[00:00:00] Elizabeth, good afternoon. Hi, Ted. How are you? I'm doing good. It's afternoon here. I don't know what time zone your body and brain is in at this point with all your traveling. Do you even know? I'm not sure I know, but you know, I came back from down under and kicked off our first Vantage Sydney conference last week, which is amazing. Um, that region is, uh, a really, really innovative region. We have some great customer conversations and record number of customers and firms attending our, um, very first vantage conference of. The year and we quickly turn our attention to New York in a couple weeks and then we go to London. So we are literally on a world tour. Wow. Yeah. And I'll be joining you in New York doing Yes. Doing some podcasting live there, which I know that should be. That should be great. That'd be a lot of fun. I've done it at several conferences and it's, it's always a [00:01:00] blast. I really enjoy it. Well, you started to talk a little bit about kind of what you do. Why don't you just give us a quick background on who you are, what you do, and where you do it? Yeah, that sounds great. Um, so Elizabeth Hardy, I am the Chief Product Officer for Elite. I have been in the industry for more years than, than I'd like to count 'cause it just. It ticks up the age every year, but 15 years with Elite and, um, been focused on the platform, our products, our investments, our product strategy throughout those, uh, those years and, um, been a part of a very exciting journey, uh, for the company where we. We're part of Thomson Reuters and then we were carved out from Thomson Reuters to private equity, um, holder ship. So it's been, it's been really great fun. And where I work is usually, should be a pretty simple question, but I am one of those people who's split my time between [00:02:00] DC on the east coast and LA on the west coast. So that's where I'm. To you from our LA office today, and it's kind of the bedrock of elite. Uh, it's where the company was formed, um, seven some decades, uh, ago, and where we have a lot of our product and development team, so it's always great to to to be out here. And prior to that, I uh, spent my time in various ERP companies working on. Accounting software. I'm one of those people who kind of find it pretty fascinating to work on financial management platforms, which I guess is good for where I am today. Somebody has to do it. I, that wouldn't, that wouldn't be my thing. But I, people look at the internet and extranet business and they think that's not very exciting either. So That's true. It's all goods. Uh, before we, before we jumped on, I was telling you about a survey. That a UK CIO was putting together, and I think he started just kind of pre COVID. [00:03:00] And the reason, uh, I think at its peak they had about 125 large law firms global. Globally who would participate this in, in the survey? And it was really basic. It was, you know, practice management. Is it on-prem, is it in the cloud? Document management on-prem, in the cloud. And it, his reason for doing it was, this is late 2010s. He was getting a lot of pressure from law firm leadership saying, Hey, we're behind on our cloud strategy. He's like, no, no, we're not. Um, so he put together the survey to kind of validate that. And then, um, once, once he did that, he, the, the survey kind of served its purpose, but I remember in there practice management was one of the, had kind of the lowest share of like cloud implementations. It was like in the mid single digits. If I remember correctly, the. Very [00:04:00] expectedly, um, messaging. So like exchange online, it's a very easy thing to move into the cloud in terms of like ROI. Nobody wants to manage mail servers on prem. So, um, but with practice management, like you guys have been on a journey at Elite to get to change that. And so why don't we just start with how's that journey going? Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's interesting, um, Ted, that that survey was around, I know exactly which survey you're, you're talking about, and I think at the time, if we kind of go back in history, since we've been around. For a while, both you and I, we remember the days when firms were really hesitant to putting their practice management in the cloud because it is the crown jewel. It has most the most sensitive information about your clients, about your business. And I think there were plenty of firms back then that were of the thought [00:05:00] that we can protect that data better and we wanna kind of control it. I think when we started this journey to invest in our three E platform to be ready to not only be in the cloud, but be a true SaaS platform. I'll tell you, I sat around a lot of tables with C-suite leaders for from, from our customer accounts, and they questioned why we were making this investment. The survey said what you needed it to say and they thought we would never go there. Um, as a firm that be, um, and fast forward to where we are today. A lot of things have changed. Technology has moved really quickly, and I think the conversations have changed to not just talk about the journey of. Getting to the cloud, but more so the journey of what do you do when you're there? What is it that you get that's different? How can I operate my [00:06:00] business differently? How can I move forward in a way that's gonna free up working capital for me as an example, and keep up with some of the new technologies, and I'm sure we'll get to the thing that everybody's talking about today, which is, which is ai. We'll, we'll get there in this conversation, I'm sure. This journey took multiple, and I think we were. Good in the sense that we were