1 00:00:02,497 --> 00:00:04,549 Monica, how are you this afternoon? 2 00:00:05,911 --> 00:00:07,632 Doing great. 3 00:00:07,833 --> 00:00:11,467 So glad you could join me about this conversation. 4 00:00:11,467 --> 00:00:12,998 I think is going to be super interesting. 5 00:00:12,998 --> 00:00:20,066 And we had such a great initial call and have lots of interesting topics to cover today. 6 00:00:20,066 --> 00:00:21,590 So thanks for being here. 7 00:00:21,590 --> 00:00:23,423 Looking forward, it's my pleasure. 8 00:00:23,843 --> 00:00:29,363 So before we jump into the content, I to just do kind of little tee you up for an introduction. 9 00:00:29,363 --> 00:00:31,063 You've got an interesting background. 10 00:00:31,063 --> 00:00:32,743 You're an attorney. 11 00:00:32,803 --> 00:00:40,583 You're a thought leader in the legal tech innovation space, which I have lots of thoughts and opinions on myself. 12 00:00:40,583 --> 00:00:42,743 We're going to dive into that. 13 00:00:42,763 --> 00:00:46,343 You ran an ALSP for over 20 years. 14 00:00:46,663 --> 00:00:51,263 Tell us a little bit about what you're up to today and a little bit about your background. 15 00:00:51,576 --> 00:00:52,367 Sure. 16 00:00:52,367 --> 00:00:55,148 Well, my background, I've been an entrepreneur for a really long time. 17 00:00:55,148 --> 00:01:01,952 mean, over almost three decades, founded companies in a number of industries, primarily tech centric. 18 00:01:01,952 --> 00:01:08,416 early companies were in the music business, early internet, as well as database kind of plays. 19 00:01:08,416 --> 00:01:12,248 And then of course, legal tech, the legal industry, legal services space. 20 00:01:12,248 --> 00:01:16,983 So have been founding companies over these many years, probably about seven total. 21 00:01:16,983 --> 00:01:19,362 I've had some successful exits. 22 00:01:19,366 --> 00:01:22,389 and have really enjoyed the journey of being an entrepreneur. 23 00:01:22,389 --> 00:01:28,744 I'm also technically a trained attorney, obviously a business person, and I do a lot of writing and speaking. 24 00:01:28,744 --> 00:01:37,731 And so I've kind of been involved with the legal industry, probably the last 20 years, really along the lines of the innovation side of the house, really pushing the envelope 25 00:01:37,731 --> 00:01:47,168 forward in terms of what's possible in the legal industry, new ways of doing things, new ways of delivering services, new types of technology, creating new technologies and so 26 00:01:47,168 --> 00:01:49,330 forth, and have been 27 00:01:49,440 --> 00:01:58,075 operating ZetLaw in the ALSP, as you mentioned, an alternative legal services provider, one of the earliest to the market at the time, along with a few contemporaries. 28 00:01:58,075 --> 00:02:00,176 And this was again, 23 years ago. 29 00:02:00,176 --> 00:02:10,092 So at a time when people really didn't understand the idea of alternative legal services or what that might look like, and really had to help carve a path in the industry and 30 00:02:10,092 --> 00:02:14,204 build that from the ground up and educate the marketplace. 31 00:02:14,405 --> 00:02:17,144 I've been in the legal tech space for a long time since 32 00:02:17,144 --> 00:02:19,045 practically the inception of LegalTech. 33 00:02:19,045 --> 00:02:31,748 I was one of the earliest LegalTech, female LegalTech founders and creating kind of early legal technologies around networking, AI powered chat bots, clauses, drafting tools, 34 00:02:31,748 --> 00:02:40,511 things like that, collaboration technologies as well at a time when again, it was a nascent industry or barely an industry really. 35 00:02:40,511 --> 00:02:43,530 And now of course it's been blooming. 36 00:02:43,530 --> 00:02:53,197 As for what I'm doing now, I'm bringing kind of all of these decades of experience as both a founder, as an attorney, somebody with domain expertise in the legal space, as a legal 37 00:02:53,197 --> 00:03:04,435 technologist and a technologist in general, and a futurist really, and bringing all of that into more of the venture space, investing and advising in companies and looking to do 38 00:03:04,435 --> 00:03:04,885 more of that. 39 00:03:04,885 --> 00:03:07,517 I've been doing that as an active angel investor for a number of years. 40 00:03:07,517 --> 00:03:11,530 So looking to bring all of that into that space as well. 41 00:03:12,001 --> 00:03:19,015 Yeah, the amount of investment funneling into the legal tech space is honestly breathtaking. 42 00:03:20,456 --> 00:03:23,788 Just a quick little rabbit hole on that. 43 00:03:23,788 --> 00:03:28,000 I have a friend of mine who's a multiple founder. 44 00:03:28,000 --> 00:03:34,173 He had a really good size exit recently, and if he's listening, he'll know I'm talking about him. 45 00:03:34,173 --> 00:03:40,807 We had a conversation yesterday morning, and he now has an AI platform that 46 00:03:41,283 --> 00:03:46,466 They do some interesting stuff with task and project management integrates tightly with outlook. 47 00:03:46,466 --> 00:04:04,636 And he mentioned that even when he has executive sponsorship at the firm, he's been getting put into a queue with all the other AI POCs and pilots that the firm has going on. 48 00:04:04,636 --> 00:04:11,259 And they have a prioritization committee that's responsible for selecting when these 49 00:04:12,075 --> 00:04:17,578 When these platforms get evaluated and it's slowing the sales cycle down so much. 50 00:04:17,578 --> 00:04:27,604 So that's on kind of the founder side that he's looking to other areas now to expand his business because there's so much in, in, legal AI right now. 51 00:04:27,604 --> 00:04:33,527 And then on the investor side, we had a call with a, with a VC yesterday. 52 00:04:33,567 --> 00:04:41,321 We're not actively soliciting new investment, but we, we keep our ear to the ground and have conversations even when we're not. 53 00:04:41,543 --> 00:04:53,386 And we were told that the fund is looking for opportunities to diversify a little bit, maybe a little heavy on the AI side. 54 00:04:53,386 --> 00:04:54,667 So it's interesting. 55 00:04:54,667 --> 00:05:05,330 The pendulum is starting to swing back just a smidge where, it was, it used to be, you've got an AI platform, you know, it's a lot of excitement buzz. 56 00:05:05,330 --> 00:05:10,593 Now things, there's so much, so much of that, that you're getting queued and on the investment side, 57 00:05:10,593 --> 00:05:20,650 investors are looking for non AI first companies to offset some of the more risky bets that they've placed. 58 00:05:20,650 --> 00:05:24,016 So it's an interesting time in legal tech. 59 00:05:24,016 --> 00:05:25,127 Would you agree? 60 00:05:25,312 --> 00:05:26,073 Absolutely. 61 00:05:26,073 --> 00:05:29,706 mean, just a couple of thoughts on some of those points. 62 00:05:29,706 --> 00:05:31,668 Yes, I mean, definitely a lot of AI hype. 63 00:05:31,668 --> 00:05:33,790 I I think we all are aware of that, right? 64 00:05:33,790 --> 00:05:39,735 We can't open sort of the, you any feed on any social media or newsfeed and not see AI in the headlines, right? 65 00:05:39,735 --> 00:05:42,587 So it's a huge, huge area right now, lots of hype. 66 00:05:42,587 --> 00:05:44,659 It could be getting a little bit frothy, right? 67 00:05:44,659 --> 00:05:52,110 People are kind of throwing money at it so fast and maybe not really looking carefully or critically at the business model or what problem is this trying to solve or... 68 00:05:52,110 --> 00:05:55,930 Does this technology or this product actually even do what it claims to do? 69 00:05:55,930 --> 00:06:02,250 So, you know, again, having been a founder, a technologist, a product person, I'm always really interested in what the product does. 70 00:06:02,250 --> 00:06:03,570 Does it actually do these things? 71 00:06:03,570 --> 00:06:05,350 Is it on track to do these things? 72 00:06:05,350 --> 00:06:06,930 Do you have the right team? 73 00:06:06,930 --> 00:06:08,310 How are they executing? 74 00:06:08,310 --> 00:06:10,070 What's their experience as well? 75 00:06:10,190 --> 00:06:12,550 But definitely, mean, huge opportunities in AI. 76 00:06:12,550 --> 00:06:16,690 I'm very bullish on sort of AI and AI and legal tech and AI and reg tech. 77 00:06:16,690 --> 00:06:19,778 And I know I've written and spoken on those topics too. 78 00:06:19,778 --> 00:06:29,923 But I would say that legal, like a lot of professional sectors, especially a lot of the kind of uninteresting or boring back office functions, still lend themselves to a lot of 79 00:06:29,923 --> 00:06:38,387 good old fashioned automation that may or may not necessarily have to enable the user to utilize AI in the course of doing that, right? 80 00:06:38,387 --> 00:06:46,016 So there's a lot of tasks that we can think of in legal, a lot of use cases that simply haven't been automated yet or haven't been automated well. 81 00:06:46,016 --> 00:06:47,939 And so there's still a lot of opportunities. 82 00:06:47,939 --> 00:06:58,192 So I would tend to agree with that VC that there are opportunities out there for a technology that maybe isn't AI heavy centric, but yet it's automating a prior process that 83 00:06:58,192 --> 00:07:02,058 was dated or clunky and needs needs refinement and efficiency. 84 00:07:02,058 --> 00:07:04,210 And there's still a lot of opportunities like that. 85 00:07:04,396 --> 00:07:04,666 Yeah. 86 00:07:04,666 --> 00:07:18,094 And then you also have the, you know, you had Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft come out and say that SAS is dead and AI is going to, and I think what he means specifically is 87 00:07:18,094 --> 00:07:20,880 like, um, you're, you're technology person. 88 00:07:20,880 --> 00:07:25,978 So you're probably familiar with CRUD create, read, update, and delete its database operations. 89 00:07:25,978 --> 00:07:34,479 When you have like just a, a fancy front end that to a CRUD infrastructure, you know, like CRM. 90 00:07:34,479 --> 00:07:47,515 Um, is, a good example that AI can, you can now spin up highly customized apps with the, know, the, with the data integration layer and AI will write all the code for you. 91 00:07:47,515 --> 00:07:50,286 So, um, you know, it's interesting. 92 00:07:50,286 --> 00:07:58,769 You've got, had so much hype, so much investment and now we're starting to see the pendulum swing a little bit in the other direction. 93 00:07:58,769 --> 00:08:00,090 It's going to swing back and forth. 94 00:08:00,090 --> 00:08:01,731 It's not headed. 95 00:08:01,731 --> 00:08:03,204 It's going to oscillate. 96 00:08:03,204 --> 00:08:08,295 in my opinion, but regardless, it is such a fun time to be in legal tech. 97 00:08:08,458 --> 00:08:09,709 It is really a fun time. 98 00:08:09,709 --> 00:08:11,601 yes, definitely AI is here to stay. 99 00:08:11,601 --> 00:08:14,143 And I know you're a technologist as well yourself. 100 00:08:14,143 --> 00:08:18,802 So I know we talked about the idea that you can create different interesting tools and things with AI. 101 00:08:18,802 --> 00:08:24,812 And there's a lot of opportunity for people and individuals to empower themselves with AI. 102 00:08:24,812 --> 00:08:34,891 yeah, AI is definitely here to stay in terms of what Garner's investment is going to have to come down to, good sound business models and the right team and the right technology 103 00:08:34,891 --> 00:08:36,842 and the right product for that market. 104 00:08:36,855 --> 00:08:37,476 Yeah. 105 00:08:37,476 --> 00:08:44,681 I think the hardest part from an investor perspective right now, at least from where I sit is anticipating churn. 106 00:08:44,681 --> 00:08:55,630 So, you you've seen massive valuations with upstarts, where, know, they've had significant revenue growth, recurring revenue growth. 107 00:08:55,630 --> 00:08:59,453 And what's not clear is what's the churn going to look like? 108 00:08:59,453 --> 00:08:59,924 Right. 109 00:08:59,924 --> 00:09:06,979 So, um, that is kind of TBD and it's a really important, like in a normal, 110 00:09:07,075 --> 00:09:12,955 like a non AI investment scenario, like you got couple, hopefully a couple of years of runway. 111 00:09:12,955 --> 00:09:14,955 Maybe you get a seed investment. 112 00:09:15,155 --> 00:09:23,134 Um, you know, before you do a series a you've got some runway behind you that you can demonstrate your churn and your revenue retention. 113 00:09:23,134 --> 00:09:32,355 And with these AI companies with sometimes billion plus dollar valuations, you no longer have visibility to what churn is going to look like. 114 00:09:32,355 --> 00:09:36,395 And you know, as an investor, that would make me really nervous. 115 00:09:37,153 --> 00:09:37,603 You know? 116 00:09:37,603 --> 00:09:42,506 Um, so it's going to be interesting to see how this, how this, plays out. 117 00:09:43,547 --> 00:09:44,167 Yeah. 118 00:09:44,167 --> 00:09:51,871 Well, we were going to talk about, innovation and innovation is a topic that, uh, we talk about frequently. 119 00:09:51,871 --> 00:09:54,803 Obviously the name of the podcast is legal innovation spotlight. 120 00:09:54,803 --> 00:10:02,017 So, you know, I started to see innovation roles pop up about 10 years ago. 121 00:10:02,017 --> 00:10:06,787 There were no C-suite, roles, um, at least on the Ilta roster. 122 00:10:06,787 --> 00:10:10,347 In 2014, there were some director level roles. 123 00:10:10,347 --> 00:10:18,847 There were 16 people who had innovation in their job title in the Ilta roster, which isn't everybody, but it's a pretty good sampling. 124 00:10:18,927 --> 00:10:21,047 And today there are over 300. 125 00:10:21,047 --> 00:10:24,647 I looked at the January roster and there were about 360. 126 00:10:25,287 --> 00:10:29,067 So 2000 % growth, 20X. 127 00:10:29,227 --> 00:10:32,327 And I expect that to continue. 128 00:10:33,307 --> 00:10:35,287 you know, in your experience, 129 00:10:35,529 --> 00:10:48,733 how have you seen this, this growth and really how much substance have you seen behind it versus, you know, firms know that they have to look innovative and that they need to do 130 00:10:48,733 --> 00:10:49,643 something. 131 00:10:49,643 --> 00:10:55,659 So sometimes they hire an innovation person without really a solid strategy. 132 00:10:55,659 --> 00:11:01,079 Um, some are doing it, um, the right way, which is figuring out what 133 00:11:01,079 --> 00:11:08,368 the role needs to do getting buy-in at the executive or XCOM level and then executing. 134 00:11:08,689 --> 00:11:13,865 what has been just kind of, how have you seen this evolution in legal innovation? 135 00:11:14,272 --> 00:11:15,923 Yeah, it's a great observation, Ted. 136 00:11:15,923 --> 00:11:16,844 And you're totally right. 137 00:11:16,844 --> 00:11:20,225 I know you and I have been around a really long time here in this space. 138 00:11:20,226 --> 00:11:20,966 you're correct. 139 00:11:20,966 --> 00:11:24,158 mean, years ago at ILTA and whatnot, mean, you're right. 140 00:11:24,158 --> 00:11:28,090 There weren't very many folks wearing an innovation badge or title. 141 00:11:28,350 --> 00:11:31,392 I have been writing and speaking on innovation for a really long time. 142 00:11:31,392 --> 00:11:42,178 It wasn't until about, I would say 2016 or 2017 when I wrote a piece, I think it was the 2017 piece on innovation, which really took off and it was kind of widely 143 00:11:42,190 --> 00:11:45,490 quoted and reposted and people referred to it quite a bit. 144 00:11:45,490 --> 00:11:49,750 In fact, even one of the law schools wanted to use it in one of their courses. 145 00:11:50,350 --> 00:11:54,270 So, you know, this innovation thing kind of took off, that was in 2017. 146 00:11:54,270 --> 00:12:02,390 And here we are, you know, number of years later still, and now it's kind of really hot and it's something people are really talking about. 147 00:12:02,390 --> 00:12:07,430 But a lot of us who've been around for a while, it is not a new theme. 148 00:12:07,430 --> 00:12:10,370 However, actually, can I strike that? 149 00:12:10,370 --> 00:12:11,736 Can I just pick up again where I left off? 150 00:12:11,736 --> 00:12:12,551 Yeah. 151 00:12:12,710 --> 00:12:18,245 let me just pick up from, I'll pick up from where I picked up where I was talking about the piece I wrote. 152 00:12:18,245 --> 00:12:19,336 Is that okay? 153 00:12:19,777 --> 00:12:21,017 Okay, perfect. 154 00:12:23,490 --> 00:12:28,515 So I wrote a piece around 2016, 2017 timeframe around innovation. 155 00:12:28,515 --> 00:12:33,259 And unlike some of my earlier pieces on the topic, that piece really took off. 156 00:12:33,259 --> 00:12:36,752 And around that time, 2017, it was widely shared. 157 00:12:36,752 --> 00:12:41,757 The piece was actually used or asked to be used in a course for law school. 158 00:12:41,757 --> 00:12:44,720 So it was really something that took off and was widely shared and reposted. 159 00:12:44,720 --> 00:12:49,794 And I feel that that was around a time when there was somewhat of an inflection point in the industry. 160 00:12:49,798 --> 00:12:55,663 A bit early, obviously, we've seen more of an inflection point these last couple of years with innovation totally taking off. 161 00:12:55,663 --> 00:13:00,488 But it was a point where people were beginning to have a discussion around innovation. 162 00:13:00,488 --> 00:13:01,308 What does that look like? 163 00:13:01,308 --> 00:13:02,949 And be more open to it. 164 00:13:02,990 --> 00:13:11,678 I mean, again, having been out here for a long time in the legal industry, carving a path where there wasn't one before, helping to create new paths where there weren't paths 165 00:13:11,678 --> 00:13:16,726 before, it has taken a long time to educate the marketplace on 166 00:13:16,726 --> 00:13:24,562 different ways of doing things, different ways of looking at things, how to use technology and why it's beneficial, how to think about efficiencies, even the idea of legal ops. 167 00:13:24,562 --> 00:13:30,197 mean, we were doing legal operations at Zentlaw years before it was called legal operations. 