1 00:00:01,908 --> 00:00:05,596 Dom, how are you this morning or afternoon your time? 2 00:00:05,865 --> 00:00:08,222 Hey Ted, yeah good thank you, good good. 3 00:00:08,275 --> 00:00:09,195 Good man. 4 00:00:09,195 --> 00:00:11,275 I'm so glad that you were able to join. 5 00:00:11,275 --> 00:00:27,015 I've enjoyed your content and your little video clips on LinkedIn and I really liked the commentary you had about the innovation councils and we're going to dig into that a little 6 00:00:27,015 --> 00:00:27,335 bit. 7 00:00:27,335 --> 00:00:29,635 But before we do, let's get you introduced. 8 00:00:29,635 --> 00:00:32,035 So you're a former lawyer. 9 00:00:32,375 --> 00:00:37,446 You're the founder and CEO of Purple and why don't you tell 10 00:00:37,446 --> 00:00:45,111 everyone fill in the gaps about kind of your background and just tell us quickly what purple is and what you guys do. 11 00:00:45,742 --> 00:00:46,442 Sure. 12 00:00:46,442 --> 00:00:56,942 So I started in a typical fashion training as a lawyer to the law degree, trained and practiced at Hogan levels and then moved over to a law firm called Gowling WLG. 13 00:00:56,942 --> 00:00:59,982 So I did that classic route into law. 14 00:00:59,982 --> 00:01:06,182 And then in around 2020, I had the opportunity to join the founding team of a legal tech AI company called Ovale. 15 00:01:06,182 --> 00:01:07,722 And that's where I've been for the last few years. 16 00:01:07,722 --> 00:01:15,604 And that was selling real estate AI tech to top law firms in the UK and also further afield. 17 00:01:15,604 --> 00:01:17,134 And that was very successful. 18 00:01:17,134 --> 00:01:23,116 And we rode the wave of large language models into law, basically. 19 00:01:23,156 --> 00:01:29,217 And uh I left the rear end of last year to start Purple. 20 00:01:29,217 --> 00:01:31,988 Now, um I'm the co-founder of Purple. 21 00:01:31,988 --> 00:01:36,519 There are three of us, actually, uh who are all co-founders there. 22 00:01:36,539 --> 00:01:44,692 And it's myself, it's Tim Pullen, who is the ex-CEO and founder of ThoughtRiver, and our CTO, Dimitri. 23 00:01:44,692 --> 00:01:52,346 And uh what we realized was that there was a huge gap in the market really for a delivery team for law firms. 24 00:01:52,346 --> 00:02:02,180 So Purple is essentially a delivery build studio for law firms who are looking to build their own tech, build their own AI, uh explore innovation and actually accelerate that 25 00:02:02,180 --> 00:02:06,132 journey towards the law firm of the future, the law firm of tomorrow. 26 00:02:06,172 --> 00:02:10,594 And this was something that I saw almost 27 00:02:10,656 --> 00:02:18,309 on a daily basis when I was looking behind the scenes at the 100, 150 law firms that I've worked with over the course of my career. 28 00:02:18,389 --> 00:02:21,040 And there was a clear need there. 29 00:02:21,040 --> 00:02:21,941 So that's my background. 30 00:02:21,941 --> 00:02:33,986 Traditional law entry route pivoted out to AI after a few years and now I find myself founding and running a build studio for law firms. 31 00:02:33,986 --> 00:02:35,006 It's an interesting gig. 32 00:02:35,006 --> 00:02:37,537 It's a very, very diverse range of. 33 00:02:37,537 --> 00:02:39,702 people that we come across and the diverse range of challenges. 34 00:02:39,702 --> 00:02:41,275 So it's really fantastic. 35 00:02:41,597 --> 00:02:43,128 Good stuff. 36 00:02:43,128 --> 00:02:48,072 Well, all that background is going to be very relevant for our conversation here today. 37 00:02:48,072 --> 00:02:59,940 So um we talked about when we were preparing the agenda for this episode, we talked about some of the headwinds to innovation in law firms. 38 00:02:59,940 --> 00:03:09,426 And I talk about this a lot and I hope my audience recognizes that it's certainly not to be critical. 39 00:03:09,426 --> 00:03:10,707 It's because 40 00:03:10,707 --> 00:03:18,067 We are at InfoDash 100 % dependent upon law firms for our survival. 41 00:03:18,067 --> 00:03:22,787 And I'm really trying to push to have the hard conversations. 42 00:03:22,927 --> 00:03:26,567 And I don't think we're having them right now. 43 00:03:26,567 --> 00:03:39,582 And by hard conversations, mean, what are the foundational elements of current state law firm world that create friction 44 00:03:39,582 --> 00:03:52,339 towards future state and we don't know exactly what future state looks like yet, but what we do know for sure is that the future state includes a tech enabled legal service 45 00:03:52,339 --> 00:03:55,420 delivery mechanism, whatever that might look like. 46 00:03:55,440 --> 00:03:56,991 So that I'm certain about. 47 00:03:56,991 --> 00:03:59,042 don't, I don't really know the timeline. 48 00:03:59,042 --> 00:04:01,763 I don't know what the pricing model is going to look like. 49 00:04:01,763 --> 00:04:04,665 I don't know what the client engagement model is going to look like though. 50 00:04:04,665 --> 00:04:06,086 have some ideas about that. 51 00:04:06,086 --> 00:04:08,979 Um, but when we, when we, 52 00:04:08,979 --> 00:04:15,642 talked, you know, I mean, starting first with, I guess, the people, which is really legal as a people business. 53 00:04:15,642 --> 00:04:18,583 Um, it certainly is today. 54 00:04:18,863 --> 00:04:21,784 And, know, I often quote Dr. 55 00:04:21,784 --> 00:04:22,785 Larry Richard. 56 00:04:22,785 --> 00:04:38,451 He wrote a book called lawyer brain and he outlined, he surveyed 30, 40,000, uh attorneys over probably a 30 year period and mapped out some personality traits. 57 00:04:38,451 --> 00:04:47,611 that lawyers have and they're above and he compared those traits to the general population. 58 00:04:47,651 --> 00:05:03,631 I did a LinkedIn post on this, I don't know, about four months ago and they're higher than average in skepticism, autonomy, urgency and abstract reasoning and they're lower than the 59 00:05:03,631 --> 00:05:05,719 mean or median. 60 00:05:05,719 --> 00:05:09,040 in sociability, resilience and empathy. 61 00:05:09,400 --> 00:05:10,360 Right. 62 00:05:10,981 --> 00:05:13,001 It is very interesting. 63 00:05:15,402 --> 00:05:25,104 They're very interesting data points, but when you look at that and you map it against, I listened to a podcast with Huberman. 64 00:05:25,105 --> 00:05:33,712 It was a marathon podcast as usual with him, but, he had Mark Andreessen on the show and Mark Andreessen, Mark Andreessen, who 65 00:05:33,712 --> 00:05:38,494 A16Z, founder of Netscape, the dude knows innovation. 66 00:05:38,494 --> 00:05:55,720 He mapped out the five traits of an innovator and there's some overlap, but there's a lot of, um I guess we'll call it white space between innovators and your typical attorney. 67 00:05:57,021 --> 00:06:00,762 innovators are open to many different kinds of new ideas. 68 00:06:00,902 --> 00:06:03,473 That's not your typical lawyer. 69 00:06:03,603 --> 00:06:07,425 High level of conscientiousness, that is your typical lawyer. 70 00:06:07,686 --> 00:06:11,208 High and disagreeableness, that's your typical lawyer. 71 00:06:12,389 --> 00:06:15,391 High IQ, that's your typical lawyer. 72 00:06:15,391 --> 00:06:17,092 And high in resilience. 73 00:06:17,112 --> 00:06:24,017 So on the first and last, open to new ideas and high in resilience, that's not your typical lawyer. 74 00:06:24,017 --> 00:06:33,023 But what sort of uh observations have you had as part of your work helping law firms 75 00:06:33,139 --> 00:06:35,207 create an innovation function? 76 00:06:35,207 --> 00:06:38,064 What have you observed along those lines? 77 00:06:38,293 --> 00:06:42,466 Well, I'll jump back to a story that I tell from when I was a trainee, actually. 78 00:06:42,466 --> 00:06:51,343 And um I won't name names for obvious reasons, but I was in a particular team and we were doing an exercise and we were cross-checking a very, very long document. 79 00:06:51,343 --> 00:06:56,536 You we were doing reference checks and definition checks for something like a 300 page document. 80 00:06:56,617 --> 00:07:02,651 And I realized, a wee trainee, I realized that there was a much faster way of doing this. 81 00:07:02,651 --> 00:07:03,851 And I wrote a macro. 82 00:07:03,851 --> 00:07:06,471 There was a word macro to actually do it for me. 83 00:07:06,471 --> 00:07:10,431 And it looked for every capitalized term in the document and it put it into a table. 84 00:07:10,431 --> 00:07:14,471 And then it looked at whether that term was used ever in the document. 85 00:07:14,471 --> 00:07:23,911 And so by using this little Excel helper that I had built, now you would call it an AI agent, of course, because everything is an AI agent. 86 00:07:23,911 --> 00:07:29,771 But using that little helper, I did this exercise in half an hour, 45 minutes. 87 00:07:29,771 --> 00:07:35,551 And I remember showing it to the lawyer who was supervising me and she said, that's great. 88 00:07:35,671 --> 00:07:37,551 Now please do it manually. 89 00:07:38,851 --> 00:07:46,811 And I think that encapsulates really nicely the lawyer brain is that you can look at something that's more efficient. 90 00:07:46,811 --> 00:07:55,711 You can appreciate that it is more efficient, but fundamentally, you know what you know and you know how you've been trained and you know how you should or at least have been 91 00:07:55,711 --> 00:07:57,523 told you should be doing something. 92 00:07:57,523 --> 00:08:10,194 and that there is a value you ascribe to the manual friction of doing work, even though you can't articulate why you place value in it, that value somehow seems right to you. 93 00:08:10,194 --> 00:08:21,223 Now, maybe that's because we work on a time-based industry, know, in the time-based industry where we build by the minute and we are deeply entrenched with we must spend time 94 00:08:21,223 --> 00:08:22,964 to achieve a result. 95 00:08:23,125 --> 00:08:24,872 Or maybe we are just 96 00:08:24,872 --> 00:08:27,814 believers that clients pay us for our time in our brains. 97 00:08:27,814 --> 00:08:29,566 And so it's almost cheating. 98 00:08:29,566 --> 00:08:37,132 I actually read something the other day that that lawyers some lawyers see AI is cheating, even though it gets you to the same end end result. 99 00:08:37,132 --> 00:08:51,344 So I think I think that story really um encapsulates the challenge that we face when we are um entrenched and onboarded as lawyers into an industry that wants to make you the 100 00:08:51,344 --> 00:08:53,085 same as everyone else. 101 00:08:53,806 --> 00:09:02,552 And a lot of people do find that training process of becoming a lawyer quite difficult because they fit you into their box. 102 00:09:02,552 --> 00:09:07,754 They almost try and round out the square edges to make you like them. 103 00:09:08,175 --> 00:09:16,940 And then you journey through your career and you get to five years qualified, 10 years qualified partnership and somebody's going, you need to change the way you're thinking. 104 00:09:16,940 --> 00:09:19,132 You need to open your mind to other ways of thinking. 105 00:09:19,132 --> 00:09:20,168 And suddenly, 106 00:09:20,168 --> 00:09:28,204 your entire career, or at least the way that you've been trained for your entire career, is acting as a blocker to you actually achieving that. 107 00:09:28,204 --> 00:09:29,795 And it's not because you don't want to. 108 00:09:29,795 --> 00:09:35,413 I think that's something that we see all the time is there's a great desire to move with the times. 109 00:09:35,413 --> 00:09:40,232 There's desire and encouragement and people say the right things a lot of the time. 110 00:09:40,232 --> 00:09:48,283 But the real friction comes in that delivery piece is actually doing it, actually changing your habits, actually 111 00:09:48,283 --> 00:09:54,336 enforcing a new way of working on your team, because what if it breaks what we have at the moment? 112 00:09:54,336 --> 00:09:57,677 And that's, I think, that's just the nature of being risk averse, right? 113 00:09:57,677 --> 00:10:00,258 And that at its core is, is what we see. 114 00:10:00,258 --> 00:10:01,385 Do you see this as well? 115 00:10:01,385 --> 00:10:13,604 I mean, you must do in when you speak to lawyers and you roll out your technology, this, eh you use the word first friction in how they think, but how they want to think versus 116 00:10:13,604 --> 00:10:14,914 how they actually think. 117 00:10:15,163 --> 00:10:17,005 Yeah, we do see it. 118 00:10:17,005 --> 00:10:26,552 so in my journey, I've been in the industry for almost 20 years and have worked with more than 110 AMLaw firms. 119 00:10:26,552 --> 00:10:34,748 I stopped counting at 110 um because it gets complicated when they merge and all right, two AMLaw firms merged. 120 00:10:34,748 --> 00:10:37,381 Does that mean that's three or is that now one? 121 00:10:37,381 --> 00:10:39,414 Anyway, so I stopped counting. 122 00:10:39,414 --> 00:10:39,785 Yeah. 123 00:10:39,785 --> 00:10:40,526 Yeah. 124 00:10:40,947 --> 00:10:42,507 I stopped counting at 110. 125 00:10:42,507 --> 00:10:54,547 So more than half, you know, I can say that I've worked with more than half the AMLaw and, we have more than a quarter of the AMLaw as clients now, um, at InfoDash and we're three 126 00:10:54,547 --> 00:10:55,807 and a half years old. 127 00:10:55,987 --> 00:11:10,007 So, um, I've seen a lot and I have seen a very high degree of variation in, you know, a mindset, I guess we'll call it and kind of default positioning. 128 00:11:10,007 --> 00:11:11,019 Um, 129 00:11:11,047 --> 00:11:21,091 But there are some common threads and I think in general, there is a resistance to change. 130 00:11:21,191 --> 00:11:30,215 historically in the general case, to your point, there has been an aversion to tech investment. 131 00:11:30,215 --> 00:11:40,619 um Maybe it's because of the reason that you mentioned where, know, officially, efficiency is, essentially penalized in the hourly bill billing model. 132 00:11:41,183 --> 00:11:55,074 And um I think that many firms have historically seen tech as an expense that needs to be managed as opposed to an investment that is a true enabler. 133 00:11:55,228 --> 00:11:57,885 they see it as IT, right infrastructure. 134 00:11:58,329 --> 00:12:02,040 And that is always just uh a negative on the PNL. 135 00:12:02,201 --> 00:12:02,821 Exactly. 136 00:12:02,821 --> 00:12:04,832 So it's a cost to be managed. 137 00:12:04,832 --> 00:12:17,969 I've also seen um throughout my journeys um a lack of empowerment in certain roles, including the innovation role. 138 00:12:17,969 --> 00:12:23,162 And again, this is changing and it's not true across the board. 139 00:12:23,162 --> 00:12:32,275 But I remember in the early days when innovation was, we have always sold into knowledge management before innovation was a thing at all. 140 00:12:32,275 --> 00:12:35,355 Nobody talked about innovation 15 years ago. 141 00:12:36,535 --> 00:12:38,055 It's pretty new. 142 00:12:38,055 --> 00:12:38,375 Yeah. 143 00:12:38,375 --> 00:12:51,175 And I, my listeners know I cite a, a, analysis that I did in 2014 where I, well, I did the analysis in 2024, but I went back 10 years and looked at the Ilta roster. 144 00:12:51,175 --> 00:12:53,735 Cause I keep this data being an Ilta sponsor. 145 00:12:53,735 --> 00:12:59,575 And there were 16 people on that list who had the word innovation in their title, a very small number. 146 00:12:59,575 --> 00:13:00,627 And now there's 147 00:13:00,627 --> 00:13:02,267 Close, close to 400. 148 00:13:02,267 --> 00:13:04,376 So, you know, 20. 149 00:13:04,376 --> 00:13:15,601 I use this stat with people ever since you told me about it I think it's amazing it's such a such a an indicator of how the industry's changed or at least how it wants to change 150 00:13:15,601 --> 00:13:16,177 right 151 00:13:16,177 --> 00:13:16,837 Exactly. 152 00:13:16,837 --> 00:13:28,165 it's not, uh so, and I think we can use this data, the ILTA data to directionally understand the trajectory of innovation. 153 00:13:28,165 --> 00:13:32,028 uh know, ILTA doesn't have a hundred percent coverage. 154 00:13:32,028 --> 00:13:41,800 They have a really strong footprint in big law in the US and uh the UK, but globally. 155 00:13:41,800 --> 00:13:46,002 But it's again, it's a good indicator of just general velocity. 156 00:13:46,202 --> 00:13:53,746 And, yeah, in those early days, the, the role was a lot of window dressing. 157 00:13:53,746 --> 00:13:56,827 was, um, what I call innovation theater. 158 00:13:56,828 --> 00:14:06,773 And there really wasn't a true fundamental commitment or a commitment to change kind of the fundamental elements that, you know, you kind of have to, if you're truly innovating, 159 00:14:06,773 --> 00:14:11,375 I think there's a interesting distinction between improvement and innovation. 