#21 - The Transforming Legal Ecosystem with Liam Brown at Elevate

What does it take to run a high performing business? Strategy, finesse and a lot of advice from people who've been there done that before. I'm Mario Carroll. Join me on my Pearls on Gloves off podcast to hear from the leaders building some of the most innovative companies today. We'll take a high value, no holds barred approach to find out what works.

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Hi everyone and welcome to Pearls on Gloves Off. Marielle, I'm your host, Mariel Carroll. Before we dive into today's episode, just a quick announcement. Ironclad Live is coming to New York City on June 20, so if you're in the area, we would really love to have you join us in person. This one is all about buy side contracting and how really smart teams can speed up and analyze all kinds of purchasing agreements. And if you can't make it live, we'll be rebroadcasting on June 22 so you can definitely join us virtually to register for either the live or virtual events. Please visit the Ironclad website for more details Today. Our guest on the show is Liam Brown, founder, chairman and CEO of Elevate, which he launched in 2011 as a law company to provide consulting, technology and services to both in house teams as well as law firms. Before that, Liam was the founder, president and CEO of Integrion, a global lpo which he grew from a startup to eventually selling to a private equity investor. Prior to Integrand, he had started a.

Virtual data room legal tech company, which.

He also sold, and today he's a frequent speaker and legal tech investor and startup coach. In this episode, we touch on the emergence of the legal ecosystem and what that means and what we've seen from law companies and how they've evolved over time. We also talk about how difficult the modernization of a legal department really is and how much we've learned from, say, the generation of legal leaders who went ahead of us. How we can help those who are now rising up and going to be the next generation of leaders and how can we get over the scars of our challenges and help to make it easier for those in the future? We're talking a little bit about enabling tech, how that can help us, and definitely leveraging partners to help legal teams be more successful. We do have a little fun and you'll get to hear why Liam and I consider ourselves spirit animals. And finally, we do touch on what is happening with change in the law firm environment. Some thoughts that I have just reflecting on our talk. You know, the legal ecosystem has grown tremendously, both in the number of companies in IT as well as the breadth of services provided now. And when we say ecosystem, that's everyone who plays in the delivery of legal services, from the law firms to law schools to law companies, alternative legal service providers in house, teams, consultants, managed services, technology, and the list goes on and on. And that's really changed over time because we used to really have to rely on internal headcount as a legal department to get stuff done. But now if you're a general counsel or in a legal ops leadership role, you really should be thinking about how to take advantage of all these resources that are available to you. I've spoken a lot to general counsel who say they really want to modernize, they really want to transform their departments, but they don't have that headcount to hire for legal ops. And that's unfortunate. But that also doesn't mean that you're stuck. There are ways to do this now and modernize through outsourcing. There are opportunities to hire people for legal ops as a service, and you can buy software and still have contractors or managed service providers implement that and administer it for you. So you're not alone. And there's definitely a lot of flexible talent as another option that can help you as well. And then if we think about legal ops professionals, I've talked a ton about how to be more strategic in your role, how to uplevel your work, how to get out of the day to day management of the processes and the systems that you've put in place for your department. So think about it. If you've implemented, say a contracts management system or an E billing system or a new process or what have you, you should always be thinking about who's going to administer that system, who's going to maintain that day to day, because that's going to be a real resource need. And if that's you, you'll never get out of that initial project. So nowadays you really can rely though on managed service providers, consultants, contractors, flexible talent. There are so many options that give you the opportunity to free up your own time to do the big thinking, to start a new strategic initiative. And so if you want help, if you need referrals, if you need ideas about how to do that, I'm definitely here for you. Happy to chat one on one anytime. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. But now, without further ado, I'm excited to get into today's chat with Liam Brown.

Thanks so much for being here today, Liam.

Thank you for having me. And that was, I thought, a Short bio, but when I listened to it, I guess when you have a little bit of time in your career, there's a lot to introduce.

Yeah, you've done a lot. I mean, you have an impressive bio that I just rattled off, but more fun. Isn't it also true that you were sort of like Doogie Howser, child genius who graduated college at, what was it, 16, 14? What's the story there?

