actually, i mean you can debate this too. right like Maybe second tier law firms won't and third tier law firms actually will because like they're cheap and super efficient. right yeah and don't know I'm curious for your thoughts on on both of those ah hypotheses. Yeah, I mean, to take the latter, I think, you know, differentiation and being able to really, you know, kind of deliver services effectively and efficiently, I think are are going to be, you know, pretty key in in the world that we're moving into. And it'll be interesting to see how firms, you know, kind of in that.
00:27:03
Speaker
mushy middle, yeah you know navigate that. um you know As for the demand piece of it, obviously, there's a point at which maybe this breaks down and certainly, you know I think there are major business model ramifications, but I do think there's a tremendous amount of latent demand in the market. I think that in-house legal departments have grown so big in part because outside council has gotten so expensive. Yeah. and If the cost of delivering outside counsel services decreases and the work that's actually being done by the outside counsel is increasingly higher value, real value add work, yes you know I think that could work out very nicely for everybody, the clients as you know clients as well as as as the firms.
00:27:43
Speaker
But I think it's a tricky thing to navigate. And I think you know certainly the the pricing model, the billable hour, and kind of the leverage model of most most major law firms strikes me as you know potentially being quite wobbly. Not necessarily today. I think Akshay, your COO, is right that you know where the technology is at today, you know you can see the potential. You can see how this is now coming for things that we would have thought would would have been kind of you know purely the province of human beings for a long time. And that does have everybody thinking that there will be kind of behavioral change. You can already see it kind of in the conversations you know around this between buy side and sell side um you know in in the industry. But for the technology to really kind of you know fulfill on the promise, it's still got a little ways to go. i mean the The pace of change has been incredible. I wouldn't be yeah i would be betting against this happening than people expect. and Anybody who's not kind of thinking about it and planning for it, I think, will be sorry.
00:28:42
Speaker
yeah it is um my My hope, and this is what i you know what I tell folks all the time, is having done this, having practiced for as long as I did, I feel in my bones all of the places that there is pain in in the you know in being a lawyer, and so much of it is unnecessary. okay So much of it is things that none of us went to law school to do. Nobody gets out of bed in the morning excited to go do a lot. of you know When I started practicing, I was printing out pages that had people's signature lines on it and PDFing them. you know
00:29:18
Speaker
acting them places I mean, it's you know this is not certainly not why I thought I went to law school. And so you know I do think that there's you know a potentially very positive future in terms of um you know giving lawyers the time to actually focus on the things where we actually do provide a lot of value. And then reframing in clients' minds that that's the thing that you're actually paying us for. It's not the thing of the paper. and the you I mean, listen, those are necessary evils to getting work done, which is why. And most people don't want to do it or anyone can't do it very efficiently. And so you know that's why we do it. There's a reason we do it. It's not it's not because we love it, ah you know those pieces of the job. But I think there's a lot of potential for everyone to be kind of focusing on
00:29:56
Speaker
higher and better things. There's not enough hours in the day for anyone yeah do the things to do the things that we're you know that we're trying to do. I think of all we could do if we could free up some of that time. Tell us about some of the things that you're building. i mean Chat GD, good name, is is maybe yeah gonna be the biggest launch that you've had. but But tell us about what you're working on from a product and technical perspective because being Chief Innovation Officer is not just about talking about innovation at Gundersen. I know. and It's not just about, I'm going to go out and buy a license to chat GPT for our attorneys. Yeah. And listen, I mean, you know, philosophically, anytime we can go out and buy a license to well supported third party software, where there's a market incentive for them for them to make it better. Great, like, you know, should not be in the business of building all everything they need to run their business in house, we're not going to build workday, and we're not going to build our financial management system necessarily, right? It's it's where do you draw that line? And and you know, what's the most effective way to build to build the thing you need to build to solve the problem? You know, for so much of this, you know, it doesn't it doesn't need to be
00:31:01
Speaker
ah you know kind of of a very bespoke ah solution. For some of it, it does. you know For us, ChachiD, I think, is an interesting kind of you know example ah of that kind of buy versus build decision making in practice. you know We did not set out, you know when ChachiPD came out, we did not say, oh, we should build that. are internal use. That is not a thought that occurred to me in a loose. But when GPT-4 came out and Case-Tex and Harvey had kind of early access to it and where you know there was kind of a feeding frenzy around you know firms you know kind of working with those companies,