168 00:13:30,197 --> 00:13:38,574 And many contemporaries that founded and colleagues of mine that have founded CLOC and some of these other groups that are focused on legal operations were again, doing this 169 00:13:38,574 --> 00:13:46,170 work a long time before the market caught up and could recognize and kind of put some energy and some effort and money around it. 170 00:13:46,426 --> 00:13:51,551 And so we've seen this play out in a lot of different areas, the same with legal tech as well. 171 00:13:51,551 --> 00:13:58,517 Some of my earlier legal tech companies did not garner the commercial success that I anticipated because they were just too early to the market. 172 00:13:58,517 --> 00:14:08,906 And I know several co-founders, not co-founders, other founders that are my contemporaries that are early legal tech founders like myself that have founded companies and their 173 00:14:08,906 --> 00:14:13,932 products were wonderful products as well that didn't garner the commercial success at the time. 174 00:14:13,932 --> 00:14:16,323 because they were just simply too early to the market. 175 00:14:16,323 --> 00:14:18,485 So fast forward, here we are 2025. 176 00:14:18,485 --> 00:14:19,715 mean, the market is ready. 177 00:14:19,715 --> 00:14:20,906 It's ripe. 178 00:14:21,066 --> 00:14:23,687 Legal tech, it's having its moment. 179 00:14:23,888 --> 00:14:29,030 And it's definitely there's the time is right in terms of this innovation mindset. 180 00:14:29,571 --> 00:14:35,614 As to your point around like these roles and whatnot, you people with sort of these titles and what does it mean for law firms? 181 00:14:35,614 --> 00:14:42,542 Yeah, I law firms, they're going to sort of put energy in some marketing dollars around something that makes sense for them and 182 00:14:42,542 --> 00:14:47,682 And having been a strategic advisor to some large law firms as well, it does make sense. 183 00:14:47,682 --> 00:14:56,042 They do have to sort of get onto the bandwagon in terms of technology and AI and looking at or revisiting how things need to be done. 184 00:14:56,282 --> 00:15:05,582 And so being able to bring somebody on who is leading that, whether they're in an innovation role with an innovation specific title, or some of them are sort of head of AI 185 00:15:05,582 --> 00:15:08,738 or head of practice management or client services. 186 00:15:08,738 --> 00:15:16,363 whatever title they may have, but this idea of revisiting and looking at how can we do things better, differently, maybe more efficiently. 187 00:15:16,964 --> 00:15:24,489 And so that's why I do believe we've seen, and we've seen this explosion of some of these CIO, Chief Innovation Officer roles. 188 00:15:24,489 --> 00:15:26,180 And then I've spoken with many of them. 189 00:15:26,180 --> 00:15:38,418 mean, many are colleagues of mine and some friends, and some of them are former CIOs, some of them are former CTOs that held CIO, CTO roles in law firms that then moved over 190 00:15:38,676 --> 00:15:41,710 into more of this innovation role. 191 00:15:41,710 --> 00:15:51,681 they're a, rather than a chief information officer, they're now a chief innovation officer, but they're basically doing similar things to what they did before, but now 192 00:15:51,681 --> 00:15:56,866 they've got more of that innovation lens and maybe more of a budget to play with in terms of trying new technologies. 193 00:15:57,079 --> 00:16:05,606 Yeah, I have seen, there are a few big law firms out there that have bundled IT and innovation. 194 00:16:05,606 --> 00:16:07,758 And I see some challenges with that. 195 00:16:07,758 --> 00:16:10,170 I, there's not many, but there are a few. 196 00:16:10,170 --> 00:16:15,815 It's like, so when I think about like, right, what are the KPIs for a chief innovation officer? 197 00:16:15,815 --> 00:16:21,330 There should be, they should be measured on failure in a good way, right? 198 00:16:21,330 --> 00:16:25,463 Like, um, if, if you're not failing, you're not innovating. 199 00:16:25,463 --> 00:16:25,733 Right. 200 00:16:25,733 --> 00:16:27,694 It's, there's a lot of trial and error, right? 201 00:16:27,694 --> 00:16:31,225 Not everything works the first time in it. 202 00:16:31,586 --> 00:16:33,096 Failure's bad, right? 203 00:16:33,096 --> 00:16:34,517 Like you don't want a failure. 204 00:16:34,517 --> 00:16:35,587 That could be a breach. 205 00:16:35,587 --> 00:16:36,788 That could be an outage. 206 00:16:36,788 --> 00:16:41,309 Um, I, I feel like, I feel like innovation fits better. 207 00:16:41,349 --> 00:16:42,750 Maybe KM. 208 00:16:42,750 --> 00:16:55,287 Um, I honestly think just a kind of a separate org structure, uh, around innovation is the best approach, but I have seen success with. 209 00:16:55,287 --> 00:16:57,808 bundling it with KM. 210 00:16:58,629 --> 00:17:08,193 I saw a really interesting, it was a podcast with Mark Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz. 211 00:17:08,193 --> 00:17:10,454 He was the inventor of Netscape. 212 00:17:10,454 --> 00:17:14,975 And he talked about this program at IBM called The Wild Ducks. 213 00:17:15,496 --> 00:17:22,979 And The Wild Ducks, in a company of hundreds of thousands of people, they selected, I think he said seven. 214 00:17:22,979 --> 00:17:29,912 there were these seven executive level roles that they put into this wild ducks program. 215 00:17:29,912 --> 00:17:30,792 And this was in the night. 216 00:17:30,792 --> 00:17:39,726 I think it was in the nineties, you know, so everybody was wearing suit and tie and these guys would wear and get girls would wear cowboy boots and put their feet on the table and 217 00:17:39,726 --> 00:17:40,226 meetings. 218 00:17:40,226 --> 00:17:46,609 And they kind of had carte blanche to bypass certain processes to, go do innovative things. 219 00:17:46,809 --> 00:17:51,661 And, know, I, I sat back and reflected on that and thought, 220 00:17:51,661 --> 00:17:55,293 There is no way in hell that would ever work at a law firm. 221 00:17:55,333 --> 00:18:04,258 You know, the culture at a law firm, all law firms, like I can't, there's not one law firm I could ever see that working at, at least as it exists today, things would have to move 222 00:18:04,258 --> 00:18:08,830 quite a bit for some, something like that to really work. 223 00:18:08,830 --> 00:18:18,546 like, how can, how can innovation teams build and adopt frameworks that align with existing cultures? 224 00:18:18,546 --> 00:18:20,477 Because culture is so hard to change. 225 00:18:20,477 --> 00:18:21,237 Like, 226 00:18:21,310 --> 00:18:23,218 How do you think about that question? 227 00:18:23,372 --> 00:18:25,303 That's a great question, Ted. 228 00:18:25,303 --> 00:18:26,033 Absolutely. 229 00:18:26,033 --> 00:18:26,753 It's critical. 230 00:18:26,753 --> 00:18:33,325 In fact, we had done some culture work at Zentlaw for years as well, and kind of as a companion to some of the legal ops. 231 00:18:33,325 --> 00:18:42,838 And one of the reasons that came about, and I've written and spoken on this topic too, a number of times along with colleagues of mine in legal ops, that you really have to deal 232 00:18:42,838 --> 00:18:45,258 with when you're looking at change management, right? 233 00:18:45,258 --> 00:18:48,830 In an organization, you do have to look at people, process, and technology. 234 00:18:48,830 --> 00:18:50,630 And I always say people, 235 00:18:50,850 --> 00:18:55,303 process and technology in that order, because you really do have to start with the people. 236 00:18:55,303 --> 00:18:57,755 You have to start with the culture of your organization. 237 00:18:57,755 --> 00:19:00,177 What is the appetite for what you're trying to achieve? 238 00:19:00,177 --> 00:19:01,638 What makes sense for that culture? 239 00:19:01,638 --> 00:19:02,589 What's realistic? 240 00:19:02,589 --> 00:19:05,040 What's realistic based on the team that you have? 241 00:19:05,040 --> 00:19:06,962 Do you need to make changes on that front? 242 00:19:06,962 --> 00:19:14,127 So there's a whole bunch just on the culture and people front that has to be addressed in order for change management to be effective. 243 00:19:14,127 --> 00:19:18,390 And a lot of these innovation practices and technologies and 244 00:19:18,390 --> 00:19:22,272 Even the use of AI and whatnot and how can we be more efficient in our work? 245 00:19:22,272 --> 00:19:23,583 How can we leverage new tools? 246 00:19:23,583 --> 00:19:26,915 How can we get the attorneys, let's say at a law firm to use new tools? 247 00:19:27,095 --> 00:19:31,788 A lot of that you do have to start with culture because if you don't, you're gonna just butt up against that. 248 00:19:31,788 --> 00:19:40,583 It's not going to be successful or it's not gonna go over well or you're not getting ROI out of your investment, whatever the net output is that you're looking for. 249 00:19:40,583 --> 00:19:45,384 It's not really going to be what you expect it to be if you don't address the culture piece first. 250 00:19:45,384 --> 00:19:50,298 And I've had this discussion actually with a number of colleagues of mine who are chief innovation officers. 251 00:19:50,298 --> 00:19:53,426 And I've asked them, what are you doing on the culture front? 252 00:19:53,426 --> 00:19:56,322 I have some ideas and we brainstormed and talked. 253 00:19:56,363 --> 00:20:04,309 And the ones I find that are very effective are dealing with sort of the innovation piece in terms of the process, right? 254 00:20:04,309 --> 00:20:11,874 And then of course, they're kicking the tires on technology, bringing in some technology, trying out the tech and working on what makes sense where. 255 00:20:11,874 --> 00:20:16,556 But they've also not neglected the culture piece and they're addressing that culture piece. 256 00:20:16,556 --> 00:20:25,620 And in particular, addressing the culture piece as it pertains to the emerging groups of lawyers that are in their organization, right? 257 00:20:25,620 --> 00:20:30,722 You've got these young, these junior associates and the folks that are coming in, they're coming up as junior partners. 258 00:20:30,722 --> 00:20:37,285 These are people that are going to be inheriting the power structure in these firms, assuming the firms are still in existence at that time. 259 00:20:37,285 --> 00:20:40,118 And they will be the ones inheriting that. 260 00:20:40,118 --> 00:20:49,166 And so addressing some of the cultural pieces with them, as well as with some of the existing partnership, some of the existing partners who may be on the last legs of their 261 00:20:49,166 --> 00:20:51,328 career or nearing retirement soon. 262 00:20:51,328 --> 00:20:52,279 It's been interesting. 263 00:20:52,279 --> 00:21:03,598 I've had some folks say that chief innovation officers, as well as heads of KM tell me that they have found some of their partners sometimes are the more. 264 00:21:03,650 --> 00:21:11,853 or ones that are inclined to be early adopters of some of the technology, as opposed to the junior associates, because the junior associates are worried about getting put out of 265 00:21:11,853 --> 00:21:16,754 a job, or they have misconceptions, whereas the more senior partners are interested in that. 266 00:21:16,754 --> 00:21:18,132 it's really kind of interesting. 267 00:21:18,132 --> 00:21:26,818 It certainly proves that you can't make any generational assumptions on who's going to be more interested in adopting technology or AI. 268 00:21:26,818 --> 00:21:28,246 But I do think it's... 269 00:21:28,246 --> 00:21:32,778 highlights the point around addressing culture in a way that makes sense for your organization. 270 00:21:32,778 --> 00:21:37,379 And there's certainly lots of approaches to that, but definitely can't be neglected. 271 00:21:37,379 --> 00:21:38,479 Yeah. 272 00:21:38,479 --> 00:21:39,139 Yeah. 273 00:21:39,139 --> 00:21:44,019 So yeah, the multi-generational perspective is an important one. 274 00:21:44,019 --> 00:21:51,939 And, you know, I've, I've said many times that, you know, the, the, the law firm world is small. 275 00:21:52,279 --> 00:22:01,879 It's, um, the biggest law firm on the planet by revenues Kirkland and Ellis and their low seven billions, they wouldn't even qualify for, to be in the fortune 500 if they were 276 00:22:01,879 --> 00:22:02,799 public. 277 00:22:02,959 --> 00:22:07,539 And, you know, then it's like, okay, well, why, why 278 00:22:07,671 --> 00:22:08,551 Don't we have one? 279 00:22:08,551 --> 00:22:12,591 There are plenty of other professional services organizations that are in the fortune 500. 280 00:22:12,613 --> 00:22:15,695 And I think it comes down to multiple things. 281 00:22:15,695 --> 00:22:24,449 think that the, um, the ownership model, um, you know, the, the governance model, which dictates the governance model, right? 282 00:22:24,449 --> 00:22:33,863 In a public company, you have a board that installs and oversees management and those management decisions. 283 00:22:33,935 --> 00:22:44,953 Um, or, or how those roles are filled are based on, you know, not being the best at lawyering, but who's got the best resume and the best background to fill the marketing 284 00:22:44,953 --> 00:22:47,154 function or the finance function or the KM function. 285 00:22:47,154 --> 00:22:48,745 And maybe it's not a lawyer. 286 00:22:48,765 --> 00:22:55,810 Maybe it's somebody from outside and how do you get somebody from a, let's say it's a, the tech world. 287 00:22:55,810 --> 00:22:58,982 How do you, how do you pull somebody from a Google or an Amazon? 288 00:22:58,982 --> 00:23:03,795 If you're a law firm, you do it with, with, with stock options and that 289 00:23:03,927 --> 00:23:06,038 that can't happen in the US. 290 00:23:06,038 --> 00:23:14,090 At least you can do some shadow equity or profit sharing, but not traditional stock options. 291 00:23:14,090 --> 00:23:30,714 yeah, you point out an interesting dimension with respect to just the generational differences and the leadership model and how all that influences how ripe a law firm is to 292 00:23:30,714 --> 00:23:33,705 really embrace innovation. 293 00:23:33,987 --> 00:23:34,954 Do you agree? 294 00:23:35,502 --> 00:23:36,142 Absolutely. 295 00:23:36,142 --> 00:23:40,504 mean, yes, and I've been kind of beating this drum for a very long time. 296 00:23:40,504 --> 00:23:46,685 mean, decades that the model, it does need to change and it's time. 297 00:23:46,685 --> 00:23:48,926 It hasn't changed as we know. 298 00:23:49,106 --> 00:23:50,817 Will it change in the coming years? 299 00:23:50,817 --> 00:23:51,604 I believe so. 300 00:23:51,604 --> 00:23:55,688 A lot of that impetus is going to need to come from the client base that they serve. 301 00:23:55,788 --> 00:24:01,182 And we serve that client base as an LSP and have done so for a long time. 302 00:24:01,182 --> 00:24:02,150 so... 303 00:24:02,242 --> 00:24:12,226 the enterprise and institutional client base when they start to demand certain improvements or adjustments to that business model, then that business model will change. 304 00:24:12,226 --> 00:24:14,927 But right now we're not quite there. 305 00:24:15,008 --> 00:24:23,011 But I will say that selling into the enterprise for such a long time, it is a unique environment. 306 00:24:24,692 --> 00:24:30,198 There are things in that environment that on the enterprise side, there's a lot of talk around 307 00:24:30,198 --> 00:24:43,154 innovation and adoption of AI and efficiencies, but yet is it playing out in terms of what they're holding sort of their external large law firms to and they may or may not always 308 00:24:43,154 --> 00:24:44,374 be doing that consistently. 309 00:24:44,374 --> 00:24:50,077 So there's a little bit of mismatch there in terms of the rhetoric versus the actual behaviors. 310 00:24:50,077 --> 00:24:52,188 And so it'll take time in the industry. 311 00:24:52,188 --> 00:24:57,120 I'm confident things will evolve and continue to evolve as they have, but it'll just take time. 312 00:24:57,133 --> 00:24:57,293 Yeah. 313 00:24:57,293 --> 00:25:01,126 I mean, most CLOs and GCs came from big law, right? 314 00:25:01,126 --> 00:25:04,558 I mean, so it's an interesting, it's an interesting relationship. 315 00:25:04,558 --> 00:25:06,310 So let's talk about ALSPs a little bit. 316 00:25:06,310 --> 00:25:17,468 So it's a world that I don't know a ton about, but, um, I find it really interesting, especially now that we have the, you know, alternative business structures in, um, Arizona 317 00:25:17,468 --> 00:25:24,781 and Utah, and we're starting to see like the big four push in and even a smaller, uh, I saw a smaller accounting. 318 00:25:24,781 --> 00:25:37,872 company, I say smaller, they have like 3000 employees, but, um, called aprio and they recently announced a joint venture with, uh, a small law firm, 50 attorneys called radix 319 00:25:37,872 --> 00:25:38,842 law. 320 00:25:39,303 --> 00:25:42,445 And, it's aprio legal. 321 00:25:42,445 --> 00:25:54,475 And I was like, wow, you know, so I'm seeing, we're seeing people at, we're seeing, uh, firms at the top of the market and kind of the mid to smaller markets start to. 322 00:25:54,605 --> 00:25:56,175 tiptoe their way in. 323 00:25:56,175 --> 00:25:58,697 And I'm curious how, how is that? 324 00:25:58,697 --> 00:26:09,171 Because if you, if you listen to KPMG, for example, and the type of work that they're going to go after to me, and I'm not fully educated, you can probably confirm or deny 325 00:26:09,171 --> 00:26:09,391 this. 326 00:26:09,391 --> 00:26:12,072 It sounds like it's a lot of ALSP kind of work. 327 00:26:12,072 --> 00:26:20,626 Is it or, or no, like the blocking and tackling work that the big four would initially go after. 328 00:26:20,626 --> 00:26:23,177 Is that a more ALSP kind of work? 329 00:26:24,010 --> 00:26:28,133 Yeah, I mean, can be, know, ALSP is the term has been thrown around quite a bit. 330 00:26:28,133 --> 00:26:30,474 So just to kind of break it down a little first for you. 331 00:26:30,474 --> 00:26:33,777 mean, ALSP referring to alternative legal services provider. 332 00:26:33,777 --> 00:26:39,180 It's a term that came about over two decades ago when we started and some contemporaries in this space started. 