always a little bit ahead of where I think the market and our clients were, which is kind of where you want a platform to be. You don't want it to have to catch up to the market. You don't want it to have to catch up to customer needs. You wanna kind of skate a little bit ahead of that, Huck, so to speak. I believe that we did that through, through our journey. And then I think what really changed and accelerated, and, and you and I have talked about this in the past, is when COVID hit, um, technology [00:07:00] needs changed overnight. All of a sudden you couldn't go into the office to print. The proforma, you couldn't pass something down the hallway with a sticky note on the folder that said, do these five things for me. You needed to collaborate. I mean, firms weren't on teams or Zoom prior to, to COVID. If they were, it was rare. And then it became a necessity in the way that you had to operate. And I think for us, we were well positioned at that time. Make sure that. Service our clients differently to say, you don't have to sit right next to your PMS system. Your PMS system can be someplace else, and you can still have great access and you can still have great product. I would say even greater productivity. Um. So that that was a change moment, I think for us. And I think if we were to run that survey today, it would say something very, very different. And I [00:08:00] think you've seen that from some of the Iil TechCon surveys, et cetera, that PMS systems are moving up in the list of. The platforms that need to move, um, that need to take advantage of some of the new technologies in ways that you simply can't do on-prem. So that's a long way of me taking you through the journey, but I think it's been a really good one. Uh, and I think what's served us well is we've stayed a little bit ahead of the curve, each step of the way. So we've been ready to catch our customers when they're at that point in their transformation and their strategy. You know, the number of server huggers in legal is dwindling. It's timely dwindled there. There might be a few left, but they're fine. There are, you know what's interesting? So two firms, so I've been beating the cloud drum. I started when I was younger and more optimistic about the ability to change things and things that seem so obvious. Uh, to the [00:09:00] rest of the world, how much longer it sometimes takes in legal. So I started cloud, pushing the cloud in like 20 12, 20 13. I did, I went on a world tour with Ilta and did Roadshow, and I think in one year I did like 22 road shows about, no, at the time, um, it was, uh, office 365 about why it made sense to move there and, um, it took another. Seven, eight years for it to really, during COVID, my experience is the same as yours. There was a step change in attitudes towards the cloud post COVID and there were still a handful of firms as recently as just a couple of years ago who said, we will, we will be the last firms in the cloud. And you know what's really interesting is one of them is on the one yard line about the sign as the client and the other one has already named us the vendor of choice. And we're cloud only. And, um, so they're finally coming around and [00:10:00] we made, we made the decision in 2018 that we were gonna build for the cloud and we'll just wait until they were ready. And that turned out to be a good decision, but it was really hard. We had to say no a lot because companies wanted us to deploy on prem and we just weren't. With our product, it's, there's infrastructure requirements that we need, like the office graph and Azure and those, some of those things don't exist on prem. So yeah, it was really hard, you know, making that decision. I would imagine. Did you have any, a similar, like did investors ask, Hey, why are you spending this money when the law firms aren't there yet? Did you get pushback like that? We, we, we certainly did, and I think one of the things that served us really well at the time is we had a lot of support internally from, from our owner at the time, which was Thomson Reuters. And I think we, we were at a good home for a good point in time of the elite history. A lot of the Thomson Reuters platforms were [00:11:00] multi-tenant SaaS platforms by birth, right? So I think we had lots. A good understanding internally from an investment perspective of here's what it's going to take. And I think there's always a good moment in time when you find yourself at the right home at that moment. And then those moments change and you gotta accelerate and you, and you might just have to move, uh, past that. And I think that that's kind of where we were very well supported when we started these investments in this, in this journey. I think the other part that. We had some tough conversations around was do we take the time to invest Now that's gonna be harder to make it a multi-tenant SaaS platform, or do we kind of get there quickly and do and lift and shift? There are pros and cons to both, right? And we took the harder path that required a little bit more time, required, a little bit more investment, a little bit more [00:12:00] patience for everyone to kind of do it right from the start. And I think that that's what's really behooved us well, where we are now. Being able to really accelerate a lot faster. The other thing that we took our time to make sure that we made good decisions around is, well, what stack are we building on, what, what partner do we need? And we partnered with Microsoft, so we are full Azure Stack and I think we have the best partner from a technology perspective and, and how we build and, and how we operate and what we can take advantage of. But that was another thing