00:31:38
Speaker
um you know We had some conversations there, looked at the price tag, and for us anyway, you know we kind of looked at that and said, i mean that is a lot of money for a product category that doesn't exactly exist right now, and we're not sure whether people are going to use it, what kind of value they're going to find out of it. And I had ah a colleague with a technical background ah who said, hey, most of this stuff is open source and it's sort of out there. ahha I think maybe we could build something that would do something you know like this. and And when I say like this, we weren't looking to build a solution that was going to say, hey, now lawyers, this is how you do X, Y, and Z. You don't do it the way you used to do it. Now you use this tool. Really what we wanted to build was all we really wanted to do, the problem we were trying to solve is
00:32:22
Speaker
This isn't going to be a foundational technology. We are in the technology business. Our lawyers should be getting exposure to this, get their hands on it, be able to understand what it is, what it can do today, what it can't do today, and figure out how they might be able to make it useful for themselves. And we wanted them to be able to do that in a secure way where we could also learn from the way that they were using it. So that's why we built what we built. And you know what we built was an application that allows you to chat directly with you know one of the Azure OpenAI LLMs or do retrieval augmented generation where you know end user can upload some documents and then may effectively chat with the documents. um
00:32:59
Speaker
And it was a huge success for the goals that we set out, which was getting our people some hands-on experience. We did it in an incredibly cost-effective way, while the market continues to mature and develop and figure it out. And frankly, still, in many cases, struggle to get that last mile to a full kind of production, consistent, repeatable solution. um you know Certainly, ah you know struggles terribly to get to any kind of headless solution that doesn't require a human in the loop. And so we feel really happy with what we did there. It was a great example of why taking a swing at something that wasn't on our roadmap wasn't something we were planning to do. It seemed like it was a good time to be nimble and explore it.
00:33:44
Speaker
Do you feel like you're i mean you're working with product managers you're working with engineers you're probably working on product requirement documents and and you know pushing this forward and do you feel like your mindset has changed like do you think of yourself as a lawyer anymore i mean i'm i'm almost asking specifically like are you going to partners in the firms and and saying like Hey, help me identify the risks here. like To what extent are you thinking about all this? I'm not saying people can't you know wear two hats at once, obviously, but it's it is it's a little tough to be the one who's like, we're going to push this whole initiative forward and try to drive adoption and meet these deadlines and and also be the one who feels like, you know okay, I'm responsible for identifying all the things that could go wrong with this or all the risks to the business. like How do you handle that?
00:34:31
Speaker
Yeah, you know so my partner in crime and all of this, Naveen Pai is our our chief knowledge officer. We we sort of you know came up came up together as the first lawyers who kind of moved into these into these roles. and you know I think we sort of view ourselves as the product managers, and but the but the product isn't the isn't the tech solution. that we're building, right? That's a tool. ah The product is delivering modern legal services, you know, modern seeming legal services to, you know, to our clients. um And the the inputs that go into that, I mean, the technology is just one kind of small component to that we, you know, we deal with kind of process management and
00:35:07
Speaker
process improvement kind of across the board you know with with our with our you know end attorneys. Knowledge management and you know how we have the right raw materials that lawyers need to actually do their jobs and the third party technology tools that we integrate into that. How do we bring all of that together to deliver the services? That's the product that we're managing. Interesting. Everything else is sort of, you know it's it's ah it's a piece of the puzzle. And I think the benefit of that is that because both of us spent significant years in practicing and practicing here, ah huh we don't have to go out and do a focus group or you know or or you know don find out where you know where is this process broken like we know.
00:35:44
Speaker
um you know we We know where the issues are. We still talk to people, right? I mean, you know without question. We also still do a fair bit of lawyering. People come to us because we're the ones who are the repositories for all the difficult problems that like people are wondering, do we have a solution for this? Has somebody come across this before? We're sort of the connective tissue around that. So I actually spend a fair bit of my line thinking deeply about legal problems and whether we should you know kind of take a position as a firm on you know kind of this form or this language or how we negotiate this or what I mean. of policies on these other things. So I in no way do I feel like I've kind of left being a lawyer, you know, I don't advise clients on a daily basis on on, on you know, kind of or do their deals. But i you know, I'm still I still feel very much, you know, kind of connected to that world.