333 00:26:39,180 --> 00:26:45,004 And the idea was to offer legal services in a model that was alternative to the conventional law firm model. 334 00:26:45,004 --> 00:26:53,472 So something other than a billable hour method of billing and something other than sort of the conventional, um, I'm hiring my lawyer and they're going to. 335 00:26:53,472 --> 00:27:01,574 answer the phone and respond to email, but these other ideas like flexible talent and subscription-based legal services. 336 00:27:01,574 --> 00:27:11,076 So these are solutions that we brought to the marketplace that were very groundbreaking at the time in terms of the flexible talent engagement, the idea of having access to legal 337 00:27:11,076 --> 00:27:19,162 talent on demand that you could then convert at the end of the engagement, the idea of being able to tap into a subscription legal services team. 338 00:27:19,602 --> 00:27:24,884 at a fixed rate and you were able to sort of tap into this on again on-demand support. 339 00:27:24,884 --> 00:27:34,098 So some of these models as well as legal operations and kind of this idea of looking at how things could be done more efficiently and somewhat even cannibalizing the revenue 340 00:27:34,098 --> 00:27:37,950 stream that would flow to the ALSP by helping that client become more efficient. 341 00:27:37,950 --> 00:27:47,554 So these types of solutions offered by us at Zetlaw and contemporaries in the space in the ALSP market are 342 00:27:48,110 --> 00:27:58,210 and have been very unique at the time and significantly underutilized when we consider the entire marketplace as well as not just the marketplace of institutional enterprise 343 00:27:58,210 --> 00:28:00,650 clients, but also look at large law firms. 344 00:28:00,650 --> 00:28:07,830 So there's still a lot of opportunity in the market and it's a segment that's growing and will continue to grow significantly. 345 00:28:07,830 --> 00:28:14,570 As for participation by some of the kind of big four, I can't comment specifically on that. 346 00:28:14,570 --> 00:28:16,696 I don't know specifically what their plans are, but 347 00:28:16,696 --> 00:28:20,969 I would imagine that they're looking at sort of grabbing some of that market share as well. 348 00:28:20,990 --> 00:28:24,353 And to the extent that makes sense, I don't know. 349 00:28:24,353 --> 00:28:30,558 Again, is their cost structure going to accommodate what clients have become accustomed to when it comes to LSPs? 350 00:28:30,558 --> 00:28:31,159 I don't know. 351 00:28:31,159 --> 00:28:32,650 mean, again, there is a cost savings. 352 00:28:32,650 --> 00:28:39,126 There's an efficiency component that's built into LSPs that clients come to expect and appreciate. 353 00:28:39,126 --> 00:28:44,312 But there's also the option of having different solutions that can be right sized. 354 00:28:44,312 --> 00:28:47,825 for what that client's looking for, as well as flexibility and convenience. 355 00:28:47,825 --> 00:28:58,483 These are factors that, and speed, that have not historically been able, been something that large law firms have been able to deliver on successfully time and again, and so 356 00:28:58,483 --> 00:29:00,084 clients are looking for that. 357 00:29:00,653 --> 00:29:05,175 Yeah, you know, I remember really, and the term has been around longer than this. 358 00:29:05,175 --> 00:29:07,666 Clearly you just mentioned 20 years. 359 00:29:08,146 --> 00:29:11,958 I started to really hear more about ALSPs around 10 years ago. 360 00:29:11,958 --> 00:29:18,561 It seemed like there was a lot of, a lot of press and a lot of talk about utilization. 361 00:29:18,561 --> 00:29:28,195 that, has that materialized like our, our GCs really leveraging ALSPs the way we expected them to? 362 00:29:29,122 --> 00:29:29,943 Yeah, great question. 363 00:29:29,943 --> 00:29:31,544 And it's a fair observation. 364 00:29:31,544 --> 00:29:32,185 Absolutely. 365 00:29:32,185 --> 00:29:40,581 I would say within the last 10 years for sure, and definitely within the last five years, we've really seen a significant uptick in the use of the term LSP in terms of people 366 00:29:40,581 --> 00:29:42,073 understanding, recognizing it. 367 00:29:42,073 --> 00:29:43,994 It's been covered more in the press. 368 00:29:43,994 --> 00:29:45,284 I know I've had pieces covered. 369 00:29:45,284 --> 00:29:46,797 I've been asked to speak on the topic. 370 00:29:46,797 --> 00:29:58,286 So it's definitely something that people understand more now and more of the market is understood and not only understood, but is more receptive to than they were before 15 or 371 00:29:58,286 --> 00:29:59,156 20 years ago. 372 00:29:59,156 --> 00:30:09,511 So definitely in the last 10 years, we've seen a lot more clients that are more receptive to utilizing ALSPs and the ability for ALSPs such as that law to kind of bust these myths 373 00:30:09,511 --> 00:30:11,672 around the use of ALSPs. 374 00:30:11,672 --> 00:30:12,752 There were a lot of myths. 375 00:30:12,752 --> 00:30:21,506 I know that we ran into that a lot in the early years, a lot of myths around what an ALSP does, what it offers, the benefits, is the benefit really there? 376 00:30:21,506 --> 00:30:23,096 Does this make sense? 377 00:30:23,096 --> 00:30:27,406 And so being able to kind of time and again show and develop a track record, 378 00:30:27,406 --> 00:30:33,166 in the marketplace, also kind of debunk these myths makes a makes a big difference. 379 00:30:33,166 --> 00:30:41,666 And it's interesting, I wrote a piece recently on the idea of do we even need to call it alternative legal services provider anymore? 380 00:30:41,666 --> 00:30:47,146 Maybe we just drop the A and call it LSP, because it really isn't that alternative anymore. 381 00:30:47,146 --> 00:30:48,226 I it shouldn't be. 382 00:30:48,226 --> 00:30:52,426 And in fact, it's not because the model is becoming ubiquitous now. 383 00:30:52,426 --> 00:30:54,126 It's becoming very common. 384 00:30:54,126 --> 00:30:57,186 It's something that people are replicating throughout the country. 385 00:30:57,190 --> 00:31:03,813 And we're seeing a lot more growth and market share and poised to have more market share in LSPs as a segment of this market. 386 00:31:03,813 --> 00:31:06,775 So arguably it's not alternative anymore. 387 00:31:06,775 --> 00:31:11,337 It's going to become mainstream most likely and in a matter of time. 388 00:31:11,357 --> 00:31:14,198 So that's something that I've often thought about. 389 00:31:14,198 --> 00:31:22,082 And so we're starting to refer to ourselves as an LSP or legal services provider because it probably makes more sense. 390 00:31:22,083 --> 00:31:24,763 ALSP was a little bit too much of a mouthful anyway. 391 00:31:24,763 --> 00:31:26,903 LSP is easier to say. 392 00:31:27,163 --> 00:31:29,403 what, what about like regional differences? 393 00:31:29,403 --> 00:31:37,483 Like it seems like in the EU, in the UK specifically, they're a little further ahead, right? 394 00:31:37,483 --> 00:31:41,643 The legal services act was six years ago. 395 00:31:41,643 --> 00:31:44,083 Um, you know, they're ahead on that. 396 00:31:44,083 --> 00:31:52,103 When I talked to innovation professionals and I've had many from the EU and, uh, here domestically. 397 00:31:52,351 --> 00:31:56,629 It feels like they're thinking about things a little differently over there. 398 00:31:56,629 --> 00:31:59,455 What, what about in the ALSP space? 399 00:31:59,455 --> 00:32:05,395 Is there a regional difference in how these providers go to market? 400 00:32:06,254 --> 00:32:07,214 Yeah, great question. 401 00:32:07,214 --> 00:32:08,725 And there's a lot to talk about there. 402 00:32:08,725 --> 00:32:13,277 I mean, first of all, in the comment on Europe and in the EU, absolutely. 403 00:32:13,277 --> 00:32:21,040 I have colleagues that have founded and popped up ALSPs over in Europe and Sweden and other places like that. 404 00:32:21,040 --> 00:32:23,011 And I've been in touch with them for a number of years. 405 00:32:23,011 --> 00:32:24,902 And yes, they're very forward looking. 406 00:32:24,902 --> 00:32:25,892 They totally get it. 407 00:32:25,892 --> 00:32:30,604 I mean, they're on the same page with me and they have been doing this for a while. 408 00:32:30,604 --> 00:32:35,918 Their market is more receptive or has been more receptive historically to that than I would say that. 409 00:32:35,918 --> 00:32:38,058 the domestic market here. 410 00:32:38,658 --> 00:32:50,698 And in terms of like regions within the United States, mean, definitely, you know, your typical coastal kind of large tech centers, metros, we've seen historically the most kind 411 00:32:50,698 --> 00:32:53,998 of adoption of the model. 412 00:32:53,998 --> 00:33:02,220 We have found though, interestingly enough that you would assume, oh, it's only kind of the forward looking sectors of the market, like, you know, tech and. 413 00:33:02,220 --> 00:33:02,560 whatnot. 414 00:33:02,560 --> 00:33:10,892 And yes, we do have a lot of clients in tech and we've seen adoption in tech, but we've also seen and have been broken, breaking into or broken through some of these other 415 00:33:10,892 --> 00:33:18,424 industries that are historically more traditional, if you will, right, like education or healthcare or insurance. 416 00:33:18,424 --> 00:33:31,766 And so we've seen these markets, these sectors, excuse me, begin to adopt ALSPs as part of their, their essential resource toolkit, basically in the legal departments and 417 00:33:31,766 --> 00:33:38,728 That's really promising as well because these are industries that historically would only rely on big law. 418 00:33:38,728 --> 00:33:43,125 And the idea of going outside of that was unusual. 419 00:33:43,125 --> 00:33:46,147 So that's something that's kind of interesting. 420 00:33:46,147 --> 00:33:50,407 Yeah, you know, one of our first legal customers, the firm no longer exists. 421 00:33:50,407 --> 00:33:56,767 It was a fairly small firm, but they blew up pretty quickly during 08. 422 00:33:56,767 --> 00:34:00,907 They were default services and I'm a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. 423 00:34:00,907 --> 00:34:05,627 I came in and helped them with some tech and at the time, you know, we were just starting out. 424 00:34:05,627 --> 00:34:07,967 I was doing actual delivery work. 425 00:34:07,967 --> 00:34:11,647 So came in and helped them streamline some processes. 426 00:34:11,867 --> 00:34:15,435 But in the default services world, so 427 00:34:15,435 --> 00:34:20,019 financial services are the clients and they made heavy use. 428 00:34:20,019 --> 00:34:22,551 This is in the late two thousands. 429 00:34:22,551 --> 00:34:33,700 You know, they used, I don't know how you differentiate like BPO, like business process outsourcing from ALSPs, there was a firm in India called Aquin that essentially did all of 430 00:34:33,700 --> 00:34:37,944 the heavy lifting around foreclosures, right? 431 00:34:37,944 --> 00:34:44,131 All the document prep and you know, docket management and like all of these sorts of tasks. 432 00:34:44,131 --> 00:34:47,311 So yeah, financial services was doing this sort of stuff. 433 00:34:47,311 --> 00:34:53,471 I don't know if that falls under the ASP ALSP banner or not, but you know, that was 15 years ago. 434 00:34:53,471 --> 00:34:55,911 Um, more 17 years ago. 435 00:34:56,091 --> 00:34:56,991 So 436 00:34:58,786 --> 00:34:59,984 Absolutely. 437 00:34:59,984 --> 00:35:00,810 go ahead. 438 00:35:00,810 --> 00:35:11,665 I was just going to say like it, and even financially, like when I think of, when I think of you had mentioned like insurance, that really jumps out as not a progressive industry. 439 00:35:11,665 --> 00:35:15,446 mean, they're still running mainframes and they are in financial services too. 440 00:35:15,446 --> 00:35:26,421 The heavy lifting and government like financial services, insurance and government are still making that all the heavy lifting intact still happens on mainframes incredibly. 441 00:35:26,576 --> 00:35:27,096 Yeah. 442 00:35:27,096 --> 00:35:30,940 it sounds like, like healthcare that's, that's surprising. 443 00:35:30,940 --> 00:35:32,602 I wasn't expecting that one. 444 00:35:32,602 --> 00:35:35,224 And what were the other industries you mentioned? 445 00:35:36,327 --> 00:35:37,237 Yeah. 446 00:35:37,267 --> 00:35:37,797 yeah. 447 00:35:37,797 --> 00:35:49,920 And some of the entities that are sort of quasi-government, know, like heavily regulated industries like utilities, we've had a lot of clients in those sectors and water and telco 448 00:35:49,920 --> 00:35:51,074 and whatnot. 449 00:35:51,074 --> 00:36:00,560 these heavily regulated sectors that historically, they don't operate like a government agency, but sometimes they look and feel that way culturally and in terms of their slow to 450 00:36:00,560 --> 00:36:03,808 move, use of tech, all that. 451 00:36:03,808 --> 00:36:05,308 use of data tech, if you will. 452 00:36:05,308 --> 00:36:08,619 So we see a lot of that with that type of client base. 453 00:36:09,179 --> 00:36:19,142 But definitely I would say, you to your question, you, you raise an interesting point of the difference between BPOs and ALSP's and yeah, I BPOs are nothing new and there, there 454 00:36:19,142 --> 00:36:20,262 is some crossover there. 455 00:36:20,262 --> 00:36:30,724 mean, historically the early BPOs were, were focused more on functions that may be not necessarily appropriate to legal or they were not maybe suited well to legal. 456 00:36:30,724 --> 00:36:33,963 And so that's sort of where an ALSP comes in as leveling up. 457 00:36:33,963 --> 00:36:40,919 the opportunity to provide services that make sense for the legal realm. 458 00:36:40,919 --> 00:36:51,127 There are some BPO's that have kind of dovetailed with legal and I'm sure you can think of many use cases, sort of your basic right due diligence reviews or sort of basic document 459 00:36:51,127 --> 00:36:53,048 review on an extremely basic level. 460 00:36:53,048 --> 00:37:00,213 There are ALSP's or BPO's that do that type of work and arguably some of those BPO's fall into the ALSP bucket. 461 00:37:00,704 --> 00:37:11,113 the majority of LSPs and I find where there makes the most sense for the market to continue to grow and evolve is on the level of work that we provide and similar LSPs 462 00:37:11,113 --> 00:37:14,907 provide, which is more of that slightly high value work, right? 463 00:37:14,907 --> 00:37:23,615 And being able to take things off lawyers' plates, paralegals' plates, contracts managers' plates, or legal ops professionals' plates and be able to handle it or be able to support 464 00:37:23,615 --> 00:37:27,618 it through a team staffed up through a subscription or... 465 00:37:27,618 --> 00:37:30,440 you know, sort of a one-to-one flexible talent engagement. 466 00:37:30,440 --> 00:37:42,580 So these are opportunities for clients to tap into, again, a set of resources or a team of resources that they would otherwise not have access to or might through a large law firm, 467 00:37:42,580 --> 00:37:47,634 but not in the same way and certainly not at the right cost or efficiency model. 468 00:37:47,875 --> 00:37:58,589 You know, when I think about the Venn diagram of you've got alternative business structures, you've got ALSPs, you've got BPO, you've got law firms, there's a lot of 469 00:37:58,589 --> 00:38:00,732 overlap in that Venn diagram. 470 00:38:00,732 --> 00:38:03,896 Um, there, there's, there's not clear lines. 471 00:38:03,896 --> 00:38:06,249 It doesn't seem, is that accurate? 472 00:38:06,378 --> 00:38:07,308 Yes, it's accurate. 473 00:38:07,308 --> 00:38:09,599 There's definitely some overlap for sure. 474 00:38:09,799 --> 00:38:16,802 I do believe that large firms to survive will have to kind of have an LSP component of their offering, really. 475 00:38:16,802 --> 00:38:23,815 I they'll have to sort of bring LSPs in and say, OK, we've got our high end kind of level. 476 00:38:23,815 --> 00:38:26,356 know, you've got your Bethel Company litigation or whatnot. 477 00:38:26,356 --> 00:38:28,457 We've got that, you your law firm setting. 478 00:38:28,457 --> 00:38:33,369 But we've got your LSP option for you to be able to do the other kinds of work that you do. 479 00:38:33,369 --> 00:38:35,596 I'm frankly, I 480 00:38:35,596 --> 00:38:39,188 would imagine we see more of that in the large law firm sector. 481 00:38:39,299 --> 00:38:41,279 Yeah, that makes perfect sense. 482 00:38:41,279 --> 00:38:51,539 Um, you know, there's not too many people who I can talk about agentic AI with, and you were one of them and we had a good conversation around this. 483 00:38:51,539 --> 00:39:04,819 And, um, I, this is another area, like we mentioned how muddy the waters are between, you know, BPO, ALSP, the waters are also pretty muddy in the agentic world. 484 00:39:04,819 --> 00:39:06,479 Like what's agentic AI? 485 00:39:06,479 --> 00:39:09,367 What is, what is just traditional workflow? 486 00:39:09,367 --> 00:39:12,269 What is AI enabled workflow? 487 00:39:12,529 --> 00:39:23,417 And, um, you know, I'm of the opinion, like I've heard, we heard a lot late last year that 2025 is going to be the year of agentic AI in 2025. 488 00:39:23,417 --> 00:39:24,997 And no, it's not. 489 00:39:25,318 --> 00:39:31,082 we have, we haven't even, we're just getting our basic blocking and tackling down. 490 00:39:31,512 --> 00:39:36,145 only I saw a really interesting stat from TR in December. 491 00:39:36,145 --> 00:39:38,499 So less than 60 days old that 492 00:39:38,499 --> 00:39:43,999 only 10 % of law firms have a generative AI strategy. 493 00:39:44,339 --> 00:39:47,118 I'm sorry, policy, not strategy. 494 00:39:47,719 --> 00:39:54,199 Fewer the natural sequence in my head is you have a strategy that informs your policy. 495 00:39:54,199 --> 00:39:57,519 You kind of have to have the strategy first in my mind. 496 00:39:57,519 --> 00:40:02,119 Maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's how, that's how I think about it, but only 10%. 