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AI Agents and Business Development - Lee Curtis
252 Plays3 months ago
In this episode, Graham Seldon & Katie Rosser speak with Lee Curtis, a legal BD and sales expert turned tech entrepreneur, who is transforming how marketing and business development (BD) teams operate using AI.
Lee shares his journey of co-founding Legal Engine, an AI-powered platform designed specifically for the legal industry. We dive into the creation of Leonard, their first AI team member, capable of turning spoken insights into CRM entries, directory content, and BD assets without losing nuance or context.
This episode explores the intersection of AI and professional services, and what the future holds for BD, marketing, and tech adoption across the sector.
Key Topics:
- The evolution from legal BD to legal tech entrepreneurship
- How AI agents can streamline heavy BD & marketing tasks
- The story behind Legal Engine and its first AI team member, Leonard
- What this innovation means for law firms and professional services
Listen to how Lee is reshaping the way firms work with AI—without losing the human touch.
Related Links:
- Whitepaper - Your new colleague is a machine
- Passle report - US & UK Cross-Selling & AI in Legal Marketing Survey 2025
Seldon Rosser is a global executive search firm specialising in placing senior leaders in Business Development, Marketing, and Communications across professional services.
Credits: Music by Grand_Project from Pixabay
Produced by Kwame Slusher Audio
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Transcript
Welcome to 'Shortlisted' Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
You're listening to Shortlisted, a podcast from Seldon Rosser, the leading executive search firm that connects professional services firms to the best leadership candidates in business development, sales, marketing, and communications.
00:00:15
Speaker
This podcast is dedicated to helping ambitious leaders in professional services build high-performing, market-leading firms. I'm Graeme Seldon. And I'm Katie Rosser.
00:00:25
Speaker
And in each episode, we bring you candid conversations with leaders who are driving growth and innovation in their fields. be it leadership and strategy to talent management, client development, marketing communications, or cutting edge technologies, including AI.
00:00:40
Speaker
We explore the key areas that contribute success in today's competitive landscape. Whether you're a CEO, managing partner, CMO, or any other C-suite in law, consulting, engineering, accounting, or any other professional services firm, Shortlisted is your go-to resource for actionable insights and inspiring stories.
Meet Lee Curtis: Legal Tech Visionary
00:01:02
Speaker
Today we welcome a guest who is at the forefront of AI and who might just change the face of marketing and BD teams as we know them. From a career in legal BD and sales to tech entrepreneur, Lee Curtis has worked his way around the world with some of the biggest law firms to now being a co-founder of Legal Engine, building a team of AI agents to handle process heavy marketing and BD tasks.
00:01:28
Speaker
Their first AI team member is Leonard, created for the legal industry, and who can turn spoken insights into CRM entries, directory content, and BD assets without losing context.
From London to Legal Engine: Lee's Journey
00:01:43
Speaker
But we're pleased to have the real human here to tell us more. Hello, Lee. Hi, Lee. Hi, Graham. How are yeah and Hey, Katie. How's it going? Now, before we get into the whole AI business you founded, just tell our listeners a little bit about your career background.
00:02:01
Speaker
I think I met you, Graham, what, it it must have been over 20 years ago now. i started life in London at Allen & Overy. And then 2008, I basically got bored of going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark. So I booked a one-way flight to Sydney.
00:02:19
Speaker
I met you and Katie very soon after that. I worked for a company called Clayton Newt, a firm that your listeners will know very well. And I did that for a few years. Then I went up to Hong Kong, worked for Clifford Chance for a bit.
00:02:35
Speaker
Simmons and Simmons brought me back from Hong Kong to do a global role out of London. So I came back to London in 2015. I did a few roles ah with Simmons and Simmons. The last role that I did was I set up and built the sales team.
Tackling Law Firm Admin with AI
00:02:51
Speaker
So still in the yeah UK, possibly in Australia. Sales has that to that connotation. It kind of splits ah a group of people in law firms. But we set up a sales function selling directly to customers of the law firm and new customers, mainly legal products.
00:03:09
Speaker
And when I was doing that, I'd always had this itch for about the last 15 years to set up on my own. And so I did that in 2022, founded a company called Linar, but that's ah concentrates on on humans and sales training for humans, mainly lawyers.
00:03:29
Speaker
And then during the course of that, I really decided to lean in heavily to tech and AI because I could see the writing on the wall, essentially. There's a lot even in sales outside of law, even outside of professional services, there is a lot, there's a heavy lift on admin related to sales and business development. And that can be done, frankly, better by a computer than it can by humans.