160 00:14:11,471 --> 00:14:14,772 Improvement is incremental, right? 161 00:14:14,772 --> 00:14:18,143 Innovation is foundational. 162 00:14:18,143 --> 00:14:23,155 When you innovate something, you know, like the iPhone was an innovation. 163 00:14:23,155 --> 00:14:31,577 If you had played with the earlier attempts at a smartphone, you would realize how, what a big leap that was. 164 00:14:31,577 --> 00:14:38,159 But um it seems like in the early days, there was a lot of focus on improvement as opposed to innovation. 165 00:14:38,247 --> 00:14:44,191 it was small steps here and there to try and make certain pain points less, less painful, right? 166 00:14:44,191 --> 00:14:50,896 And actually, there's a distinction there as well to draw between top down innovation and bottom up innovation. 167 00:14:50,896 --> 00:15:01,443 So if you have aligned leadership, and this is something I talk about a lot, and it's a whole different em kind of point of discussion around how a partnership model can enable 168 00:15:01,443 --> 00:15:06,873 innovation in itself, fundamentally, how does a partnership with lots of different five things. 169 00:15:06,873 --> 00:15:11,206 actually enable that innovation piece across the entire business. 170 00:15:11,206 --> 00:15:23,015 Whereas if you innovate from the bottom up and you innovate with champions on the ground level, a lot of the time you are just whack-a-mole-ing to try and by sheer quantity drive 171 00:15:23,015 --> 00:15:25,967 that particular organization forward in terms of its innovation. 172 00:15:25,967 --> 00:15:33,022 But this idea of uh pure innovation, so above and beyond improvement. 173 00:15:33,094 --> 00:15:43,978 I mean, we've seen over the last few months speaking to the law firms that we do and, you know, the law firms we work with are your top kind of our hundreds across US, UK. 174 00:15:44,458 --> 00:15:53,562 There's a lot of talk around the law firm of tomorrow and people are really investing in this idea and they're investing their time, their energy, their money. 175 00:15:53,562 --> 00:15:59,444 And it's not about necessarily how do we change what we have now. 176 00:15:59,444 --> 00:16:02,445 It's about how can we almost 177 00:16:02,495 --> 00:16:15,595 start again in a, let's say a related venture or entity to build the law firm of tomorrow from the bottom up, there is a recognition almost that fundamentally something is broken 178 00:16:15,996 --> 00:16:22,701 and to go on that journey to pure innovation, it's almost a bit scorched earth. 179 00:16:22,701 --> 00:16:25,203 You know, at times there are some, law firms talking about this. 180 00:16:25,203 --> 00:16:32,326 We just need to start a brand new law firm and we need to go AI first from day dot and see where that takes us. 181 00:16:32,326 --> 00:16:34,948 em It's a journey that many are going on. 182 00:16:34,948 --> 00:16:47,098 And I think it's a really interesting conversation around to use em your two options, improvement and innovation, and what do they look like and who's responsible for what, and 183 00:16:47,098 --> 00:16:55,764 what should you be doing in this day and age when we know that AI is coming for the industry in some way or form and what that looks like we don't know yet. 184 00:16:55,764 --> 00:16:56,939 Super interesting. 185 00:16:56,939 --> 00:16:57,690 it is super. 186 00:16:57,690 --> 00:16:58,181 It's a man. 187 00:16:58,181 --> 00:16:59,522 It's a really fun time. 188 00:16:59,522 --> 00:17:08,893 It's I when I talk to people who know a little bit about the industry and they hear that, you know, my business is solely dependent upon law firms. 189 00:17:08,893 --> 00:17:10,330 They're like, aren't you worried? 190 00:17:10,330 --> 00:17:11,000 You know what I mean? 191 00:17:11,000 --> 00:17:16,904 Like there's going to be a complete reboot of the industry again over what span of time. 192 00:17:16,904 --> 00:17:19,837 Like things aren't going to change tomorrow. 193 00:17:19,837 --> 00:17:23,121 I think things will fundamentally shift. 194 00:17:23,121 --> 00:17:33,174 five years from now and 10 years, think the industry is going to look completely, completely different, but it is a great time to be a challenger firm in this market. 195 00:17:33,174 --> 00:17:40,716 Now, you know, like the Crosby's of the world, um, they had a podcast with, uh, their VC Sequoia. 196 00:17:40,716 --> 00:17:47,918 Uh, I can't recall the name of their, of the podcast, but I'm sure you could find it. 197 00:17:47,918 --> 00:17:50,519 We'll put it in the show notes, but, 198 00:17:50,686 --> 00:17:52,367 Crosby strategy is interesting. 199 00:17:52,367 --> 00:17:54,377 So they're doing a couple of things. 200 00:17:54,497 --> 00:18:07,842 One is they are training or they are fine tuning and leveraging reinforcement um learning to adapt to individual attorneys. 201 00:18:08,203 --> 00:18:08,603 Right. 202 00:18:08,603 --> 00:18:12,834 So that I'll have my own Ted LLM, right. 203 00:18:12,834 --> 00:18:15,645 When I'm conducting legal work and that makes a lot of sense. 204 00:18:15,645 --> 00:18:20,583 And they didn't say this on that podcast, but I'm, connecting the dots. 205 00:18:20,583 --> 00:18:29,956 They got there after experimentation, um, because it would be much more efficient for everybody to just use the same LLM, right? 206 00:18:29,956 --> 00:18:37,758 You, you, you train it once you go through the reinforcement learning and fine tuning process once, and then you're off to the races. 207 00:18:37,758 --> 00:18:47,031 The problem is that legal is so bespoke that if I get something different than what I'm used to, 208 00:18:47,807 --> 00:18:52,912 as output, I'm going to rearrange the hell out of it to make it look the way I'm comfortable with. 209 00:18:52,912 --> 00:18:59,658 So I'm the, again, they didn't say this, but I'm assuming that after some experimentation, said, you know what? 210 00:18:59,658 --> 00:19:09,146 Let's make these, let's make these models reflect the voice and the style of individual lawyers. 211 00:19:09,146 --> 00:19:11,277 And they don't have a big legal team. 212 00:19:11,277 --> 00:19:14,170 they're, they're, their leverage is tech, not people. 213 00:19:14,170 --> 00:19:15,711 Um, 214 00:19:15,741 --> 00:19:18,276 So yeah, I don't know, what are your thoughts on that strategy? 215 00:19:18,648 --> 00:19:31,979 I think that's really interesting because arguably the only way to really make legal services AI first is to drive towards a degree of commoditization across the industry. 216 00:19:31,979 --> 00:19:42,358 And that means acknowledging that even though at the moment there is uh a lot of reward in carrying out things in a bespoke way because you essentially separate yourself from 217 00:19:42,358 --> 00:19:42,958 everybody else. 218 00:19:42,958 --> 00:19:44,610 You go, well, what is your USP? 219 00:19:44,610 --> 00:19:46,388 Well, I do things in a different way. 220 00:19:46,388 --> 00:19:51,591 know, I'm more commercial or I speak your language or I deliver things in the way that you want. 221 00:19:51,591 --> 00:19:52,992 And that's great. 222 00:19:53,092 --> 00:20:08,042 But as a firm, to maintain a standard of delivery that is uniform, I would think actually, you need to persuade lawyers to work in cohesion, like a school of fish. 223 00:20:08,042 --> 00:20:13,566 And actually, the LLM should reflect the personality of the firm, not necessarily the personality of the people. 224 00:20:13,566 --> 00:20:16,235 Now, there's a technical side to this as well, because 225 00:20:16,235 --> 00:20:25,443 A lot of the time when people talk about, we are fine tuning of the limbs, are making things reflect our personality or the way that we like to work. 226 00:20:25,443 --> 00:20:37,352 Well, a lot of that isn't true, or at least it's a very, very light layer of technology above what the core foundation model is outputting. 227 00:20:37,795 --> 00:20:45,700 I mean, if this law firm is, for example, just putting in some of the previous emails of that particular lawyer and saying, adapt your style and tone. 228 00:20:45,700 --> 00:20:48,940 to how this person speaks, great. 229 00:20:48,940 --> 00:20:51,340 I think really easy solution there. 230 00:20:51,340 --> 00:20:55,360 You could dress up as fine tuning or reinforcement learning, however you want to call it. 231 00:20:55,360 --> 00:21:01,840 Really what it is, is a very simple prompt system prompt that sits behind that particular lawyer's interactions. 232 00:21:03,540 --> 00:21:04,900 It's a regular. 233 00:21:05,480 --> 00:21:12,295 So there is a point here around what is 234 00:21:12,295 --> 00:21:14,317 let's call it innovation by press release. 235 00:21:14,317 --> 00:21:19,241 So what people are doing, they say they're doing, they make it sound very grand and very difficult. 236 00:21:19,241 --> 00:21:27,378 There is a point here around whether that personalization layer should be something as lawyers that we should be trying to get out of our technology. 237 00:21:27,378 --> 00:21:29,069 know, it's like meet the lawyer where they are. 238 00:21:29,069 --> 00:21:30,430 That's how you get people to use tech. 239 00:21:30,430 --> 00:21:32,412 You try not to get them to change too much. 240 00:21:32,452 --> 00:21:40,900 And certainly when I use large language models, and I'm sure when your listeners out there using chat GPT, it's far more effective if it reflects your tone. 241 00:21:40,900 --> 00:21:43,642 you enjoy using it a lot more, you're more likely to use it. 242 00:21:43,642 --> 00:21:49,205 So adoption is going to skyrocket if you do do that, which in itself is half the battle. 243 00:21:49,386 --> 00:21:52,117 But I don't think it's the end of the journey. 244 00:21:52,117 --> 00:21:53,358 I don't think it's the answer. 245 00:21:53,358 --> 00:21:55,149 I don't think it's the end of the rainbow. 246 00:21:55,149 --> 00:22:00,806 And I think there's a lot more thought and time that needs to go into what does that law firm of tomorrow actually look like? 247 00:22:00,806 --> 00:22:06,296 What does the full stack law firm that Y Combinator have been talking about actually look like? 248 00:22:06,296 --> 00:22:07,947 And it's very interesting. 249 00:22:07,947 --> 00:22:10,785 And I was speaking to somebody this morning about this around 250 00:22:10,785 --> 00:22:15,648 how many non-lawyers are starting full stack law firms. 251 00:22:15,648 --> 00:22:20,241 The idea of a non-lawyer starting a law firm, you go back a few years, outrageous. 252 00:22:20,241 --> 00:22:25,925 How can someone who's not been to law school even begin to understand what we do as lawyers? 253 00:22:25,925 --> 00:22:26,845 And that's quite interesting. 254 00:22:26,845 --> 00:22:34,620 If you look at lots of the big legal tech platforms as well, the main one obviously aside, a lot of the founders are not lawyers. 255 00:22:34,620 --> 00:22:38,673 And you're going, well, how are you doing this? 256 00:22:38,673 --> 00:22:40,754 How are you understanding 257 00:22:40,754 --> 00:22:48,019 pain points in the industry which you've not trained in, you've not practiced in, which is pretty dense and opaque and difficult to understand. 258 00:22:48,019 --> 00:23:01,408 um So there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of movement, there's a lot of people uh pronouncing and announcing their solutions to this big problem of the law firm tomorrow. 259 00:23:01,489 --> 00:23:08,093 just don't think we're there, I don't think anyone has got that answer yet because the goalposts keep moving, new challenges are coming in all the time and everyone has a 260 00:23:08,093 --> 00:23:09,600 slightly different approach to it. 261 00:23:09,600 --> 00:23:12,292 I think it's fantastic what people like Crosby are doing. 262 00:23:12,292 --> 00:23:18,878 I think it's pushing the envelope forward, but it's a for now rather than a this is what law firms look like. 263 00:23:19,059 --> 00:23:20,039 For sure. 264 00:23:20,039 --> 00:23:22,599 think this is a transitional step. 265 00:23:22,599 --> 00:23:29,539 I think in the long-term, so I'm a lean Six Sigma black belt and I trained at Bank of America. 266 00:23:29,539 --> 00:23:36,759 They have a very robust Six Sigma program there. 267 00:23:36,919 --> 00:23:41,739 And when I first entered the industry, I tried to apply that training. 268 00:23:41,739 --> 00:23:44,759 One of our first legal clients, they no longer exist. 269 00:23:44,759 --> 00:23:46,539 This is in 08, 09. 270 00:23:46,539 --> 00:23:48,779 They were default services. 271 00:23:48,924 --> 00:23:56,850 which business was really good in 08 and 09 um in the default services world, as you can imagine. 272 00:23:57,111 --> 00:24:01,554 And they scaled from, you know, this wasn't a big law firm. 273 00:24:01,554 --> 00:24:07,158 mean, they started off with maybe 50 employees and ended up with 518 months time. 274 00:24:07,379 --> 00:24:10,621 So 10 X growth, maybe it was 24 months. 275 00:24:10,621 --> 00:24:13,123 It was a, it was a real short period of time. 276 00:24:13,123 --> 00:24:18,333 And the guy who ran the, this law firm came from big law. 277 00:24:18,333 --> 00:24:20,384 but he was an outside of the box thinker. 278 00:24:20,384 --> 00:24:30,566 still keep in touch with him and we, had, um, I had a friend who was in between roles at the bank and he was a lean Six Sigma black belt. 279 00:24:30,566 --> 00:24:34,867 So I, I, I put him embedded with that firm. 280 00:24:34,867 --> 00:24:37,755 Actually the ABA journal wrote an article about the work that we did there. 281 00:24:37,755 --> 00:24:39,089 It was very impressive. 282 00:24:39,089 --> 00:24:41,299 The name of the firm was the Hunneville law firm. 283 00:24:41,299 --> 00:24:48,311 If anybody wants to go through the ABA journal archives and read, read it, but we, 284 00:24:48,391 --> 00:24:53,685 Um, we set up pods where, know, the default services work. 285 00:24:53,685 --> 00:24:57,177 There's a ton of administrative tasks required. 286 00:24:57,177 --> 00:25:06,391 And we put in pods, we put monitors where we could show the flow of work and bottlenecks and control charts. 287 00:25:06,391 --> 00:25:15,670 I mean, we were managing this like a manufacturing facility would manage an assembly line and it was extremely efficient and cutting edge. 288 00:25:15,670 --> 00:25:17,363 And again, this is. 289 00:25:17,363 --> 00:25:29,853 This has been 15 years, but since then I've never seen it work that way in, all, in all my travels in all of those years, I've never seen it work like it did at that. 290 00:25:29,894 --> 00:25:38,302 Again, 500 employee, they probably had 10 attorneys, but they had 500 employees just doing the grunt work. 291 00:25:38,302 --> 00:25:44,097 Um, so the ability to standardize, I think has been, there's a lot of resistance to that. 292 00:25:44,097 --> 00:25:44,807 So 293 00:25:44,807 --> 00:25:48,407 I think we're gonna have to transitionally get there, get there incrementally. 294 00:25:48,844 --> 00:25:58,821 think actually you've hit on something quite interesting there, which is that our lawyers really the ones who should be in charge of innovating in the law firm. 295 00:25:59,843 --> 00:26:01,544 Can they innovate? 296 00:26:01,544 --> 00:26:12,893 know, cycling back to what we talked about earlier in terms of mindset, the concept of the Innovation Council, the Innovation Group or the Future Services Group, know, million names 297 00:26:12,893 --> 00:26:13,873 for them. 298 00:26:14,294 --> 00:26:18,207 And you put a bunch of senior lawyers around the table and you say, right, 299 00:26:18,207 --> 00:26:23,843 Right, right guys, guys and girls, your job is to innovate now and drive us forward. 300 00:26:23,843 --> 00:26:26,986 uh Look, here's a good test, right? 301 00:26:26,986 --> 00:26:28,687 Teddy, are you a singer? 302 00:26:29,889 --> 00:26:34,443 No, right, if I said, right, You're not gonna do it, you're not gonna do it, right? 303 00:26:34,443 --> 00:26:41,291 Now, right, now, so I am a singer and if you said to me, sing, I will say, I'm not gonna sing on your podcast, don't worry. 304 00:26:41,291 --> 00:26:42,912 But for me, that's fine. 305 00:26:42,912 --> 00:26:44,001 I'm comfortable. 306 00:26:44,001 --> 00:26:45,785 I trained in the past. 307 00:26:45,785 --> 00:26:50,187 This is something that I'm very, very comfortable doing in public. 308 00:26:50,328 --> 00:27:00,936 And it's the same thing is that you are asking people who are not trained to innovate to be creative, to find different ways of looking at the problem, whether that's through a 309 00:27:00,936 --> 00:27:07,711 framework like uh Lean Six Sigma or whether it's through other just creative, more creative frameworks. 