497 00:40:02,119 --> 00:40:03,595 So are we going to 498 00:40:03,595 --> 00:40:11,337 Are we going to enable agents to take action inside our organization before we have a strategy and policy around it? 499 00:40:11,337 --> 00:40:12,838 That sounds crazy to me. 500 00:40:12,838 --> 00:40:14,959 So I feel like we got a longer way to go. 501 00:40:14,959 --> 00:40:22,241 Maybe mid 2026, we'll start to see real use of agentic AI in, in practice of law. 502 00:40:22,241 --> 00:40:29,353 think we could deploy some business of law use cases almost immediately, but I don't know what, how do you see that picture? 503 00:40:29,768 --> 00:40:30,608 Yeah, absolutely. 504 00:40:30,608 --> 00:40:38,502 I know I've enjoyed our conversations on this topic and yeah, to kind of pick it up again, I would say that timeline is probably fairly accurate. 505 00:40:38,502 --> 00:40:40,573 I mean, there's definitely a lot of interest. 506 00:40:40,573 --> 00:40:41,834 You're going to have your power users. 507 00:40:41,834 --> 00:40:49,607 You're going to have some of these organizations and GCs and maybe smaller legal teams that are willing to just jump right in with two feet and start adopting some agentic AI. 508 00:40:49,607 --> 00:40:56,246 But I do believe for the adoption and sort of larger pieces of the market, the large law firms and large corporate legal departments. 509 00:40:56,246 --> 00:40:57,516 It's going to take a bit of time. 510 00:40:57,516 --> 00:41:02,518 it is for that reason we talked about even earlier as I referenced the people process technology piece, right? 511 00:41:02,518 --> 00:41:07,049 So making sure culturally you've got the culture that makes sense there for that. 512 00:41:07,049 --> 00:41:14,892 Everyone's ready and primed for this technology to come in and how and where it's going to be used as well as sort of the policy and guardrails around that. 513 00:41:14,892 --> 00:41:17,412 Or if it's not guardrails, then what is the policy? 514 00:41:17,412 --> 00:41:18,302 How are we going to use it? 515 00:41:18,302 --> 00:41:19,473 What are we going to use it for? 516 00:41:19,473 --> 00:41:21,674 What data can we use in this? 517 00:41:21,674 --> 00:41:23,904 what workflows is this going to support? 518 00:41:24,026 --> 00:41:26,087 And so we're going to see some of that. 519 00:41:26,087 --> 00:41:36,962 And we've seen this firsthand with clients just building policies for them, helping them create kind of how to think about how to use AI, where to use it, how to use it as it 520 00:41:36,962 --> 00:41:46,237 pertains to various other parts of their organization, and how to think about it relative to key priorities they have, whether that's around IP, data security and privacy 521 00:41:46,237 --> 00:41:48,696 compliance, litigation management. 522 00:41:48,696 --> 00:41:51,759 So tremendous opportunities in the agentic AI space. 523 00:41:51,759 --> 00:41:53,430 I again, I'm very bullish on that. 524 00:41:53,430 --> 00:41:59,766 I think there's a lot of opportunity and efficiencies to unlock and value to unlock with agentic AI. 525 00:41:59,766 --> 00:42:03,199 But yeah, as a practical matter, like what are we looking at in terms of adoption? 526 00:42:03,199 --> 00:42:09,465 would say it's gonna take this year is gonna be the year of a lot of experimentation, education. 527 00:42:09,465 --> 00:42:15,310 This is something that came out of even a talk I gave recently at the Women in AI Conference and. 528 00:42:16,000 --> 00:42:18,511 At the end of my talk, had a breakout. 529 00:42:18,511 --> 00:42:25,854 And one of the themes that emerged, which was interesting among all of us talking, was about the need for education in a lot of these organizations. 530 00:42:25,854 --> 00:42:35,929 That there are a lot of, again, both within law firms as well as legal teams, that they are simply not as educated on AI in terms of its capabilities, what it can be used for, 531 00:42:35,929 --> 00:42:36,879 how it can be used. 532 00:42:36,879 --> 00:42:43,702 And so increasing some education on that front will empower that user base a lot more, and that's going to drive some more adoption. 533 00:42:43,917 --> 00:42:48,931 Yeah, you I don't know why I'm just now connecting these dots, but you are kind of perfectly positioned. 534 00:42:48,931 --> 00:43:02,290 Like when I think about agentic AI and like it seems massive opportunity in the more predictable ALSP BPO kind of space, like, I don't know why I'm just connecting those dots, 535 00:43:02,290 --> 00:43:09,585 but, what are the use cases like that you see on the practice side with agentic AI? 536 00:43:09,585 --> 00:43:12,517 Because that's where things get a little fuzzy for me. 537 00:43:12,517 --> 00:43:13,025 I, 538 00:43:13,025 --> 00:43:28,582 Again, business of law, I see lots of opportunities in business development, HR, you know, it's, but on the practice side, are there any use cases that jump out at you as good 539 00:43:28,582 --> 00:43:30,483 candidates to take a look at? 540 00:43:30,976 --> 00:43:32,357 Yeah, yeah. 541 00:43:32,357 --> 00:43:35,619 And I would say I wouldn't discount the business of law piece, right? 542 00:43:35,619 --> 00:43:36,918 Because you're totally accurate. 543 00:43:36,918 --> 00:43:45,616 mean, there's a lot of opportunity there just to streamline the business of law, the back office functions, the billing, the timekeeping, the screening calls, the getting back to 544 00:43:45,616 --> 00:43:46,936 clients, the client intake. 545 00:43:46,936 --> 00:43:51,860 I mean, all of these are business of law pieces, never mind the marketing, biz dev piece, right? 546 00:43:51,860 --> 00:43:55,363 So the business of law component is critical and important. 547 00:43:55,363 --> 00:43:59,992 And there are lots of opportunities there for agentic AI to streamline just as there is 548 00:43:59,992 --> 00:44:06,145 for agentic AI to streamline these other kind of business functions within any company such as customer support, right? 549 00:44:06,145 --> 00:44:11,767 Or certain marketing functions or certain HR functions or training and compliance functions. 550 00:44:11,767 --> 00:44:15,278 So there's a lot of opportunities there generally within a corporate environment. 551 00:44:15,278 --> 00:44:18,450 And I see that playing out in the business of loss side for sure. 552 00:44:18,450 --> 00:44:24,532 And then just to shift over to your question about workflows and kind of getting down to nitty gritty elements of practice. 553 00:44:24,833 --> 00:44:28,514 Yeah, I mean, there's certainly a lot of different opportunities with agentic AI. 554 00:44:28,642 --> 00:44:32,516 There are, we're starting to see things in sort of the litigation sphere, right? 555 00:44:32,516 --> 00:44:37,490 Going through certain kind of workflows within litigation that are repetitive. 556 00:44:37,490 --> 00:44:46,959 It may involve analysis of high volumes of documents and then evaluating that information in order to prepare questions for witnesses or whatnot. 557 00:44:47,940 --> 00:44:50,823 Let me redo that, sorry, I skipped over my words. 558 00:44:50,823 --> 00:44:53,645 I'll pick it up from the earlier point. 559 00:44:54,626 --> 00:45:03,253 So now jumping over to your other question about agentic AI in sort of the workflow setting, there's a lot of opportunities around that. 560 00:45:03,313 --> 00:45:09,338 Certainly we've seen some technologies come out that are addressing workflows around litigation. 561 00:45:09,338 --> 00:45:18,646 There are workflows around legal ops, a lot of opportunities around the legal ops front in terms of streamlining, whether it's access to certain types of data sets and being able to 562 00:45:18,646 --> 00:45:23,714 sort of produce the type of knowledge that we need to drive 563 00:45:23,714 --> 00:45:28,566 greater efficiencies within a corporate legal team, certainly around sort of spend management. 564 00:45:28,566 --> 00:45:29,757 That would be an example. 565 00:45:29,757 --> 00:45:33,589 We're also starting to see agentic AI around the contracting space, right? 566 00:45:33,589 --> 00:45:37,701 Contracting space and any contracting function within a company is a huge beast. 567 00:45:37,701 --> 00:45:45,945 And so being able to leverage agentic AI and some of those workflows can be extremely powerful and drive significant efficiencies and cost savings. 568 00:45:45,945 --> 00:45:48,375 So those are just a few examples, but there's a lot more. 569 00:45:48,375 --> 00:45:50,306 Yeah, I'm waiting for the day. 570 00:45:50,306 --> 00:45:53,636 So, uh, my wife and I own five gyms here in St. 571 00:45:53,636 --> 00:45:56,476 Louis and we've, we moved one. 572 00:45:56,476 --> 00:46:08,340 So we've signed six commercial retail leases and I'm waiting for the day when you can just have, you know, the tenants AI and the landlords AI and they get together and negotiate 573 00:46:08,340 --> 00:46:08,620 the league. 574 00:46:08,620 --> 00:46:13,862 Cause that is the most painful, dreadful, awful process. 575 00:46:13,862 --> 00:46:17,985 And, um, yeah, it's, that'll be a great day when 576 00:46:17,985 --> 00:46:26,051 When you you kind of put it put in your baseline that I'm not willing to move below these terms and you kind of increment almost like a Dutch auction. 577 00:46:26,051 --> 00:46:27,975 You kind of work your way there. 578 00:46:27,975 --> 00:46:30,399 That would be phenomenal. 579 00:46:30,934 --> 00:46:32,615 Yeah, we're starting to get there. 580 00:46:32,615 --> 00:46:41,661 There are some early contracting tools and things I'm involved in a few in terms of as an advisor investor that we're starting to see some of that happen where you can kind of get 581 00:46:41,661 --> 00:46:52,397 to these standardized tool, standardized sets of terms or toolkits, if you will, in terms of fallbacks and positioning and start to begin to have your system talk to their system 582 00:46:52,397 --> 00:46:53,208 or vice versa. 583 00:46:53,208 --> 00:46:57,250 But again, around streamlining the contracting process and. 584 00:46:57,250 --> 00:47:04,895 And I do believe on some level, at some point with negotiations, we'll get to that point of the, your AI can talk to my AI and work it out. 585 00:47:05,275 --> 00:47:09,818 We're not there yet, but I do envision a future where that will be happening. 586 00:47:09,921 --> 00:47:11,882 be amazing because it's awful. 587 00:47:11,882 --> 00:47:20,556 And even just redlining software licensing agreements and master services agreements and statements of work. 588 00:47:20,997 --> 00:47:23,598 I'm looking forward to those days. 589 00:47:23,718 --> 00:47:29,981 All right, well, we're almost out of time, but I wanted to ask you one more question because I think you're going to have a good perspective on this. 590 00:47:30,061 --> 00:47:34,163 Balancing innovation and risk management with AI. 591 00:47:34,167 --> 00:47:36,648 Like it's still early days. 592 00:47:36,648 --> 00:47:38,528 AI is very unpredictable. 593 00:47:38,528 --> 00:47:45,807 Still, you can go to the same model with the same prompt, enter it, copy paste it, enter it again. 594 00:47:45,807 --> 00:47:50,031 You get different output, not every time, but often. 595 00:47:50,051 --> 00:47:55,883 So, you know, it seems like there's still some, uh, there's still some uncertainty. 596 00:47:55,883 --> 00:48:03,073 How should, how should firms think about that striking that balance with being innovative, but 597 00:48:03,073 --> 00:48:07,486 not taking too much risk early on when they're thinking about their AI strategy. 598 00:48:08,076 --> 00:48:09,407 Yeah, great question, Ted. 599 00:48:09,407 --> 00:48:11,839 I would say a couple things on that. 600 00:48:11,839 --> 00:48:15,402 mean, first of all, yeah, risk is always important, right? 601 00:48:15,402 --> 00:48:23,619 Lawyers and legal industry players, whether they're law firms or corporate legal teams, they're always weighing risk to some degree or another, right? 602 00:48:23,619 --> 00:48:26,901 It's an occupational hazard and it's a necessary one. 603 00:48:26,901 --> 00:48:37,449 So looking at that, but also bearing in mind that there is an opportunity here and there's an opportunity for significant growth, efficiencies and value creation. 604 00:48:38,143 --> 00:48:46,759 To some extent as well, mean, looking at even attrition and reducing attrition on your team, I mean, we have sort of certain folks coming into the marketplace that are going to 605 00:48:46,759 --> 00:48:49,011 expect to be able to use AI and these tools. 606 00:48:49,011 --> 00:48:56,627 We have a whole crop of the next generations of lawyers that are going to be coming in, completely digital natives, very well versed in AI, very accustomed to using it, and 607 00:48:56,627 --> 00:48:59,220 they're going to expect to be able to utilize these tools. 608 00:48:59,220 --> 00:49:02,486 So we've seen with some corporate legal teams and law firms, 609 00:49:02,486 --> 00:49:06,237 Some of them have taken a very kind of risk averse approach of you can't use AI. 610 00:49:06,237 --> 00:49:09,248 It's, know, we have to worry about the data and the security piece. 611 00:49:09,248 --> 00:49:12,199 And yes, that's critical, but it's also not necessarily realistic. 612 00:49:12,199 --> 00:49:19,531 So a balanced approach that takes into account, okay, what data, what workflows are we going to be comfortable with using AI for? 613 00:49:19,531 --> 00:49:21,401 Where does it make sense for our organization? 614 00:49:21,401 --> 00:49:25,032 Where can we kind of do this and experiment properly? 615 00:49:25,032 --> 00:49:30,834 But also what's sensible in terms of what's realistic in terms of what we're trying to accomplish. 616 00:49:30,834 --> 00:49:32,320 Because if they just kind of, 617 00:49:32,320 --> 00:49:38,434 sit back and let risk keep them from utilizing these tools or embracing these tools, they're going to be left behind. 618 00:49:38,434 --> 00:49:47,110 And so it's really critical, or I would advise, it's very critical for corporate legal teams, as well as large law firms, to begin to jump into AI, to begin to use it, 619 00:49:47,110 --> 00:49:50,663 experiment with it, identify the workflows where they can leverage it. 620 00:49:50,663 --> 00:49:54,956 And sure, put in some policies in place to kind of address the risk component. 621 00:49:54,956 --> 00:49:59,780 But take this balanced approach and with an understanding that we're going to be utilizing AI. 622 00:49:59,780 --> 00:50:06,214 It's just a matter of, okay, where and which pockets of our workflows and our organization does that make sense? 623 00:50:07,315 --> 00:50:09,017 That would be my recommendation. 624 00:50:09,017 --> 00:50:19,154 And in terms of what we're going to actually see, I believe that the ones that are more forward-looking, that we're gonna start to see more adoption from those organizations that 625 00:50:19,154 --> 00:50:21,826 can adopt that balanced and measured approach. 626 00:50:22,359 --> 00:50:24,160 Yeah, I saw an interesting stat. 627 00:50:24,160 --> 00:50:29,581 I'll wrap up with this because it's a, I thought it was, it kind of blew my mind a little bit. 628 00:50:29,581 --> 00:50:47,196 So the, legal value network, um, has a LPPM, um, annual survey and they talked to, I forget how many hundreds of law firms, but the question was our largest clients blank us 629 00:50:47,196 --> 00:50:49,306 to use generative AI. 630 00:50:49,307 --> 00:50:50,947 And in that blank, 631 00:50:51,267 --> 00:50:56,427 discourage or forbid was the answer 41 % of the time. 632 00:50:57,367 --> 00:51:00,167 So it's not all the law firms fault here. 633 00:51:00,167 --> 00:51:02,587 The clients are also holding them back. 634 00:51:02,659 --> 00:51:05,751 Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, and I can comment on that too. 635 00:51:05,751 --> 00:51:10,185 I mean, we've seen this with clients even just having to revisit their own outside council guidelines, right? 636 00:51:10,185 --> 00:51:19,991 Where sometimes the security policies or the outside council guidelines basically all out prohibit the idea of utilizing AI or the idea of using external systems or whatnot where 637 00:51:19,991 --> 00:51:22,713 data is going to be deposited. 638 00:51:22,713 --> 00:51:29,958 then, you know, and so some of these policies themselves are a bit dated and they have not been revisited with an AI. 639 00:51:30,058 --> 00:51:31,008 friendly lens. 640 00:51:31,008 --> 00:51:38,682 And so yes, the law firms then having to be compliant with these policies in order to perform work for these clients, their hands are bound. 641 00:51:38,682 --> 00:51:42,163 So it's definitely the clients as well as the providers. 642 00:51:42,163 --> 00:51:46,825 ALSP is again, we tend to be on the bleeding edge of technology adoption and use. 643 00:51:46,825 --> 00:51:58,119 And so we're out there kind of in the middle pushing the corporate clients to revisit their policies on that front and also advising sometimes in some cases, the large law 644 00:51:58,119 --> 00:51:59,480 firms on what they could be doing. 645 00:51:59,480 --> 00:52:06,889 But yeah, definitely both sides of the transactional relationship have to sort of be on the same page as far as AI. 646 00:52:08,283 --> 00:52:09,996 Well, this has been a great conversation. 647 00:52:09,996 --> 00:52:11,848 I really enjoyed it. 648 00:52:11,848 --> 00:52:13,680 We covered some really interesting topics. 649 00:52:13,680 --> 00:52:16,243 I learned a lot about ALSP. 650 00:52:16,243 --> 00:52:18,806 So it was great having you on. 651 00:52:18,806 --> 00:52:21,769 Thanks so much for having this conversation with me. 652 00:52:21,854 --> 00:52:22,335 Thank you. 653 00:52:22,335 --> 00:52:23,408 really enjoyed it, Ted. 654 00:52:23,408 --> 00:52:26,753 It's a pleasure as always and look forward to continuing our conversations. 655 00:52:26,753 --> 00:52:27,680 That sounds great. 656 00:52:27,680 --> 00:52:29,248 All right, have a good afternoon. 657 00:52:29,622 --> 00:52:31,224 Okay, thank you, you too. 658 00:52:31,224 --> 00:52:33,867 really quickly before we hang up. 659 00:52:33,928 --> 00:52:38,262 So how does it go with your next steps and do you need anything from me? 660 00:52:38,262 --> 00:52:40,938 I think you guys have my headshot and speaker bio. 00:00:04,549 Monica, how are you this afternoon? 