00:03:58
Speaker
You founded Legal Engine. So Legal Engine is building AI-powered assistants to help Law firms, scale-led business operations, particularly in areas like directory submissions, credentials, pitches, CRM entries, etc.
00:04:14
Speaker
Now, you recently wrote a white paper where you boldly predicted that 70% of BD tasks will be handled by AI agents by 2027.
00:04:27
Speaker
So what inspired you to focus on this transformation? What specific pain points in law firm processes are you aiming to solve,
AI's Impact on BD Tasks by 2027
00:04:35
Speaker
do you think? I mean, the one word as to why we founded Legal Engine um that describes it really is pain.
00:04:42
Speaker
You know, in my and my career, um whether it was me doing it or managing big global teams, there was a load of pain in my teams. what what the How did that pain manifest itself?
00:04:56
Speaker
They were buried constantly. in admin related tasks. So whether that was the directory submission, the internal report, the updating ah of a spreadsheet, the pitch content that no one could find because the person before you had left and it wasn't filed correctly, the marketing list, there was just so much pain that was chaining people to their desk for hour after hour.
00:05:23
Speaker
And i see great people in my career and speaking to law firms who are just buried. And their skills, the skills that they were actually recruit, that you guys recruit for are just completely lost.
00:05:38
Speaker
You know, we recruit magnificent, outgoing, bubbly people that we want to get in front of clients every single day. But because of the admin load and the heavy lift, they can't do it because they just simply haven't got hours in the day. And so Legal Engine's vision is It's really quite simple.
00:05:58
Speaker
Let us do the jobs that you hate, right? And that can actually be done by a computer that are repeatable, that actually no one likes doing. No one in my career ever said to me, yay, another marketing list to review.
00:06:15
Speaker
Yay, another directory submission. It's all of those repeatable tasks that need to be done at scale that no one wants to do. But actually, they're quite critical to the so the running of the BD engine.
00:06:31
Speaker
The easiest example to give you is credentials and credentials management. Firms over the years have spent millions collectively on various different CRM systems. And there's a load of them.
00:06:43
Speaker
that are really quite good. They're really quite good. The challenge people don't use them. because they don't see the value in this kind of collective, we're going to put stuff in and get value out.
Leonard: The AI Assistant for Lawyers
00:06:57
Speaker
And so part of what we're doing is trying to solve that problem as well. It's really interesting. And just explore this pain a little bit more. And I wonder how much pain you'd noticed and maybe missed opportunity by the firm as well.
00:07:11
Speaker
And revenue walking out the door because of this problem. Yeah. So I've got, i mean I mean, there's a personal anecdote I'll share with you. And then there's a report that's been done by a company called Passle. So the personal anecdote is, like I said, at Simmons, I built the sales team.
00:07:26
Speaker
What did that mean? It meant I was on 20 to 30 client calls trying to peddle their legal products every single week. And so I was sat in there with some really quite senior partners and clients every single day. And these were the partners that we consider we'd probably term in the industry the rainmakers, the proactive ones, the engaged ones.
00:07:50
Speaker
And even at that level, which constitutes probably between 5% and 10% of any firm, even at that level, and this remember this was during COVID, so most of it was done online, I'd listened to these clients and I'd listened to the discussions we were having, and there were opportunities that arose in every single call that I had.
00:08:13
Speaker
But these partners had been trained to have really deep technical knowledge. And so they didn't They didn't hear them. And if they did hear them, they didn't want to act on them because they didn't know 100% of the answer. And you know what I do know about lawyers, if if there is any level of vulnerability, they'd rather ignore it then than go with it.
00:08:34
Speaker
And so if I was listening when I was at Simmons to 30 clients a week, that was probably... a decimal point of the number of client interactions that were happening across the firm.
00:08:46
Speaker
And i I can guarantee you that there were about 80% of opportunities missed in those conversations. PASL have done this report where they've estimated what the lost missed opportunity revenue is by extrapolating it out across the UK market.
00:09:05
Speaker
They think for a UK firm, there is 44 million pounds lost per firm per year. That is x extraordinary. If you just multiply that by the top 100 firms, that is a lot of money to run out
00:09:22
Speaker
How is Leonard going to solve this problem? ah Talk us through how Leonard is going to work to capture that type of opportunity information and share it around the partners.
00:09:35
Speaker
Let me give you an example. Leonard is phased, and we're going through the their product development at the moment. and In the current landscape, lawyer, partner, associate, whatever, goes and sees a client, and the information that they glean from that client conversation resides in their head.