I'd like to not think I wasn't, but, yeah, I did go to college a few years early. And yes, I did study medicine. And to my mother's continuing chagrin, I found myself not liking sick people. I know you're not supposed to say that out loud, but I really enjoyed the sort of intellectual challenge. I'm sure lots of people will see that we all like thinking about complicated problems, and I really did enjoy that. It's kind of like medicine is a bit like escape rooms. Okay. But it's like zombie escape rooms. And what I mean by that is there are sick people and, you know, and sick people really do need care. And when I was a young person, was not an especially empathetic person, I'd be embarrassed to admit.

Well, you know, you and I have so much in common, so I can kind of relate to that. My whole family is dentists, and I was very young when I said, there's no way I'm going to be looking into stinky mouths all day. No interest in that. Thank you so much.

I have that conversation with my kids now and none of them have any interest in being a business person. Entrepreneur. In fact, I'm actually quite grumpy about the fact that my eldest son seems to have an affinity or real interest in becoming a lawyer. Can you believe it?

That's what my daughter says, too. I think she just says that to make me angry.

Okay. So I think you and I first met, I was trying to think back, and I'm guessing it'd have to be like 2010, 2011ish. Maybe you have a better memory than me, but I think it was probably when you came to speak at a very early clock meeting. This is like before we were an official organization and you came and did.

A presentation, and I believe it was.

The first time I ever heard the term legal ecosystem. That was something you were thinking about for a while.

That's when I think we met. And it's interesting that you bring up that topic, legal ecosystem, because I shy away from terms that sort of seem consulting or highfalutin. Kind of not very plain spoken. But I have found myself coming back to that idea again and again and again over the decade or so that we all been working or known each other.

Yeah.

Okay, so how would you describe the ecosystem? Because I know you advise both law departments as well as law firms, and you've seen. We've all seen the ecosystem change over the last decade or two. What have you seen in terms of the changes of the roles of the companies or even the types of companies that exist in our ecosystem?

I think I probably thought of ecosystem as just a word that captured the idea of lots of different types of animal operating in lots of different niches. My mind is going back to that talk because I remember it was. You guys were all really talking about your shared experiences and sharing your experiences. And one of the things I remember was I think I had a slide that showed the legal ego system, and I had a picture of animals, but at the top of the triangle was a person, which I think was my way of saying, look, that's the way that we have all thought of the legal world. The lawyer at the top of the triangle. And I think I then had a slide that perhaps showed a circle where the lawyer was in the middle somewhere of the. I think the point of it for me, when I was thinking about ecosystem was that law was really starting to permeate all sorts of elements of the business. So the idea that business people and lawyers were forever separated, except for the phone call asking for advice, seemed to me to be an archaic perspective because business people started to have to have some legal training. I know, in my job not being a lawyer, but I have to consider all sorts of legal elements to the work that I do in contracting or commercial or managing people or risk or, you know, cyber, in the same way that I have to also have a whole bunch of other disciplines at my fingertips. So I think of ecosystem reflecting the fact that all of us have different types of experiences and different adaptations that mean that we can play in different niches, and those niches sometimes overlap. You know, I've got this thing where I prefer to not call our community alternative, because I do think it's vaguely pejorative. It's vaguely not quite good enough. But it just seems to me that if you're a professional and I think about your career, Mary, if you think of yourself as a professional, you could be in a law firm one stage in your career. The next stage in your career, you could be in a law department. And the next stage in your career, you can be in one of numerous types of Law companies, in your case, a software law company. But I think that the concept of ecosystem for me touches on we are a community of professionals and we work in businesses at points of time that fulfill different spaces and places. And I remember when we were talking about the legal ecosystem, we also started to talk about. Because I remember there was a whiteboard session and you were all sort of throwing up things like, but okay, but what about law schools, for example? Or what about the regulator? And you get my point, kind of. We quite quickly realized that law was everywhere.

Yeah.

And we had to think beyond just the law firm lawyer or the in house lawyer as the only elements of that ecosystem.

Right. And you have talked a lot about the role of law companies in the ecosystem and you already touched on it. Right. And this is one of your hot issues, your soapboxes. So I want to give you an opportunity. Talk about the term law company and why you prefer that over alsp, Alternative legal service provider, or even the older terms LPO or lso. Right. Legal process outsourcer, or legal services outsourcing.