where. There were varying degrees of opinions back then of, well, what's a good, what's a good cloud stack to be on? And companies have made different choices for varying reasons. So that was another thing that I think we had a lot of back and forth conversations. And then it was about, well, how are we gonna bring our. Customers on [00:13:00] this change journey. Where do we start? How do we kind of build towards a path that can take them, take them there when they're ready, and, and how do we kind of push on that a little bit where, where we can, um, so that was, that was another thing that I think we, we experienced, but. Looking back. Yeah. There were hard conversations and there were hard conversations with our customers as well. But I think today, when I sit around, because let's face it, a lot of the C-suite that we talked to those years ago, uh, you know, 7, 8, 9 years ago, are still there today. And I remind them of some of the conversations that we had, and they're now live in our, in our cloud environment and, and, and, and running. Um, great. New innovative business processes to help them move forward and, and service their internal clients and their external clients a lot better. So it's, uh, it's, it's funny if you're, if you're around the business long enough, you get to have these conversations of, remember way back when [00:14:00] and here we are today. Who, who would, who would've thought that this was just now a given? And that's the important point that I think I get asked a lot if we get still. The pushback of never, ever clouds, so to speak. And if there are some out there, they're very, very far few in between. I think now it's more of how fast can you get me there and help me with the transformation bit as well as the technology part. Yeah. AI becomes, I think was an also an accelerator. COVID was a massive like warp speed accelerator. Yeah. Yeah. AI has, has also been, it's, it's very difficult to take advantage of the latest and greatest without being in the cloud in some capacity. Well, so there was a lot of work to do. So you had to move from single tenant on-prem, I would assume. Perpetual licensing with maintenance, all the traditional SaaS kind of, yeah. Baggage to subscription, [00:15:00] um, hosted 24 by seven support, uh, multi-tenancy. That had to be, been a complete rewrite of the platform. No. Well, it wasn't as much, um, of a rewrite. There were some, some aspects of that that we needed to do, but more of it was a change in how we were developing and how we were bringing functionality through. I mean, one of the first areas that we really started with was we knew security had to look completely different, um, when you're, when you're a SaaS platform. So how do, how do you do that? So we started there and then we a. Making sure that we had different ways to integrate, which at the time, this sounds crazy today, but at the time as we look sort of in the back rear view mirror APIs were sort of another hot topic that people were talking about because they weren't, they weren't being used heavily because if you're on-prem, everyone was integrating in the wild, wild SQL in SQL [00:16:00] script, I mean. Talk about huggers. I mean, you have people who just hug those SQL scripts, right? And they just, that's just how, how things were done. So that's really where our investments started. We, we focused a lot on writing and rewriting our security protocols. Um, we developed API protocols and a rich library of, of APIs and, and endpoints. Um, 'cause we knew that that was gonna be table stakes. And then little by little we kind of looked through what do we needed to do to kind of carve things out from a multi-tenant perspective and where were the most logical places for us to start to do that. Because if you think of three E, it's a, it's a big platform. It's it's wide and it's deep is what I'm telling people all the time. It can do a lot of things. So we also needed to find more. Configurable aspects for people to operate and tailor the platform and the system to how they wanna work. Um, and that was also a topic that [00:17:00] wasn't as popular back in the day. Even if I think five, six years back, people did not wanna think about standard ways of operating. Today we talk about only standard ways of operating because the uplift you can get in customizations. The cost outweighs the benefit in most cases. So we invested heavily in making sure that there was plenty of configuration options, um, new ways of operating in the platform, outside the platform. Uh, we were one of the first technology providers that integrated with the Microsoft Power platform as an example. So we've always. Try to kind of preserve the things that are just, that work extremely well in our platform. And then build around that with new capabilities, either to access those features or functions or extend those experiences, whether that is into Microsoft teams, whether that is into [00:18:00] any of the office applications, um, as an example. Yeah. You know, as part of our work, we 100% of the time integrate with practice management. There's never a scenario where we deploy an internet solution and there's not a PMS integrate. Yeah. PMS and DMS are pretty much a hundred percent, and I have seen, I. A lot of, I'll call it bastardization, for lack of a better term, in terms of it's not customization, it's bastardization, um, you know, user defined fields and using, you know, using existing attributes for things they weren't intended. And, you know, that does create a ton of technical debt. And as we enter into this AI era, we gotta clean that stuff up. And, um, I'm curious what your take is on where the industry is within