00:09:57
Speaker
Now, the great lawyers would come back and potentially go into their CRM system if they remember to do so and type it out. But let's be honest, that is probably one or two percent of cases, because for a variety of reasons, usually when you get back from a client engagement, you've got an inbox that is filling up. There's fires to put out all over the place and you simply forget there's no malicious intent.
00:10:21
Speaker
But that's the reality based on 20 years experience across the world. And it's it's the same all over the world. So how would Leonard help? So you're back. Well, let's assume that you're not on Zoom and you've actually gone to see the client. Tick.
00:10:35
Speaker
Well done. um But you're in the cab on the way back and you get a phone call from Leonard. And Leonard basically says to you, how's it going? How was that meeting?
00:10:46
Speaker
What went on? Is there anything else I can help you with by way of follow up? And importantly, is there any are there any opportunities that you saw where we can introduce another part of the firm going forward?
00:11:00
Speaker
He's programmed to do that. So not only does he capture the information properly, at the point at which it is most fresh in your mind, he's also prompting you in an intelligent way and asking the right questions that your best BD person would ask.
00:11:17
Speaker
So he gets all of that information, he then who consolidates it, he understands, and he has the ability then to put it into ah CRM system.
00:11:28
Speaker
Or he has well and or he has the ability to. So let's say, for example, you needed to write a follow up email and there was an opportunity in a practice area outside of your practice area.
00:11:42
Speaker
he has the ability to draft that email. And because he knows the entirety of your firm at different levels, so whether that's he's read your entire website and knows exactly what's going on, or and or he's inside your firm and knows what you're doing for that particular client, he has the ability to draft that and get that email draft and 90% ready. You're not even back at the firm yet.
00:12:09
Speaker
So when you get back, all you do is quick review and off it goes. And so this is to your point, Katie. Sales is a pretty easy game, I think, right? It's loads of opportunities at the top.
00:12:21
Speaker
Then the funnel comes down, less opportunities, less conversion. You guys know this better than anyone, right? If you put more opportunities in at the top and you follow them up, you're going to get more out of the bottom. it's That's maths.
00:12:35
Speaker
um And so Leonard helps you with filling the top of the hopper and
Customizing Leonard for Better Interactions
00:12:40
Speaker
executing. Do you think that Leonard is possibly more confident and assertive than most BD people are?
00:12:48
Speaker
The beauty of it is, Graham, we can make him as assertive as possible. He's, you know, at the end of the day, despite the fact we're calling him Leonard, we're giving him a personality, he's a computer, right? So if we want him to be more assertive,
00:13:02
Speaker
I go and speak to Edu, my CTO, and I say, Edu, make him more assertive. And so um from that perspective, ah we've had a fantastic time. The team at Legal Engine, I cannot even begin to describe to you some of the conversations we have.
00:13:16
Speaker
you know Make him more emotional, give him some more empathy, that sort of thing. The really interesting thing that we're finding, though, and we've had feedback from lawyers around this in in some of the projects we've got,
00:13:31
Speaker
There's no judgment from a computer. So if you take the psychology of a lawyer, you know, I need to be right 100% of the time because that's my training, et cetera, et cetera.
00:13:42
Speaker
then when they're not right, there's no judgment from Leonard. He just asks the question in a different way. But he's ah dogged. He's got a bit of Lee Curtis in it.
00:13:53
Speaker
So he's dogged and he keeps ah keeps asking the question until he gets the answer. But he's incredibly polite. you know He doesn't get flustered. He doesn't get angry.
00:14:03
Speaker
He doesn't get pissed off. Sorry for saying that. But he just
AI as a Strategic Partner
00:14:07
Speaker
doesn't. He just keeps going until he gets the answer. It was really interesting Graham and I sort of having a go today. i almost felt like I started to sort of trust him as well. And so to your white paper, there was a ah comment on how, you know, you've given an example there that this AI agent can start to subtly influence.
00:14:29
Speaker
And, you know, my experience was you've created such a great character that you know, you start to build a bit of trust in the delivery of what you'll get back So are we certain about what is going to be human and what is going to be AI agent and where that starts and stops?
00:14:46
Speaker
like this period in legal BD is absolutely fascinating, right? We have been, we have been given the opportunity to fundamentally change things.
00:14:56
Speaker
We put out a poll on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, my co-founder Sam put out a poll, which is, which basically said, you know, what level of emotion are you comfortable with, Rhi Leonard?