310 00:27:08,809 --> 00:27:11,871 you're asking them to do something they don't know. 311 00:27:13,012 --> 00:27:14,473 lawyers are very intelligent. 312 00:27:14,473 --> 00:27:17,195 We've gone to law school, we've studied a lot. 313 00:27:17,195 --> 00:27:22,659 We um think most of the time we can give anything a good crack if we put our mind to it. 314 00:27:22,659 --> 00:27:27,702 And I think that's the mistake is that that flexibility is not there. 315 00:27:27,702 --> 00:27:35,648 And so unfortunately, I see a lot of uh innovation groups fail after a certain amount of time because 316 00:27:35,648 --> 00:27:40,528 They look at their output over 18 months and they go, have we actually achieved here? 317 00:27:40,528 --> 00:27:42,188 And it's certainly not what we set out to achieve. 318 00:27:42,188 --> 00:27:43,268 People are busy. 319 00:27:43,268 --> 00:27:44,748 People don't have the time to make decisions. 320 00:27:44,748 --> 00:27:49,668 Nobody wants to make the decision because nobody wants to be the person on the hook for a particular project. 321 00:27:50,028 --> 00:27:52,968 But fundamentally, that reimagining doesn't happen. 322 00:27:52,968 --> 00:28:02,608 And I think that's a big part of why I do what I do now is that I was a difficult trainee, to put it that way. 323 00:28:02,771 --> 00:28:05,241 I didn't want to play by the rules. 324 00:28:05,322 --> 00:28:09,282 if you go and look at my old supervisors, inevitably they'd say the same. 325 00:28:09,282 --> 00:28:11,923 They'd be like, I remember you, you were a pain in the backside. 326 00:28:11,923 --> 00:28:22,446 and you know, that, that skillset or that ability to just look at things and go, wait a minute, this is not how the world works in other industries. 327 00:28:22,446 --> 00:28:25,927 If this was a car manufacturing plant, this is the point you were making. 328 00:28:25,927 --> 00:28:27,557 This is not how we would do it. 329 00:28:27,557 --> 00:28:30,968 If this was Apple, this is not how we would do it. 330 00:28:31,008 --> 00:28:34,528 And yet we want to 2x our revenue in the next five years. 331 00:28:35,008 --> 00:28:38,948 And we're not learning from the way that other industries do it. 332 00:28:39,008 --> 00:28:44,828 So I've definitely seen a trend for innovation leaders in law firms to be actually from outside the law. 333 00:28:44,828 --> 00:28:47,868 That's something I've seen more and more over time, especially in the UK. 334 00:28:47,868 --> 00:28:51,628 That's a very interesting trend and one that I very much encourage. 335 00:28:51,928 --> 00:29:00,883 And also, I think there is a need there for law firms to take an honest look at their own innovation. 336 00:29:00,883 --> 00:29:03,504 functions and go, well, do we need help here? 337 00:29:03,525 --> 00:29:15,674 You do we do we need someone with a flexible mind, you know, a dynamic way of looking at business to come in and essentially coach our seniors in being innovative and being 338 00:29:15,674 --> 00:29:16,335 dynamic? 339 00:29:16,335 --> 00:29:23,310 eh And that's well, that yeah, that's that's another good question. 340 00:29:23,310 --> 00:29:26,300 You know, if a non lawyer comes into a law firm and tells you 341 00:29:26,300 --> 00:29:28,871 I'm going to tell you how to innovate around your own business. 342 00:29:28,871 --> 00:29:29,861 Will a lawyer accept that? 343 00:29:29,861 --> 00:29:31,712 The answer is probably no. 344 00:29:31,772 --> 00:29:35,544 Now, then it gets to the question of, who is on that? 345 00:29:35,544 --> 00:29:37,454 Who are you trying to coach? 346 00:29:37,535 --> 00:29:42,136 And actually, my opinion is that you should be coaching the juniors, not the seniors. 347 00:29:42,136 --> 00:29:46,398 The juniors are the ones who actually are feeling most of the pain in your law firm. 348 00:29:46,398 --> 00:29:48,899 By the time you're a senior, you've gone through the fire. 349 00:29:48,899 --> 00:29:50,320 You're out on the other side. 350 00:29:50,320 --> 00:29:52,400 You're sipping a mojito on the beach. 351 00:29:52,821 --> 00:29:54,001 Gross generalization. 352 00:29:54,001 --> 00:29:56,072 But a lot of the time you're doing 353 00:29:56,072 --> 00:30:06,869 far higher level work than you would as a junior when you're going through the drudgery of sitting in a room with two million files and you have to go through every single word to 354 00:30:06,869 --> 00:30:09,611 find a particular keyword for a litigation case. 355 00:30:09,611 --> 00:30:10,952 That's the real pain. 356 00:30:10,952 --> 00:30:15,595 actually bringing the juniors on that journey is where law firms should be focusing right now. 357 00:30:15,595 --> 00:30:22,920 And then, and this goes back to your point earlier, empowering the juniors to actually deliver that innovation. 358 00:30:22,920 --> 00:30:25,725 So the seniors should go, this is something that we are not good at. 359 00:30:25,725 --> 00:30:32,080 and we'll never be good at, but we will give you that power because you know what the future looks like better than we do. 360 00:30:32,080 --> 00:30:33,401 And that's really scary. 361 00:30:33,401 --> 00:30:44,839 And I totally get why law firms are scared and I totally get why seniors are scared because in no other area of the business will the partners co-tow to juniors in that way. 362 00:30:44,839 --> 00:30:49,723 Yeah, that requires a lot of humility, right? 363 00:30:49,844 --> 00:30:50,625 Don't you think? 364 00:30:50,625 --> 00:30:57,371 And is that uh a common trait in the senior ranks within law firms, do you think? 365 00:30:58,896 --> 00:31:09,272 I think it depends, uh know, people are people and personalities will differ, especially in a large partnership, you know, the politics and the large partnership, the politics of 366 00:31:09,272 --> 00:31:10,523 innovation are fascinating. 367 00:31:10,523 --> 00:31:19,978 You have your older partners who are close to retirement, who frankly won't care because it's going to make no difference to the money they receive before they retire. 368 00:31:19,978 --> 00:31:22,659 And to be honest, it's probably going to spend their money. 369 00:31:22,659 --> 00:31:24,440 They're probably going to get less. 370 00:31:24,440 --> 00:31:27,662 So if there's a big innovation play, they're going to be like, you know what? 371 00:31:28,619 --> 00:31:30,440 I don't really think that's a good idea. 372 00:31:30,440 --> 00:31:38,744 And then you've got the junior partners who were around the time now where junior partners are making AI innovation part of their business case. 373 00:31:38,904 --> 00:31:45,468 So even though your book of business is the core of why you're made up to partnership, really, they're going to be putting this sort of stuff in there. 374 00:31:45,468 --> 00:31:47,654 They're still keen because they still need to prove themselves. 375 00:31:47,654 --> 00:31:51,991 They need to move from a salaried partner to an equity partner or they need to move up the scale. 376 00:31:51,991 --> 00:31:58,226 em I'm of the age where a lot of my friends now are getting onto the partnership scale and it's 377 00:31:58,226 --> 00:32:08,321 fascinating you think partnership is the top and you open the door and you go behind and you realize there is a whole other scale going on there in terms of whose opinion is valid 378 00:32:08,321 --> 00:32:10,832 and who's bringing in what and all that sort of stuff. 379 00:32:11,326 --> 00:32:19,817 kind of junior partners, senior partners, different perspectives, those in the middle are kind of caught in a tug of war trying to decide whether it's worth investing or not. 380 00:32:20,498 --> 00:32:24,460 And that unity of vision is very hard to come by. 381 00:32:24,580 --> 00:32:28,126 yeah, think think humility, there is humility. 382 00:32:28,126 --> 00:32:39,393 uh The question is, is that something that is then supported by the leadership to actually empower the entire firm's journey, or is that just a few individuals who are very 383 00:32:39,393 --> 00:32:47,218 supportive of innovation and AI and they're the good guys and they're the ones who will help if they can, but can't drive real change? 384 00:32:47,306 --> 00:32:48,119 It's just fascinating. 385 00:32:48,119 --> 00:32:49,530 It's psychology at its core. 386 00:32:49,530 --> 00:32:50,591 Everything is psychology. 387 00:32:50,591 --> 00:32:57,497 And it's just a fascinating view of how people struggle with change, especially when we are an industry that 388 00:32:57,497 --> 00:32:59,324 encourage people not to. 389 00:32:59,463 --> 00:32:59,823 Yeah. 390 00:32:59,823 --> 00:33:07,446 And you know, and, I have lots of friends who, are lawyers in the KM and I space. 391 00:33:07,446 --> 00:33:23,293 And, um, I would say the overwhelming majority are extremely humble and, um but I hear stories and it's probably, you know, the bad apples, you know, you hear 10 X the stories 392 00:33:23,293 --> 00:33:27,034 about the bad apples, then you do the good ones. 393 00:33:27,034 --> 00:33:29,535 Um, but yeah, I hear lots of 394 00:33:29,873 --> 00:33:43,094 Lots of really difficult situations with senior partners who will monkey wrench an initiative because for whatever reason, could be a personal conflict with the champion of 395 00:33:43,094 --> 00:33:44,015 that initiative. 396 00:33:44,015 --> 00:33:50,820 could be um maybe this platform wasn't their first choice. 397 00:33:51,281 --> 00:33:58,426 you know, and that sort of situation in a corporate environment gets dealt with differently, right? 398 00:33:58,426 --> 00:33:59,567 Because most 399 00:33:59,742 --> 00:34:03,333 corporations are not partnerships, right? 400 00:34:03,333 --> 00:34:05,914 They're C corporations and they have a governance structure. 401 00:34:05,914 --> 00:34:13,495 Management is fully empowered and the shareholders of the business aren't working in the business, right? 402 00:34:13,495 --> 00:34:17,006 The vast majority of the equity is held outside. 403 00:34:17,006 --> 00:34:28,319 Of course, managers have some, senior managers have some equity incentive within the business, but it is somewhat unique where the owners of the business are the business. 404 00:34:28,371 --> 00:34:33,396 um with legal and they have the ability to throw their weight around in their influence. 405 00:34:33,396 --> 00:34:36,580 And sometimes that's not used in productive ways. 406 00:34:36,580 --> 00:34:38,041 Sometimes it is. 407 00:34:38,242 --> 00:34:43,917 So that's an interesting dynamic that I think is a little bit unique in uh the law firm partnership world. 408 00:34:44,260 --> 00:34:53,144 I think for juniors, especially if you think about the path of a junior lawyer, they are probably and this is different to your your normal corporate. 409 00:34:53,584 --> 00:35:04,549 They are probably not going to be a manager until their 30s, because you just don't you just don't manage other lawyers until you are experienced and becoming a lawyer takes a 410 00:35:04,549 --> 00:35:05,449 while. 411 00:35:05,630 --> 00:35:11,013 And so you don't even get experience of of almost 412 00:35:11,013 --> 00:35:15,416 your base level corporate structure until much later on when you're a lawyer. 413 00:35:15,416 --> 00:35:19,119 And then you just carry on practicing as a lawyer until you're very senior. 414 00:35:19,119 --> 00:35:24,222 And then eventually you get to partnership and you're thrown into this is now your business. 415 00:35:24,663 --> 00:35:35,780 And so, and so I agree with you that the overwhelming majority of seniors that I meet are humble and do acknowledge that they don't necessarily have the skills of the training to 416 00:35:35,780 --> 00:35:37,771 be able to implement AI. 417 00:35:37,872 --> 00:35:38,788 But 418 00:35:38,788 --> 00:35:47,490 At the same time, the juniors in the business do not know how to justify to that business an investment in that innovation or AI. 419 00:35:47,490 --> 00:35:53,872 If I'm a junior lawyer and I want this new platform, the firm will turn around and say, well, what's the ROI of that platform for us? 420 00:35:53,872 --> 00:36:01,644 And I have no idea how to show that or display that or illustrate that to senior management because I am not given that view of the business. 421 00:36:01,644 --> 00:36:03,055 I am just told you are a lawyer. 422 00:36:03,055 --> 00:36:04,425 These are the services you provide. 423 00:36:04,425 --> 00:36:05,535 You are a service provider. 424 00:36:05,535 --> 00:36:08,676 Go and provide those services, which totally fair. 425 00:36:08,892 --> 00:36:19,648 um But the art of building business cases and displaying return and showing investment returns, these are not the skills of oh a lawyer. 426 00:36:19,648 --> 00:36:20,878 We aren't taught these things. 427 00:36:20,878 --> 00:36:24,480 um Exactly. 428 00:36:24,792 --> 00:36:26,457 MBA, for example. 429 00:36:26,764 --> 00:36:27,764 Exactly. 430 00:36:27,764 --> 00:36:39,407 Or at least if you're in a corporate structure, you would normally be exposed to that a lot earlier than I in my experience than in a partnership LLP law firm environment. 431 00:36:39,407 --> 00:36:52,220 there's so many different frictions and tensions that unfortunately undermine all the good work that is being done and make it very difficult for firms to move agilely without 432 00:36:52,220 --> 00:36:56,141 outside help or without a really, really strong leader. 433 00:36:56,335 --> 00:36:59,387 And I think those are the firms that I've seen really excel. 434 00:36:59,387 --> 00:37:09,683 It's that really strong leadership in terms of AI innovation where your CEO or your overall managing partner goes, this is what we are doing. 435 00:37:10,844 --> 00:37:13,986 Jump on the train because this is the direction of travel. 436 00:37:14,106 --> 00:37:16,308 And I talk a lot about this. 437 00:37:16,308 --> 00:37:21,991 think that this leadership point is so important. 438 00:37:22,331 --> 00:37:25,011 And you need that top down leadership. 439 00:37:25,011 --> 00:37:35,291 Otherwise, no matter what ground level initiatives you manage to get off the ground, no matter how humble people are in terms of their skills or lack of, it will never be 440 00:37:35,291 --> 00:37:35,711 innovation. 441 00:37:35,711 --> 00:37:38,011 It will come back to your point around just improvement. 442 00:37:38,216 --> 00:37:38,796 Yeah. 443 00:37:38,796 --> 00:37:50,875 And so I don't know if you would agree with this, it, my, my, my Spidey sense tells me that there's a lot of winging it in terms of AI strategy, right? 444 00:37:50,875 --> 00:38:04,054 Not, there's not a lot of like really clear, I guess strategic vision that's articulated clearly across the organization. 445 00:38:04,054 --> 00:38:06,035 There's a lot of experimentation. 446 00:38:06,131 --> 00:38:08,954 um I don't know, is that your sense too? 447 00:38:08,954 --> 00:38:14,929 And if so, why do you think that's the case when people are writing, firms are writing big checks? 448 00:38:15,300 --> 00:38:25,023 I mean, we are lucky enough to work with some really bold law firms, some who are looking at what everyone else is doing, and they're all looking right and they're looking left. 449 00:38:25,023 --> 00:38:28,365 And that is it's so refreshing to work with people like that. 450 00:38:28,365 --> 00:38:40,840 And, you know, there are some who are completely rejecting the the um Harvey versus Lagora race that most law firms seem to be on at the moment and going, you know what, no, we're 451 00:38:40,840 --> 00:38:42,190 going to build our own. 452 00:38:42,806 --> 00:38:53,709 or we're going to just go down the route of in five years, we will have outpaced other competitors, but this will be in our ecosystem rather than buying off the shelf. 453 00:38:53,709 --> 00:38:56,810 There are other law firms, of course, who have come at it from a different direction. 454 00:38:56,810 --> 00:39:00,891 They've gone, our AI strategy is actually going to be to buy first. 455 00:39:01,111 --> 00:39:02,711 And we're going to be the leaders. 456 00:39:02,711 --> 00:39:06,879 We're going to buy the Harveys, Lagorias, the other platforms that are popular. 457 00:39:06,879 --> 00:39:10,209 We're going to get them first and we're going to really go deep with our vendor relationships. 458 00:39:10,209 --> 00:39:12,674 And we're going to try and get an advantage that way. 459 00:39:12,922 --> 00:39:23,468 em And there are others who kind of toddle along listening to the noise in the ecosystem and two years after everybody else will just buy what everyone else is buying because by 460 00:39:23,468 --> 00:39:32,734 that point the trust signals that most of the industry have bought platform X are enough that their risk averse partnership will be happy with that investment. 