2 00:00:05,911 --> 00:00:07,632 Doing great. 3 00:00:07,833 --> 00:00:11,467 So glad you could join me about this conversation. 4 00:00:11,467 --> 00:00:12,998 I think is going to be super interesting. 5 00:00:12,998 --> 00:00:20,066 And we had such a great initial call and have lots of interesting topics to cover today. 6 00:00:20,066 --> 00:00:21,590 So thanks for being here. 7 00:00:21,590 --> 00:00:23,423 Looking forward, it's my pleasure. 8 00:00:23,843 --> 00:00:29,363 So before we jump into the content, I to just do kind of little tee you up for an introduction. 9 00:00:29,363 --> 00:00:31,063 You've got an interesting background. 10 00:00:31,063 --> 00:00:32,743 You're an attorney. 11 00:00:32,803 --> 00:00:40,583 You're a thought leader in the legal tech innovation space, which I have lots of thoughts and opinions on myself. 12 00:00:40,583 --> 00:00:42,743 We're going to dive into that. 13 00:00:42,763 --> 00:00:46,343 You ran an ALSP for over 20 years. 14 00:00:46,663 --> 00:00:51,263 Tell us a little bit about what you're up to today and a little bit about your background. 15 00:00:51,576 --> 00:00:52,367 Sure. 16 00:00:52,367 --> 00:00:55,148 Well, my background, I've been an entrepreneur for a really long time. 17 00:00:55,148 --> 00:01:01,952 mean, over almost three decades, founded companies in a number of industries, primarily tech centric. 18 00:01:01,952 --> 00:01:08,416 early companies were in the music business, early internet, as well as database kind of plays. 19 00:01:08,416 --> 00:01:12,248 And then of course, legal tech, the legal industry, legal services space. 20 00:01:12,248 --> 00:01:16,983 So have been founding companies over these many years, probably about seven total. 21 00:01:16,983 --> 00:01:19,362 I've had some successful exits. 22 00:01:19,366 --> 00:01:22,389 and have really enjoyed the journey of being an entrepreneur. 23 00:01:22,389 --> 00:01:28,744 I'm also technically a trained attorney, obviously a business person, and I do a lot of writing and speaking. 24 00:01:28,744 --> 00:01:37,731 And so I've kind of been involved with the legal industry, probably the last 20 years, really along the lines of the innovation side of the house, really pushing the envelope 25 00:01:37,731 --> 00:01:47,168 forward in terms of what's possible in the legal industry, new ways of doing things, new ways of delivering services, new types of technology, creating new technologies and so 26 00:01:47,168 --> 00:01:49,330 forth, and have been 27 00:01:49,440 --> 00:01:58,075 operating ZetLaw in the ALSP, as you mentioned, an alternative legal services provider, one of the earliest to the market at the time, along with a few contemporaries. 28 00:01:58,075 --> 00:02:00,176 And this was again, 23 years ago. 29 00:02:00,176 --> 00:02:10,092 So at a time when people really didn't understand the idea of alternative legal services or what that might look like, and really had to help carve a path in the industry and 30 00:02:10,092 --> 00:02:14,204 build that from the ground up and educate the marketplace. 31 00:02:14,405 --> 00:02:17,144 I've been in the legal tech space for a long time since 32 00:02:17,144 --> 00:02:19,045 practically the inception of LegalTech. 33 00:02:19,045 --> 00:02:31,748 I was one of the earliest LegalTech, female LegalTech founders and creating kind of early legal technologies around networking, AI powered chat bots, clauses, drafting tools, 34 00:02:31,748 --> 00:02:40,511 things like that, collaboration technologies as well at a time when again, it was a nascent industry or barely an industry really. 35 00:02:40,511 --> 00:02:43,530 And now of course it's been blooming. 36 00:02:43,530 --> 00:02:53,197 As for what I'm doing now, I'm bringing kind of all of these decades of experience as both a founder, as an attorney, somebody with domain expertise in the legal space, as a legal 37 00:02:53,197 --> 00:03:04,435 technologist and a technologist in general, and a futurist really, and bringing all of that into more of the venture space, investing and advising in companies and looking to do 38 00:03:04,435 --> 00:03:04,885 more of that. 39 00:03:04,885 --> 00:03:07,517 I've been doing that as an active angel investor for a number of years. 40 00:03:07,517 --> 00:03:11,530 So looking to bring all of that into that space as well. 41 00:03:12,001 --> 00:03:19,015 Yeah, the amount of investment funneling into the legal tech space is honestly breathtaking. 42 00:03:20,456 --> 00:03:23,788 Just a quick little rabbit hole on that. 43 00:03:23,788 --> 00:03:28,000 I have a friend of mine who's a multiple founder. 44 00:03:28,000 --> 00:03:34,173 He had a really good size exit recently, and if he's listening, he'll know I'm talking about him. 45 00:03:34,173 --> 00:03:40,807 We had a conversation yesterday morning, and he now has an AI platform that 46 00:03:41,283 --> 00:03:46,466 They do some interesting stuff with task and project management integrates tightly with outlook. 47 00:03:46,466 --> 00:04:04,636 And he mentioned that even when he has executive sponsorship at the firm, he's been getting put into a queue with all the other AI POCs and pilots that the firm has going on. 48 00:04:04,636 --> 00:04:11,259 And they have a prioritization committee that's responsible for selecting when these 49 00:04:12,075 --> 00:04:17,578 When these platforms get evaluated and it's slowing the sales cycle down so much. 50 00:04:17,578 --> 00:04:27,604 So that's on kind of the founder side that he's looking to other areas now to expand his business because there's so much in, in, legal AI right now. 51 00:04:27,604 --> 00:04:33,527 And then on the investor side, we had a call with a, with a VC yesterday. 52 00:04:33,567 --> 00:04:41,321 We're not actively soliciting new investment, but we, we keep our ear to the ground and have conversations even when we're not. 53 00:04:41,543 --> 00:04:53,386 And we were told that the fund is looking for opportunities to diversify a little bit, maybe a little heavy on the AI side. 54 00:04:53,386 --> 00:04:54,667 So it's interesting. 55 00:04:54,667 --> 00:05:05,330 The pendulum is starting to swing back just a smidge where, it was, it used to be, you've got an AI platform, you know, it's a lot of excitement buzz. 56 00:05:05,330 --> 00:05:10,593 Now things, there's so much, so much of that, that you're getting queued and on the investment side, 57 00:05:10,593 --> 00:05:20,650 investors are looking for non AI first companies to offset some of the more risky bets that they've placed. 58 00:05:20,650 --> 00:05:24,016 So it's an interesting time in legal tech. 59 00:05:24,016 --> 00:05:25,127 Would you agree? 60 00:05:25,312 --> 00:05:26,073 Absolutely. 61 00:05:26,073 --> 00:05:29,706 mean, just a couple of thoughts on some of those points. 62 00:05:29,706 --> 00:05:31,668 Yes, I mean, definitely a lot of AI hype. 63 00:05:31,668 --> 00:05:33,790 I I think we all are aware of that, right? 64 00:05:33,790 --> 00:05:39,735 We can't open sort of the, you any feed on any social media or newsfeed and not see AI in the headlines, right? 65 00:05:39,735 --> 00:05:42,587 So it's a huge, huge area right now, lots of hype. 66 00:05:42,587 --> 00:05:44,659 It could be getting a little bit frothy, right? 67 00:05:44,659 --> 00:05:52,110 People are kind of throwing money at it so fast and maybe not really looking carefully or critically at the business model or what problem is this trying to solve or... 68 00:05:52,110 --> 00:05:55,930 Does this technology or this product actually even do what it claims to do? 69 00:05:55,930 --> 00:06:02,250 So, you know, again, having been a founder, a technologist, a product person, I'm always really interested in what the product does. 70 00:06:02,250 --> 00:06:03,570 Does it actually do these things? 71 00:06:03,570 --> 00:06:05,350 Is it on track to do these things? 72 00:06:05,350 --> 00:06:06,930 Do you have the right team? 73 00:06:06,930 --> 00:06:08,310 How are they executing? 74 00:06:08,310 --> 00:06:10,070 What's their experience as well? 75 00:06:10,190 --> 00:06:12,550 But definitely, mean, huge opportunities in AI. 76 00:06:12,550 --> 00:06:16,690 I'm very bullish on sort of AI and AI and legal tech and AI and reg tech. 77 00:06:16,690 --> 00:06:19,778 And I know I've written and spoken on those topics too. 78 00:06:19,778 --> 00:06:29,923 But I would say that legal, like a lot of professional sectors, especially a lot of the kind of uninteresting or boring back office functions, still lend themselves to a lot of 79 00:06:29,923 --> 00:06:38,387 good old fashioned automation that may or may not necessarily have to enable the user to utilize AI in the course of doing that, right? 80 00:06:38,387 --> 00:06:46,016 So there's a lot of tasks that we can think of in legal, a lot of use cases that simply haven't been automated yet or haven't been automated well. 81 00:06:46,016 --> 00:06:47,939 And so there's still a lot of opportunities. 82 00:06:47,939 --> 00:06:58,192 So I would tend to agree with that VC that there are opportunities out there for a technology that maybe isn't AI heavy centric, but yet it's automating a prior process that 83 00:06:58,192 --> 00:07:02,058 was dated or clunky and needs needs refinement and efficiency. 84 00:07:02,058 --> 00:07:04,210 And there's still a lot of opportunities like that. 85 00:07:04,396 --> 00:07:04,666 Yeah. 86 00:07:04,666 --> 00:07:18,094 And then you also have the, you know, you had Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft come out and say that SAS is dead and AI is going to, and I think what he means specifically is 87 00:07:18,094 --> 00:07:20,880 like, um, you're, you're technology person. 88 00:07:20,880 --> 00:07:25,978 So you're probably familiar with CRUD create, read, update, and delete its database operations. 89 00:07:25,978 --> 00:07:34,479 When you have like just a, a fancy front end that to a CRUD infrastructure, you know, like CRM. 90 00:07:34,479 --> 00:07:47,515 Um, is, a good example that AI can, you can now spin up highly customized apps with the, know, the, with the data integration layer and AI will write all the code for you. 91 00:07:47,515 --> 00:07:50,286 So, um, you know, it's interesting. 92 00:07:50,286 --> 00:07:58,769 You've got, had so much hype, so much investment and now we're starting to see the pendulum swing a little bit in the other direction. 93 00:07:58,769 --> 00:08:00,090 It's going to swing back and forth. 94 00:08:00,090 --> 00:08:01,731 It's not headed. 95 00:08:01,731 --> 00:08:03,204 It's going to oscillate. 96 00:08:03,204 --> 00:08:08,295 in my opinion, but regardless, it is such a fun time to be in legal tech. 97 00:08:08,458 --> 00:08:09,709 It is really a fun time. 98 00:08:09,709 --> 00:08:11,601 yes, definitely AI is here to stay. 99 00:08:11,601 --> 00:08:14,143 And I know you're a technologist as well yourself. 100 00:08:14,143 --> 00:08:18,802 So I know we talked about the idea that you can create different interesting tools and things with AI. 101 00:08:18,802 --> 00:08:24,812 And there's a lot of opportunity for people and individuals to empower themselves with AI. 102 00:08:24,812 --> 00:08:34,891 yeah, AI is definitely here to stay in terms of what Garner's investment is going to have to come down to, good sound business models and the right team and the right technology 103 00:08:34,891 --> 00:08:36,842 and the right product for that market. 104 00:08:36,855 --> 00:08:37,476 Yeah. 105 00:08:37,476 --> 00:08:44,681 I think the hardest part from an investor perspective right now, at least from where I sit is anticipating churn. 106 00:08:44,681 --> 00:08:55,630 So, you you've seen massive valuations with upstarts, where, know, they've had significant revenue growth, recurring revenue growth. 107 00:08:55,630 --> 00:08:59,453 And what's not clear is what's the churn going to look like? 108 00:08:59,453 --> 00:08:59,924 Right. 109 00:08:59,924 --> 00:09:06,979 So, um, that is kind of TBD and it's a really important, like in a normal, 110 00:09:07,075 --> 00:09:12,955 like a non AI investment scenario, like you got couple, hopefully a couple of years of runway. 111 00:09:12,955 --> 00:09:14,955 Maybe you get a seed investment. 112 00:09:15,155 --> 00:09:23,134 Um, you know, before you do a series a you've got some runway behind you that you can demonstrate your churn and your revenue retention. 113 00:09:23,134 --> 00:09:32,355 And with these AI companies with sometimes billion plus dollar valuations, you no longer have visibility to what churn is going to look like. 114 00:09:32,355 --> 00:09:36,395 And you know, as an investor, that would make me really nervous. 115 00:09:37,153 --> 00:09:37,603 You know? 116 00:09:37,603 --> 00:09:42,506 Um, so it's going to be interesting to see how this, how this, plays out. 117 00:09:43,547 --> 00:09:44,167 Yeah. 118 00:09:44,167 --> 00:09:51,871 Well, we were going to talk about, innovation and innovation is a topic that, uh, we talk about frequently. 119 00:09:51,871 --> 00:09:54,803 Obviously the name of the podcast is legal innovation spotlight. 120 00:09:54,803 --> 00:10:02,017 So, you know, I started to see innovation roles pop up about 10 years ago. 121 00:10:02,017 --> 00:10:06,787 There were no C-suite, roles, um, at least on the Ilta roster. 122 00:10:06,787 --> 00:10:10,347 In 2014, there were some director level roles. 123 00:10:10,347 --> 00:10:18,847 There were 16 people who had innovation in their job title in the Ilta roster, which isn't everybody, but it's a pretty good sampling. 124 00:10:18,927 --> 00:10:21,047 And today there are over 300. 125 00:10:21,047 --> 00:10:24,647 I looked at the January roster and there were about 360. 126 00:10:25,287 --> 00:10:29,067 So 2000 % growth, 20X. 127 00:10:29,227 --> 00:10:32,327 And I expect that to continue. 128 00:10:33,307 --> 00:10:35,287 you know, in your experience, 129 00:10:35,529 --> 00:10:48,733 how have you seen this, this growth and really how much substance have you seen behind it versus, you know, firms know that they have to look innovative and that they need to do 130 00:10:48,733 --> 00:10:49,643 something. 131 00:10:49,643 --> 00:10:55,659 So sometimes they hire an innovation person without really a solid strategy. 132 00:10:55,659 --> 00:11:01,079 Um, some are doing it, um, the right way, which is figuring out what 133 00:11:01,079 --> 00:11:08,368 the role needs to do getting buy-in at the executive or XCOM level and then executing. 134 00:11:08,689 --> 00:11:13,865 what has been just kind of, how have you seen this evolution in legal innovation? 135 00:11:14,272 --> 00:11:15,923 Yeah, it's a great observation, Ted. 136 00:11:15,923 --> 00:11:16,844 And you're totally right. 137 00:11:16,844 --> 00:11:20,225 I know you and I have been around a really long time here in this space. 138 00:11:20,226 --> 00:11:20,966 you're correct. 139 00:11:20,966 --> 00:11:24,158 mean, years ago at ILTA and whatnot, mean, you're right. 140 00:11:24,158 --> 00:11:28,090 There weren't very many folks wearing an innovation badge or title. 141 00:11:28,350 --> 00:11:31,392 I have been writing and speaking on innovation for a really long time. 142 00:11:31,392 --> 00:11:42,178 It wasn't until about, I would say 2016 or 2017 when I wrote a piece, I think it was the 2017 piece on innovation, which really took off and it was kind of widely 143 00:11:42,190 --> 00:11:45,490 quoted and reposted and people referred to it quite a bit. 144 00:11:45,490 --> 00:11:49,750 In fact, even one of the law schools wanted to use it in one of their courses. 145 00:11:50,350 --> 00:11:54,270 So, you know, this innovation thing kind of took off, that was in 2017. 146 00:11:54,270 --> 00:12:02,390 And here we are, you know, number of years later still, and now it's kind of really hot and it's something people are really talking about. 147 00:12:02,390 --> 00:12:07,430 But a lot of us who've been around for a while, it is not a new theme. 148 00:12:07,430 --> 00:12:10,370 However, actually, can I strike that? 149 00:12:10,370 --> 00:12:11,736 Can I just pick up again where I left off? 150 00:12:11,736 --> 00:12:12,551 Yeah. 151 00:12:12,710 --> 00:12:18,245 let me just pick up from, I'll pick up from where I picked up where I was talking about the piece I wrote. 152 00:12:18,245 --> 00:12:19,336 Is that okay? 153 00:12:19,777 --> 00:12:21,017 Okay, perfect. 154 00:12:23,490 --> 00:12:28,515 So I wrote a piece around 2016, 2017 timeframe around innovation. 155 00:12:28,515 --> 00:12:33,259 And unlike some of my earlier pieces on the topic, that piece really took off. 156 00:12:33,259 --> 00:12:36,752 And around that time, 2017, it was widely shared. 157 00:12:36,752 --> 00:12:41,757 The piece was actually used or asked to be used in a course for law school. 158 00:12:41,757 --> 00:12:44,720 So it was really something that took off and was widely shared and reposted. 159 00:12:44,720 --> 00:12:49,794 And I feel that that was around a time when there was somewhat of an inflection point in the industry. 160 00:12:49,798 --> 00:12:55,663 A bit early, obviously, we've seen more of an inflection point these last couple of years with innovation totally taking off. 161 00:12:55,663 --> 00:13:00,488 But it was a point where people were beginning to have a discussion around innovation. 162 00:13:00,488 --> 00:13:01,308 What does that look like? 163 00:13:01,308 --> 00:13:02,949 And be more open to it. 164 00:13:02,990 --> 00:13:11,678 I mean, again, having been out here for a long time in the legal industry, carving a path where there wasn't one before, helping to create new paths where there weren't paths 165 00:13:11,678 --> 00:13:16,726 before, it has taken a long time to educate the marketplace on 166 00:13:16,726 --> 00:13:24,562 different ways of doing things, different ways of looking at things, how to use technology and why it's beneficial, how to think about efficiencies, even the idea of legal ops. 167 00:13:24,562 --> 00:13:30,197 mean, we were doing legal operations at Zentlaw years before it was called legal operations. 