00:15:08
Speaker
Do you want, you know, you want him to sound like a computer? You know, just question, answer, question, answer. Do you want him to be a little, have a little bit of a personality?
00:15:19
Speaker
do you want basically him to feel like you're talking to a human? The interesting thing is, People don't want him to be exactly human-like, but probably for the reasons you're alluding to, Katie.
00:15:32
Speaker
But they do want him to have, you know, a bit of a sense of, a bit of kind of feedback on the answers that you provide. um see to your point around human versus computer, like the strongest example or the strongest message I can i can give to you is, you know,
00:15:53
Speaker
I have two businesses. Line is sales training for humans, right? that That will keep going, that will continue to going, it's doing well, and I am absolutely committed to that because for one simple important reason, for the definitely the short to medium term, humans will continue to buy off humans, right? Particularly in a services-based industry.
00:16:22
Speaker
And so humans are essentially, as we see at Legal Engine, the last mile. So Leonard can help you with the first mile and the middle mile. What does that mean?
00:16:33
Speaker
He can do all of the research for you. can draft emails for you. he can connect you with other people within the firm. um But what he can't what he can't do, and he's not designed to do,
00:16:46
Speaker
is pick up the phone to the client. What is not designed to do is get in a room with a client, read the room, realize that the client is actually, you know, under the weather or annoyed or something like that.
00:16:58
Speaker
There is absolutely 100 percent. And I'm very kind of passionate about this. There is there's still a place for humans in the world, particularly
Evolution of BD Teams with AI
00:17:06
Speaker
in sales. And it's the last mile. You talk in your white paper, which I liked, you said that this was not a threat, this was an invitation, um an invitation for humans to sort of step up and take on more strategic work, I suppose.
00:17:21
Speaker
In your experience working in BDM marketing teams for for law firms and having been a head of sales managing a team, How do you think any CMO listening to this is going to start to think about how they can use their leverage, their teams and use their teams better with bots like Leonard coming in and doing all the grunt work? Like, what are they going to have to do to catch up and what are they going to do with that people that currently got?
00:17:47
Speaker
Look, it's a great question. And at Legal Engine, we are under no illusion that this is hard, right? It's tough. We're talking about having an assistant in your team that isn't a human.
00:17:58
Speaker
It's hard. It's a hard concept to get your head around, right? What i'm most pleased about is I've had a bunch of conversations with CMOs in the UK, across the UK, in the past since launch. And we only launched in June.
00:18:12
Speaker
And they fall into a ah couple of camps. um The ones that are, I'd say, most progressive and most enlightened are get the basis on which legal engine is is built, which is so we we think about it in in three pillars.
00:18:29
Speaker
Speed, scalability and security. right so Security we can get through really quickly. You know, we're in the legal industry. Everyone is i scared of AI and hallucinations and all of this.
00:18:43
Speaker
And so we've worked really hard to be the gold and platinum standard for security. see My CTO, Edu, is from healthcare. care He spent 20 years dealing with really sensitive patient data.
00:18:57
Speaker
There's a reason we employed him, right? The other two, though, scale and speed. I'll give you this example. So if you're a CMO sat there, let's say you're at a mid-sized firm, right, and you've got 30 people in your team.
00:19:13
Speaker
Having an assistant who doesn't sleep, doesn't take holidays, doesn't complain, frankly, doesn't um have taxes to pay, doesn't have pensions to pay.
00:19:28
Speaker
and has the ability to scale at a level that we've never seen before. It is essentially like taking your very best two or three BD people and allowing them to engage with lawyers so that the volume of information and intelligence you get back as a BD team and then not have the ability to manipulate is frightening in a way, in a really positive way.
00:19:56
Speaker
It's absolutely frightening. So for CMOs out there, I think it really is open your minds to the possibility that an assistant actually supercharges the value that you can give back to the firm.
00:20:10
Speaker
and um And we all know if I'm delivering value and revenue back to a firm, and I have much easier conversations about recruitment and investment in more technology.
AI in Recruitment and Retention
00:20:21
Speaker
It's a lot easier. I've lost count of the number of conversations Graham and I have had with job about job descriptions for recruitment where we go, it's two different jobs. There's this strategic relational person and then here's this sort of admin work. They don't go together. So, I mean, it just solves a problem that's been around for years.
00:20:37
Speaker
I'm interested, you referenced the conversation you've had with CMOs, whether you've been having them yet or you predict them. ah I'm wondering about the sort of managing partner sort of exec leadership team response. And if you had a partner in front of you that said, oh, well, great. That's 70 percent of the team, you know, done. what What's the role of BD now? How are the conversations going at that level? and and And how would you how would you speak to them about what they need to do about this?