It will surprise you to learn that I came to Law Company kicking and screaming. And what I mean by that is when we started Elevate, we really did struggle with this first concept of, hey, we had previously built legal process outsourcers and we'd sat in enough meetings where in some cases some law firm lawyers had said in meetings that we were in, well, you know, what we do isn't really a process and clearly requires judgment and expertise, etc. That actually made sense. But the thrust of that was anyone else looking at solving routine problems at what I think of as the intersection of business and law. If they aren't an expert in a law firm, or possibly in a law department, if they're not an expert that has the appropriate seal of approval, then you're running a risk. If you're a business person, I remember thinking like, you know, that's not really a fair characterization. Of course I call my outside counsel to help me think through, hey, what is the risk of? Or how do I navigate this? But there are lots of problems where having an understanding of the legal issues, that doesn't mean a deep understanding, but having a working understanding of the legal issues is actually sufficient to being able to solve these business problems. One might argue that solving these business problems requires that you have not only a working understanding of the legal issues, but a working understanding of the data issues or the technology issues or a working understanding of the politics of an organization, how decisions get made and etcetera and that's exactly right. Discussion, yeah. But it did seem to me that a couple of those meetings had gotten under my skin enough that I thought, yeah, this is being used as a way to hold back, well, I'll call them the alternatives. And I believe that holding that community back, those members of the ecosystem, actually holds back business in general. Because if business in general is restricted to the only way to solve a problem is you must call outside counsel to get the highest quality advice, I believe two things happen. Not all problems require that, but more significantly, if all problems do, and I've said this to some managing partners, the supply of lawyers isn't really growing. If you look at the explosion of data, regulatory globalization, et cetera, the demand for more law is undeniable. Eventually we'll all become lawyers if the only way to solve it is the old way of working. And I know that law firms have done a great job of actually working through this and starting to modernize and think differently. And it's just a generational shift that we're all working through. But it seems to me that we needed to get beyond this concept of alternatives. Not quite good enough, and as I say, vaguely pejorative. And so I know when I started to elevate and I talked with my colleagues and when we talked to you and your clock colleagues, and when we talked to some law firm leaders who were predicting ahead 10 years about war for talent, and that kind of thing just seemed to me that we would be better served to try to find a way that allowed individuals, people to feel as worthy if they worked one day at a law department, another day at a law firm, another day at a law company, as opposed to creating this sort of extension of lawyer, non lawyer, front or back office, which permeates a profession. I saw the same thing in medicine 30 years ago, and I really did really learn that lesson. I know I joked when I said that I didn't have a lot of empathy when I was younger. I did see how important it was to have all these different people around a patient. It was really important. And I feel like that's the journey that we are all on as we are modernizing law.

We've seen it in the past and we're going to continue to see it accelerate even more. The need for the changing roles and jobs and the resources that are available to deliver this increasing demand for legal services. I know that companies like Elevate and other law companies do advisory work. They do managed services work, they do counseling work, they do overflow work. There are so many GCs right now that I talk to that know this massive transformation tidal wave is coming at them and they want to do something, but they go, I don't have Legal Ops, I don't have headcount. I don't have a way to maintain systems once I get them up and running. And I know when I started in Legal Ops, it was like me headcount. And that's all you had. And now you have all these other options, like you can transform your entire department without any headcount now because there are options like law companies.