168 00:13:30,197 --> 00:13:38,574 And many contemporaries that founded and colleagues of mine that have founded CLOC and some of these other groups that are focused on legal operations were again, doing this 169 00:13:38,574 --> 00:13:46,170 work a long time before the market caught up and could recognize and kind of put some energy and some effort and money around it. 170 00:13:46,426 --> 00:13:51,551 And so we've seen this play out in a lot of different areas, the same with legal tech as well. 171 00:13:51,551 --> 00:13:58,517 Some of my earlier legal tech companies did not garner the commercial success that I anticipated because they were just too early to the market. 172 00:13:58,517 --> 00:14:08,906 And I know several co-founders, not co-founders, other founders that are my contemporaries that are early legal tech founders like myself that have founded companies and their 173 00:14:08,906 --> 00:14:13,932 products were wonderful products as well that didn't garner the commercial success at the time. 174 00:14:13,932 --> 00:14:16,323 because they were just simply too early to the market. 175 00:14:16,323 --> 00:14:18,485 So fast forward, here we are 2025. 176 00:14:18,485 --> 00:14:19,715 mean, the market is ready. 177 00:14:19,715 --> 00:14:20,906 It's ripe. 178 00:14:21,066 --> 00:14:23,687 Legal tech, it's having its moment. 179 00:14:23,888 --> 00:14:29,030 And it's definitely there's the time is right in terms of this innovation mindset. 180 00:14:29,571 --> 00:14:35,614 As to your point around like these roles and whatnot, you people with sort of these titles and what does it mean for law firms? 181 00:14:35,614 --> 00:14:42,542 Yeah, I law firms, they're going to sort of put energy in some marketing dollars around something that makes sense for them and 182 00:14:42,542 --> 00:14:47,682 And having been a strategic advisor to some large law firms as well, it does make sense. 183 00:14:47,682 --> 00:14:56,042 They do have to sort of get onto the bandwagon in terms of technology and AI and looking at or revisiting how things need to be done. 184 00:14:56,282 --> 00:15:05,582 And so being able to bring somebody on who is leading that, whether they're in an innovation role with an innovation specific title, or some of them are sort of head of AI 185 00:15:05,582 --> 00:15:08,738 or head of practice management or client services. 186 00:15:08,738 --> 00:15:16,363 whatever title they may have, but this idea of revisiting and looking at how can we do things better, differently, maybe more efficiently. 187 00:15:16,964 --> 00:15:24,489 And so that's why I do believe we've seen, and we've seen this explosion of some of these CIO, Chief Innovation Officer roles. 188 00:15:24,489 --> 00:15:26,180 And then I've spoken with many of them. 189 00:15:26,180 --> 00:15:38,418 mean, many are colleagues of mine and some friends, and some of them are former CIOs, some of them are former CTOs that held CIO, CTO roles in law firms that then moved over 190 00:15:38,676 --> 00:15:41,710 into more of this innovation role. 191 00:15:41,710 --> 00:15:51,681 they're a, rather than a chief information officer, they're now a chief innovation officer, but they're basically doing similar things to what they did before, but now 192 00:15:51,681 --> 00:15:56,866 they've got more of that innovation lens and maybe more of a budget to play with in terms of trying new technologies. 193 00:15:57,079 --> 00:16:05,606 Yeah, I have seen, there are a few big law firms out there that have bundled IT and innovation. 194 00:16:05,606 --> 00:16:07,758 And I see some challenges with that. 195 00:16:07,758 --> 00:16:10,170 I, there's not many, but there are a few. 196 00:16:10,170 --> 00:16:15,815 It's like, so when I think about like, right, what are the KPIs for a chief innovation officer? 197 00:16:15,815 --> 00:16:21,330 There should be, they should be measured on failure in a good way, right? 198 00:16:21,330 --> 00:16:25,463 Like, um, if, if you're not failing, you're not innovating. 199 00:16:25,463 --> 00:16:25,733 Right. 200 00:16:25,733 --> 00:16:27,694 It's, there's a lot of trial and error, right? 201 00:16:27,694 --> 00:16:31,225 Not everything works the first time in it. 202 00:16:31,586 --> 00:16:33,096 Failure's bad, right? 203 00:16:33,096 --> 00:16:34,517 Like you don't want a failure. 204 00:16:34,517 --> 00:16:35,587 That could be a breach. 205 00:16:35,587 --> 00:16:36,788 That could be an outage. 206 00:16:36,788 --> 00:16:41,309 Um, I, I feel like, I feel like innovation fits better. 207 00:16:41,349 --> 00:16:42,750 Maybe KM. 208 00:16:42,750 --> 00:16:55,287 Um, I honestly think just a kind of a separate org structure, uh, around innovation is the best approach, but I have seen success with. 209 00:16:55,287 --> 00:16:57,808 bundling it with KM. 210 00:16:58,629 --> 00:17:08,193 I saw a really interesting, it was a podcast with Mark Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz. 211 00:17:08,193 --> 00:17:10,454 He was the inventor of Netscape. 212 00:17:10,454 --> 00:17:14,975 And he talked about this program at IBM called The Wild Ducks. 213 00:17:15,496 --> 00:17:22,979 And The Wild Ducks, in a company of hundreds of thousands of people, they selected, I think he said seven. 214 00:17:22,979 --> 00:17:29,912 there were these seven executive level roles that they put into this wild ducks program. 215 00:17:29,912 --> 00:17:30,792 And this was in the night. 216 00:17:30,792 --> 00:17:39,726 I think it was in the nineties, you know, so everybody was wearing suit and tie and these guys would wear and get girls would wear cowboy boots and put their feet on the table and 217 00:17:39,726 --> 00:17:40,226 meetings. 218 00:17:40,226 --> 00:17:46,609 And they kind of had carte blanche to bypass certain processes to, go do innovative things. 219 00:17:46,809 --> 00:17:51,661 And, know, I, I sat back and reflected on that and thought, 220 00:17:51,661 --> 00:17:55,293 There is no way in hell that would ever work at a law firm. 221 00:17:55,333 --> 00:18:04,258 You know, the culture at a law firm, all law firms, like I can't, there's not one law firm I could ever see that working at, at least as it exists today, things would have to move 222 00:18:04,258 --> 00:18:08,830 quite a bit for some, something like that to really work. 223 00:18:08,830 --> 00:18:18,546 like, how can, how can innovation teams build and adopt frameworks that align with existing cultures? 224 00:18:18,546 --> 00:18:20,477 Because culture is so hard to change. 225 00:18:20,477 --> 00:18:21,237 Like, 226 00:18:21,310 --> 00:18:23,218 How do you think about that question? 227 00:18:23,372 --> 00:18:25,303 That's a great question, Ted. 228 00:18:25,303 --> 00:18:26,033 Absolutely. 229 00:18:26,033 --> 00:18:26,753 It's critical. 230 00:18:26,753 --> 00:18:33,325 In fact, we had done some culture work at Zentlaw for years as well, and kind of as a companion to some of the legal ops. 231 00:18:33,325 --> 00:18:42,838 And one of the reasons that came about, and I've written and spoken on this topic too, a number of times along with colleagues of mine in legal ops, that you really have to deal 232 00:18:42,838 --> 00:18:45,258 with when you're looking at change management, right? 233 00:18:45,258 --> 00:18:48,830 In an organization, you do have to look at people, process, and technology. 234 00:18:48,830 --> 00:18:50,630 And I always say people, 235 00:18:50,850 --> 00:18:55,303 process and technology in that order, because you really do have to start with the people. 236 00:18:55,303 --> 00:18:57,755 You have to start with the culture of your organization. 237 00:18:57,755 --> 00:19:00,177 What is the appetite for what you're trying to achieve? 238 00:19:00,177 --> 00:19:01,638 What makes sense for that culture? 239 00:19:01,638 --> 00:19:02,589 What's realistic? 240 00:19:02,589 --> 00:19:05,040 What's realistic based on the team that you have? 241 00:19:05,040 --> 00:19:06,962 Do you need to make changes on that front? 242 00:19:06,962 --> 00:19:14,127 So there's a whole bunch just on the culture and people front that has to be addressed in order for change management to be effective. 243 00:19:14,127 --> 00:19:18,390 And a lot of these innovation practices and technologies and 244 00:19:18,390 --> 00:19:22,272 Even the use of AI and whatnot and how can we be more efficient in our work? 245 00:19:22,272 --> 00:19:23,583 How can we leverage new tools? 246 00:19:23,583 --> 00:19:26,915 How can we get the attorneys, let's say at a law firm to use new tools? 247 00:19:27,095 --> 00:19:31,788 A lot of that you do have to start with culture because if you don't, you're gonna just butt up against that. 248 00:19:31,788 --> 00:19:40,583 It's not going to be successful or it's not gonna go over well or you're not getting ROI out of your investment, whatever the net output is that you're looking for. 249 00:19:40,583 --> 00:19:45,384 It's not really going to be what you expect it to be if you don't address the culture piece first. 250 00:19:45,384 --> 00:19:50,298 And I've had this discussion actually with a number of colleagues of mine who are chief innovation officers. 251 00:19:50,298 --> 00:19:53,426 And I've asked them, what are you doing on the culture front? 252 00:19:53,426 --> 00:19:56,322 I have some ideas and we brainstormed and talked. 253 00:19:56,363 --> 00:20:04,309 And the ones I find that are very effective are dealing with sort of the innovation piece in terms of the process, right? 254 00:20:04,309 --> 00:20:11,874 And then of course, they're kicking the tires on technology, bringing in some technology, trying out the tech and working on what makes sense where. 255 00:20:11,874 --> 00:20:16,556 But they've also not neglected the culture piece and they're addressing that culture piece. 256 00:20:16,556 --> 00:20:25,620 And in particular, addressing the culture piece as it pertains to the emerging groups of lawyers that are in their organization, right? 257 00:20:25,620 --> 00:20:30,722 You've got these young, these junior associates and the folks that are coming in, they're coming up as junior partners. 258 00:20:30,722 --> 00:20:37,285 These are people that are going to be inheriting the power structure in these firms, assuming the firms are still in existence at that time. 259 00:20:37,285 --> 00:20:40,118 And they will be the ones inheriting that. 260 00:20:40,118 --> 00:20:49,166 And so addressing some of the cultural pieces with them, as well as with some of the existing partnership, some of the existing partners who may be on the last legs of their 261 00:20:49,166 --> 00:20:51,328 career or nearing retirement soon. 262 00:20:51,328 --> 00:20:52,279 It's been interesting. 263 00:20:52,279 --> 00:21:03,598 I've had some folks say that chief innovation officers, as well as heads of KM tell me that they have found some of their partners sometimes are the more. 264 00:21:03,650 --> 00:21:11,853 or ones that are inclined to be early adopters of some of the technology, as opposed to the junior associates, because the junior associates are worried about getting put out of 265 00:21:11,853 --> 00:21:16,754 a job, or they have misconceptions, whereas the more senior partners are interested in that. 266 00:21:16,754 --> 00:21:18,132 it's really kind of interesting. 267 00:21:18,132 --> 00:21:26,818 It certainly proves that you can't make any generational assumptions on who's going to be more interested in adopting technology or AI. 268 00:21:26,818 --> 00:21:28,246 But I do think it's... 269 00:21:28,246 --> 00:21:32,778 highlights the point around addressing culture in a way that makes sense for your organization. 270 00:21:32,778 --> 00:21:37,379 And there's certainly lots of approaches to that, but definitely can't be neglected. 271 00:21:37,379 --> 00:21:38,479 Yeah. 272 00:21:38,479 --> 00:21:39,139 Yeah. 273 00:21:39,139 --> 00:21:44,019 So yeah, the multi-generational perspective is an important one. 274 00:21:44,019 --> 00:21:51,939 And, you know, I've, I've said many times that, you know, the, the, the law firm world is small. 275 00:21:52,279 --> 00:22:01,879 It's, um, the biggest law firm on the planet by revenues Kirkland and Ellis and their low seven billions, they wouldn't even qualify for, to be in the fortune 500 if they were 276 00:22:01,879 --> 00:22:02,799 public. 277 00:22:02,959 --> 00:22:07,539 And, you know, then it's like, okay, well, why, why 278 00:22:07,671 --> 00:22:08,551 Don't we have one? 279 00:22:08,551 --> 00:22:12,591 There are plenty of other professional services organizations that are in the fortune 500. 280 00:22:12,613 --> 00:22:15,695 And I think it comes down to multiple things. 281 00:22:15,695 --> 00:22:24,449 think that the, um, the ownership model, um, you know, the, the governance model, which dictates the governance model, right? 282 00:22:24,449 --> 00:22:33,863 In a public company, you have a board that installs and oversees management and those management decisions. 283 00:22:33,935 --> 00:22:44,953 Um, or, or how those roles are filled are based on, you know, not being the best at lawyering, but who's got the best resume and the best background to fill the marketing 284 00:22:44,953 --> 00:22:47,154 function or the finance function or the KM function. 285 00:22:47,154 --> 00:22:48,745 And maybe it's not a lawyer. 286 00:22:48,765 --> 00:22:55,810 Maybe it's somebody from outside and how do you get somebody from a, let's say it's a, the tech world. 287 00:22:55,810 --> 00:22:58,982 How do you, how do you pull somebody from a Google or an Amazon? 288 00:22:58,982 --> 00:23:03,795 If you're a law firm, you do it with, with, with stock options and that 289 00:23:03,927 --> 00:23:06,038 that can't happen in the US. 290 00:23:06,038 --> 00:23:14,090 At least you can do some shadow equity or profit sharing, but not traditional stock options. 291 00:23:14,090 --> 00:23:30,714 yeah, you point out an interesting dimension with respect to just the generational differences and the leadership model and how all that influences how ripe a law firm is to 292 00:23:30,714 --> 00:23:33,705 really embrace innovation. 293 00:23:33,987 --> 00:23:34,954 Do you agree? 294 00:23:35,502 --> 00:23:36,142 Absolutely. 295 00:23:36,142 --> 00:23:40,504 mean, yes, and I've been kind of beating this drum for a very long time. 296 00:23:40,504 --> 00:23:46,685 mean, decades that the model, it does need to change and it's time. 297 00:23:46,685 --> 00:23:48,926 It hasn't changed as we know. 298 00:23:49,106 --> 00:23:50,817 Will it change in the coming years? 299 00:23:50,817 --> 00:23:51,604 I believe so. 300 00:23:51,604 --> 00:23:55,688 A lot of that impetus is going to need to come from the client base that they serve. 301 00:23:55,788 --> 00:24:01,182 And we serve that client base as an LSP and have done so for a long time. 302 00:24:01,182 --> 00:24:02,150 so... 303 00:24:02,242 --> 00:24:12,226 the enterprise and institutional client base when they start to demand certain improvements or adjustments to that business model, then that business model will change. 304 00:24:12,226 --> 00:24:14,927 But right now we're not quite there. 305 00:24:15,008 --> 00:24:23,011 But I will say that selling into the enterprise for such a long time, it is a unique environment. 306 00:24:24,692 --> 00:24:30,198 There are things in that environment that on the enterprise side, there's a lot of talk around 307 00:24:30,198 --> 00:24:43,154 innovation and adoption of AI and efficiencies, but yet is it playing out in terms of what they're holding sort of their external large law firms to and they may or may not always 308 00:24:43,154 --> 00:24:44,374 be doing that consistently. 309 00:24:44,374 --> 00:24:50,077 So there's a little bit of mismatch there in terms of the rhetoric versus the actual behaviors. 310 00:24:50,077 --> 00:24:52,188 And so it'll take time in the industry. 311 00:24:52,188 --> 00:24:57,120 I'm confident things will evolve and continue to evolve as they have, but it'll just take time. 312 00:24:57,133 --> 00:24:57,293 Yeah. 313 00:24:57,293 --> 00:25:01,126 I mean, most CLOs and GCs came from big law, right? 314 00:25:01,126 --> 00:25:04,558 I mean, so it's an interesting, it's an interesting relationship. 315 00:25:04,558 --> 00:25:06,310 So let's talk about ALSPs a little bit. 316 00:25:06,310 --> 00:25:17,468 So it's a world that I don't know a ton about, but, um, I find it really interesting, especially now that we have the, you know, alternative business structures in, um, Arizona 317 00:25:17,468 --> 00:25:24,781 and Utah, and we're starting to see like the big four push in and even a smaller, uh, I saw a smaller accounting. 318 00:25:24,781 --> 00:25:37,872 company, I say smaller, they have like 3000 employees, but, um, called aprio and they recently announced a joint venture with, uh, a small law firm, 50 attorneys called radix 319 00:25:37,872 --> 00:25:38,842 law. 320 00:25:39,303 --> 00:25:42,445 And, it's aprio legal. 321 00:25:42,445 --> 00:25:54,475 And I was like, wow, you know, so I'm seeing, we're seeing people at, we're seeing, uh, firms at the top of the market and kind of the mid to smaller markets start to. 322 00:25:54,605 --> 00:25:56,175 tiptoe their way in. 323 00:25:56,175 --> 00:25:58,697 And I'm curious how, how is that? 324 00:25:58,697 --> 00:26:09,171 Because if you, if you listen to KPMG, for example, and the type of work that they're going to go after to me, and I'm not fully educated, you can probably confirm or deny 325 00:26:09,171 --> 00:26:09,391 this. 326 00:26:09,391 --> 00:26:12,072 It sounds like it's a lot of ALSP kind of work. 327 00:26:12,072 --> 00:26:20,626 Is it or, or no, like the blocking and tackling work that the big four would initially go after. 328 00:26:20,626 --> 00:26:23,177 Is that a more ALSP kind of work? 329 00:26:24,010 --> 00:26:28,133 Yeah, I mean, can be, know, ALSP is the term has been thrown around quite a bit. 330 00:26:28,133 --> 00:26:30,474 So just to kind of break it down a little first for you. 331 00:26:30,474 --> 00:26:33,777 mean, ALSP referring to alternative legal services provider. 332 00:26:33,777 --> 00:26:39,180 It's a term that came about over two decades ago when we started and some contemporaries in this space started. 