461 00:39:32,734 --> 00:39:37,356 So short answer to your question is no, everyone's doing something slightly different. 462 00:39:37,356 --> 00:39:40,538 No one is uh necessarily 463 00:39:40,622 --> 00:39:42,113 Well, there is no answer to this, right? 464 00:39:42,113 --> 00:39:45,024 Everyone's strategy is going to be different. 465 00:39:45,704 --> 00:39:48,746 the minority are able to articulate it clearly. 466 00:39:48,746 --> 00:39:53,167 The majority, I think, are wait and seeers still. 467 00:39:53,528 --> 00:39:57,970 And they are trying to figure out what that law firm of tomorrow still looks like. 468 00:39:57,970 --> 00:40:02,792 Until you figure out what your future looks like, you can't really build a strategy to achieve that future. 469 00:40:02,992 --> 00:40:05,463 And I sympathize because 470 00:40:05,557 --> 00:40:06,738 It's difficult. 471 00:40:06,738 --> 00:40:12,364 I bet that if you went into non-law firms and said, what's your AI strategy, you'd have exactly the same challenge, right? 472 00:40:12,364 --> 00:40:23,355 Most, most legal tech vendors don't know where they're going in the next two, three years because they're waiting on OpenAI to release better technology to enable their own 473 00:40:23,355 --> 00:40:24,376 roadmap. 474 00:40:24,697 --> 00:40:25,349 So. 475 00:40:25,349 --> 00:40:37,725 you touched on something there, kind of the build versus buy and we have some theories about this and I'll be transparent about my motives here and say that our platform, we're 476 00:40:37,725 --> 00:40:47,869 an internet, legal internet and extranet platform and we went down the internet path first, got very well established and we did that because there was a burning need. 477 00:40:47,869 --> 00:40:52,793 All these big firms were moving to the cloud and they had to do something with their SharePoint. 478 00:40:52,793 --> 00:40:54,203 on-prem intranet. 479 00:40:54,203 --> 00:40:59,385 we, but we always knew extranet was our, that was going to be our big deal. 480 00:40:59,385 --> 00:41:06,407 And we just released that in May and we have been taking customers on very, very slowly to make sure that we get it right. 481 00:41:06,427 --> 00:41:20,531 So we have three as of, middle of September and two of those three are implementing client facing AI solutions that are built in-house. 482 00:41:20,531 --> 00:41:21,731 One of them, 483 00:41:22,367 --> 00:41:24,789 is and how we play a role in that. 484 00:41:24,789 --> 00:41:35,168 And you know, this is why we're putting all our chips in this part of the table is I believe that in order for firms to differentiate themselves, they're going to have to do 485 00:41:35,168 --> 00:41:37,180 something besides by Harvey and Legora. 486 00:41:37,180 --> 00:41:40,502 That's not going to be differentiating if your competitors can go buy it. 487 00:41:40,502 --> 00:41:43,165 So how can you create differentiation? 488 00:41:43,165 --> 00:41:51,144 Well, that collective knowledge and wisdom of the firm that lives in your document management system or in structured data stores. 489 00:41:51,144 --> 00:42:02,283 Like we have a large labor and employment firm that has this beautifully matriculated L and E data regulatory updates for all 50 states here in the U S and we said, Hey, rather 490 00:42:02,283 --> 00:42:12,541 than having your clients come and log into a portal and peruse the new ERISA rules in California, what if you took that curated data? 491 00:42:12,541 --> 00:42:16,084 You've already got all of their employment documents in your DMS. 492 00:42:16,084 --> 00:42:19,793 We crawl and vectorize it using Azure AI search. 493 00:42:19,793 --> 00:42:31,369 And then we use Azure Open AI to flag exceptions, create work items and power automate, route them to the attorneys and go, oh yeah, non-competes aren't valid in California 494 00:42:31,369 --> 00:42:31,680 anymore. 495 00:42:31,680 --> 00:42:34,991 And you have 9,000 employment agreements with non-compete language. 496 00:42:34,991 --> 00:42:35,932 Check, check, check. 497 00:42:35,932 --> 00:42:42,395 That goes to a client portal where they can see these exceptions and say, remediate, remediate, remediate. 498 00:42:42,395 --> 00:42:46,768 And it allows the firms to be proactive, that firm to be proactive with their client. 499 00:42:46,768 --> 00:42:49,329 And those are all revenue opportunities. 500 00:42:49,467 --> 00:42:53,472 And these are, these are risks that the client may not even know they have. 501 00:42:53,472 --> 00:42:55,255 And the law firm is being proactive. 502 00:42:55,255 --> 00:43:01,203 So we believe, and we're trying to skate where the puck is going to be instead of where it is right now. 503 00:43:01,203 --> 00:43:05,999 We believe that that those sorts of scenarios are how firms are going to differentiate themselves. 504 00:43:05,999 --> 00:43:08,141 Do you agree or do you see it differently? 505 00:43:08,893 --> 00:43:09,663 I agree. 506 00:43:09,663 --> 00:43:16,896 mean, you know your pain points better than anybody, which means that you can envisage your solutions better than anyone. 507 00:43:16,896 --> 00:43:25,045 If you knew how to build something or you had the ability to deliver it, then you could do it a lot better than the third party vendor. 508 00:43:25,045 --> 00:43:27,500 I I know this from experience. 509 00:43:27,500 --> 00:43:32,862 The biggest challenge that you have as a third party vendor, if you're building legal tech is you've got no data. 510 00:43:32,923 --> 00:43:35,604 You've got no legal documents to test your product on. 511 00:43:35,604 --> 00:43:36,480 you almost 512 00:43:36,480 --> 00:43:43,561 need a client before you can validate your product because no one's going to give you access to their data to begin with. 513 00:43:43,561 --> 00:43:50,984 I mean, the depth of data that law firms have, which is unfortunately a lot of the time unstructured is unbelievable. 514 00:43:51,444 --> 00:44:00,207 So if you can structure that, and I talk a lot about this around structuring data, around workflows, actually basically getting your house in order to enable it for the AI age is 515 00:44:00,207 --> 00:44:02,008 so, so, so important. 516 00:44:02,008 --> 00:44:03,902 And then those that can... 517 00:44:03,902 --> 00:44:10,504 add value on top of that, layering on top of it, think that is where the ventures of the future will lie. 518 00:44:10,504 --> 00:44:20,657 I'm a big fan of uh agents, uh agents in the pure form, not in the kind of everything's an agent now form. 519 00:44:20,657 --> 00:44:31,913 So what I mean by that is um autonomous pieces of technology that can use tools and can carry out a series of different events on your data. 520 00:44:31,913 --> 00:44:38,506 which will allow you to unlock new revenue streams, new workflows or shortcut workflows are already in place. 521 00:44:38,546 --> 00:44:46,650 And so, yeah, I believe that the future is a far more tailored service. 522 00:44:46,650 --> 00:44:58,175 Now, whether that's delivered by third party vendors or whether that's delivered by you as a firm building a delivery capability of some sort, they'll probably be a mix. 523 00:44:58,647 --> 00:45:04,287 Again, know, cards on the table, I believe that you need a delivery partner and you need to be doing it yourself. 524 00:45:04,287 --> 00:45:15,067 And with the right delivery partner, you can do it yourself and you can do it more effectively and a hell of a lot cheaper than essentially funding the VCs that are funding 525 00:45:15,067 --> 00:45:17,887 the big tools, because that's really what you're doing. 526 00:45:17,887 --> 00:45:27,415 You know, if you you look at the price of a the price of a call to a large language model is, you know, cents, pennies and you're paying, you know, 527 00:45:27,415 --> 00:45:33,050 20, 30X what you would be paying at source just for a wrapper of some sort. 528 00:45:33,050 --> 00:45:35,622 And also it's very important. 529 00:45:35,622 --> 00:45:37,273 I don't mean to denigrate these platforms. 530 00:45:37,273 --> 00:45:46,280 There is a lot of added value that they do offer and they offer security and they offer data resources such as case law resources and all these sorts of stuff. 531 00:45:46,280 --> 00:45:51,955 And you can look at how Harvey partnering with Lexis and Legora partnering as well with a data partner. 532 00:45:51,955 --> 00:45:57,299 They can see the importance of this, but nothing out competes your own data. 533 00:45:57,927 --> 00:46:03,534 And that, think, whoever can manage to leverage that is going to be the real winner long-term. 534 00:46:03,935 --> 00:46:05,677 it's exactly what you're doing. 535 00:46:05,677 --> 00:46:13,587 You're enabling firms to use their own data to deliver a new way of thinking and a new way of providing a service. 536 00:46:13,667 --> 00:46:22,511 Exactly, you know, and we kind of, I'm being totally honest, we were just, it was pure luck that we ended up in this beautiful position in the ecosystem. 537 00:46:22,511 --> 00:46:25,172 So we built this thing called integration hub. 538 00:46:25,172 --> 00:46:36,226 That's essentially an Azure appliance that reaches into all of their back office systems, document management, CRM, practice management, uh HR, IS experience management. 539 00:46:36,226 --> 00:46:41,398 And we needed that layer and it's security trimmed and respects ethical wall boundaries. 540 00:46:41,398 --> 00:46:43,271 We needed that layer to surface. 541 00:46:43,271 --> 00:46:45,633 data in our intranet and extranet platform. 542 00:46:45,633 --> 00:46:56,000 Well, it just so happens that you also need that integration layer if you want to use Azure AI search and Azure open AI and co-pilot and power automate. 543 00:46:56,000 --> 00:47:03,165 So we were very fortunate in around that and we get bombarded from VCs. 544 00:47:03,165 --> 00:47:08,288 I've got a spreadsheet right now that I've been keeping track four weeks before Ilta's when I started. 545 00:47:08,288 --> 00:47:12,447 I've got 30 VCs who have reached out to us in 546 00:47:12,447 --> 00:47:13,547 What's that been? 547 00:47:13,547 --> 00:47:15,308 10 weeks, 30. 548 00:47:15,308 --> 00:47:18,793 These I'm not counting individual emails. 549 00:47:18,793 --> 00:47:27,360 These are individual funds and they see it the same way we do because initially I was like, why are we getting bombarded with like this? 550 00:47:27,360 --> 00:47:29,082 Then I started tracking it. 551 00:47:29,082 --> 00:47:40,196 Then I actually started reading some of the emails and a lot of it is BDRs, you know that they go source some deals for us, but we got a few like really thoughtful. 552 00:47:40,196 --> 00:47:43,508 emails with like, Hey, this is why we're interested in you and listed it out. 553 00:47:43,508 --> 00:47:45,370 And I was like, okay, they get it. 554 00:47:45,370 --> 00:47:56,206 So I think the investor community understands much better than people think on what the future is very likely going to look like because they get it. 555 00:47:56,206 --> 00:48:03,773 Um, it's not just, we've got growth on LinkedIn and these guys are in legal tech and we think something's going to happen there. 556 00:48:03,773 --> 00:48:07,655 No, they've got a narrative and a thesis and um, 557 00:48:08,085 --> 00:48:10,979 I think they really understand where things are going. 558 00:48:11,381 --> 00:48:12,152 Yeah, I think so. 559 00:48:12,152 --> 00:48:22,993 kind of personification, personalization, actually a better way of putting it, layer with data is going to be so important for the future. 560 00:48:22,994 --> 00:48:27,739 And there are some trailblazers already who are really kind of going deep into that. 561 00:48:27,739 --> 00:48:33,585 And I think it's really interesting to look at how they are. 562 00:48:34,229 --> 00:48:36,049 I'm actually facing a lot of resistance. 563 00:48:36,049 --> 00:48:39,829 So I was going to say doing well, but actually facing a lot of resistance because it's quite scary. 564 00:48:39,829 --> 00:48:46,809 You know, the idea that you open up your entire data to to a third party tool. 565 00:48:47,309 --> 00:48:53,729 That is terrifying to most CIOs of law firms. 566 00:48:54,009 --> 00:48:55,749 get get. 567 00:48:56,429 --> 00:48:56,649 Right. 568 00:48:56,649 --> 00:49:00,313 where you would put this outside your four walls of your tenant. 569 00:49:00,797 --> 00:49:11,440 Right, but then you've got your big AI models, which are obviously outside your tenant that you have to connect to and find the data is encrypted in rest and in transit and 570 00:49:11,440 --> 00:49:15,771 obfuscated and there's zero day retention, all this stuff, it's still extremely scary. 571 00:49:15,771 --> 00:49:22,283 And there's still a huge number of client profiles who will not let their data be used in that way. 572 00:49:22,443 --> 00:49:29,669 Financial institutions, for example, now you're seeing it in NDAs that you're not allowed to put my data into AI models. 573 00:49:29,669 --> 00:49:34,032 You're seeing a lot of people balancing that risk. 574 00:49:34,152 --> 00:49:43,859 yeah, mean, maybe the future will look like localized LLMs within law firms own maybe even a move back to on-prem. 575 00:49:43,859 --> 00:49:47,231 Probably not, but you never know in terms of data. 576 00:49:47,231 --> 00:49:55,267 All it takes is one big data breach, one big scare story and everyone battens, the hatches go down and everyone's looking for alternatives. 577 00:49:56,818 --> 00:50:09,298 Yeah, it's going to be very interesting to watch, but I agree with you very, very strongly that that the next big chapter will be about your data, not about what is the training 578 00:50:09,298 --> 00:50:11,540 data of the LLM going to provide you. 579 00:50:11,827 --> 00:50:13,468 percent, couldn't agree more. 580 00:50:13,468 --> 00:50:16,619 Well, this has been a fantastic conversation, Dom. 581 00:50:16,619 --> 00:50:17,610 I've really enjoyed it. 582 00:50:17,610 --> 00:50:19,451 I really enjoyed our last conversation. 583 00:50:19,451 --> 00:50:28,995 um What is the best way for, if listeners want to learn more about Purple or you, what's the best way for them to do that? 584 00:50:29,632 --> 00:50:34,135 They can jump onto our website, just www.purple.law. 585 00:50:34,135 --> 00:50:36,376 They can have look at some of the stuff we do for law firms. 586 00:50:36,376 --> 00:50:39,738 There's quite a lot of information up there, case studies and things like that. 587 00:50:39,738 --> 00:50:45,921 uh We're also building at the moment something quite fun, which is essentially a component playground. 588 00:50:46,522 --> 00:50:57,660 The idea being that if lawyers could visualize what they can do with tech better, then actually they could articulate internally what they want to achieve a lot more easily. 589 00:50:57,660 --> 00:51:02,942 So a bunch of different legal AI components that people can just like throw stuff out and just play around with. 590 00:51:02,942 --> 00:51:13,466 you know, the sorts of things that have been, let's say previously made to feel like they are incredibly difficult to build because that is as a vendor, how you sell these things. 591 00:51:13,867 --> 00:51:18,068 We're just basically opening them up open source for people to play around with that. 592 00:51:18,068 --> 00:51:20,890 That will be on our website soon, but there's lots of cool stuff on there. 593 00:51:20,890 --> 00:51:23,201 People can check it out and see, see what we do. 594 00:51:23,201 --> 00:51:24,371 And um 595 00:51:24,371 --> 00:51:31,071 and be part of the conversation because it's a fascinating conversation, fascinating time to be in this industry. 596 00:51:31,071 --> 00:51:36,111 we've got through probably about a third of, I'm sure, what we wanted to talk about in this. 597 00:51:36,571 --> 00:51:38,931 there's a lot to unpack, right? 598 00:51:38,931 --> 00:51:40,030 There's lot to unpack. 599 00:51:40,030 --> 00:51:40,420 Yeah. 600 00:51:40,420 --> 00:51:48,063 And we can maybe do a follow-up conversation um maybe in the spring and get through the rest of the agenda. 601 00:51:48,063 --> 00:51:50,144 We literally got through half. 602 00:51:50,144 --> 00:51:56,066 um let's, right, exactly. 603 00:51:56,087 --> 00:51:56,487 All right. 604 00:51:56,487 --> 00:51:58,017 Well, it was great talking to you. 605 00:51:58,017 --> 00:52:01,729 I really appreciate the time and um we'll chat again soon. 606 00:52:02,709 --> 00:52:03,059 All right. 