Yeah. The first company ever started was a data room company. I remember back then we paid a lot of money for. We probably paid back in 96, like $120,000 for an HTML program. Okay. And there was massive demand for those people. So that feels a lot like neatlops in the last couple of years, okay, we had to build our own servers and we had to let me literally, you had to have your own iron, your own hardware, and you had to actually build all the various levels of a server stack, you know, the web stack, but including cyber. Now, we all know today that if we want to actually launch a new software capability, there's kind of a point and click way of being able to build your own website now or a web application. And I'm not saying we are at a place where we've matured from build it yourself, pay people a lot of money because there's limited talent, design everything from scratch or every process from scratch, every metric that you're going to measure, navigate the political landscape for the first time. I'm not saying that we're through to this now, point and click future, but I think the direction of travel is clear. When I think of our unfortunately very, very good competitors and we're all trying to participate in building the future. I think that again, if you have this more community view of things, a view of us all as professionals that can work in different places over our career, I think we're getting to a greater and greater shared understanding of what is actually possible. And you can imagine if you could do X, Y or Z. And in the past you would say there were a few of you who had the native talents, GC who was supportive and you could kind of get things off the ground. But now this has been democratized, there's a lot more imagine if. And I think the problem for us now is less what we could imagine doing. I think now we've just discovered that it's actually quite hard work. I Feel like we're all starting to now be more realistic about. Not only is it clear that most of us or more companies want to modernize law in the business. We understand the enterprise imperative of law not slowing down the business. We've got more and more of us with capabilities but we've also got some scarce, you know, we've also got some skin knees and I think a couple of years ago that held us back a bit. There was a little bit of like well that didn't work. But I think now what's happening is this is emergence of in the ecosystem people saying, you know what, it is hard if you want to transform. I'll give us a parallel want to transform your sales organization. It's actually quite hard to change the hearts and minds and systems and data and processes and methods of and same thing in legal. It's quite hard. And so when it gets hard, we shouldn't say that was a crazy idea, that person wasn't capable, that provider doesn't care. I do think clock was a really big part of this but I think the general counsel rolling up their sleeves as well and actually saying instead of ops being separate, I think there's just a beginning awareness of the law department is multidisciplinary and it requires both deep expertise in some areas and it requires real experience and understanding of the culture and of the personalities and the objectives of the business and the people. And it requires the ability to weave all of that together operationally into some sort of executable path and at risk of this actually preventing people from ever working with elevate. I think you just got to go into this knowing that your plan is going to meet the real world and you've got to pivot and duck and dive and know when to be patient, know when to take a step back, be clear eyed about things that don't go according to plan but actually come up with a way of mitigating those risks, advancing things because if we're not careful there will be winners and losers. There will be some businesses I'm thinking about a customer right now, life sciences business where two departments, I'll say the non clinical and the clinical teams took very different paths to operationalize law. And as their business grew they were a very successful business. The people who worked through the difficulties were able to much better respond to the business demands for growth than the people the legal team supporting the other off. You'll notice I'm careful not to say which is which. You just said this is too hard and I don't know I'll be able to operationalize. And then when the demand did come through, because the business was successful, because their executive team, which the law department is part of, had executed well on their strategy, all of a sudden, this becomes a bottleneck.

Right. It is hard. And I think that's why the community and why Clock was successful is because it is such a hard job that you kind of need to rely on each other just to vent, but to also have a common understanding of the journey and the pitfalls and the best practices and to share what's going to work and what's not going to work. You already mentioned the importance of the community and our shared vision for building the future and understanding what's possible. That is a journey you and I have both been on for decades now, I think. And I do want to just give you and your elevate team some credit because we just talked about how we met probably in 2010, 2011, in the early days of Clocks New, and it was a book club. But you all were so critical in supporting us, from our very first meetings to being the first sponsor to sign up and really write us a check and fund the business that we were going to create or this organization, this nonprofit, because you believed in this small group of misfits. You know, I often tell the story that I put the first institute on my personal credit card and kind of just held my breath. But you guys also put some skin in the game and kind of held your breath with us, and we jumped in.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to see how this whole community is evolved and the fragmentation that happens. I'm not sure people are comfortable with me mentioning the fact that if you look at my peer group, there was a group of people who we have stood on the shoulders of the people that came before, and the people who are the next cohort are standing on the shoulders of, I'll say, my peer group. And one of the things I talk about with my peer group is, hey, we didn't move as far or as fast as we hoped we would, but we didn't move forward. And we also have to kind of accept that now. We have to really not only accept it, but we somehow have to find a way to celebrate the fact that the next cohort is the spotlight is on them. This is their time to shine. And we have to be comfortable with not being at the center of things anymore. And I think that's quite a hard thing. I think that's quite a hard thing for the, As I said, the sort of group. That was before my peer group and my peer group. Somehow we've got to find a way to help this much larger next generation. Yeah, exactly. I feel it's less about playbooks and practices, which I think are absolutely important, but I see them as hygiene factors now. I think it's the coaching and mentoring and advising. And I don't mean it in a fluffy sense. I mean, how do you persuade that difficult executive GC or CFO who doesn't really fully buy into what you're proposing? By the way, sometimes it's because your proposal isn't really fully baked down and that's part of the coaching. You actually need to do a better job of building a consensus or really surfacing what the burning platform is so that people feel it, but do it in a way that doesn't embarrass people. It's easier to talk about this when you've got the scars. But we don't want the next group to just have to learn and make the same mistakes that we did. We've got to find a way to help them. And every person's situation is different. But there are things around change and experiences that you can bring to the table. And personally, one of the best things that the big four have brought to their participation is that they have opened up much more of the conversation around providing experience, the value of experience. So in the past, I used to say, hi, I'm Liam, I've done this 12 times, please listen to me. But now what happens is you walk into a situation and they've already had meetings with someone else from another credible provider. So that when I get to the point that says, you know, look, I'm Liam and I've done this 37 times, they're already open to being advised. Okay. I'm not just buying a service where I want to direct every step of the way. I want to co design a path to this better future.