333 00:26:39,180 --> 00:26:45,004 And the idea was to offer legal services in a model that was alternative to the conventional law firm model. 334 00:26:45,004 --> 00:26:53,472 So something other than a billable hour method of billing and something other than sort of the conventional, um, I'm hiring my lawyer and they're going to. 335 00:26:53,472 --> 00:27:01,574 answer the phone and respond to email, but these other ideas like flexible talent and subscription-based legal services. 336 00:27:01,574 --> 00:27:11,076 So these are solutions that we brought to the marketplace that were very groundbreaking at the time in terms of the flexible talent engagement, the idea of having access to legal 337 00:27:11,076 --> 00:27:19,162 talent on demand that you could then convert at the end of the engagement, the idea of being able to tap into a subscription legal services team. 338 00:27:19,602 --> 00:27:24,884 at a fixed rate and you were able to sort of tap into this on again on-demand support. 339 00:27:24,884 --> 00:27:34,098 So some of these models as well as legal operations and kind of this idea of looking at how things could be done more efficiently and somewhat even cannibalizing the revenue 340 00:27:34,098 --> 00:27:37,950 stream that would flow to the ALSP by helping that client become more efficient. 341 00:27:37,950 --> 00:27:47,554 So these types of solutions offered by us at Zetlaw and contemporaries in the space in the ALSP market are 342 00:27:48,110 --> 00:27:58,210 and have been very unique at the time and significantly underutilized when we consider the entire marketplace as well as not just the marketplace of institutional enterprise 343 00:27:58,210 --> 00:28:00,650 clients, but also look at large law firms. 344 00:28:00,650 --> 00:28:07,830 So there's still a lot of opportunity in the market and it's a segment that's growing and will continue to grow significantly. 345 00:28:07,830 --> 00:28:14,570 As for participation by some of the kind of big four, I can't comment specifically on that. 346 00:28:14,570 --> 00:28:16,696 I don't know specifically what their plans are, but 347 00:28:16,696 --> 00:28:20,969 I would imagine that they're looking at sort of grabbing some of that market share as well. 348 00:28:20,990 --> 00:28:24,353 And to the extent that makes sense, I don't know. 349 00:28:24,353 --> 00:28:30,558 Again, is their cost structure going to accommodate what clients have become accustomed to when it comes to LSPs? 350 00:28:30,558 --> 00:28:31,159 I don't know. 351 00:28:31,159 --> 00:28:32,650 mean, again, there is a cost savings. 352 00:28:32,650 --> 00:28:39,126 There's an efficiency component that's built into LSPs that clients come to expect and appreciate. 353 00:28:39,126 --> 00:28:44,312 But there's also the option of having different solutions that can be right sized. 354 00:28:44,312 --> 00:28:47,825 for what that client's looking for, as well as flexibility and convenience. 355 00:28:47,825 --> 00:28:58,483 These are factors that, and speed, that have not historically been able, been something that large law firms have been able to deliver on successfully time and again, and so 356 00:28:58,483 --> 00:29:00,084 clients are looking for that. 357 00:29:00,653 --> 00:29:05,175 Yeah, you know, I remember really, and the term has been around longer than this. 358 00:29:05,175 --> 00:29:07,666 Clearly you just mentioned 20 years. 359 00:29:08,146 --> 00:29:11,958 I started to really hear more about ALSPs around 10 years ago. 360 00:29:11,958 --> 00:29:18,561 It seemed like there was a lot of, a lot of press and a lot of talk about utilization. 361 00:29:18,561 --> 00:29:28,195 that, has that materialized like our, our GCs really leveraging ALSPs the way we expected them to? 362 00:29:29,122 --> 00:29:29,943 Yeah, great question. 363 00:29:29,943 --> 00:29:31,544 And it's a fair observation. 364 00:29:31,544 --> 00:29:32,185 Absolutely. 365 00:29:32,185 --> 00:29:40,581 I would say within the last 10 years for sure, and definitely within the last five years, we've really seen a significant uptick in the use of the term LSP in terms of people 366 00:29:40,581 --> 00:29:42,073 understanding, recognizing it. 367 00:29:42,073 --> 00:29:43,994 It's been covered more in the press. 368 00:29:43,994 --> 00:29:45,284 I know I've had pieces covered. 369 00:29:45,284 --> 00:29:46,797 I've been asked to speak on the topic. 370 00:29:46,797 --> 00:29:58,286 So it's definitely something that people understand more now and more of the market is understood and not only understood, but is more receptive to than they were before 15 or 371 00:29:58,286 --> 00:29:59,156 20 years ago. 372 00:29:59,156 --> 00:30:09,511 So definitely in the last 10 years, we've seen a lot more clients that are more receptive to utilizing ALSPs and the ability for ALSPs such as that law to kind of bust these myths 373 00:30:09,511 --> 00:30:11,672 around the use of ALSPs. 374 00:30:11,672 --> 00:30:12,752 There were a lot of myths. 375 00:30:12,752 --> 00:30:21,506 I know that we ran into that a lot in the early years, a lot of myths around what an ALSP does, what it offers, the benefits, is the benefit really there? 376 00:30:21,506 --> 00:30:23,096 Does this make sense? 377 00:30:23,096 --> 00:30:27,406 And so being able to kind of time and again show and develop a track record, 378 00:30:27,406 --> 00:30:33,166 in the marketplace, also kind of debunk these myths makes a makes a big difference. 379 00:30:33,166 --> 00:30:41,666 And it's interesting, I wrote a piece recently on the idea of do we even need to call it alternative legal services provider anymore? 380 00:30:41,666 --> 00:30:47,146 Maybe we just drop the A and call it LSP, because it really isn't that alternative anymore. 381 00:30:47,146 --> 00:30:48,226 I it shouldn't be. 382 00:30:48,226 --> 00:30:52,426 And in fact, it's not because the model is becoming ubiquitous now. 383 00:30:52,426 --> 00:30:54,126 It's becoming very common. 384 00:30:54,126 --> 00:30:57,186 It's something that people are replicating throughout the country. 385 00:30:57,190 --> 00:31:03,813 And we're seeing a lot more growth and market share and poised to have more market share in LSPs as a segment of this market. 386 00:31:03,813 --> 00:31:06,775 So arguably it's not alternative anymore. 387 00:31:06,775 --> 00:31:11,337 It's going to become mainstream most likely and in a matter of time. 388 00:31:11,357 --> 00:31:14,198 So that's something that I've often thought about. 389 00:31:14,198 --> 00:31:22,082 And so we're starting to refer to ourselves as an LSP or legal services provider because it probably makes more sense. 390 00:31:22,083 --> 00:31:24,763 ALSP was a little bit too much of a mouthful anyway. 391 00:31:24,763 --> 00:31:26,903 LSP is easier to say. 392 00:31:27,163 --> 00:31:29,403 what, what about like regional differences? 393 00:31:29,403 --> 00:31:37,483 Like it seems like in the EU, in the UK specifically, they're a little further ahead, right? 394 00:31:37,483 --> 00:31:41,643 The legal services act was six years ago. 395 00:31:41,643 --> 00:31:44,083 Um, you know, they're ahead on that. 396 00:31:44,083 --> 00:31:52,103 When I talked to innovation professionals and I've had many from the EU and, uh, here domestically. 397 00:31:52,351 --> 00:31:56,629 It feels like they're thinking about things a little differently over there. 398 00:31:56,629 --> 00:31:59,455 What, what about in the ALSP space? 399 00:31:59,455 --> 00:32:05,395 Is there a regional difference in how these providers go to market? 400 00:32:06,254 --> 00:32:07,214 Yeah, great question. 401 00:32:07,214 --> 00:32:08,725 And there's a lot to talk about there. 402 00:32:08,725 --> 00:32:13,277 I mean, first of all, in the comment on Europe and in the EU, absolutely. 403 00:32:13,277 --> 00:32:21,040 I have colleagues that have founded and popped up ALSPs over in Europe and Sweden and other places like that. 404 00:32:21,040 --> 00:32:23,011 And I've been in touch with them for a number of years. 405 00:32:23,011 --> 00:32:24,902 And yes, they're very forward looking. 406 00:32:24,902 --> 00:32:25,892 They totally get it. 407 00:32:25,892 --> 00:32:30,604 I mean, they're on the same page with me and they have been doing this for a while. 408 00:32:30,604 --> 00:32:35,918 Their market is more receptive or has been more receptive historically to that than I would say that. 409 00:32:35,918 --> 00:32:38,058 the domestic market here. 410 00:32:38,658 --> 00:32:50,698 And in terms of like regions within the United States, mean, definitely, you know, your typical coastal kind of large tech centers, metros, we've seen historically the most kind 411 00:32:50,698 --> 00:32:53,998 of adoption of the model. 412 00:32:53,998 --> 00:33:02,220 We have found though, interestingly enough that you would assume, oh, it's only kind of the forward looking sectors of the market, like, you know, tech and. 413 00:33:02,220 --> 00:33:02,560 whatnot. 414 00:33:02,560 --> 00:33:10,892 And yes, we do have a lot of clients in tech and we've seen adoption in tech, but we've also seen and have been broken, breaking into or broken through some of these other 415 00:33:10,892 --> 00:33:18,424 industries that are historically more traditional, if you will, right, like education or healthcare or insurance. 416 00:33:18,424 --> 00:33:31,766 And so we've seen these markets, these sectors, excuse me, begin to adopt ALSPs as part of their, their essential resource toolkit, basically in the legal departments and 417 00:33:31,766 --> 00:33:38,728 That's really promising as well because these are industries that historically would only rely on big law. 418 00:33:38,728 --> 00:33:43,125 And the idea of going outside of that was unusual. 419 00:33:43,125 --> 00:33:46,147 So that's something that's kind of interesting. 420 00:33:46,147 --> 00:33:50,407 Yeah, you know, one of our first legal customers, the firm no longer exists. 421 00:33:50,407 --> 00:33:56,767 It was a fairly small firm, but they blew up pretty quickly during 08. 422 00:33:56,767 --> 00:34:00,907 They were default services and I'm a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. 423 00:34:00,907 --> 00:34:05,627 I came in and helped them with some tech and at the time, you know, we were just starting out. 424 00:34:05,627 --> 00:34:07,967 I was doing actual delivery work. 425 00:34:07,967 --> 00:34:11,647 So came in and helped them streamline some processes. 426 00:34:11,867 --> 00:34:15,435 But in the default services world, so 427 00:34:15,435 --> 00:34:20,019 financial services are the clients and they made heavy use. 428 00:34:20,019 --> 00:34:22,551 This is in the late two thousands. 429 00:34:22,551 --> 00:34:33,700 You know, they used, I don't know how you differentiate like BPO, like business process outsourcing from ALSPs, there was a firm in India called Aquin that essentially did all of 430 00:34:33,700 --> 00:34:37,944 the heavy lifting around foreclosures, right? 431 00:34:37,944 --> 00:34:44,131 All the document prep and you know, docket management and like all of these sorts of tasks. 432 00:34:44,131 --> 00:34:47,311 So yeah, financial services was doing this sort of stuff. 433 00:34:47,311 --> 00:34:53,471 I don't know if that falls under the ASP ALSP banner or not, but you know, that was 15 years ago. 434 00:34:53,471 --> 00:34:55,911 Um, more 17 years ago. 435 00:34:56,091 --> 00:34:56,991 So 436 00:34:58,786 --> 00:34:59,984 Absolutely. 437 00:34:59,984 --> 00:35:00,810 go ahead. 438 00:35:00,810 --> 00:35:11,665 I was just going to say like it, and even financially, like when I think of, when I think of you had mentioned like insurance, that really jumps out as not a progressive industry. 439 00:35:11,665 --> 00:35:15,446 mean, they're still running mainframes and they are in financial services too. 440 00:35:15,446 --> 00:35:26,421 The heavy lifting and government like financial services, insurance and government are still making that all the heavy lifting intact still happens on mainframes incredibly. 441 00:35:26,576 --> 00:35:27,096 Yeah. 442 00:35:27,096 --> 00:35:30,940 it sounds like, like healthcare that's, that's surprising. 443 00:35:30,940 --> 00:35:32,602 I wasn't expecting that one. 444 00:35:32,602 --> 00:35:35,224 And what were the other industries you mentioned? 445 00:35:36,327 --> 00:35:37,237 Yeah. 446 00:35:37,267 --> 00:35:37,797 yeah. 447 00:35:37,797 --> 00:35:49,920 And some of the entities that are sort of quasi-government, know, like heavily regulated industries like utilities, we've had a lot of clients in those sectors and water and telco 448 00:35:49,920 --> 00:35:51,074 and whatnot. 449 00:35:51,074 --> 00:36:00,560 these heavily regulated sectors that historically, they don't operate like a government agency, but sometimes they look and feel that way culturally and in terms of their slow to 450 00:36:00,560 --> 00:36:03,808 move, use of tech, all that. 451 00:36:03,808 --> 00:36:05,308 use of data tech, if you will. 452 00:36:05,308 --> 00:36:08,619 So we see a lot of that with that type of client base. 453 00:36:09,179 --> 00:36:19,142 But definitely I would say, you to your question, you, you raise an interesting point of the difference between BPOs and ALSP's and yeah, I BPOs are nothing new and there, there 454 00:36:19,142 --> 00:36:20,262 is some crossover there. 455 00:36:20,262 --> 00:36:30,724 mean, historically the early BPOs were, were focused more on functions that may be not necessarily appropriate to legal or they were not maybe suited well to legal. 456 00:36:30,724 --> 00:36:33,963 And so that's sort of where an ALSP comes in as leveling up. 457 00:36:33,963 --> 00:36:40,919 the opportunity to provide services that make sense for the legal realm. 458 00:36:40,919 --> 00:36:51,127 There are some BPO's that have kind of dovetailed with legal and I'm sure you can think of many use cases, sort of your basic right due diligence reviews or sort of basic document 459 00:36:51,127 --> 00:36:53,048 review on an extremely basic level. 460 00:36:53,048 --> 00:37:00,213 There are ALSP's or BPO's that do that type of work and arguably some of those BPO's fall into the ALSP bucket. 461 00:37:00,704 --> 00:37:11,113 the majority of LSPs and I find where there makes the most sense for the market to continue to grow and evolve is on the level of work that we provide and similar LSPs 462 00:37:11,113 --> 00:37:14,907 provide, which is more of that slightly high value work, right? 463 00:37:14,907 --> 00:37:23,615 And being able to take things off lawyers' plates, paralegals' plates, contracts managers' plates, or legal ops professionals' plates and be able to handle it or be able to support 464 00:37:23,615 --> 00:37:27,618 it through a team staffed up through a subscription or... 465 00:37:27,618 --> 00:37:30,440 you know, sort of a one-to-one flexible talent engagement. 466 00:37:30,440 --> 00:37:42,580 So these are opportunities for clients to tap into, again, a set of resources or a team of resources that they would otherwise not have access to or might through a large law firm, 467 00:37:42,580 --> 00:37:47,634 but not in the same way and certainly not at the right cost or efficiency model. 468 00:37:47,875 --> 00:37:58,589 You know, when I think about the Venn diagram of you've got alternative business structures, you've got ALSPs, you've got BPO, you've got law firms, there's a lot of 469 00:37:58,589 --> 00:38:00,732 overlap in that Venn diagram. 470 00:38:00,732 --> 00:38:03,896 Um, there, there's, there's not clear lines. 471 00:38:03,896 --> 00:38:06,249 It doesn't seem, is that accurate? 472 00:38:06,378 --> 00:38:07,308 Yes, it's accurate. 473 00:38:07,308 --> 00:38:09,599 There's definitely some overlap for sure. 474 00:38:09,799 --> 00:38:16,802 I do believe that large firms to survive will have to kind of have an LSP component of their offering, really. 475 00:38:16,802 --> 00:38:23,815 I they'll have to sort of bring LSPs in and say, OK, we've got our high end kind of level. 476 00:38:23,815 --> 00:38:26,356 know, you've got your Bethel Company litigation or whatnot. 477 00:38:26,356 --> 00:38:28,457 We've got that, you your law firm setting. 478 00:38:28,457 --> 00:38:33,369 But we've got your LSP option for you to be able to do the other kinds of work that you do. 479 00:38:33,369 --> 00:38:35,596 I'm frankly, I 480 00:38:35,596 --> 00:38:39,188 would imagine we see more of that in the large law firm sector. 481 00:38:39,299 --> 00:38:41,279 Yeah, that makes perfect sense. 482 00:38:41,279 --> 00:38:51,539 Um, you know, there's not too many people who I can talk about agentic AI with, and you were one of them and we had a good conversation around this. 483 00:38:51,539 --> 00:39:04,819 And, um, I, this is another area, like we mentioned how muddy the waters are between, you know, BPO, ALSP, the waters are also pretty muddy in the agentic world. 484 00:39:04,819 --> 00:39:06,479 Like what's agentic AI? 485 00:39:06,479 --> 00:39:09,367 What is, what is just traditional workflow? 486 00:39:09,367 --> 00:39:12,269 What is AI enabled workflow? 487 00:39:12,529 --> 00:39:23,417 And, um, you know, I'm of the opinion, like I've heard, we heard a lot late last year that 2025 is going to be the year of agentic AI in 2025. 488 00:39:23,417 --> 00:39:24,997 And no, it's not. 489 00:39:25,318 --> 00:39:31,082 we have, we haven't even, we're just getting our basic blocking and tackling down. 490 00:39:31,512 --> 00:39:36,145 only I saw a really interesting stat from TR in December. 491 00:39:36,145 --> 00:39:38,499 So less than 60 days old that 492 00:39:38,499 --> 00:39:43,999 only 10 % of law firms have a generative AI strategy. 493 00:39:44,339 --> 00:39:47,118 I'm sorry, policy, not strategy. 494 00:39:47,719 --> 00:39:54,199 Fewer the natural sequence in my head is you have a strategy that informs your policy. 495 00:39:54,199 --> 00:39:57,519 You kind of have to have the strategy first in my mind. 496 00:39:57,519 --> 00:40:02,119 Maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's how, that's how I think about it, but only 10%. 