the PMS realm in terms of like data hygiene. Are we in a good place? Like, the DMS is a mess, like document management. There's been very [00:19:00] little data hygiene that's been applied to document management, uh, systems. And as a result, you know, now we're in a place where. We can, through an automated mechanism, ai, we can go in and gather insights, but the signal to noise ratio is so low in the DMS, it creates challenges. Do we have those same challenges in practice management or are things a a little bit more tidy there? They're not more tidy. So there are a lot of sins of the past that we're having to, to clean up some of those sins. Um, we encouraged as, as a very, very flexible platform. Some of it, the larger ecosystem that sits around a platform like Elite has contributed to, and I'm sure if, and. Look, make it do anything you want. And that was sort of the flavor 10 years, 20, 15 years [00:20:00] ago with, with software. It wasn't, it wasn't really looking for those optimal ways of working. Um, it was make it fit to however you want it to fit within what you do currently versus you, you changing. So. It's, it's still, it's still messy and it's messy in a couple different areas. I think one is there are a lot of bolted on applications that are used and writing in and out of PMS platforms that creates noise and data. It creates multiple locations for data and come to, this is an issue I'm sure you know very well covering the. If you don't have data in more single source places, and I'll call it just places for a moment, applying AI either on top of it or more importantly, embedding it becomes extremely difficult. [00:21:00] If you don't get your data in order, it's, it's, it's not gonna produce the outcome. No matter what technology you embed, it's just gonna be really noisy and it's gonna be really messy and it's gonna be inaccurate, most importantly. So there's data cleanup that needs to happen and starting with looking at how are you using fields and structures to begin with, can that be cleaned up? And then I think the other part that needs to be cleaned up is where do you actually wanna operate with some of these smaller bolt-on capabilities? I'll give you a very real example. If you are using a bolt on application on a PMS platform, like, like three E for proforma editing or time entry, let's take those. They're easy examples. You are going to miss opportunities of capturing certain types of data. So now you have to kind of combine those data points anywhere you. [00:22:00] Want to, and that's very expensive and hard for you to do. So we think about it from the perspective of how much of the work to cash workflow, or you can even extend it to intake and conflicts, can you actually accomplish now on top of a platform like ours? So that avoids having those smaller data sources sitting out there that's gonna be really hard for you to combine together. And then once you get that sorted out, how do you get the data into a construct in a place where you can easily do the fancy things like AI analytics on top of it? And that's the route that we took not too long ago of what we did with Microsoft Fabric of creating a pipeline to get your data out in near real time. This is only for, for our sas. Uh, customers and get it to a data lake where now you can start to apply pretty sophisticated analytic capabilities on top of that. And [00:23:00] that's kind of the, the, the, the goal of how do you wanna use your data. But there's multiple steps to get, to get to that point. So there's, there's work to, to be done, but I think by most, most customers Interesting. Yeah. You know, um. The, what you describe has been the standard in, in legal, and I, I think a contributing factor to that is the bespoke nature of the practice of law. Yeah. Right. Every lawyer has their own way of doing things. You can go to the same practice area at the same law firm and the real estate practice and get a commercial lease agreement for the same client. They will look completely different. I know because I've done it. My wife and I own five gyms here in St. Louis and we, uh, we had an attorney out one time at our, uh, legal partner in the middle of a red lines, and it was so, it's painful. It's very painful as a customer, [00:24:00] you know, and, um, it makes, it, makes, it, it, it's tough to provide coverage on the law firm side as well, but that bespoke mindset. Lawyers translates through into the, into the business of law functions. And, you know, even like our intranet platform, we try so hard to create a, a viable. Like good out of the box experience. And in so many cases it's like, no, we're not doing that. We've got these Figma over here and we want it to look completely different. And we say yes, but it does, you know, with the caveat of, hey, okay, this is a customization. If something breaks, not only are we not gonna fix it for for free. It's like you're gonna have to get in queue. Um, if there was a breaking change from Microsoft, for example, 'cause we run in on top of SharePoint online, Microsoft can push a, a breaking change and we have no control over it. Sometimes we have no visibility and, um, so we have to [00:25:00] explain the trade off to customers, but law firms seem willing to make that trade off much more than I spent 10 years in financial services at Bank of America. That was a, that, that was, um, that was a no-no. Um, but in legal, it seems to be standard practice. Yeah. I, I, I, I think, I think you're right, Ted. And, um, I, I think where we try to lean in with our customers quite a bit is, look, if you're, if you're really gonna try to optimize the way you wanna operate, you have to have a strategy of what