00:36:29
Speaker
The thing that I picked up, I mean, I was an English and business major, and then I went to law school. I had no actual technical background. So all of the things that I picked up around building technology, building product, helps me be, I hope, an effective translator. Lawyers have desires and, you know, needs and, you know, want things done. And in many cases, kind of think like, well, that can't be too hard. Right. And then there's the like, oh, we need to actually go do this thing. And it actually is quite hard. And like, you know, I feel like I've built up enough credibility to be able to mediate that conversation in in ah in a productive way, in a way that's, you know, hey, we're trying to get get to yes, find an answer here, find a solution. It may not be your platonic ideal of what that solution, you know, could be because we don't have kind of unlimited resources. I still feel very much, you know, kind of afoot firmly planted in in in both of these worlds. so
00:37:20
Speaker
I've got one question for you that I thought of on on legal tech. i mean you say you're an advisor to the legal tech fund um You mentioned looking at or or evaluating Harvey, which you know right now is is raising sort of more money than anyone else. I've not seen the product. I don't know anybody at Harvey. like but um as a part of that process, also generating maybe sort of like the most promise but also the most skepticism of anybody in the legal tech industry. I'm not putting this question to you just as like a talk about Harvey and and what you think there, but more you know a broader sense of
00:38:00
Speaker
Is there the right amount of focus and investment in legal tech? Is there not enough? Are the bets too concentrated? what's What's your thought on investment in the legal tech landscape right now? It's ah it's a great question and ah one that I've had a lot of exposure to like much more so than in a pre-chat GPT world, where you know we represent many, if not most of the kind of marquee you know venture capital investors you know out there and and growth equity investors out there in the world. And I've spoken to many of them.
00:38:34
Speaker
not giving them legal advice, right but in my capacity as you know someone who who you know kind of has a view of this industry and where it's headed and you know kind of how technology plays a role in that and how we're deploying technology today. but And so I've spoken to many of our of our VC funds about it. And I think that the you know Zach and the LegalTech, Zach Posner and the LegalTech Fund were you know kind of very early to this game of seeing that you know legal was this interesting area. And it's a very broad conception of what legal tech is, right? I mean, it's the FinTech and RegTech and you know a whole bunch of you know different areas that all really do have you know very strong kind of legal components um you know to them. I think that it's a very exciting time to be building technology in legal because so many VCs are wanting to get smart on the industry and understand
00:39:25
Speaker
you know, kind of the dynamics at play. And yes, AI has kind of brought a lot of them, ah you know, to the industry, kind of the promise of this kind of transformative change. But I think that's going to bleed into, you know, a whole bunch of, I mean, every software product is going to be an AI company to some degree, right? There's nobody building software that didn't pause their roadmap to see where they should be integrated into their product. And if they did, they're probably not long for this world. or if they didn't do that. um So you know I think that you know once the money comes and kind of develops a thesis, an investment thesis around the industry, all of a sudden, you know there's just going to be a lot more capital and a lot more a lot more investment in the industry. um And I think that's going to you know breed successes. ah And I think that's i think that's super super exciting. I also think another trend that I've noticed in talking to a lot of entrepreneurs in the space, I spend a lot of time
00:40:20
Speaker
and talking to the startup founders as well, is that a lot of people with real deep tech backgrounds, I mean, I'm talking, you know they were developing autonomous driving companies or like, you know, very big data companies, talent here, people who are moving into the legal tech space. That was not a trend, right? like i mean it was you know Legal tech was in many ways dominated by people who kind of had a legal background, had a problem, wanted to scratch the rich, built a product. And you know great companies have come out of that. And that's that's often a source of of of great ideas as people who have been in the trenches. And I mean, that's that's what I do. yeah But I think that the interest of people with you know really strong technical capabilities is a very positive sign for where the industry is headed from up from a technical perspective.
00:41:05
Speaker
maybe a last sort of substantive question for you. And I mean, look, we've we've talked about this for the better part of 40 minutes, but um you know if you had a sort of crystal ball or you were thinking about, hey, five years down the road, this is how I see the law firm business model evolving or the market for legal services, maybe let's say more broadly evolving, where Where do you think we'll be? it's hard you know the Putting a time on it is the hardest part of all that's in in many ways because you know i mean it it could be much sooner than that. and Also, people have been, like I said, you know saying that the billable hour was dead for for many, many years. yeah um I think that the model
00:41:51
Speaker
through which firms deliver services is not just changing because of AI. It's because everybody who's alive today buys goods and services from companies that have a very kind of, you know, customer centric philosophy and a modern experience. I go to the Apple store and make it very easy for me to spend money. Very, very easy. right and and like We all have that experience and then we have experiences with businesses that are not like that. None of us like it. right and so like you know as as As we move on here, that's only going to grow and the capabilities that law firms now have at their disposal to be able to deliver more modern feeling services and hopefully reframe in clients' minds what is the value proposition of what law firms do.
00:42:38
Speaker
you know beyond having what appear to be relatively junior people spending countless hours doing things that people think are very low value necessary evils. I think that's the transition that firms are going to go through. I think the firms that navigated successfully could come out of this even better, even more profitable, even stronger, and with much client much higher client satisfaction and stickiness. But I think it's i think it's going to be a windy road. you know and I think it's going to be it's certainly going to be very interesting to see how market participants react and how nimble law firm partnerships can be yeah to react to these kinds of you know market developments that are coming on, I think, pretty quick.