497 00:40:02,119 --> 00:40:03,595 So are we going to 498 00:40:03,595 --> 00:40:11,337 Are we going to enable agents to take action inside our organization before we have a strategy and policy around it? 499 00:40:11,337 --> 00:40:12,838 That sounds crazy to me. 500 00:40:12,838 --> 00:40:14,959 So I feel like we got a longer way to go. 501 00:40:14,959 --> 00:40:22,241 Maybe mid 2026, we'll start to see real use of agentic AI in, in practice of law. 502 00:40:22,241 --> 00:40:29,353 think we could deploy some business of law use cases almost immediately, but I don't know what, how do you see that picture? 503 00:40:29,768 --> 00:40:30,608 Yeah, absolutely. 504 00:40:30,608 --> 00:40:38,502 I know I've enjoyed our conversations on this topic and yeah, to kind of pick it up again, I would say that timeline is probably fairly accurate. 505 00:40:38,502 --> 00:40:40,573 I mean, there's definitely a lot of interest. 506 00:40:40,573 --> 00:40:41,834 You're going to have your power users. 507 00:40:41,834 --> 00:40:49,607 You're going to have some of these organizations and GCs and maybe smaller legal teams that are willing to just jump right in with two feet and start adopting some agentic AI. 508 00:40:49,607 --> 00:40:56,246 But I do believe for the adoption and sort of larger pieces of the market, the large law firms and large corporate legal departments. 509 00:40:56,246 --> 00:40:57,516 It's going to take a bit of time. 510 00:40:57,516 --> 00:41:02,518 it is for that reason we talked about even earlier as I referenced the people process technology piece, right? 511 00:41:02,518 --> 00:41:07,049 So making sure culturally you've got the culture that makes sense there for that. 512 00:41:07,049 --> 00:41:14,892 Everyone's ready and primed for this technology to come in and how and where it's going to be used as well as sort of the policy and guardrails around that. 513 00:41:14,892 --> 00:41:17,412 Or if it's not guardrails, then what is the policy? 514 00:41:17,412 --> 00:41:18,302 How are we going to use it? 515 00:41:18,302 --> 00:41:19,473 What are we going to use it for? 516 00:41:19,473 --> 00:41:21,674 What data can we use in this? 517 00:41:21,674 --> 00:41:23,904 what workflows is this going to support? 518 00:41:24,026 --> 00:41:26,087 And so we're going to see some of that. 519 00:41:26,087 --> 00:41:36,962 And we've seen this firsthand with clients just building policies for them, helping them create kind of how to think about how to use AI, where to use it, how to use it as it 520 00:41:36,962 --> 00:41:46,237 pertains to various other parts of their organization, and how to think about it relative to key priorities they have, whether that's around IP, data security and privacy 521 00:41:46,237 --> 00:41:48,696 compliance, litigation management. 522 00:41:48,696 --> 00:41:51,759 So tremendous opportunities in the agentic AI space. 523 00:41:51,759 --> 00:41:53,430 I again, I'm very bullish on that. 524 00:41:53,430 --> 00:41:59,766 I think there's a lot of opportunity and efficiencies to unlock and value to unlock with agentic AI. 525 00:41:59,766 --> 00:42:03,199 But yeah, as a practical matter, like what are we looking at in terms of adoption? 526 00:42:03,199 --> 00:42:09,465 would say it's gonna take this year is gonna be the year of a lot of experimentation, education. 527 00:42:09,465 --> 00:42:15,310 This is something that came out of even a talk I gave recently at the Women in AI Conference and. 528 00:42:16,000 --> 00:42:18,511 At the end of my talk, had a breakout. 529 00:42:18,511 --> 00:42:25,854 And one of the themes that emerged, which was interesting among all of us talking, was about the need for education in a lot of these organizations. 530 00:42:25,854 --> 00:42:35,929 That there are a lot of, again, both within law firms as well as legal teams, that they are simply not as educated on AI in terms of its capabilities, what it can be used for, 531 00:42:35,929 --> 00:42:36,879 how it can be used. 532 00:42:36,879 --> 00:42:43,702 And so increasing some education on that front will empower that user base a lot more, and that's going to drive some more adoption. 533 00:42:43,917 --> 00:42:48,931 Yeah, you I don't know why I'm just now connecting these dots, but you are kind of perfectly positioned. 534 00:42:48,931 --> 00:43:02,290 Like when I think about agentic AI and like it seems massive opportunity in the more predictable ALSP BPO kind of space, like, I don't know why I'm just connecting those dots, 535 00:43:02,290 --> 00:43:09,585 but, what are the use cases like that you see on the practice side with agentic AI? 536 00:43:09,585 --> 00:43:12,517 Because that's where things get a little fuzzy for me. 537 00:43:12,517 --> 00:43:13,025 I, 538 00:43:13,025 --> 00:43:28,582 Again, business of law, I see lots of opportunities in business development, HR, you know, it's, but on the practice side, are there any use cases that jump out at you as good 539 00:43:28,582 --> 00:43:30,483 candidates to take a look at? 540 00:43:30,976 --> 00:43:32,357 Yeah, yeah. 541 00:43:32,357 --> 00:43:35,619 And I would say I wouldn't discount the business of law piece, right? 542 00:43:35,619 --> 00:43:36,918 Because you're totally accurate. 543 00:43:36,918 --> 00:43:45,616 mean, there's a lot of opportunity there just to streamline the business of law, the back office functions, the billing, the timekeeping, the screening calls, the getting back to 544 00:43:45,616 --> 00:43:46,936 clients, the client intake. 545 00:43:46,936 --> 00:43:51,860 I mean, all of these are business of law pieces, never mind the marketing, biz dev piece, right? 546 00:43:51,860 --> 00:43:55,363 So the business of law component is critical and important. 547 00:43:55,363 --> 00:43:59,992 And there are lots of opportunities there for agentic AI to streamline just as there is 548 00:43:59,992 --> 00:44:06,145 for agentic AI to streamline these other kind of business functions within any company such as customer support, right? 549 00:44:06,145 --> 00:44:11,767 Or certain marketing functions or certain HR functions or training and compliance functions. 550 00:44:11,767 --> 00:44:15,278 So there's a lot of opportunities there generally within a corporate environment. 551 00:44:15,278 --> 00:44:18,450 And I see that playing out in the business of loss side for sure. 552 00:44:18,450 --> 00:44:24,532 And then just to shift over to your question about workflows and kind of getting down to nitty gritty elements of practice. 553 00:44:24,833 --> 00:44:28,514 Yeah, I mean, there's certainly a lot of different opportunities with agentic AI. 554 00:44:28,642 --> 00:44:32,516 There are, we're starting to see things in sort of the litigation sphere, right? 555 00:44:32,516 --> 00:44:37,490 Going through certain kind of workflows within litigation that are repetitive. 556 00:44:37,490 --> 00:44:46,959 It may involve analysis of high volumes of documents and then evaluating that information in order to prepare questions for witnesses or whatnot. 557 00:44:47,940 --> 00:44:50,823 Let me redo that, sorry, I skipped over my words. 558 00:44:50,823 --> 00:44:53,645 I'll pick it up from the earlier point. 559 00:44:54,626 --> 00:45:03,253 So now jumping over to your other question about agentic AI in sort of the workflow setting, there's a lot of opportunities around that. 560 00:45:03,313 --> 00:45:09,338 Certainly we've seen some technologies come out that are addressing workflows around litigation. 561 00:45:09,338 --> 00:45:18,646 There are workflows around legal ops, a lot of opportunities around the legal ops front in terms of streamlining, whether it's access to certain types of data sets and being able to 562 00:45:18,646 --> 00:45:23,714 sort of produce the type of knowledge that we need to drive 563 00:45:23,714 --> 00:45:28,566 greater efficiencies within a corporate legal team, certainly around sort of spend management. 564 00:45:28,566 --> 00:45:29,757 That would be an example. 565 00:45:29,757 --> 00:45:33,589 We're also starting to see agentic AI around the contracting space, right? 566 00:45:33,589 --> 00:45:37,701 Contracting space and any contracting function within a company is a huge beast. 567 00:45:37,701 --> 00:45:45,945 And so being able to leverage agentic AI and some of those workflows can be extremely powerful and drive significant efficiencies and cost savings. 568 00:45:45,945 --> 00:45:48,375 So those are just a few examples, but there's a lot more. 569 00:45:48,375 --> 00:45:50,306 Yeah, I'm waiting for the day. 570 00:45:50,306 --> 00:45:53,636 So, uh, my wife and I own five gyms here in St. 571 00:45:53,636 --> 00:45:56,476 Louis and we've, we moved one. 572 00:45:56,476 --> 00:46:08,340 So we've signed six commercial retail leases and I'm waiting for the day when you can just have, you know, the tenants AI and the landlords AI and they get together and negotiate 573 00:46:08,340 --> 00:46:08,620 the league. 574 00:46:08,620 --> 00:46:13,862 Cause that is the most painful, dreadful, awful process. 575 00:46:13,862 --> 00:46:17,985 And, um, yeah, it's, that'll be a great day when 576 00:46:17,985 --> 00:46:26,051 When you you kind of put it put in your baseline that I'm not willing to move below these terms and you kind of increment almost like a Dutch auction. 577 00:46:26,051 --> 00:46:27,975 You kind of work your way there. 578 00:46:27,975 --> 00:46:30,399 That would be phenomenal. 579 00:46:30,934 --> 00:46:32,615 Yeah, we're starting to get there. 580 00:46:32,615 --> 00:46:41,661 There are some early contracting tools and things I'm involved in a few in terms of as an advisor investor that we're starting to see some of that happen where you can kind of get 581 00:46:41,661 --> 00:46:52,397 to these standardized tool, standardized sets of terms or toolkits, if you will, in terms of fallbacks and positioning and start to begin to have your system talk to their system 582 00:46:52,397 --> 00:46:53,208 or vice versa. 583 00:46:53,208 --> 00:46:57,250 But again, around streamlining the contracting process and. 584 00:46:57,250 --> 00:47:04,895 And I do believe on some level, at some point with negotiations, we'll get to that point of the, your AI can talk to my AI and work it out. 585 00:47:05,275 --> 00:47:09,818 We're not there yet, but I do envision a future where that will be happening. 586 00:47:09,921 --> 00:47:11,882 be amazing because it's awful. 587 00:47:11,882 --> 00:47:20,556 And even just redlining software licensing agreements and master services agreements and statements of work. 588 00:47:20,997 --> 00:47:23,598 I'm looking forward to those days. 589 00:47:23,718 --> 00:47:29,981 All right, well, we're almost out of time, but I wanted to ask you one more question because I think you're going to have a good perspective on this. 590 00:47:30,061 --> 00:47:34,163 Balancing innovation and risk management with AI. 591 00:47:34,167 --> 00:47:36,648 Like it's still early days. 592 00:47:36,648 --> 00:47:38,528 AI is very unpredictable. 593 00:47:38,528 --> 00:47:45,807 Still, you can go to the same model with the same prompt, enter it, copy paste it, enter it again. 594 00:47:45,807 --> 00:47:50,031 You get different output, not every time, but often. 595 00:47:50,051 --> 00:47:55,883 So, you know, it seems like there's still some, uh, there's still some uncertainty. 596 00:47:55,883 --> 00:48:03,073 How should, how should firms think about that striking that balance with being innovative, but 597 00:48:03,073 --> 00:48:07,486 not taking too much risk early on when they're thinking about their AI strategy. 598 00:48:08,076 --> 00:48:09,407 Yeah, great question, Ted. 599 00:48:09,407 --> 00:48:11,839 I would say a couple things on that. 600 00:48:11,839 --> 00:48:15,402 mean, first of all, yeah, risk is always important, right? 601 00:48:15,402 --> 00:48:23,619 Lawyers and legal industry players, whether they're law firms or corporate legal teams, they're always weighing risk to some degree or another, right? 602 00:48:23,619 --> 00:48:26,901 It's an occupational hazard and it's a necessary one. 603 00:48:26,901 --> 00:48:37,449 So looking at that, but also bearing in mind that there is an opportunity here and there's an opportunity for significant growth, efficiencies and value creation. 604 00:48:38,143 --> 00:48:46,759 To some extent as well, mean, looking at even attrition and reducing attrition on your team, I mean, we have sort of certain folks coming into the marketplace that are going to 605 00:48:46,759 --> 00:48:49,011 expect to be able to use AI and these tools. 606 00:48:49,011 --> 00:48:56,627 We have a whole crop of the next generations of lawyers that are going to be coming in, completely digital natives, very well versed in AI, very accustomed to using it, and 607 00:48:56,627 --> 00:48:59,220 they're going to expect to be able to utilize these tools. 608 00:48:59,220 --> 00:49:02,486 So we've seen with some corporate legal teams and law firms, 609 00:49:02,486 --> 00:49:06,237 Some of them have taken a very kind of risk averse approach of you can't use AI. 610 00:49:06,237 --> 00:49:09,248 It's, know, we have to worry about the data and the security piece. 611 00:49:09,248 --> 00:49:12,199 And yes, that's critical, but it's also not necessarily realistic. 612 00:49:12,199 --> 00:49:19,531 So a balanced approach that takes into account, okay, what data, what workflows are we going to be comfortable with using AI for? 613 00:49:19,531 --> 00:49:21,401 Where does it make sense for our organization? 614 00:49:21,401 --> 00:49:25,032 Where can we kind of do this and experiment properly? 615 00:49:25,032 --> 00:49:30,834 But also what's sensible in terms of what's realistic in terms of what we're trying to accomplish. 616 00:49:30,834 --> 00:49:32,320 Because if they just kind of, 617 00:49:32,320 --> 00:49:38,434 sit back and let risk keep them from utilizing these tools or embracing these tools, they're going to be left behind. 618 00:49:38,434 --> 00:49:47,110 And so it's really critical, or I would advise, it's very critical for corporate legal teams, as well as large law firms, to begin to jump into AI, to begin to use it, 619 00:49:47,110 --> 00:49:50,663 experiment with it, identify the workflows where they can leverage it. 620 00:49:50,663 --> 00:49:54,956 And sure, put in some policies in place to kind of address the risk component. 621 00:49:54,956 --> 00:49:59,780 But take this balanced approach and with an understanding that we're going to be utilizing AI. 622 00:49:59,780 --> 00:50:06,214 It's just a matter of, okay, where and which pockets of our workflows and our organization does that make sense? 623 00:50:07,315 --> 00:50:09,017 That would be my recommendation. 624 00:50:09,017 --> 00:50:19,154 And in terms of what we're going to actually see, I believe that the ones that are more forward-looking, that we're gonna start to see more adoption from those organizations that 625 00:50:19,154 --> 00:50:21,826 can adopt that balanced and measured approach. 626 00:50:22,359 --> 00:50:24,160 Yeah, I saw an interesting stat. 627 00:50:24,160 --> 00:50:29,581 I'll wrap up with this because it's a, I thought it was, it kind of blew my mind a little bit. 628 00:50:29,581 --> 00:50:47,196 So the, legal value network, um, has a LPPM, um, annual survey and they talked to, I forget how many hundreds of law firms, but the question was our largest clients blank us 629 00:50:47,196 --> 00:50:49,306 to use generative AI. 630 00:50:49,307 --> 00:50:50,947 And in that blank, 631 00:50:51,267 --> 00:50:56,427 discourage or forbid was the answer 41 % of the time. 632 00:50:57,367 --> 00:51:00,167 So it's not all the law firms fault here. 633 00:51:00,167 --> 00:51:02,587 The clients are also holding them back. 634 00:51:02,659 --> 00:51:05,751 Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, and I can comment on that too. 635 00:51:05,751 --> 00:51:10,185 I mean, we've seen this with clients even just having to revisit their own outside council guidelines, right? 636 00:51:10,185 --> 00:51:19,991 Where sometimes the security policies or the outside council guidelines basically all out prohibit the idea of utilizing AI or the idea of using external systems or whatnot where 637 00:51:19,991 --> 00:51:22,713 data is going to be deposited. 638 00:51:22,713 --> 00:51:29,958 then, you know, and so some of these policies themselves are a bit dated and they have not been revisited with an AI. 639 00:51:30,058 --> 00:51:31,008 friendly lens. 640 00:51:31,008 --> 00:51:38,682 And so yes, the law firms then having to be compliant with these policies in order to perform work for these clients, their hands are bound. 641 00:51:38,682 --> 00:51:42,163 So it's definitely the clients as well as the providers. 642 00:51:42,163 --> 00:51:46,825 ALSP is again, we tend to be on the bleeding edge of technology adoption and use. 643 00:51:46,825 --> 00:51:58,119 And so we're out there kind of in the middle pushing the corporate clients to revisit their policies on that front and also advising sometimes in some cases, the large law 644 00:51:58,119 --> 00:51:59,480 firms on what they could be doing. 645 00:51:59,480 --> 00:52:06,889 But yeah, definitely both sides of the transactional relationship have to sort of be on the same page as far as AI. 646 00:52:08,283 --> 00:52:09,996 Well, this has been a great conversation. 647 00:52:09,996 --> 00:52:11,848 I really enjoyed it. 648 00:52:11,848 --> 00:52:13,680 We covered some really interesting topics. 649 00:52:13,680 --> 00:52:16,243 I learned a lot about ALSP. 650 00:52:16,243 --> 00:52:18,806 So it was great having you on. 651 00:52:18,806 --> 00:52:21,769 Thanks so much for having this conversation with me. 652 00:52:21,854 --> 00:52:22,335 Thank you. 653 00:52:22,335 --> 00:52:23,408 really enjoyed it, Ted. 654 00:52:23,408 --> 00:52:26,753 It's a pleasure as always and look forward to continuing our conversations. 655 00:52:26,753 --> 00:52:27,680 That sounds great. 656 00:52:27,680 --> 00:52:29,248 All right, have a good afternoon. 657 00:52:29,622 --> 00:52:31,224 Okay, thank you, you too. 658 00:52:31,224 --> 00:52:33,867 really quickly before we hang up. 659 00:52:33,928 --> 00:52:38,262 So how does it go with your next steps and do you need anything from me? 660 00:52:38,262 --> 00:52:40,938 I think you guys have my headshot and speaker bio. -->