that looks like that is bought in across the firm. Because if you don't, you're gonna end up, just in that situation that you talked about, Ted, there's always gonna be someone in the corner office that wanna operate slightly differently, and maybe that's okay for a short period of time. But ultimately, and I think that especially CIOs, CFOs, CTOs that [00:26:00] I, that I spend a lot of time talking to, I think that there is a door that we're all leaning on that's open. To really focus in on making sure that the lid of nuances don't get away of the greater good. Of the greater of the greater goal, right? Because everyone is facing tremendous pressure right now. There's pricing pressure firms, and we haven't gotten quite to this topic yet, but firms are. Facing pricing, challenging questions of if your lawyers are using AI to deliver work faster, shouldn't that impact the way that I have to pay you and the price of legal services. And that just requires you to think about things very, very differently. And if everyone is living in this bespoke world inside of the farm, you're just not gonna move the needle enough. That can't just be the billing team that's pushing on a standard process. If there's not [00:27:00] buy-in from the partnership at large that hey, we do wanna do things differently. The little quirky, bespoke things that we've all gotten used to do, they really drive. The profitability, which everybody is interested and, and, and having profitable clients, profitable matters and, and, and, and a highly profitable firm. So, so I think, I think conversations are changing. I think we're leaning on an open door and I think we're entering an era where technology is gonna be in the center of how things get done. But I think we're entering the conversation of how do we actually want. To operate and what is our three to five year strategy? How, because the firms are not gonna look the same from an operational perspective five years from now. The I, I just don't believe that. I think technology is driving so hard to force that change, that your structure and the way that you staff, the way that you [00:28:00] hire. And we have one of our customers who. Is very focused in on what kind of skillset do you have to hire. So before when, when you hired for, let's say, anyone in a law firm, financial team, you were probably looking at. Just finance skills, preferably worked at another law firm, so you understand sort of the DNA of of the legal industry. But more and more some of our customers and, and, and we have one in particular who will be speaking about this at our conference. I leave that as a little nugget as who it is. Um. Look at hiring in skills to the finance team that have AI skills, that have technology skills, that know how to work with technology to get work done faster and differently. So I think we're gonna sit here a few years from now and we're gonna be talking about different operating models, I think, and modes. Yeah. So this, uh, uh, legal has a squeaky wheel problem. [00:29:00] Um, you know, there are, there is a. A pretty uniform cultural norm at, in big law. And I say this not to be critical, but I really, I really want it to change because it's, it's an inhibitor to scale, which I think law firms are gonna need to figure out how to scale. Legal is the most fragment, one of the most fragmented industries on planet earth. Um, if you add. Revenues are the top 100 firms in the US It's, it's two big four companies. It's about 160 billion. That's e and y and Deloitte, right? Mm-hmm. So, and that's a very closely adjacent industry. It is an unsustainable. It's unsustainable fragmentation. And what has driven that fragmentation, in my opinion, is this be bespoke mindset. It's very difficult to scale an organization where everybody does things differently and you have a BA rules that necessitate that lawyers be able to take their books of business with them. [00:30:00] So if I don't like what's, you know, what's being laid down at a law firm, even as a partner, I can pick up sticks and move down the street. That makes things difficult to create standards. Mm-hmm. But we are entering into an era where I think scale is going to provide a strategic advantage. Mm-hmm. Um, in the fact that it can fund infrastructure. Yeah. That, that creates the foundation to build a tech enabled. Legal service delivery machine. And I don't know if you see it playing out the playing out the same way, but I see today the top firm k and e at eight and a half billion wouldn't qualify to be in the Fortune 500 if they were public. I see that dynamic changing and I think it, I think technology and standardization and what you talked about, like hiring, hiring people with tech skills, um, you know, that's been. A lot of the business [00:31:00] of law functions have been underpowered in, in legal, and now we're entering it into an era where technology is. Gonna be part of how firms differentiate. That's never happened before. Mm-hmm. It's, it's, it's who, it's who we are. It's our brand, it's our people. It's our wins we have on the board. Guess what? It's getting ready to be technology too. Those things are still gonna matter, but it's tech is gonna be part of the equation and you gotta have people who, who understand it and know it. And you're gonna have to draw from outside our little pond here in legal tech and go find people from other places. And they're going to. They're going need to be empowered. Yeah. Um, do you see it the same way? I I I, I, I don't disagree. Although I do think KE passed $10 billion. Oh, did they really? Oh, I don't have this year's. They were at like eight last year. I do, I do, I do believe that. But they