00:43:16
Speaker
super interesting to think about. I mean, it's client services, right? But you almost think of a client, like the expectations of a client are different than the expectations of a consumer, at least in sort of modern parlance around like what delivery looks like and what satisfaction should be. And but that's interesting. I've got just a couple of sort of fun questions for you that I like to ask folks as as we wrap up. ah The first is if there's a good book that you've read recently or that has been really important in your career development that you'd like to recommend to our audience and it does not have to be about AI.
00:43:53
Speaker
although look good yeah actually I actually have not been reading books on AI. Enough enough of my enough of my my day that I don't need to devote more time to it. um So I actually just finished writing another book chapter yeah about you know kind of big law business strategy and andd management where I read thousands of pages and multiple books on that topic. One of my favorites from that is from a professor named Laura Empson in the UK. She wrote a book called Leading Professionals, Power, Politics, and Primadonnas. It's quite excellent. It's given me a lot of food for thought. I highly recommend that one to anybody who's in the law firm world and wanting a better understanding of what makes law firms tick and why they work the way that they do, and some of the benefits of that partnership model. The book I'm reading right now, because apparently I should be reading a novel or something to take my mind off this stuff, but I can't seem to help it. I'm reading a book called Priceless by William Poundstone, which is about the psychology of pricing. It deals a lot with behavioral economics, which was sort of the thing that I was applying for PhD programs in neuroscience has been a real interest of mine for a long time. It's really fascinating.
00:45:10
Speaker
If folks want to find your book chapter, where do they look for that? Sure. um It's on SSRN, the the Social Science Research Network. There's a draft up there. It hasn't been published ah yet. But it's going to be in an Oxford handbook on law and management. um that's That's going to be coming out hopefully hopefully later this year. Academic publishing timelines are are ah ah variable. But um yeah, the draft is is up on SSRN dot.com. We'll find that for the show notes. Awesome. All right. As we start to wrap up, I've got one final question for you that I like to ask all of our guests, which is, you know if if you could look back on your days, young days as a lawyer, maybe at Simpson Thatcher, maybe even at Gunderson for the first time, you're just getting started. Something that you know now that you wish that you'd known back then.
00:46:04
Speaker
um You know, one of the one of the things that has has really guided me on what someone once called my eclectic career path, I decided to take that as a compliment backhanded though it might have been. Who knows? um One of the things that's really guided me is something that I actually learned a long time ago when I was I think maybe in high school. I was reading biographies of people who you know seem to have really, you know, kind of done amazing things, found really interesting jobs. The type of people, are you know, magazine articles, people who have this job where they're like, I wake up every day and I'm happy to go to work. I have to admit that was not my experience of being a practicing lawyer. yeah I did not wake up every day thrilled to go to work. In part, that's what drives me to try to make it a better experience for for all of my friends who are still, you know, still still doing it. I realized that people who ended up in jobs that they really loved
00:46:55
Speaker
almost in almost to a person, had no idea that that existed when they were going through school, had no conception of how to get there. There was no linear path to that. And I followed a pretty traditional guy. I went to college. I went to law school. I went to Simpson Thatcher. I allowed him to another law firm. Keeping an open mind to trying different things out, different possibilities, even when it seems scary, even when it feels like, hey, you're going off of this linear path. Oftentimes, the linear path does not lead to places that people are thrilled that they ended up.
00:47:28
Speaker
Yeah. And that's something that really stuck with me um and has, you know, made me more willing than I think I might have otherwise been to, you know, put myself out there, put things out into the universe and see, you see what kind of comes back. um And that that's that's usually my advice for for young lawyers is to, you know, Be open to exploring different things. It's hard to carve out the time, especially when you're practicing law, to you know kind of pursue other kinds of interests. But you know if you're not happy doing what you're doing, try to try to find low-risk ways of experimenting with things that you think you might be more stimulated by. Because the best thing about my job is that I wake up every day truly feeling like I'm going to do something that's stimulating and that I'm going to find interesting and hard. I like solving hard problems. We've got plenty of those. So it keeps me busy.
00:48:12
Speaker
And if there's a theme to the podcast, ah that is it. So you may i see yourself in an advertisement for season four of The Abstract sometime soon. awesome Joe, thank you so much for joining me for this episode. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks a lot, Tyler. And to all of our listeners, thanks so much for tuning in, and we hope to see you next time.