Yeah. I think this next generation is critically important and we have maybe set the stage for them. I want them to be successful and to learn from everything that we've put in place. But I really envy them because like you said, so much of the conversation is being forced by all these new entrants. Right. And all this change that's happening that you cannot ignore in the industry. And so it's not the first time that people are hearing about efficiency, effectiveness, big four different types of ways to deliver services, all these options that are available we talked about when I first started, in the beginning of the early days of legal Ops it was do everything yourselves, figure it out on your own, recreate the wheel in your silo. But now there's a community, now there's advisory services, now there's managed services.

There's all this flexible talent that can.

Come and help you. So they have a lot more options to get ahead. And I mean we haven't even talked about the technology revolution and generative AI that's happening now that's bringing technology and transformation conversations into the workplace with serious gusto.

Yeah, I really, really agree with that. I think one of the excuses of not building a law department that runs at the speed of business was I don't have a technology platform or I don't have a technology budget and those two are related because if it's a lot of money, then there's a reason. And if what got you here didn't cost very much, then who wants to then spend another couple of hundred thousand dollars or more? I think anyone who knows me has said, look, firstly there has been an explosion of technologies that are all experiments and some of them very successful. Your company is an example of that. Very successful about they found a use case and they really building a really usable experience. I have remained committed to building digital in elevate not because I think we're going to build a digital sort of legal platform for the GC or technology platform for the GC that is better than others will build. But it has been really useful when we work with some customers who have said I can't really go very far because I don't have a technology platform. So at some point I said okay, you know what, I'm going to take that problem away. I'm going to deliver a workflow and a reporting and a AI powered capability that will be enough. And I think that in five years I may find that I don't need that because there are enough low cost kind of you can buy them off the shelf, so to speak. But I do feel this is important that some of us stay focused on the digital enablement and the software enablement of routine legal work. We do a bunch of work with companies who have employed obviously great software from, you know, the sort of servicenows of the world. For example, they're great, it's great software but the and part is and they are built for a variety of cases, sometimes not raw. We use one of these tools ourselves in the way that we run our accounting businesses or our HR program on an integrated platform. And do I really want to kind of, you know, the work I have to do to integrate workday and Carta and netsuite and all of that. I can see that we're on this journey where one day there will be one ERP ring to rule them all. But for now, look, law departments need a good enough digital platform to handle the use cases that are their day to day routine use cases. I've continued to invest in that because I think that if you can take that reason for not doing something away, you open up the belief that the legal ops or the law department has that they can actually work differently. That's the reason that I've kept at it because I feel that you won't really get to routine scale managed services if everything is built as a custom set of workflows on whatever custom software environment that every law department in the world has. Because every law department is unique, because a business is unique. I think we have to also lean into how do we as much as possible provide a standardized getting started platform that you can configure and connect. Because if without that I think there is a bit of a reliance to sort of spreadsheets and email.

Yeah, well, what are your thoughts on the one system to rule them all? Is that going to happen in the foreseeable future? Is that even valuable? Do we need that? Do we just need something that's purpose built for 80% and has good APIs? What are your thoughts?