look, they're, they're a huge firm, right? Massive, massive firm. Great elite, um, customer. And we have a really good partnership with them. And I think that that's precisely how some of these larger firms are starting to think, right? Which is why they're zeroing in on something that we haven't zeroed in on [00:32:00] before, which is what skill sets do you need in the next generation of workers inside of a law firm? How many do you need? And there's no different than how we at Elite have to think about it as well, because we're using AI and new technologies to build our products faster, to operate differently, to service our customers differently. We have AI embedded in our support processes. Now we can understand, um, where customers are using our products differently than, than we ever could before when everything was on-prem and. All over the place from a version perspective, and who knows what anyone had done to their system, right? Like you had no, you had no window in. Now when you're operating in a cloud, in a SaaS platform, all of a sudden you have that window so you can apply technology to change the way that you're operating, and that's. The same that I think law firms need to do is you have to think about it holistically. How are you going to operate? And I think when you start to [00:33:00] have those conversations, and I did an interview with, with a customer, um, similar to this, not not a good style podcast as you have set up, Ted. Good. It was a little, it was a little more JV setup. I have to talk to my marketing team about that. But nevertheless, we did. Um. I talk a lot about this notion of how do you, how do you think about the larger benefits and the strategy that you're driving towards, because that has to be. Agreed to at, at, at all levels, or, or you're gonna continue to just sort of have, I'm gonna use this tool, you're using this tool over there. And, and that's just the way that we are and that's the way that we're gonna operate. So, um, I think you're right. I think we're entering an era where the ways of working and operating is just about to completely, completely change and change fast. Yeah. You know, and I've, I've had conversations with, uh, I was. Lucky enough to be part of this [00:34:00] Pathways group that the TLTF crew put together in, um, in Austin this past year. And I was sitting next to people way above my pay grade, uh, talking about the future of law. And I mean, you know, CFOs of AM law 10 companies. Yeah. Chief Operating Officers, managing Partners. And, um, it, it was. The way I see things moving forward in, let's say, three to five years. The current, the current structure, even down to the entity, the, the business, the the, um, partnership model operating on a cash basis is really incompatible with where we're gonna be post transformation and we're gonna need external capital. And capital is like water. It finds its way into every, every crevice it will find, and it's already with MSOs, you're already seeing this. Yeah. Find its way in and it's a, it's, it's, it's a bit messy. [00:35:00] Um, but I really see the future of law being like an A BSC Corp. Um, with that's capitalized with a, with a, with a board and a governance model, more traditional of a Fortune 500 company. And, you know, the number of lawyers being, um. Having fewer lawyers and more engineers, analysts, technicians, um, product designers and, uh, lawyers are still gonna absolutely be a critical part of the equation. But it's, today, it's about one to one in, um, in the AM law. So, mm-hmm. If, if, if it's a thousand attorney firm, on average they have about 2000 people, I think that number's gonna be closer to three, maybe three and a half to one. In the near term, I don't know. How do you see our target state where we're heading when we come out of the other side of this transformation? Yeah, I think one, one good area to sort of look at and, and this is interesting for, for us, I think in particular [00:36:00] because we serve so many different, different geos, right? And not just the US or North America, but when we look at some of the firms over in the uk, especially a few few down in Australia as well, but especially the UK where some firms are not owned by private equity. They're publicly owned by publicly traded entities. All of a sudden, A CFO has to show up at a board meeting and talk very different language in a very different lens than what you do inside of a partnership that's cash driven, right, or cash basis. That's an interesting model to kind of look and compare to if that became the norm all over the place, what would have to drive as a change inside of the, the org structure or the way that you think about applying your, your capital? 'cause that's really what you're, you're talking about how does. Capital get deployed across the, the organization. So do I, do I have a firm [00:37:00] point of view of how many lawyer ratios there will be? No, but I, I think it's an interesting space to watch, especially as a lot of the lawyers that are associates or junior associates that are coming outta law school today. The way that they learn in a law firm is by doing some of. Tasks. Right? That's how, that's how they learn. That's how they get indoctrinated into the firm, the culture. This is how we do work at, at the firm. If that gets replaced by technology, that would be an interesting point because where do they learn, how do they, how do they move up the ladder? Does the career ladder change? Because this been a pretty set model from a lawyer perspective for. Forever. This is just, this is how many years you serve at this level. Then you move to this and you move to this. So I, I, I, I don't