607 00:52:03,059 --> 00:52:04,030 Thanks, Dom. 00:00:05,596 Dom, how are you this morning or afternoon your time? 2 00:00:05,865 --> 00:00:08,222 Hey Ted, yeah good thank you, good good. 3 00:00:08,275 --> 00:00:09,195 Good man. 4 00:00:09,195 --> 00:00:11,275 I'm so glad that you were able to join. 5 00:00:11,275 --> 00:00:27,015 I've enjoyed your content and your little video clips on LinkedIn and I really liked the commentary you had about the innovation councils and we're going to dig into that a little 6 00:00:27,015 --> 00:00:27,335 bit. 7 00:00:27,335 --> 00:00:29,635 But before we do, let's get you introduced. 8 00:00:29,635 --> 00:00:32,035 So you're a former lawyer. 9 00:00:32,375 --> 00:00:37,446 You're the founder and CEO of Purple and why don't you tell 10 00:00:37,446 --> 00:00:45,111 everyone fill in the gaps about kind of your background and just tell us quickly what purple is and what you guys do. 11 00:00:45,742 --> 00:00:46,442 Sure. 12 00:00:46,442 --> 00:00:56,942 So I started in a typical fashion training as a lawyer to the law degree, trained and practiced at Hogan levels and then moved over to a law firm called Gowling WLG. 13 00:00:56,942 --> 00:00:59,982 So I did that classic route into law. 14 00:00:59,982 --> 00:01:06,182 And then in around 2020, I had the opportunity to join the founding team of a legal tech AI company called Ovale. 15 00:01:06,182 --> 00:01:07,722 And that's where I've been for the last few years. 16 00:01:07,722 --> 00:01:15,604 And that was selling real estate AI tech to top law firms in the UK and also further afield. 17 00:01:15,604 --> 00:01:17,134 And that was very successful. 18 00:01:17,134 --> 00:01:23,116 And we rode the wave of large language models into law, basically. 19 00:01:23,156 --> 00:01:29,217 And uh I left the rear end of last year to start Purple. 20 00:01:29,217 --> 00:01:31,988 Now, um I'm the co-founder of Purple. 21 00:01:31,988 --> 00:01:36,519 There are three of us, actually, uh who are all co-founders there. 22 00:01:36,539 --> 00:01:44,692 And it's myself, it's Tim Pullen, who is the ex-CEO and founder of ThoughtRiver, and our CTO, Dimitri. 23 00:01:44,692 --> 00:01:52,346 And uh what we realized was that there was a huge gap in the market really for a delivery team for law firms. 24 00:01:52,346 --> 00:02:02,180 So Purple is essentially a delivery build studio for law firms who are looking to build their own tech, build their own AI, uh explore innovation and actually accelerate that 25 00:02:02,180 --> 00:02:06,132 journey towards the law firm of the future, the law firm of tomorrow. 26 00:02:06,172 --> 00:02:10,594 And this was something that I saw almost 27 00:02:10,656 --> 00:02:18,309 on a daily basis when I was looking behind the scenes at the 100, 150 law firms that I've worked with over the course of my career. 28 00:02:18,389 --> 00:02:21,040 And there was a clear need there. 29 00:02:21,040 --> 00:02:21,941 So that's my background. 30 00:02:21,941 --> 00:02:33,986 Traditional law entry route pivoted out to AI after a few years and now I find myself founding and running a build studio for law firms. 31 00:02:33,986 --> 00:02:35,006 It's an interesting gig. 32 00:02:35,006 --> 00:02:37,537 It's a very, very diverse range of. 33 00:02:37,537 --> 00:02:39,702 people that we come across and the diverse range of challenges. 34 00:02:39,702 --> 00:02:41,275 So it's really fantastic. 35 00:02:41,597 --> 00:02:43,128 Good stuff. 36 00:02:43,128 --> 00:02:48,072 Well, all that background is going to be very relevant for our conversation here today. 37 00:02:48,072 --> 00:02:59,940 So um we talked about when we were preparing the agenda for this episode, we talked about some of the headwinds to innovation in law firms. 38 00:02:59,940 --> 00:03:09,426 And I talk about this a lot and I hope my audience recognizes that it's certainly not to be critical. 39 00:03:09,426 --> 00:03:10,707 It's because 40 00:03:10,707 --> 00:03:18,067 We are at InfoDash 100 % dependent upon law firms for our survival. 41 00:03:18,067 --> 00:03:22,787 And I'm really trying to push to have the hard conversations. 42 00:03:22,927 --> 00:03:26,567 And I don't think we're having them right now. 43 00:03:26,567 --> 00:03:39,582 And by hard conversations, mean, what are the foundational elements of current state law firm world that create friction 44 00:03:39,582 --> 00:03:52,339 towards future state and we don't know exactly what future state looks like yet, but what we do know for sure is that the future state includes a tech enabled legal service 45 00:03:52,339 --> 00:03:55,420 delivery mechanism, whatever that might look like. 46 00:03:55,440 --> 00:03:56,991 So that I'm certain about. 47 00:03:56,991 --> 00:03:59,042 don't, I don't really know the timeline. 48 00:03:59,042 --> 00:04:01,763 I don't know what the pricing model is going to look like. 49 00:04:01,763 --> 00:04:04,665 I don't know what the client engagement model is going to look like though. 50 00:04:04,665 --> 00:04:06,086 have some ideas about that. 51 00:04:06,086 --> 00:04:08,979 Um, but when we, when we, 52 00:04:08,979 --> 00:04:15,642 talked, you know, I mean, starting first with, I guess, the people, which is really legal as a people business. 53 00:04:15,642 --> 00:04:18,583 Um, it certainly is today. 54 00:04:18,863 --> 00:04:21,784 And, know, I often quote Dr. 55 00:04:21,784 --> 00:04:22,785 Larry Richard. 56 00:04:22,785 --> 00:04:38,451 He wrote a book called lawyer brain and he outlined, he surveyed 30, 40,000, uh attorneys over probably a 30 year period and mapped out some personality traits. 57 00:04:38,451 --> 00:04:47,611 that lawyers have and they're above and he compared those traits to the general population. 58 00:04:47,651 --> 00:05:03,631 I did a LinkedIn post on this, I don't know, about four months ago and they're higher than average in skepticism, autonomy, urgency and abstract reasoning and they're lower than the 59 00:05:03,631 --> 00:05:05,719 mean or median. 60 00:05:05,719 --> 00:05:09,040 in sociability, resilience and empathy. 61 00:05:09,400 --> 00:05:10,360 Right. 62 00:05:10,981 --> 00:05:13,001 It is very interesting. 63 00:05:15,402 --> 00:05:25,104 They're very interesting data points, but when you look at that and you map it against, I listened to a podcast with Huberman. 64 00:05:25,105 --> 00:05:33,712 It was a marathon podcast as usual with him, but, he had Mark Andreessen on the show and Mark Andreessen, Mark Andreessen, who 65 00:05:33,712 --> 00:05:38,494 A16Z, founder of Netscape, the dude knows innovation. 66 00:05:38,494 --> 00:05:55,720 He mapped out the five traits of an innovator and there's some overlap, but there's a lot of, um I guess we'll call it white space between innovators and your typical attorney. 67 00:05:57,021 --> 00:06:00,762 innovators are open to many different kinds of new ideas. 68 00:06:00,902 --> 00:06:03,473 That's not your typical lawyer. 69 00:06:03,603 --> 00:06:07,425 High level of conscientiousness, that is your typical lawyer. 70 00:06:07,686 --> 00:06:11,208 High and disagreeableness, that's your typical lawyer. 71 00:06:12,389 --> 00:06:15,391 High IQ, that's your typical lawyer. 72 00:06:15,391 --> 00:06:17,092 And high in resilience. 73 00:06:17,112 --> 00:06:24,017 So on the first and last, open to new ideas and high in resilience, that's not your typical lawyer. 74 00:06:24,017 --> 00:06:33,023 But what sort of uh observations have you had as part of your work helping law firms 75 00:06:33,139 --> 00:06:35,207 create an innovation function? 76 00:06:35,207 --> 00:06:38,064 What have you observed along those lines? 77 00:06:38,293 --> 00:06:42,466 Well, I'll jump back to a story that I tell from when I was a trainee, actually. 78 00:06:42,466 --> 00:06:51,343 And um I won't name names for obvious reasons, but I was in a particular team and we were doing an exercise and we were cross-checking a very, very long document. 79 00:06:51,343 --> 00:06:56,536 You we were doing reference checks and definition checks for something like a 300 page document. 80 00:06:56,617 --> 00:07:02,651 And I realized, a wee trainee, I realized that there was a much faster way of doing this. 81 00:07:02,651 --> 00:07:03,851 And I wrote a macro. 82 00:07:03,851 --> 00:07:06,471 There was a word macro to actually do it for me. 83 00:07:06,471 --> 00:07:10,431 And it looked for every capitalized term in the document and it put it into a table. 84 00:07:10,431 --> 00:07:14,471 And then it looked at whether that term was used ever in the document. 85 00:07:14,471 --> 00:07:23,911 And so by using this little Excel helper that I had built, now you would call it an AI agent, of course, because everything is an AI agent. 86 00:07:23,911 --> 00:07:29,771 But using that little helper, I did this exercise in half an hour, 45 minutes. 87 00:07:29,771 --> 00:07:35,551 And I remember showing it to the lawyer who was supervising me and she said, that's great. 88 00:07:35,671 --> 00:07:37,551 Now please do it manually. 89 00:07:38,851 --> 00:07:46,811 And I think that encapsulates really nicely the lawyer brain is that you can look at something that's more efficient. 90 00:07:46,811 --> 00:07:55,711 You can appreciate that it is more efficient, but fundamentally, you know what you know and you know how you've been trained and you know how you should or at least have been 91 00:07:55,711 --> 00:07:57,523 told you should be doing something. 92 00:07:57,523 --> 00:08:10,194 and that there is a value you ascribe to the manual friction of doing work, even though you can't articulate why you place value in it, that value somehow seems right to you. 93 00:08:10,194 --> 00:08:21,223 Now, maybe that's because we work on a time-based industry, know, in the time-based industry where we build by the minute and we are deeply entrenched with we must spend time 94 00:08:21,223 --> 00:08:22,964 to achieve a result. 95 00:08:23,125 --> 00:08:24,872 Or maybe we are just 96 00:08:24,872 --> 00:08:27,814 believers that clients pay us for our time in our brains. 97 00:08:27,814 --> 00:08:29,566 And so it's almost cheating. 98 00:08:29,566 --> 00:08:37,132 I actually read something the other day that that lawyers some lawyers see AI is cheating, even though it gets you to the same end end result. 99 00:08:37,132 --> 00:08:51,344 So I think I think that story really um encapsulates the challenge that we face when we are um entrenched and onboarded as lawyers into an industry that wants to make you the 100 00:08:51,344 --> 00:08:53,085 same as everyone else. 101 00:08:53,806 --> 00:09:02,552 And a lot of people do find that training process of becoming a lawyer quite difficult because they fit you into their box. 102 00:09:02,552 --> 00:09:07,754 They almost try and round out the square edges to make you like them. 103 00:09:08,175 --> 00:09:16,940 And then you journey through your career and you get to five years qualified, 10 years qualified partnership and somebody's going, you need to change the way you're thinking. 104 00:09:16,940 --> 00:09:19,132 You need to open your mind to other ways of thinking. 105 00:09:19,132 --> 00:09:20,168 And suddenly, 106 00:09:20,168 --> 00:09:28,204 your entire career, or at least the way that you've been trained for your entire career, is acting as a blocker to you actually achieving that. 107 00:09:28,204 --> 00:09:29,795 And it's not because you don't want to. 108 00:09:29,795 --> 00:09:35,413 I think that's something that we see all the time is there's a great desire to move with the times. 109 00:09:35,413 --> 00:09:40,232 There's desire and encouragement and people say the right things a lot of the time. 110 00:09:40,232 --> 00:09:48,283 But the real friction comes in that delivery piece is actually doing it, actually changing your habits, actually 111 00:09:48,283 --> 00:09:54,336 enforcing a new way of working on your team, because what if it breaks what we have at the moment? 112 00:09:54,336 --> 00:09:57,677 And that's, I think, that's just the nature of being risk averse, right? 113 00:09:57,677 --> 00:10:00,258 And that at its core is, is what we see. 114 00:10:00,258 --> 00:10:01,385 Do you see this as well? 115 00:10:01,385 --> 00:10:13,604 I mean, you must do in when you speak to lawyers and you roll out your technology, this, eh you use the word first friction in how they think, but how they want to think versus 116 00:10:13,604 --> 00:10:14,914 how they actually think. 117 00:10:15,163 --> 00:10:17,005 Yeah, we do see it. 118 00:10:17,005 --> 00:10:26,552 so in my journey, I've been in the industry for almost 20 years and have worked with more than 110 AMLaw firms. 119 00:10:26,552 --> 00:10:34,748 I stopped counting at 110 um because it gets complicated when they merge and all right, two AMLaw firms merged. 120 00:10:34,748 --> 00:10:37,381 Does that mean that's three or is that now one? 121 00:10:37,381 --> 00:10:39,414 Anyway, so I stopped counting. 122 00:10:39,414 --> 00:10:39,785 Yeah. 123 00:10:39,785 --> 00:10:40,526 Yeah. 124 00:10:40,947 --> 00:10:42,507 I stopped counting at 110. 125 00:10:42,507 --> 00:10:54,547 So more than half, you know, I can say that I've worked with more than half the AMLaw and, we have more than a quarter of the AMLaw as clients now, um, at InfoDash and we're three 126 00:10:54,547 --> 00:10:55,807 and a half years old. 127 00:10:55,987 --> 00:11:10,007 So, um, I've seen a lot and I have seen a very high degree of variation in, you know, a mindset, I guess we'll call it and kind of default positioning. 128 00:11:10,007 --> 00:11:11,019 Um, 129 00:11:11,047 --> 00:11:21,091 But there are some common threads and I think in general, there is a resistance to change. 130 00:11:21,191 --> 00:11:30,215 historically in the general case, to your point, there has been an aversion to tech investment. 131 00:11:30,215 --> 00:11:40,619 um Maybe it's because of the reason that you mentioned where, know, officially, efficiency is, essentially penalized in the hourly bill billing model. 132 00:11:41,183 --> 00:11:55,074 And um I think that many firms have historically seen tech as an expense that needs to be managed as opposed to an investment that is a true enabler. 133 00:11:55,228 --> 00:11:57,885 they see it as IT, right infrastructure. 134 00:11:58,329 --> 00:12:02,040 And that is always just uh a negative on the PNL. 135 00:12:02,201 --> 00:12:02,821 Exactly. 136 00:12:02,821 --> 00:12:04,832 So it's a cost to be managed. 137 00:12:04,832 --> 00:12:17,969 I've also seen um throughout my journeys um a lack of empowerment in certain roles, including the innovation role. 138 00:12:17,969 --> 00:12:23,162 And again, this is changing and it's not true across the board. 139 00:12:23,162 --> 00:12:32,275 But I remember in the early days when innovation was, we have always sold into knowledge management before innovation was a thing at all. 140 00:12:32,275 --> 00:12:35,355 Nobody talked about innovation 15 years ago. 141 00:12:36,535 --> 00:12:38,055 It's pretty new. 142 00:12:38,055 --> 00:12:38,375 Yeah. 143 00:12:38,375 --> 00:12:51,175 And I, my listeners know I cite a, a, analysis that I did in 2014 where I, well, I did the analysis in 2024, but I went back 10 years and looked at the Ilta roster. 144 00:12:51,175 --> 00:12:53,735 Cause I keep this data being an Ilta sponsor. 145 00:12:53,735 --> 00:12:59,575 And there were 16 people on that list who had the word innovation in their title, a very small number. 146 00:12:59,575 --> 00:13:00,627 And now there's 147 00:13:00,627 --> 00:13:02,267 Close, close to 400. 148 00:13:02,267 --> 00:13:04,376 So, you know, 20. 149 00:13:04,376 --> 00:13:15,601 I use this stat with people ever since you told me about it I think it's amazing it's such a such a an indicator of how the industry's changed or at least how it wants to change 150 00:13:15,601 --> 00:13:16,177 right 151 00:13:16,177 --> 00:13:16,837 Exactly. 152 00:13:16,837 --> 00:13:28,165 it's not, uh so, and I think we can use this data, the ILTA data to directionally understand the trajectory of innovation. 153 00:13:28,165 --> 00:13:32,028 uh know, ILTA doesn't have a hundred percent coverage. 154 00:13:32,028 --> 00:13:41,800 They have a really strong footprint in big law in the US and uh the UK, but globally. 155 00:13:41,800 --> 00:13:46,002 But it's again, it's a good indicator of just general velocity. 156 00:13:46,202 --> 00:13:53,746 And, yeah, in those early days, the, the role was a lot of window dressing. 157 00:13:53,746 --> 00:13:56,827 was, um, what I call innovation theater. 158 00:13:56,828 --> 00:14:06,773 And there really wasn't a true fundamental commitment or a commitment to change kind of the fundamental elements that, you know, you kind of have to, if you're truly innovating, 159 00:14:06,773 --> 00:14:11,375 I think there's a interesting distinction between improvement and innovation. 