00:21:05
Speaker
Yeah, there is. Look, there is a danger that managing partners go down the route of cost cutting, headcount reduction. And so to be perfectly honest, our target market at the moment is CMOs because we want to work with CMOs to enable them to have the conversations to steer it away from that.
00:21:25
Speaker
The facts to me and to the legal engine team are really quite clear. your Your team will not and should not look the same today as it will do in three years time. right and your Your team in three years time will be a mix of digital colleagues and humans.
00:21:47
Speaker
And so as a result of that, your investment decisions will be slightly different. But what it does do is it really does, if you've got the right mindset, it enables people to not do more with less, which is, as you described, Katie, that's the that so ah some managing partners, right?
00:22:08
Speaker
Okay, so I want you to do 10% more BD with 20% less people next year because this is this thing called AI. we Legal Engine is not in that game.
00:22:20
Speaker
What we're doing is we're scaling and we're saying, you know, with our assistance, you can do significantly more without, you know, killing your human BD colleagues.
Empowering Juniors with AI
00:22:33
Speaker
um And also without with lifting morale, because actually all of that grunt has been done, which means that your BDE colleagues are actually doing what those job descriptions you've just described say.
00:22:47
Speaker
I've seen the same job descriptions, right? We want you to be client facing. We want you to be there. We want you to be part of our kind of industry network. Go out there, shake the tree. But by the way, i need a very detailed expert Excel worksheet every single week that tells me to the nth degree exactly what you've been doing because I'm a lawyer and I need to see everything in six minute units.
00:23:12
Speaker
That's ridiculous, right? So this is a repositioning, I think, of the BD team, even at the junior level to say, actually empower these people.
00:23:23
Speaker
Because if we give an exec or a junior exec an assistant to manage, there's a couple of things that happen there. Early management skills. Now, it's a different set of managing skills because you're basically managing a computer.
00:23:37
Speaker
So that's one of the skills you need to develop. But you've got, you know, Leonard lenard has taken a lot of time to train and to tweak, right? I could see in a future that actually it's the exec's role to train and to tweak, Leonard, to a firm's nuances, to affirms so the way in which a firm deals with it. You know you could even see a situation when we get hyper-personalized, like you do when a human gets inducted to a firm.
00:24:05
Speaker
Someone senior usually sits them down and goes, these people are great. You want to watch out for this person, right? We could have a situation where we've got a junior exec that's training and AI assistant to perform that.
00:24:17
Speaker
So you're empowering those juniors to actually be more senior than they are at the moment. And you're also providing them with significant amounts of content and information that's relevant to a specific opportunity or a specific client.
00:24:33
Speaker
So they walk in with a level of confidence that they haven't got at the moment. And the lawyer basically says, I need this person on my
Cultural Tailoring of AI
00:24:41
Speaker
team. So, ah yeah, I think it's a really exciting time if you get your head around the fact we're not replacing. What I think is fascinating, having spent an hour with Leonard this afternoon, who I have to tell you was joyous. Like it was actually really fun to engage with this this entity, which is not real. You know, there are there are moments when I had to remind myself that I wasn't talking to somebody like you.
00:25:04
Speaker
what What it did make me think of though was, um and I wonder if you've thought about this, often when we're briefed on on um roles in teams, the CMO might say to us,
00:25:15
Speaker
We have this fantastic BDM. Their attitude is really positive. They're really um proactive. They're really can do. They're really commercial. We want somebody like that. And when I was working with Leonard this afternoon, I thought you are all of those things. You're positive, commercial. You're bright. You're savvy.
00:25:33
Speaker
You're engaging. and You're interesting. Do you think there might be an opportunity for more junior members of of a team to actually learn behavior and learn communication style from Leonard.
00:25:48
Speaker
Look, I ah think there is, Graham. So on the line, our side of the business, we have thought about, you know, can we develop a sales coach that lawyers talk to? And the answer is yes, we can.
00:26:00
Speaker
The really interesting thing for us, though, is that is quite a big lift because, you know, as as you will know, sometimes it's not necessarily what you say. It's the way you say it and your kind of and your responses and the way your face looks, et cetera.
00:26:16
Speaker
That's really hard to program. It's really difficult. It will come. I'm confident it will come. But for that, again, going back to the the point I made earlier, for the short to medium term, humans will still buy from humans.