know exactly where it will end other than to say, I think it's, I think it's gonna be a change. And I think what we're seeing is from the sort of younger [00:38:00] generation is the use of technology and how they wanna use it. It's just very different. And that's gonna drive a lot of changes. Yeah. You think. The, um, you know, I think AI is going to also change drastically by necessity, associate development. Like if you talked, and I'm not a lawyer, but. Friends with, many been selling into the space for almost 20 years, and I almost universally across the board, they all say the way I learned to be a lawyer was painful and not the most efficient. And it certainly wasn't the most cost efficient for, you know, the clients we were, we were doing the work for. So I think there's opportunities there on the associate development side to, to make things better. Law schools are continuing to have record enrollment, which has been encouraging to me because I've been a bit worried about. Mm-hmm. I mean, you know, people on the sidelines saying, Hey, do I really want to enter into a field that's undergoing this [00:39:00] radical transformation that if you were to stack rank industries from like most likely to be trans or impacted by this transformation, legal's pretty, pretty high up there. It's, and I think there's been some interesting surveys on that too. What, like what, what industries are most ripe for serious impact Right. To, due to technology and, and I think any sort of service provider industry is, is, is ripe for that. Now I think where we lean hard into this, and this speaks to my product hard obviously, is we can help guide and sort of bring these. Two worlds together. And, and what I mean by that is, and I kind of don't like this, I don't know what you think about this. Ted, I'll ask you a question back, but I don't like this notion of front office and back office. Yeah, I, I, I don't like the terminology because it indicates separation and I think that. In order to be successful, you have to think about it holistically [00:40:00] and everyone serves a role. Now those roles are gonna change over time, but you gotta, you gotta think about that, um, holistically. And as we think of lawyers and the way that they work, that's gonna impact a billing team. For example, how many. Billers do actually need, do you need hundreds of them if you're a really large law firm? Or can you automate some of that tasks? And then comes the hard question, well, what do you, what do you do with that savings? How do you deploy that capital? Where do you wanna take it to the bottom line of savings? Or do you wanna hire different skillset and expand and take advantage of that in a different way? But we gotta think about it holistically. So while yes. Lawyers will go through change. It will also have an impact and change due to what the professionals inside of a firm is doing. But I've been trying to make a way with this back office, front office notion for years. It's, it, maybe if I say it [00:41:00] enough here, Ted, it will go away, but I don't know why your, your opinion on that is because I think it's an old way of thinking. It, it is, and especially given where we are now, like think about it. Yeah. Like it is in the bowels of the back office. Right. You know? Mm-hmm. It's like, and, and, and law firms have historically underinvested in it, so industry numbers are low, single digit percentages of budget are allocated towards technology. Our, again, accounting friends over in an adjacent industry spend twice what. Legal does. Mm-hmm. And it's, it's not been a strategic imperative that is changing. So it's absolutely changing. Yeah. What, what was, what was a back office function now has a direct impact on the practice. IE the front office. So I agree with you. I, I think it's an old way of thinking. And it, it, it, um, it alludes to a pro a pecking [00:42:00] order that, um, I think doesn't serve the industry well. Yeah, I, uh, I think, I think you said that part very well, Ted, and I think the firms that continue to think in those ways will be left behind because they can't rally around the same. Goal, they can't rally around the same mission. And with AI and what it's able to do, and we have a very, we have a very strong point of view at Elite on, on AI in in general. And we think that in order for it to be effective. Not just a shiny cool little thing that you play with on the side or lose your Saturday morning to exploring the world of ai. In order for it to be effective, it has to show up where the end user is working and it has to be embedded in order to show up where you are. Um, and today, I think the other [00:43:00] fascinating part about AI is we're talking about it as. A thing, I guess as a separate thing. Mm-hmm. I believe just like we're no longer really talking about cloud as a separate thing, it's just a, it's just a given. That's where you need to be. You need to be on scalable SaaS platforms. If you wanna operate at scale and perform well. I think we won't talk as much about AI being the thing more of. Of course that is how we develop. Of course, that is how we work. It would just become part of our DNA. So I think that's the other part that will drive a lot of, a lot of change. But, um, we're maybe not quite there yet in, in our industry. But I think if we look around, why would you ever develop anything? Without thinking about how you can first eliminate the work that you're trying to to do using technology. I mean, that should be the first thing. You should be thinking AI first. Yeah. I believe AI is [00:44:00] going to be infrastructure just like cloud. I think it's gonna be like autocorrect in your Word