160 00:14:11,471 --> 00:14:14,772 Improvement is incremental, right? 161 00:14:14,772 --> 00:14:18,143 Innovation is foundational. 162 00:14:18,143 --> 00:14:23,155 When you innovate something, you know, like the iPhone was an innovation. 163 00:14:23,155 --> 00:14:31,577 If you had played with the earlier attempts at a smartphone, you would realize how, what a big leap that was. 164 00:14:31,577 --> 00:14:38,159 But um it seems like in the early days, there was a lot of focus on improvement as opposed to innovation. 165 00:14:38,247 --> 00:14:44,191 it was small steps here and there to try and make certain pain points less, less painful, right? 166 00:14:44,191 --> 00:14:50,896 And actually, there's a distinction there as well to draw between top down innovation and bottom up innovation. 167 00:14:50,896 --> 00:15:01,443 So if you have aligned leadership, and this is something I talk about a lot, and it's a whole different em kind of point of discussion around how a partnership model can enable 168 00:15:01,443 --> 00:15:06,873 innovation in itself, fundamentally, how does a partnership with lots of different five things. 169 00:15:06,873 --> 00:15:11,206 actually enable that innovation piece across the entire business. 170 00:15:11,206 --> 00:15:23,015 Whereas if you innovate from the bottom up and you innovate with champions on the ground level, a lot of the time you are just whack-a-mole-ing to try and by sheer quantity drive 171 00:15:23,015 --> 00:15:25,967 that particular organization forward in terms of its innovation. 172 00:15:25,967 --> 00:15:33,022 But this idea of uh pure innovation, so above and beyond improvement. 173 00:15:33,094 --> 00:15:43,978 I mean, we've seen over the last few months speaking to the law firms that we do and, you know, the law firms we work with are your top kind of our hundreds across US, UK. 174 00:15:44,458 --> 00:15:53,562 There's a lot of talk around the law firm of tomorrow and people are really investing in this idea and they're investing their time, their energy, their money. 175 00:15:53,562 --> 00:15:59,444 And it's not about necessarily how do we change what we have now. 176 00:15:59,444 --> 00:16:02,445 It's about how can we almost 177 00:16:02,495 --> 00:16:15,595 start again in a, let's say a related venture or entity to build the law firm of tomorrow from the bottom up, there is a recognition almost that fundamentally something is broken 178 00:16:15,996 --> 00:16:22,701 and to go on that journey to pure innovation, it's almost a bit scorched earth. 179 00:16:22,701 --> 00:16:25,203 You know, at times there are some, law firms talking about this. 180 00:16:25,203 --> 00:16:32,326 We just need to start a brand new law firm and we need to go AI first from day dot and see where that takes us. 181 00:16:32,326 --> 00:16:34,948 em It's a journey that many are going on. 182 00:16:34,948 --> 00:16:47,098 And I think it's a really interesting conversation around to use em your two options, improvement and innovation, and what do they look like and who's responsible for what, and 183 00:16:47,098 --> 00:16:55,764 what should you be doing in this day and age when we know that AI is coming for the industry in some way or form and what that looks like we don't know yet. 184 00:16:55,764 --> 00:16:56,939 Super interesting. 185 00:16:56,939 --> 00:16:57,690 it is super. 186 00:16:57,690 --> 00:16:58,181 It's a man. 187 00:16:58,181 --> 00:16:59,522 It's a really fun time. 188 00:16:59,522 --> 00:17:08,893 It's I when I talk to people who know a little bit about the industry and they hear that, you know, my business is solely dependent upon law firms. 189 00:17:08,893 --> 00:17:10,330 They're like, aren't you worried? 190 00:17:10,330 --> 00:17:11,000 You know what I mean? 191 00:17:11,000 --> 00:17:16,904 Like there's going to be a complete reboot of the industry again over what span of time. 192 00:17:16,904 --> 00:17:19,837 Like things aren't going to change tomorrow. 193 00:17:19,837 --> 00:17:23,121 I think things will fundamentally shift. 194 00:17:23,121 --> 00:17:33,174 five years from now and 10 years, think the industry is going to look completely, completely different, but it is a great time to be a challenger firm in this market. 195 00:17:33,174 --> 00:17:40,716 Now, you know, like the Crosby's of the world, um, they had a podcast with, uh, their VC Sequoia. 196 00:17:40,716 --> 00:17:47,918 Uh, I can't recall the name of their, of the podcast, but I'm sure you could find it. 197 00:17:47,918 --> 00:17:50,519 We'll put it in the show notes, but, 198 00:17:50,686 --> 00:17:52,367 Crosby strategy is interesting. 199 00:17:52,367 --> 00:17:54,377 So they're doing a couple of things. 200 00:17:54,497 --> 00:18:07,842 One is they are training or they are fine tuning and leveraging reinforcement um learning to adapt to individual attorneys. 201 00:18:08,203 --> 00:18:08,603 Right. 202 00:18:08,603 --> 00:18:12,834 So that I'll have my own Ted LLM, right. 203 00:18:12,834 --> 00:18:15,645 When I'm conducting legal work and that makes a lot of sense. 204 00:18:15,645 --> 00:18:20,583 And they didn't say this on that podcast, but I'm, connecting the dots. 205 00:18:20,583 --> 00:18:29,956 They got there after experimentation, um, because it would be much more efficient for everybody to just use the same LLM, right? 206 00:18:29,956 --> 00:18:37,758 You, you, you train it once you go through the reinforcement learning and fine tuning process once, and then you're off to the races. 207 00:18:37,758 --> 00:18:47,031 The problem is that legal is so bespoke that if I get something different than what I'm used to, 208 00:18:47,807 --> 00:18:52,912 as output, I'm going to rearrange the hell out of it to make it look the way I'm comfortable with. 209 00:18:52,912 --> 00:18:59,658 So I'm the, again, they didn't say this, but I'm assuming that after some experimentation, said, you know what? 210 00:18:59,658 --> 00:19:09,146 Let's make these, let's make these models reflect the voice and the style of individual lawyers. 211 00:19:09,146 --> 00:19:11,277 And they don't have a big legal team. 212 00:19:11,277 --> 00:19:14,170 they're, they're, their leverage is tech, not people. 213 00:19:14,170 --> 00:19:15,711 Um, 214 00:19:15,741 --> 00:19:18,276 So yeah, I don't know, what are your thoughts on that strategy? 215 00:19:18,648 --> 00:19:31,979 I think that's really interesting because arguably the only way to really make legal services AI first is to drive towards a degree of commoditization across the industry. 216 00:19:31,979 --> 00:19:42,358 And that means acknowledging that even though at the moment there is uh a lot of reward in carrying out things in a bespoke way because you essentially separate yourself from 217 00:19:42,358 --> 00:19:42,958 everybody else. 218 00:19:42,958 --> 00:19:44,610 You go, well, what is your USP? 219 00:19:44,610 --> 00:19:46,388 Well, I do things in a different way. 220 00:19:46,388 --> 00:19:51,591 know, I'm more commercial or I speak your language or I deliver things in the way that you want. 221 00:19:51,591 --> 00:19:52,992 And that's great. 222 00:19:53,092 --> 00:20:08,042 But as a firm, to maintain a standard of delivery that is uniform, I would think actually, you need to persuade lawyers to work in cohesion, like a school of fish. 223 00:20:08,042 --> 00:20:13,566 And actually, the LLM should reflect the personality of the firm, not necessarily the personality of the people. 224 00:20:13,566 --> 00:20:16,235 Now, there's a technical side to this as well, because 225 00:20:16,235 --> 00:20:25,443 A lot of the time when people talk about, we are fine tuning of the limbs, are making things reflect our personality or the way that we like to work. 226 00:20:25,443 --> 00:20:37,352 Well, a lot of that isn't true, or at least it's a very, very light layer of technology above what the core foundation model is outputting. 227 00:20:37,795 --> 00:20:45,700 I mean, if this law firm is, for example, just putting in some of the previous emails of that particular lawyer and saying, adapt your style and tone. 228 00:20:45,700 --> 00:20:48,940 to how this person speaks, great. 229 00:20:48,940 --> 00:20:51,340 I think really easy solution there. 230 00:20:51,340 --> 00:20:55,360 You could dress up as fine tuning or reinforcement learning, however you want to call it. 231 00:20:55,360 --> 00:21:01,840 Really what it is, is a very simple prompt system prompt that sits behind that particular lawyer's interactions. 232 00:21:03,540 --> 00:21:04,900 It's a regular. 233 00:21:05,480 --> 00:21:12,295 So there is a point here around what is 234 00:21:12,295 --> 00:21:14,317 let's call it innovation by press release. 235 00:21:14,317 --> 00:21:19,241 So what people are doing, they say they're doing, they make it sound very grand and very difficult. 236 00:21:19,241 --> 00:21:27,378 There is a point here around whether that personalization layer should be something as lawyers that we should be trying to get out of our technology. 237 00:21:27,378 --> 00:21:29,069 know, it's like meet the lawyer where they are. 238 00:21:29,069 --> 00:21:30,430 That's how you get people to use tech. 239 00:21:30,430 --> 00:21:32,412 You try not to get them to change too much. 240 00:21:32,452 --> 00:21:40,900 And certainly when I use large language models, and I'm sure when your listeners out there using chat GPT, it's far more effective if it reflects your tone. 241 00:21:40,900 --> 00:21:43,642 you enjoy using it a lot more, you're more likely to use it. 242 00:21:43,642 --> 00:21:49,205 So adoption is going to skyrocket if you do do that, which in itself is half the battle. 243 00:21:49,386 --> 00:21:52,117 But I don't think it's the end of the journey. 244 00:21:52,117 --> 00:21:53,358 I don't think it's the answer. 245 00:21:53,358 --> 00:21:55,149 I don't think it's the end of the rainbow. 246 00:21:55,149 --> 00:22:00,806 And I think there's a lot more thought and time that needs to go into what does that law firm of tomorrow actually look like? 247 00:22:00,806 --> 00:22:06,296 What does the full stack law firm that Y Combinator have been talking about actually look like? 248 00:22:06,296 --> 00:22:07,947 And it's very interesting. 249 00:22:07,947 --> 00:22:10,785 And I was speaking to somebody this morning about this around 250 00:22:10,785 --> 00:22:15,648 how many non-lawyers are starting full stack law firms. 251 00:22:15,648 --> 00:22:20,241 The idea of a non-lawyer starting a law firm, you go back a few years, outrageous. 252 00:22:20,241 --> 00:22:25,925 How can someone who's not been to law school even begin to understand what we do as lawyers? 253 00:22:25,925 --> 00:22:26,845 And that's quite interesting. 254 00:22:26,845 --> 00:22:34,620 If you look at lots of the big legal tech platforms as well, the main one obviously aside, a lot of the founders are not lawyers. 255 00:22:34,620 --> 00:22:38,673 And you're going, well, how are you doing this? 256 00:22:38,673 --> 00:22:40,754 How are you understanding 257 00:22:40,754 --> 00:22:48,019 pain points in the industry which you've not trained in, you've not practiced in, which is pretty dense and opaque and difficult to understand. 258 00:22:48,019 --> 00:23:01,408 um So there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of movement, there's a lot of people uh pronouncing and announcing their solutions to this big problem of the law firm tomorrow. 259 00:23:01,489 --> 00:23:08,093 just don't think we're there, I don't think anyone has got that answer yet because the goalposts keep moving, new challenges are coming in all the time and everyone has a 260 00:23:08,093 --> 00:23:09,600 slightly different approach to it. 261 00:23:09,600 --> 00:23:12,292 I think it's fantastic what people like Crosby are doing. 262 00:23:12,292 --> 00:23:18,878 I think it's pushing the envelope forward, but it's a for now rather than a this is what law firms look like. 263 00:23:19,059 --> 00:23:20,039 For sure. 264 00:23:20,039 --> 00:23:22,599 think this is a transitional step. 265 00:23:22,599 --> 00:23:29,539 I think in the long-term, so I'm a lean Six Sigma black belt and I trained at Bank of America. 266 00:23:29,539 --> 00:23:36,759 They have a very robust Six Sigma program there. 267 00:23:36,919 --> 00:23:41,739 And when I first entered the industry, I tried to apply that training. 268 00:23:41,739 --> 00:23:44,759 One of our first legal clients, they no longer exist. 269 00:23:44,759 --> 00:23:46,539 This is in 08, 09. 270 00:23:46,539 --> 00:23:48,779 They were default services. 271 00:23:48,924 --> 00:23:56,850 which business was really good in 08 and 09 um in the default services world, as you can imagine. 272 00:23:57,111 --> 00:24:01,554 And they scaled from, you know, this wasn't a big law firm. 273 00:24:01,554 --> 00:24:07,158 mean, they started off with maybe 50 employees and ended up with 518 months time. 274 00:24:07,379 --> 00:24:10,621 So 10 X growth, maybe it was 24 months. 275 00:24:10,621 --> 00:24:13,123 It was a, it was a real short period of time. 276 00:24:13,123 --> 00:24:18,333 And the guy who ran the, this law firm came from big law. 277 00:24:18,333 --> 00:24:20,384 but he was an outside of the box thinker. 278 00:24:20,384 --> 00:24:30,566 still keep in touch with him and we, had, um, I had a friend who was in between roles at the bank and he was a lean Six Sigma black belt. 279 00:24:30,566 --> 00:24:34,867 So I, I, I put him embedded with that firm. 280 00:24:34,867 --> 00:24:37,755 Actually the ABA journal wrote an article about the work that we did there. 281 00:24:37,755 --> 00:24:39,089 It was very impressive. 282 00:24:39,089 --> 00:24:41,299 The name of the firm was the Hunneville law firm. 283 00:24:41,299 --> 00:24:48,311 If anybody wants to go through the ABA journal archives and read, read it, but we, 284 00:24:48,391 --> 00:24:53,685 Um, we set up pods where, know, the default services work. 285 00:24:53,685 --> 00:24:57,177 There's a ton of administrative tasks required. 286 00:24:57,177 --> 00:25:06,391 And we put in pods, we put monitors where we could show the flow of work and bottlenecks and control charts. 287 00:25:06,391 --> 00:25:15,670 I mean, we were managing this like a manufacturing facility would manage an assembly line and it was extremely efficient and cutting edge. 288 00:25:15,670 --> 00:25:17,363 And again, this is. 289 00:25:17,363 --> 00:25:29,853 This has been 15 years, but since then I've never seen it work that way in, all, in all my travels in all of those years, I've never seen it work like it did at that. 290 00:25:29,894 --> 00:25:38,302 Again, 500 employee, they probably had 10 attorneys, but they had 500 employees just doing the grunt work. 291 00:25:38,302 --> 00:25:44,097 Um, so the ability to standardize, I think has been, there's a lot of resistance to that. 292 00:25:44,097 --> 00:25:44,807 So 293 00:25:44,807 --> 00:25:48,407 I think we're gonna have to transitionally get there, get there incrementally. 294 00:25:48,844 --> 00:25:58,821 think actually you've hit on something quite interesting there, which is that our lawyers really the ones who should be in charge of innovating in the law firm. 295 00:25:59,843 --> 00:26:01,544 Can they innovate? 296 00:26:01,544 --> 00:26:12,893 know, cycling back to what we talked about earlier in terms of mindset, the concept of the Innovation Council, the Innovation Group or the Future Services Group, know, million names 297 00:26:12,893 --> 00:26:13,873 for them. 298 00:26:14,294 --> 00:26:18,207 And you put a bunch of senior lawyers around the table and you say, right, 299 00:26:18,207 --> 00:26:23,843 Right, right guys, guys and girls, your job is to innovate now and drive us forward. 300 00:26:23,843 --> 00:26:26,986 uh Look, here's a good test, right? 301 00:26:26,986 --> 00:26:28,687 Teddy, are you a singer? 302 00:26:29,889 --> 00:26:34,443 No, right, if I said, right, You're not gonna do it, you're not gonna do it, right? 303 00:26:34,443 --> 00:26:41,291 Now, right, now, so I am a singer and if you said to me, sing, I will say, I'm not gonna sing on your podcast, don't worry. 304 00:26:41,291 --> 00:26:42,912 But for me, that's fine. 305 00:26:42,912 --> 00:26:44,001 I'm comfortable. 306 00:26:44,001 --> 00:26:45,785 I trained in the past. 307 00:26:45,785 --> 00:26:50,187 This is something that I'm very, very comfortable doing in public. 308 00:26:50,328 --> 00:27:00,936 And it's the same thing is that you are asking people who are not trained to innovate to be creative, to find different ways of looking at the problem, whether that's through a 309 00:27:00,936 --> 00:27:07,711 framework like uh Lean Six Sigma or whether it's through other just creative, more creative frameworks. 