00:26:32
Speaker
And so I think from a legal engine perspective, we're going to concentrate on doing the jobs you hate, which will then allow you more time so develop those skills that you've just spoken about.
00:26:46
Speaker
And one of the byproducts of that is hopefully... Because everyone gets more time back, including the more senior you know people within an organization, they can spend more time with their juniors coaching them rather than we're going to have half an hour for a PDR every quarter and it's going to be formulaic and it's going to mean precisely nothing.
00:27:08
Speaker
And so actually, you know, invest your juniors in a way that when I was growing up at Clayton Newt's or when I was growing up, at you know, CC, people actually took the time to take me out and, you know, tell me all the things I was doing wrong. So it's quite a long lunch most of the time.
00:27:26
Speaker
it's We're at this cultural moment of change, aren't we, where there may be so of a few years of pain, but then I'm quite envious of those starting their careers when you know we get to your 2027 prediction, because there's this escalation of the of where they'll be operating at more quickly.
00:27:42
Speaker
And I suppose learning and development is going to be critical to
Embrace AI for Competitiveness
00:27:45
Speaker
that change. So yeah do you have any further advice for people as to what they need to be doing now to be ready for that 2027 future to get their people ready you in terms of training and also who they're hiring?
00:28:00
Speaker
Yeah, the overarching message and my co-founder, Sam, who's got a degree from Cambridge in anthropology. So he's this is much more his bag than mine. But um he says it really well.
00:28:14
Speaker
In six months time, in 12 months time, you don't want to be standing on the beach having watched the tide go out, right? You've got to get in the sea and you've got to start playing with this stuff. And whether you need to wear armbands to continue the analogy or a surfboard, just get in there and try it.
00:28:32
Speaker
What does that actually mean? i think i think for the more junior levels, I actually, I'm quite confident they're doing it anyway. i think actually it's the firms that are restricting people rather than the individuals.
00:28:44
Speaker
I've had the opportunity to speak to a load of execs to kind of gauge what Legal Engine's doing. And they're all using ChatGPT and this and the other. and And the brave ones will tell me that they're, you know, in a very safe and not putting client names in.
00:29:01
Speaker
They're doing it themselves off the side of their desk because it is literally making them more efficient. That's the reality. And firms that tell you they're not doing that are lying. um And so the juniors, they're definitely experimenting.
00:29:13
Speaker
I think one of the hard things for people that aren't digitally native and are probably my age, you know, is is fear, yeah particularly with lawyers.
00:29:24
Speaker
There's been a great fear campaign propagated usually by lawyers. where there's you know hallucinations happening and wrong information being given and loads of stories in the US about people going to court and you know talking about fictitious cases.
00:29:41
Speaker
I have a very strong view on that. If you're doing that and you're getting advice from you know and LLM, chat GPT, and you're not reviewing it, you've got other governance problems apart from yeah AI, to be honest.
00:29:56
Speaker
And so you've got to take... AI with a pinch of salt. But the reality is, treat any sort of AI platform as a starting point. Treat it like a trainee or a junior exec, you know, and manage it appropriately.
00:30:12
Speaker
Give it clear tasks, review and refine and provide feedback, and it will just get better. The beauty of AI, Katie, is once it's learned something once,
00:30:25
Speaker
never forgets, ever, will do the same thing. The same can't be said for a human, not because humans are stupid, but they've got a lot of other stuff
AI-Driven Business Development
00:30:34
Speaker
going on. So there are massive benefits.
00:30:36
Speaker
Final question. I'm conscious of time. We could talk to you all day about this. And and it's so exciting given you've only just launched it in in June last month. So thank you very much for coming on and and sharing this with us.
00:30:48
Speaker
I just would like to know what is the what is your vision for Legal Engine? like What would you like to see happen this time next year? The vision for legal engine, I think, is pretty clear. So you've got this.
00:31:02
Speaker
You will have a a group of assistants, various different ones that are really driving the BD engine within a firm, but driving it from two aspects.
00:31:16
Speaker
Leonard and his mates will hoover up all of the jobs that you hate. We know that there's a lot of content and information that drives a firm, right? And from a process perspective, from a systems perspective, you know people have, like I said earlier, have spent millions on CRM systems and they're largely empty.
00:31:35
Speaker
We're gonna solve that problem. So that's problem one gonna solve. The thing that's more exciting for me and from a visionary perspective is, we start to have the agents and the assistants interact at a more sophisticated level.
00:31:50
Speaker
So i'll leave you but I'll leave you with this as an example of of where we're going. So in our kind of testing suite at the moment, we started to talk to a couple of firms and also a couple of client listening providers.