I think we will see enterprise systems Salesforce emerge as the winner. Will we see some of the elp SAP emerges the winner in that I think that the work streams that a law department touches and contracting is a good one. I think they are unique and complex enough that the next generation of software will be focused on solving those problems. If you're pretty clear that your roadmap is I'm going to work on contracting next and then I'm going to work on compliance. I mean the fact is is that you'll buy software for each of those things. I think a lot of law departments to go on that path, they have to ask for materially more budget. But not going on the path means that they won't be able to enable the enterprise. They won't be able to operate at the speed of the enterprise. So I think there's this tension that's emerging that I believe is most global companies are buying and building a more modern infrastructure for law. And just like in the accounting department or HR and you're putting it together and you're trying to connect with APIs, I think that is going to be the way of the future for the next five years, the idea that a couple of the big legal and risk software providers are going to build very large scale single platforms, they're going to have to be private equity backed and I have to be therefore valuable and expensive and they're going to be very sticky and there'll only be a few winners in that. So yeah, I think that we will see after this generation of technology over the next few years, I think we'll see another wave of, we'll see a consolidation wave and then I think it will end up with a couple of winners and I think the segmentation will probably be more around the size of company. If you are a Global 1000 business, you will likely have a platform that integrates a single legal platform that integrates with your single accounting platform or your single IT platform or your single sales platform. And I think that if you kind of push out even further, you know, in 15, 20 years, maybe sooner than that, but then I think there's a possibility of there will be the full enterprise stack and legal is just perhaps the last or one of the laggards in this. And I do think it's an important part of our roles, you know, legal ops, the law company. I think we are helping provide the advice, the software, the services to take steps down that path. I do think it's going to be steps forward and back. Mary, you and I have worked together over the years as well and I'd like to say that it always went well and went easily, but I know that's not true. Sometimes you have to take a step back in order to take a step forward and you need to accept that customers priorities change as well. So I think that's another thing that we also have to kind of build. The service provider community has got to be a bit more agile and adaptable and flexible to just deal with the fact that not only do things not always go according to plan, but sometimes things do go according to plan. And then you have a general counsel change and you're suddenly say you want to head in a direction or you start the same team, but all of a sudden the business has acquired a business and has a very different set of priorities. So I think there's a ton of opportunity, but there are no shortcuts, there are no quick fixes.

I mean the only constant is change. We say that again and again. It's a series of failures before you get that step forward, like you said.

And I think you're right.

The collaboration and the relationships that we have across the ecosystem are so strong. And there is a lot of forgiveness because we understand we're trying to figure this out on our own. Right. I know when Google had worked with Elevate, it was kind of the first time either of us had done a project of that type. And we had to figure it out together. And we took a couple steps backwards together and we eventually made it forward, which is fantastic. And that paved the way for a lot of companies to follow. After what we did, it's going to take some stumbling together to figure it.

Out what the future looks like.

That takes a bunch of emotional resilience for the buyers. I remember once having a meeting with you and we were talking a bit about your culture in your culture of the company and how it worked. I remember I left and I'd given you the assurances of like, you know, well, elevate can be googly. And I remember that conversation. But I remember getting in my car to go to the, you know, my next meeting. I was thinking to myself, like, what happens to Mary if I don't do that? It just crossed my mind that it was, I thought, like, okay, in my own company, what happens when an executive walks into my room, pitches an idea, I get on board with it and then it doesn't quite go according to plan. Because we're human. We have this sort of how do people see us? And sometimes they see us because we execute what we said we're going to do. We deliver ahead of plan, we deliver under budget, and other times we get our reputation because we're really good at communicating problems. As soon as we see them, we get ahead of them. We actually make sure that we bring supporters along. We don't overreact when things don't go according to plan, but we are clear eyed about it so that we don't put good money on. I mean, for the buyers or the builders of the future, there's a sort of emotional reputational resilience that I think we in the builder provider community have got to be mindful of. And we also need to also try not to get too defensive as well. Because when I think About Elevate today $100 million business, I've got a couple of customer moments where I'm like, yeah, I really, really wish we haven't put that customer in that difficult position for that. But largely, I mean, when I say largely, I mean like the vast majority of the time I think people would say they've got what I actually hope for. I don't think we could have built this if we, me and my colleagues and our customers weren't prepared to take risks and sometimes have to work together to kind of get through things. How do you deal with your manager when they are unclear about their priorities? Or how do you deal with, I didn't plan for this uptick in business or down ticking business and now I'm kind of flat foot. I mean, I think there's more to community and belonging and feeling that we can lean on each other than meets the eye. And in a business where we talk a lot about our astronomical hourly bill rates and it's quite easy to throw stones at that sort of capitalist side of law. But actually that's just one dimension. There are a lot of people trying really hard and making progress.