310 00:27:08,809 --> 00:27:11,871 you're asking them to do something they don't know. 311 00:27:13,012 --> 00:27:14,473 lawyers are very intelligent. 312 00:27:14,473 --> 00:27:17,195 We've gone to law school, we've studied a lot. 313 00:27:17,195 --> 00:27:22,659 We um think most of the time we can give anything a good crack if we put our mind to it. 314 00:27:22,659 --> 00:27:27,702 And I think that's the mistake is that that flexibility is not there. 315 00:27:27,702 --> 00:27:35,648 And so unfortunately, I see a lot of uh innovation groups fail after a certain amount of time because 316 00:27:35,648 --> 00:27:40,528 They look at their output over 18 months and they go, have we actually achieved here? 317 00:27:40,528 --> 00:27:42,188 And it's certainly not what we set out to achieve. 318 00:27:42,188 --> 00:27:43,268 People are busy. 319 00:27:43,268 --> 00:27:44,748 People don't have the time to make decisions. 320 00:27:44,748 --> 00:27:49,668 Nobody wants to make the decision because nobody wants to be the person on the hook for a particular project. 321 00:27:50,028 --> 00:27:52,968 But fundamentally, that reimagining doesn't happen. 322 00:27:52,968 --> 00:28:02,608 And I think that's a big part of why I do what I do now is that I was a difficult trainee, to put it that way. 323 00:28:02,771 --> 00:28:05,241 I didn't want to play by the rules. 324 00:28:05,322 --> 00:28:09,282 if you go and look at my old supervisors, inevitably they'd say the same. 325 00:28:09,282 --> 00:28:11,923 They'd be like, I remember you, you were a pain in the backside. 326 00:28:11,923 --> 00:28:22,446 and you know, that, that skillset or that ability to just look at things and go, wait a minute, this is not how the world works in other industries. 327 00:28:22,446 --> 00:28:25,927 If this was a car manufacturing plant, this is the point you were making. 328 00:28:25,927 --> 00:28:27,557 This is not how we would do it. 329 00:28:27,557 --> 00:28:30,968 If this was Apple, this is not how we would do it. 330 00:28:31,008 --> 00:28:34,528 And yet we want to 2x our revenue in the next five years. 331 00:28:35,008 --> 00:28:38,948 And we're not learning from the way that other industries do it. 332 00:28:39,008 --> 00:28:44,828 So I've definitely seen a trend for innovation leaders in law firms to be actually from outside the law. 333 00:28:44,828 --> 00:28:47,868 That's something I've seen more and more over time, especially in the UK. 334 00:28:47,868 --> 00:28:51,628 That's a very interesting trend and one that I very much encourage. 335 00:28:51,928 --> 00:29:00,883 And also, I think there is a need there for law firms to take an honest look at their own innovation. 336 00:29:00,883 --> 00:29:03,504 functions and go, well, do we need help here? 337 00:29:03,525 --> 00:29:15,674 You do we do we need someone with a flexible mind, you know, a dynamic way of looking at business to come in and essentially coach our seniors in being innovative and being 338 00:29:15,674 --> 00:29:16,335 dynamic? 339 00:29:16,335 --> 00:29:23,310 eh And that's well, that yeah, that's that's another good question. 340 00:29:23,310 --> 00:29:26,300 You know, if a non lawyer comes into a law firm and tells you 341 00:29:26,300 --> 00:29:28,871 I'm going to tell you how to innovate around your own business. 342 00:29:28,871 --> 00:29:29,861 Will a lawyer accept that? 343 00:29:29,861 --> 00:29:31,712 The answer is probably no. 344 00:29:31,772 --> 00:29:35,544 Now, then it gets to the question of, who is on that? 345 00:29:35,544 --> 00:29:37,454 Who are you trying to coach? 346 00:29:37,535 --> 00:29:42,136 And actually, my opinion is that you should be coaching the juniors, not the seniors. 347 00:29:42,136 --> 00:29:46,398 The juniors are the ones who actually are feeling most of the pain in your law firm. 348 00:29:46,398 --> 00:29:48,899 By the time you're a senior, you've gone through the fire. 349 00:29:48,899 --> 00:29:50,320 You're out on the other side. 350 00:29:50,320 --> 00:29:52,400 You're sipping a mojito on the beach. 351 00:29:52,821 --> 00:29:54,001 Gross generalization. 352 00:29:54,001 --> 00:29:56,072 But a lot of the time you're doing 353 00:29:56,072 --> 00:30:06,869 far higher level work than you would as a junior when you're going through the drudgery of sitting in a room with two million files and you have to go through every single word to 354 00:30:06,869 --> 00:30:09,611 find a particular keyword for a litigation case. 355 00:30:09,611 --> 00:30:10,952 That's the real pain. 356 00:30:10,952 --> 00:30:15,595 actually bringing the juniors on that journey is where law firms should be focusing right now. 357 00:30:15,595 --> 00:30:22,920 And then, and this goes back to your point earlier, empowering the juniors to actually deliver that innovation. 358 00:30:22,920 --> 00:30:25,725 So the seniors should go, this is something that we are not good at. 359 00:30:25,725 --> 00:30:32,080 and we'll never be good at, but we will give you that power because you know what the future looks like better than we do. 360 00:30:32,080 --> 00:30:33,401 And that's really scary. 361 00:30:33,401 --> 00:30:44,839 And I totally get why law firms are scared and I totally get why seniors are scared because in no other area of the business will the partners co-tow to juniors in that way. 362 00:30:44,839 --> 00:30:49,723 Yeah, that requires a lot of humility, right? 363 00:30:49,844 --> 00:30:50,625 Don't you think? 364 00:30:50,625 --> 00:30:57,371 And is that uh a common trait in the senior ranks within law firms, do you think? 365 00:30:58,896 --> 00:31:09,272 I think it depends, uh know, people are people and personalities will differ, especially in a large partnership, you know, the politics and the large partnership, the politics of 366 00:31:09,272 --> 00:31:10,523 innovation are fascinating. 367 00:31:10,523 --> 00:31:19,978 You have your older partners who are close to retirement, who frankly won't care because it's going to make no difference to the money they receive before they retire. 368 00:31:19,978 --> 00:31:22,659 And to be honest, it's probably going to spend their money. 369 00:31:22,659 --> 00:31:24,440 They're probably going to get less. 370 00:31:24,440 --> 00:31:27,662 So if there's a big innovation play, they're going to be like, you know what? 371 00:31:28,619 --> 00:31:30,440 I don't really think that's a good idea. 372 00:31:30,440 --> 00:31:38,744 And then you've got the junior partners who were around the time now where junior partners are making AI innovation part of their business case. 373 00:31:38,904 --> 00:31:45,468 So even though your book of business is the core of why you're made up to partnership, really, they're going to be putting this sort of stuff in there. 374 00:31:45,468 --> 00:31:47,654 They're still keen because they still need to prove themselves. 375 00:31:47,654 --> 00:31:51,991 They need to move from a salaried partner to an equity partner or they need to move up the scale. 376 00:31:51,991 --> 00:31:58,226 em I'm of the age where a lot of my friends now are getting onto the partnership scale and it's 377 00:31:58,226 --> 00:32:08,321 fascinating you think partnership is the top and you open the door and you go behind and you realize there is a whole other scale going on there in terms of whose opinion is valid 378 00:32:08,321 --> 00:32:10,832 and who's bringing in what and all that sort of stuff. 379 00:32:11,326 --> 00:32:19,817 kind of junior partners, senior partners, different perspectives, those in the middle are kind of caught in a tug of war trying to decide whether it's worth investing or not. 380 00:32:20,498 --> 00:32:24,460 And that unity of vision is very hard to come by. 381 00:32:24,580 --> 00:32:28,126 yeah, think think humility, there is humility. 382 00:32:28,126 --> 00:32:39,393 uh The question is, is that something that is then supported by the leadership to actually empower the entire firm's journey, or is that just a few individuals who are very 383 00:32:39,393 --> 00:32:47,218 supportive of innovation and AI and they're the good guys and they're the ones who will help if they can, but can't drive real change? 384 00:32:47,306 --> 00:32:48,119 It's just fascinating. 385 00:32:48,119 --> 00:32:49,530 It's psychology at its core. 386 00:32:49,530 --> 00:32:50,591 Everything is psychology. 387 00:32:50,591 --> 00:32:57,497 And it's just a fascinating view of how people struggle with change, especially when we are an industry that 388 00:32:57,497 --> 00:32:59,324 encourage people not to. 389 00:32:59,463 --> 00:32:59,823 Yeah. 390 00:32:59,823 --> 00:33:07,446 And you know, and, I have lots of friends who, are lawyers in the KM and I space. 391 00:33:07,446 --> 00:33:23,293 And, um, I would say the overwhelming majority are extremely humble and, um but I hear stories and it's probably, you know, the bad apples, you know, you hear 10 X the stories 392 00:33:23,293 --> 00:33:27,034 about the bad apples, then you do the good ones. 393 00:33:27,034 --> 00:33:29,535 Um, but yeah, I hear lots of 394 00:33:29,873 --> 00:33:43,094 Lots of really difficult situations with senior partners who will monkey wrench an initiative because for whatever reason, could be a personal conflict with the champion of 395 00:33:43,094 --> 00:33:44,015 that initiative. 396 00:33:44,015 --> 00:33:50,820 could be um maybe this platform wasn't their first choice. 397 00:33:51,281 --> 00:33:58,426 you know, and that sort of situation in a corporate environment gets dealt with differently, right? 398 00:33:58,426 --> 00:33:59,567 Because most 399 00:33:59,742 --> 00:34:03,333 corporations are not partnerships, right? 400 00:34:03,333 --> 00:34:05,914 They're C corporations and they have a governance structure. 401 00:34:05,914 --> 00:34:13,495 Management is fully empowered and the shareholders of the business aren't working in the business, right? 402 00:34:13,495 --> 00:34:17,006 The vast majority of the equity is held outside. 403 00:34:17,006 --> 00:34:28,319 Of course, managers have some, senior managers have some equity incentive within the business, but it is somewhat unique where the owners of the business are the business. 404 00:34:28,371 --> 00:34:33,396 um with legal and they have the ability to throw their weight around in their influence. 405 00:34:33,396 --> 00:34:36,580 And sometimes that's not used in productive ways. 406 00:34:36,580 --> 00:34:38,041 Sometimes it is. 407 00:34:38,242 --> 00:34:43,917 So that's an interesting dynamic that I think is a little bit unique in uh the law firm partnership world. 408 00:34:44,260 --> 00:34:53,144 I think for juniors, especially if you think about the path of a junior lawyer, they are probably and this is different to your your normal corporate. 409 00:34:53,584 --> 00:35:04,549 They are probably not going to be a manager until their 30s, because you just don't you just don't manage other lawyers until you are experienced and becoming a lawyer takes a 410 00:35:04,549 --> 00:35:05,449 while. 411 00:35:05,630 --> 00:35:11,013 And so you don't even get experience of of almost 412 00:35:11,013 --> 00:35:15,416 your base level corporate structure until much later on when you're a lawyer. 413 00:35:15,416 --> 00:35:19,119 And then you just carry on practicing as a lawyer until you're very senior. 414 00:35:19,119 --> 00:35:24,222 And then eventually you get to partnership and you're thrown into this is now your business. 415 00:35:24,663 --> 00:35:35,780 And so, and so I agree with you that the overwhelming majority of seniors that I meet are humble and do acknowledge that they don't necessarily have the skills of the training to 416 00:35:35,780 --> 00:35:37,771 be able to implement AI. 417 00:35:37,872 --> 00:35:38,788 But 418 00:35:38,788 --> 00:35:47,490 At the same time, the juniors in the business do not know how to justify to that business an investment in that innovation or AI. 419 00:35:47,490 --> 00:35:53,872 If I'm a junior lawyer and I want this new platform, the firm will turn around and say, well, what's the ROI of that platform for us? 420 00:35:53,872 --> 00:36:01,644 And I have no idea how to show that or display that or illustrate that to senior management because I am not given that view of the business. 421 00:36:01,644 --> 00:36:03,055 I am just told you are a lawyer. 422 00:36:03,055 --> 00:36:04,425 These are the services you provide. 423 00:36:04,425 --> 00:36:05,535 You are a service provider. 424 00:36:05,535 --> 00:36:08,676 Go and provide those services, which totally fair. 425 00:36:08,892 --> 00:36:19,648 um But the art of building business cases and displaying return and showing investment returns, these are not the skills of oh a lawyer. 426 00:36:19,648 --> 00:36:20,878 We aren't taught these things. 427 00:36:20,878 --> 00:36:24,480 um Exactly. 428 00:36:24,792 --> 00:36:26,457 MBA, for example. 429 00:36:26,764 --> 00:36:27,764 Exactly. 430 00:36:27,764 --> 00:36:39,407 Or at least if you're in a corporate structure, you would normally be exposed to that a lot earlier than I in my experience than in a partnership LLP law firm environment. 431 00:36:39,407 --> 00:36:52,220 there's so many different frictions and tensions that unfortunately undermine all the good work that is being done and make it very difficult for firms to move agilely without 432 00:36:52,220 --> 00:36:56,141 outside help or without a really, really strong leader. 433 00:36:56,335 --> 00:36:59,387 And I think those are the firms that I've seen really excel. 434 00:36:59,387 --> 00:37:09,683 It's that really strong leadership in terms of AI innovation where your CEO or your overall managing partner goes, this is what we are doing. 435 00:37:10,844 --> 00:37:13,986 Jump on the train because this is the direction of travel. 436 00:37:14,106 --> 00:37:16,308 And I talk a lot about this. 437 00:37:16,308 --> 00:37:21,991 think that this leadership point is so important. 438 00:37:22,331 --> 00:37:25,011 And you need that top down leadership. 439 00:37:25,011 --> 00:37:35,291 Otherwise, no matter what ground level initiatives you manage to get off the ground, no matter how humble people are in terms of their skills or lack of, it will never be 440 00:37:35,291 --> 00:37:35,711 innovation. 441 00:37:35,711 --> 00:37:38,011 It will come back to your point around just improvement. 442 00:37:38,216 --> 00:37:38,796 Yeah. 443 00:37:38,796 --> 00:37:50,875 And so I don't know if you would agree with this, it, my, my, my Spidey sense tells me that there's a lot of winging it in terms of AI strategy, right? 444 00:37:50,875 --> 00:38:04,054 Not, there's not a lot of like really clear, I guess strategic vision that's articulated clearly across the organization. 445 00:38:04,054 --> 00:38:06,035 There's a lot of experimentation. 446 00:38:06,131 --> 00:38:08,954 um I don't know, is that your sense too? 447 00:38:08,954 --> 00:38:14,929 And if so, why do you think that's the case when people are writing, firms are writing big checks? 448 00:38:15,300 --> 00:38:25,023 I mean, we are lucky enough to work with some really bold law firms, some who are looking at what everyone else is doing, and they're all looking right and they're looking left. 449 00:38:25,023 --> 00:38:28,365 And that is it's so refreshing to work with people like that. 450 00:38:28,365 --> 00:38:40,840 And, you know, there are some who are completely rejecting the the um Harvey versus Lagora race that most law firms seem to be on at the moment and going, you know what, no, we're 451 00:38:40,840 --> 00:38:42,190 going to build our own. 452 00:38:42,806 --> 00:38:53,709 or we're going to just go down the route of in five years, we will have outpaced other competitors, but this will be in our ecosystem rather than buying off the shelf. 453 00:38:53,709 --> 00:38:56,810 There are other law firms, of course, who have come at it from a different direction. 454 00:38:56,810 --> 00:39:00,891 They've gone, our AI strategy is actually going to be to buy first. 455 00:39:01,111 --> 00:39:02,711 And we're going to be the leaders. 456 00:39:02,711 --> 00:39:06,879 We're going to buy the Harveys, Lagorias, the other platforms that are popular. 457 00:39:06,879 --> 00:39:10,209 We're going to get them first and we're going to really go deep with our vendor relationships. 458 00:39:10,209 --> 00:39:12,674 And we're going to try and get an advantage that way. 459 00:39:12,922 --> 00:39:23,468 em And there are others who kind of toddle along listening to the noise in the ecosystem and two years after everybody else will just buy what everyone else is buying because by 460 00:39:23,468 --> 00:39:32,734 that point the trust signals that most of the industry have bought platform X are enough that their risk averse partnership will be happy with that investment. 