00:32:06
Speaker
Why are we doing that? Because most firms will tout they've got a great client listening and client feedback program. And they probably have. But you delve a bit deeper into that.
00:32:17
Speaker
And I'll give you an example of Simmons, right? So when I was there, We had a lady called Susie, fantastic interviewer. She did about 50 key client interviews a year, and it was brilliant.
00:32:30
Speaker
The problem was Simmons at the time when I left had 6,500 clients. So who was talking to the other 5950 odd, right?
00:32:39
Speaker
right You've spoken to Leonard Graham. We, in our test environment, if we go and speak to 5,000 simultaneously and start to grab all of that data and that client feedback and consolidate it, that gives us a huge amount of power.
00:32:57
Speaker
around how we need to change our service offering for various different tiers and sectors. So actually having Leonard and his mates out there as a support to external client facing stuff is, you know, i was in ah I was in a meeting last week and this is the hill we've got to get over.
00:33:17
Speaker
So I explained this to a head of marketing and business development operations at a global foot. And they said, that's greatly, but that will never happen because lawyers won't let a robot talk to their clients.
00:33:29
Speaker
Fine. Yeah, understand that. I said, but no one's talking to those clients at the moment. So what you're telling me is that you'd rather nothing happened then something happened.
00:33:40
Speaker
Oh, well, people would think that they are a lower class of client because you've got a robot talking to
Overcoming AI Resistance in Legal Practices
00:33:46
Speaker
them. And I think what's going to happen is, and again, vision for Legal Engine, the world will catch up.
00:33:51
Speaker
So in 18 months time, when Katie, you want to book a nice restaurant in Melbourne, you'll probably talk to an agent And when you need your next haircut, Graham, you know, you'll probably talk to an agent that's going to book your hair appointment.
00:34:06
Speaker
It will happen. The legal industry will catch up and it will just become commonplace. And that's what Legal Engine's banking on from a vision perspective. Well, bravo to you. Absolutely. Honestly, I feel so excited about it. It solves so many problems and and reading your white paper, it definitely felt like there was an urgency to it rather than a chance to differentiate, you know, making sure you're not left behind.
00:34:29
Speaker
And ah would you would you say that that's fair? Yeah. So again, ah you know i can't I can't take credit for this. It's my co-founder, Sam. For years, and you guys will have heard this, legal BD is behind. It's ah behind the accountants. and It's behind the rest of it. Sam's strong view is you've got the opportunity to leapfrog now.
00:34:48
Speaker
you know, not catch up, actually leapfrog and get ahead. And so we're really excited about that because the power of what we've developed is frightening in a way, in a really good way.
00:35:00
Speaker
It's frightening. I would love to invite you back in six months time, but I actually think it'd be better to invite Leonard back. Compare the interviews. And compare the interviews. Thank you so much for your time today. We've really learned loads. And it's, as Casey said, it's really exciting for the industry. So Brilliant and that you've taken this initiative.
00:35:18
Speaker
Thank you so much. You're both very welcome. And yeah, you can have Leonard in six months time. That was just fascinating, wasn't it? What did you think?
00:35:29
Speaker
Totally fascinating. I mean, for me, I have many takeaways. The first one I really want to talk to you about is the proactivity of this AI system. You know, we're so used to working with things like ChatGPT and Grok where you you know put in your inquiry and it gives you back the information and it's all a bit sort of ah static.
00:35:48
Speaker
But the fact that this is, you speak to it and it speaks back to you almost instantaneously. and And the idea that it will be proactive in calling you or, you know, inquiring and finding out the information.
00:36:01
Speaker
I just thought that was um amazing. changes the dynamic completely between the AI assistant being static and being there in the room with you. Absolutely. And when I first read that in the white paper, I couldn't quite picture it happening in real life in terms of law firm partners engaging with that idea.
00:36:18
Speaker
But it took less than five minutes of actually using Leonard ourselves for me to absolutely believe in it because it was just a joy to be on the other side of Leonard. And I can genuinely see law firm partners absolutely loving this. So I'm so convinced that this is the future. It was convincing.
00:36:37
Speaker
I mean, you know, we trialed it today ourselves, you know, independently, you and I. and And there was a point where, you know, you sent me a message and and said, I'm addicted. you know it but But you did. write And i and i when I came back to you and I said, actually, I've been talking to him for an hour. I think I stop my help. But the thing is, is that, i'll be you know, we so quickly trusted the fact that this was it It felt ah a lot more equal than normal AI interaction that we've had before.