documents that just kind of happens behind the scenes. I'm in the middle of writing a post. McKenzie just came out with a report about the. 250 years of the United States economy and how what has differentiated the US is its investment in infrastructure and all the advantages that that has given us, whether it's education, railways or roadways, internet, um mm-hmm. Higher, higher ed. And, um, I think that, I think that. You're, you're exactly right. AI is going to be infrastructure, like the chief AI officer role, I think makes sense today because we're. We really need kind of a center of excellence to help us transform, but post transformation, that function is going to be embedded within the business itself. I spent years at Bank of America in risk management and you know, we always used to say we have four lines of [00:45:00] defense in risk management. We have the line of business. So that's like the branch that you walk into, or it's your wealth managing advisor. We have our risk management partners that are aligned to those lines of business. That's the second line of defense. Third line of defense is corporate audit. Mm-hmm. So they catch things. Mm-hmm. And then the fourth line of defense is the Wall Street Journal, because that's where, that's where you end up. I wasn't expecting, I wasn't expecting that as your fourth line. So, right. It, it, that's where you end up if you don't embed risk management throughout the organization. The same thing is true with innovation. And ai. So, um, if you try to control innovation, if you try to department it, right, if you try to box it in, it's, it's just not gonna work. It has to be the way that you live out every day activity and you can't put it in a box. And we have these conversations today, internally, [00:46:00] you know. We're a technology company, right? So we've never seen new technology that we don't like to play with, and we are of the mindset of we can't restrict or process or framework this too much because that's gonna stifle the innovation. It has to be propagated throughout and you have to let go a little bit. You have to give your teams a little bit of freedom and, and. And that's counter to how everything has been done in the past. But I think you, I think you're spot on. I think we're gonna talk not too far in the distance about it just being a given and it's just part of your DNA, like you said, it's infrastructure, it's how you do things, it's how you operate. And, um, it's gonna change the way that. We wake up every day. I think it's pretty exciting. It's a little scary at times, but I think it's pretty exciting. Yeah, it is. It is both scary and, and exciting. Um, there's a lot. I mean, change creates opportunity, right? Mm-hmm. When industries are stagnant, um, or markets are stagnant, it's [00:47:00] very hard to make money. Um, movement creates opportunity. So if we. If we embrace an abundance mindset as we go through this, I think we'll come out the other side just fine. I mean, we have physical constraints in, in, in the world that are going to prevent this from happening overnight. You know, power compute. Yeah. Like there are data, there's things that, this isn't gonna happen tomorrow, but it's going to happen. And I think firms will be much better positioned if they embrace that. And um, and that means. That means changing and lawyers don't always like change, so it should be, uh, it should be really interesting. Um, we're about out of time, but um, by the time this airs, we will have vantage will have been complete. Yeah. But how do, how do people find out more about, you know, what you guys are up to at Elite? Yes. Best way to always start is is go to our website, [00:48:00] leak.com. Um, you can check out the conference, um, soundbites post, uh, the event there. Um, that's the best way to, to start to find out about what we're up to and what we're doing. Sign up for one of our great. Um. Webinars that we do on a regular basis. Even if you are not a customer, we welcome you with open arms. Um, I think everyone should be well informed with what everyone is up to. And in an industry that's still quite, quite small, so it's not, it's not hard to learn new things. So we, we welcome everyone to, to participate in the events that we have, and don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn. Uh, there you go. It's always a great place to, to follow us. Uh, follow me, follow, uh, elite, um, and you'll get some good information on what we're doing. And, um, signing up for some of our exciting upcoming events. We have a, a few more up our sleeve for the remainder of the year. We get past, like our big conferences, we'll be doing smaller city by city, um, meetings and, and events [00:49:00] with, uh, with the broader. Customer base and, uh, non-customers. Yeah. And, uh, one way people can find out more about what happened is at Vantage is I'll be there broadcasting live. I'm gonna put the videos on legal innovation spotlight.com. You guys are gonna put the videos, um, on your site. So, uh, yeah, I would encourage people to go have a look and, uh, and follow Elizabeth. That would be great. Uh, and I appreciate you having me on Ted. Yes. This fun time went fast and uh, uh, thank you for having me. Absolutely. Look forward to seeing you in a couple weeks. Sounds great. Alright. It's take care. Thanks. Thanks for listening to Legal Innovation Spotlight. If you found value in this chat, hit the subscribe button to be notified when we release new episodes. We'd also really appreciate it if you could take a moment to rate us and leave us a review wherever you're listening right now. Your feedback helps us provide you with top-notch [00:50:00] content.