461 00:39:32,734 --> 00:39:37,356 So short answer to your question is no, everyone's doing something slightly different. 462 00:39:37,356 --> 00:39:40,538 No one is uh necessarily 463 00:39:40,622 --> 00:39:42,113 Well, there is no answer to this, right? 464 00:39:42,113 --> 00:39:45,024 Everyone's strategy is going to be different. 465 00:39:45,704 --> 00:39:48,746 the minority are able to articulate it clearly. 466 00:39:48,746 --> 00:39:53,167 The majority, I think, are wait and seeers still. 467 00:39:53,528 --> 00:39:57,970 And they are trying to figure out what that law firm of tomorrow still looks like. 468 00:39:57,970 --> 00:40:02,792 Until you figure out what your future looks like, you can't really build a strategy to achieve that future. 469 00:40:02,992 --> 00:40:05,463 And I sympathize because 470 00:40:05,557 --> 00:40:06,738 It's difficult. 471 00:40:06,738 --> 00:40:12,364 I bet that if you went into non-law firms and said, what's your AI strategy, you'd have exactly the same challenge, right? 472 00:40:12,364 --> 00:40:23,355 Most, most legal tech vendors don't know where they're going in the next two, three years because they're waiting on OpenAI to release better technology to enable their own 473 00:40:23,355 --> 00:40:24,376 roadmap. 474 00:40:24,697 --> 00:40:25,349 So. 475 00:40:25,349 --> 00:40:37,725 you touched on something there, kind of the build versus buy and we have some theories about this and I'll be transparent about my motives here and say that our platform, we're 476 00:40:37,725 --> 00:40:47,869 an internet, legal internet and extranet platform and we went down the internet path first, got very well established and we did that because there was a burning need. 477 00:40:47,869 --> 00:40:52,793 All these big firms were moving to the cloud and they had to do something with their SharePoint. 478 00:40:52,793 --> 00:40:54,203 on-prem intranet. 479 00:40:54,203 --> 00:40:59,385 we, but we always knew extranet was our, that was going to be our big deal. 480 00:40:59,385 --> 00:41:06,407 And we just released that in May and we have been taking customers on very, very slowly to make sure that we get it right. 481 00:41:06,427 --> 00:41:20,531 So we have three as of, middle of September and two of those three are implementing client facing AI solutions that are built in-house. 482 00:41:20,531 --> 00:41:21,731 One of them, 483 00:41:22,367 --> 00:41:24,789 is and how we play a role in that. 484 00:41:24,789 --> 00:41:35,168 And you know, this is why we're putting all our chips in this part of the table is I believe that in order for firms to differentiate themselves, they're going to have to do 485 00:41:35,168 --> 00:41:37,180 something besides by Harvey and Legora. 486 00:41:37,180 --> 00:41:40,502 That's not going to be differentiating if your competitors can go buy it. 487 00:41:40,502 --> 00:41:43,165 So how can you create differentiation? 488 00:41:43,165 --> 00:41:51,144 Well, that collective knowledge and wisdom of the firm that lives in your document management system or in structured data stores. 489 00:41:51,144 --> 00:42:02,283 Like we have a large labor and employment firm that has this beautifully matriculated L and E data regulatory updates for all 50 states here in the U S and we said, Hey, rather 490 00:42:02,283 --> 00:42:12,541 than having your clients come and log into a portal and peruse the new ERISA rules in California, what if you took that curated data? 491 00:42:12,541 --> 00:42:16,084 You've already got all of their employment documents in your DMS. 492 00:42:16,084 --> 00:42:19,793 We crawl and vectorize it using Azure AI search. 493 00:42:19,793 --> 00:42:31,369 And then we use Azure Open AI to flag exceptions, create work items and power automate, route them to the attorneys and go, oh yeah, non-competes aren't valid in California 494 00:42:31,369 --> 00:42:31,680 anymore. 495 00:42:31,680 --> 00:42:34,991 And you have 9,000 employment agreements with non-compete language. 496 00:42:34,991 --> 00:42:35,932 Check, check, check. 497 00:42:35,932 --> 00:42:42,395 That goes to a client portal where they can see these exceptions and say, remediate, remediate, remediate. 498 00:42:42,395 --> 00:42:46,768 And it allows the firms to be proactive, that firm to be proactive with their client. 499 00:42:46,768 --> 00:42:49,329 And those are all revenue opportunities. 500 00:42:49,467 --> 00:42:53,472 And these are, these are risks that the client may not even know they have. 501 00:42:53,472 --> 00:42:55,255 And the law firm is being proactive. 502 00:42:55,255 --> 00:43:01,203 So we believe, and we're trying to skate where the puck is going to be instead of where it is right now. 503 00:43:01,203 --> 00:43:05,999 We believe that that those sorts of scenarios are how firms are going to differentiate themselves. 504 00:43:05,999 --> 00:43:08,141 Do you agree or do you see it differently? 505 00:43:08,893 --> 00:43:09,663 I agree. 506 00:43:09,663 --> 00:43:16,896 mean, you know your pain points better than anybody, which means that you can envisage your solutions better than anyone. 507 00:43:16,896 --> 00:43:25,045 If you knew how to build something or you had the ability to deliver it, then you could do it a lot better than the third party vendor. 508 00:43:25,045 --> 00:43:27,500 I I know this from experience. 509 00:43:27,500 --> 00:43:32,862 The biggest challenge that you have as a third party vendor, if you're building legal tech is you've got no data. 510 00:43:32,923 --> 00:43:35,604 You've got no legal documents to test your product on. 511 00:43:35,604 --> 00:43:36,480 you almost 512 00:43:36,480 --> 00:43:43,561 need a client before you can validate your product because no one's going to give you access to their data to begin with. 513 00:43:43,561 --> 00:43:50,984 I mean, the depth of data that law firms have, which is unfortunately a lot of the time unstructured is unbelievable. 514 00:43:51,444 --> 00:44:00,207 So if you can structure that, and I talk a lot about this around structuring data, around workflows, actually basically getting your house in order to enable it for the AI age is 515 00:44:00,207 --> 00:44:02,008 so, so, so important. 516 00:44:02,008 --> 00:44:03,902 And then those that can... 517 00:44:03,902 --> 00:44:10,504 add value on top of that, layering on top of it, think that is where the ventures of the future will lie. 518 00:44:10,504 --> 00:44:20,657 I'm a big fan of uh agents, uh agents in the pure form, not in the kind of everything's an agent now form. 519 00:44:20,657 --> 00:44:31,913 So what I mean by that is um autonomous pieces of technology that can use tools and can carry out a series of different events on your data. 520 00:44:31,913 --> 00:44:38,506 which will allow you to unlock new revenue streams, new workflows or shortcut workflows are already in place. 521 00:44:38,546 --> 00:44:46,650 And so, yeah, I believe that the future is a far more tailored service. 522 00:44:46,650 --> 00:44:58,175 Now, whether that's delivered by third party vendors or whether that's delivered by you as a firm building a delivery capability of some sort, they'll probably be a mix. 523 00:44:58,647 --> 00:45:04,287 Again, know, cards on the table, I believe that you need a delivery partner and you need to be doing it yourself. 524 00:45:04,287 --> 00:45:15,067 And with the right delivery partner, you can do it yourself and you can do it more effectively and a hell of a lot cheaper than essentially funding the VCs that are funding 525 00:45:15,067 --> 00:45:17,887 the big tools, because that's really what you're doing. 526 00:45:17,887 --> 00:45:27,415 You know, if you you look at the price of a the price of a call to a large language model is, you know, cents, pennies and you're paying, you know, 527 00:45:27,415 --> 00:45:33,050 20, 30X what you would be paying at source just for a wrapper of some sort. 528 00:45:33,050 --> 00:45:35,622 And also it's very important. 529 00:45:35,622 --> 00:45:37,273 I don't mean to denigrate these platforms. 530 00:45:37,273 --> 00:45:46,280 There is a lot of added value that they do offer and they offer security and they offer data resources such as case law resources and all these sorts of stuff. 531 00:45:46,280 --> 00:45:51,955 And you can look at how Harvey partnering with Lexis and Legora partnering as well with a data partner. 532 00:45:51,955 --> 00:45:57,299 They can see the importance of this, but nothing out competes your own data. 533 00:45:57,927 --> 00:46:03,534 And that, think, whoever can manage to leverage that is going to be the real winner long-term. 534 00:46:03,935 --> 00:46:05,677 it's exactly what you're doing. 535 00:46:05,677 --> 00:46:13,587 You're enabling firms to use their own data to deliver a new way of thinking and a new way of providing a service. 536 00:46:13,667 --> 00:46:22,511 Exactly, you know, and we kind of, I'm being totally honest, we were just, it was pure luck that we ended up in this beautiful position in the ecosystem. 537 00:46:22,511 --> 00:46:25,172 So we built this thing called integration hub. 538 00:46:25,172 --> 00:46:36,226 That's essentially an Azure appliance that reaches into all of their back office systems, document management, CRM, practice management, uh HR, IS experience management. 539 00:46:36,226 --> 00:46:41,398 And we needed that layer and it's security trimmed and respects ethical wall boundaries. 540 00:46:41,398 --> 00:46:43,271 We needed that layer to surface. 541 00:46:43,271 --> 00:46:45,633 data in our intranet and extranet platform. 542 00:46:45,633 --> 00:46:56,000 Well, it just so happens that you also need that integration layer if you want to use Azure AI search and Azure open AI and co-pilot and power automate. 543 00:46:56,000 --> 00:47:03,165 So we were very fortunate in around that and we get bombarded from VCs. 544 00:47:03,165 --> 00:47:08,288 I've got a spreadsheet right now that I've been keeping track four weeks before Ilta's when I started. 545 00:47:08,288 --> 00:47:12,447 I've got 30 VCs who have reached out to us in 546 00:47:12,447 --> 00:47:13,547 What's that been? 547 00:47:13,547 --> 00:47:15,308 10 weeks, 30. 548 00:47:15,308 --> 00:47:18,793 These I'm not counting individual emails. 549 00:47:18,793 --> 00:47:27,360 These are individual funds and they see it the same way we do because initially I was like, why are we getting bombarded with like this? 550 00:47:27,360 --> 00:47:29,082 Then I started tracking it. 551 00:47:29,082 --> 00:47:40,196 Then I actually started reading some of the emails and a lot of it is BDRs, you know that they go source some deals for us, but we got a few like really thoughtful. 552 00:47:40,196 --> 00:47:43,508 emails with like, Hey, this is why we're interested in you and listed it out. 553 00:47:43,508 --> 00:47:45,370 And I was like, okay, they get it. 554 00:47:45,370 --> 00:47:56,206 So I think the investor community understands much better than people think on what the future is very likely going to look like because they get it. 555 00:47:56,206 --> 00:48:03,773 Um, it's not just, we've got growth on LinkedIn and these guys are in legal tech and we think something's going to happen there. 556 00:48:03,773 --> 00:48:07,655 No, they've got a narrative and a thesis and um, 557 00:48:08,085 --> 00:48:10,979 I think they really understand where things are going. 558 00:48:11,381 --> 00:48:12,152 Yeah, I think so. 559 00:48:12,152 --> 00:48:22,993 kind of personification, personalization, actually a better way of putting it, layer with data is going to be so important for the future. 560 00:48:22,994 --> 00:48:27,739 And there are some trailblazers already who are really kind of going deep into that. 561 00:48:27,739 --> 00:48:33,585 And I think it's really interesting to look at how they are. 562 00:48:34,229 --> 00:48:36,049 I'm actually facing a lot of resistance. 563 00:48:36,049 --> 00:48:39,829 So I was going to say doing well, but actually facing a lot of resistance because it's quite scary. 564 00:48:39,829 --> 00:48:46,809 You know, the idea that you open up your entire data to to a third party tool. 565 00:48:47,309 --> 00:48:53,729 That is terrifying to most CIOs of law firms. 566 00:48:54,009 --> 00:48:55,749 get get. 567 00:48:56,429 --> 00:48:56,649 Right. 568 00:48:56,649 --> 00:49:00,313 where you would put this outside your four walls of your tenant. 569 00:49:00,797 --> 00:49:11,440 Right, but then you've got your big AI models, which are obviously outside your tenant that you have to connect to and find the data is encrypted in rest and in transit and 570 00:49:11,440 --> 00:49:15,771 obfuscated and there's zero day retention, all this stuff, it's still extremely scary. 571 00:49:15,771 --> 00:49:22,283 And there's still a huge number of client profiles who will not let their data be used in that way. 572 00:49:22,443 --> 00:49:29,669 Financial institutions, for example, now you're seeing it in NDAs that you're not allowed to put my data into AI models. 573 00:49:29,669 --> 00:49:34,032 You're seeing a lot of people balancing that risk. 574 00:49:34,152 --> 00:49:43,859 yeah, mean, maybe the future will look like localized LLMs within law firms own maybe even a move back to on-prem. 575 00:49:43,859 --> 00:49:47,231 Probably not, but you never know in terms of data. 576 00:49:47,231 --> 00:49:55,267 All it takes is one big data breach, one big scare story and everyone battens, the hatches go down and everyone's looking for alternatives. 577 00:49:56,818 --> 00:50:09,298 Yeah, it's going to be very interesting to watch, but I agree with you very, very strongly that that the next big chapter will be about your data, not about what is the training 578 00:50:09,298 --> 00:50:11,540 data of the LLM going to provide you. 579 00:50:11,827 --> 00:50:13,468 percent, couldn't agree more. 580 00:50:13,468 --> 00:50:16,619 Well, this has been a fantastic conversation, Dom. 581 00:50:16,619 --> 00:50:17,610 I've really enjoyed it. 582 00:50:17,610 --> 00:50:19,451 I really enjoyed our last conversation. 583 00:50:19,451 --> 00:50:28,995 um What is the best way for, if listeners want to learn more about Purple or you, what's the best way for them to do that? 584 00:50:29,632 --> 00:50:34,135 They can jump onto our website, just www.purple.law. 585 00:50:34,135 --> 00:50:36,376 They can have look at some of the stuff we do for law firms. 586 00:50:36,376 --> 00:50:39,738 There's quite a lot of information up there, case studies and things like that. 587 00:50:39,738 --> 00:50:45,921 uh We're also building at the moment something quite fun, which is essentially a component playground. 588 00:50:46,522 --> 00:50:57,660 The idea being that if lawyers could visualize what they can do with tech better, then actually they could articulate internally what they want to achieve a lot more easily. 589 00:50:57,660 --> 00:51:02,942 So a bunch of different legal AI components that people can just like throw stuff out and just play around with. 590 00:51:02,942 --> 00:51:13,466 you know, the sorts of things that have been, let's say previously made to feel like they are incredibly difficult to build because that is as a vendor, how you sell these things. 591 00:51:13,867 --> 00:51:18,068 We're just basically opening them up open source for people to play around with that. 592 00:51:18,068 --> 00:51:20,890 That will be on our website soon, but there's lots of cool stuff on there. 593 00:51:20,890 --> 00:51:23,201 People can check it out and see, see what we do. 594 00:51:23,201 --> 00:51:24,371 And um 595 00:51:24,371 --> 00:51:31,071 and be part of the conversation because it's a fascinating conversation, fascinating time to be in this industry. 596 00:51:31,071 --> 00:51:36,111 we've got through probably about a third of, I'm sure, what we wanted to talk about in this. 597 00:51:36,571 --> 00:51:38,931 there's a lot to unpack, right? 598 00:51:38,931 --> 00:51:40,030 There's lot to unpack. 599 00:51:40,030 --> 00:51:40,420 Yeah. 600 00:51:40,420 --> 00:51:48,063 And we can maybe do a follow-up conversation um maybe in the spring and get through the rest of the agenda. 601 00:51:48,063 --> 00:51:50,144 We literally got through half. 602 00:51:50,144 --> 00:51:56,066 um let's, right, exactly. 603 00:51:56,087 --> 00:51:56,487 All right. 604 00:51:56,487 --> 00:51:58,017 Well, it was great talking to you. 605 00:51:58,017 --> 00:52:01,729 I really appreciate the time and um we'll chat again soon. 606 00:52:02,709 --> 00:52:03,059 All right. 607 00:52:03,059 --> 00:52:04,030 Thanks, Dom. -->