00:37:07
Speaker
And it felt organic in a way that I've never experienced before. And I can really see that that's the difference between people using it and people not using it, you know, because it's almost like a colleague.
00:37:22
Speaker
and And actually that's a lot of the psychology of the fact that these AI agents are gonna be designed to be on an org chart. You know, prior technology was a tool and this is the first time technology is actually pseudo individual on an org chart. And I didn't really understand until we started engaging with Leonard why that was important.
00:37:44
Speaker
um But I think it really, really is critical. And what's so exciting is this is going to solve so many problems that we've been talking to our clients about for over a decade.
00:37:56
Speaker
i mean, no longer are BD people or ea is going to be prepping to prod law firms, partners to write things in a system. No one wants to sit there doing data and trade.
00:38:09
Speaker
and directory submissions, all of that stuff that takes up so much
AI as Part of the Organizational Structure
00:38:14
Speaker
time. and And you can see on a log chart how you could have under you know the communications arm, you could have directory submission assistants or you know pitch assistants that were these proactive AI tools. I thought that was fascinating.
00:38:30
Speaker
I also thought it was really, really interesting about the personality because, you know, given that we spend so much of our time with clients working out cultural fits and you and I know that that that people get the job, can sometimes get the job based on the fact that they are a better cultural fit than the next person who might have the same spiel set on paper.
00:38:51
Speaker
And this idea that you can you can train this AI assistant to have the right type of cultural fit for your organization, i thought I thought that was fascinating.
00:39:03
Speaker
and Because there's no doubt using Leonard, that Leonard was like little mini Lee Curtis, you know, it even sounded like him at some point and it had that energy and vibe, didn't it? and And I can see that wouldn't work for everybody. But, you know, if the idea that you can train it to be a little bit more like the culture of the organization you're working for.
00:39:21
Speaker
And then I wondered whether or not we didn't ask him this, but I wondered whether or not that would then mean that you could train it on level. You know, therefore, could it be that you have AI assistants on your org chart that are junior execs? and But could you all have AI assistants in your org chart that were senior managers on strategy? I mean, you know, it's just fascinating, isn't it?
00:39:42
Speaker
And if we think about it with a recruitment lens, I mean, this will help recruitment and retention. I mean, this will absolutely scale the impact of BD teams and just take away the the bits of the role that the people don't want to do.
00:39:57
Speaker
And actually, Lee made a really interesting point, which is if we think about recruitment and and career development, that actually management experience could be managing these assistants. And I can really see that playing out in real life.
Episode Wrap-Up and Future Guests
00:40:12
Speaker
The quality control, the briefing, you you don't need the people HR aspects, but all the other management skills are still learned by managing these assistants. So I can see that playing out really well and in the career journey.
00:40:28
Speaker
And I can also see this, you know, we have the often get this, we've got an exec who wants to be a junior manager, wants to be a manager, wants to be a senior manager, know, that whole sort of hierarchy of people's career development.
00:40:40
Speaker
and And often it's because they want to get rid ah of the that the work that is... boring or a little bit repetitive or not really using their experience and skills and maturity. So stripping away all of that takes away that need to sort of always having to keep a recruiting junior people to do these junior tasks.
00:40:59
Speaker
I mean, my overarching takeaway is wouldn't it be wonderful to be starting your career now um ah i think I mentioned in there I was little bit envious of people who were. I mean, it would just be amazing to be able to start your career doing the interesting people-focused work um and and to have this available to you.
00:41:23
Speaker
i agree. And i've got ah I've got a question for you. It's more of a request, actually. can Can we have a Leonard? Oh, I'm really interested in Elenad. What personality do we want for Elenad? How assertive is it going to be? Will it adjust between you and I?
00:41:40
Speaker
too assertive. yes So that was a great first episode of of the podcast for Shortlisted. Who have we got? What have we got coming up next? I can't wait.
00:41:52
Speaker
I know. Well, we have got ah such a diverse mix of professional services leaders from the engineering sector, from the accounting, advisory, consulting, legal sector and different types of leadership roles. ah One person that we've got coming up next is Carly. currently the managing director of a consulting group based in Asia. um A good friend of ours that we've worked with for many years, Abdul Malik Amwad-Din. He's great.
00:42:24
Speaker
Oh, he is. So that'll be a really good one, talking about leading from the front and and managing directors, managing partners, driving BD in new markets and new areas of revenue. So I'm really looking forward to having a conversation with him.
00:42:43
Speaker
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