That's right. The peer community is certainly one thing, like you said, where we can all help each other. But the ecosystem, going back to the term that I think you coined, the legal ecosystem, there are such strong relationships and trust and ties because we are taking a leap of faith together. And that's why whenever we counsel people, we say, when you're trying to find the right vendor, whether it's software or managed services or advisory, you have to look for a partner. Don't just look for requirements, look for a partner who is going to help you and understand your needs and grow with you. Because like you said, that person is taking a risk in their company and their reputation is on the line. And when every one of the initiatives that Legal Ops is doing is trying to be successful to gain the trust of your stakeholders, it's like, if I hire elevate, you better be in this with me because we need to succeed. You got to make me look good, right? And same with the software. Like I can't buy software. That's not going to work.

It's the other way around as well. I wonder if people actually say this. So what happens when my colleagues come away from a meeting with a law firm or law department? There is a pretty quick discussion about does that team have the support buying budget, burning desire to actually make it work? Especially when there was that explosion of everyone wanted to do things all at the same time. You'd have to have this way of saying like, well, how do you not learn into a land war in Asia? You know, you don't want to work with a customer that may be an optimistic, passionate person, but actually isn't supported by the rest of their organization, or doesn't really have the budget or doesn't have the clarity of what next. So that comes back to the People side of things. You've got to find it's a partnership and it's a partnership over the long run. So it has to be sustainable.

Yeah, that's right. Okay, I'm going to pivot us to a little bit of fun since you mentioned people and tell the story of how you and I were sitting next to each other at a clock dinner in Vegas 2017. And that's when we realized we were cosmically bound because the stars of our backgrounds are so aligned. So I can't remember exactly how the story goes. I think we were sitting around and talking about our Myers Briggs.

Yeah.

And that's when we both realized that we are both ENTJ. And not just ENTJ, but quite extreme on some of the ENTJ's. And that's rare, I think. What is it like less than 20% of the world, Right. Is that category?

I think it's something like 6%, but.

Yeah, 6 or 8.

Yeah.

So that's already like 6 or 8%. Then we found out that we share the same birthday, which again is like how many people in a room are at the same dinner table share the same birthday? So if anyone's interested, I think someone.

Can do the math on that. But I think that that is statistically more likely than one thinks. But certainly not sitting opposite.

Yeah.

Okay. So we're both August 13th. Leo's. If anyone wants to send us birthday cards and presents.

And we're very Leo as well.

We are very Leo. And then it gets better. So we're already sitting there going, what are the chances? What are the chances? And meanwhile the rest of the dinner table is like, this is crazy. And then for some random reason we decide to share what our favorite songs are. And that's the kicker. You tell the rest of the story.

I can't remember what maybe we were talking about concerts and as we got onto our favorite song, where is My Mind by the Pixies. And like at that point when we sort of blurted out at the same time, it was a little bit like, remember back in the day when we weren't sure if Google was reading our email? You know what I mean? It was one of those moments that you must have thought I was stalking you and you were stalking me.

I thought you were pulling my leg. When you said that's my favorite song. I was like, very, very funny. Okay. You said, I swear to God. I said, I swear to God.

And randomly this is going to make you laugh even more than. So my son's home from university, right? Now and he's best friend from high school is visiting him and the movie that they sat down and we all watched last night was my club.

I knew you were going to say that. So that's wild. And the similarities continue. I mean, every time we talk to each other, we sort of find some quirky thing that we have in common. Like last time we sat down together, we discovered we're both really adamant about making sure we find time to work out every day. It's like a non negotiable. Even when we travel, we got to make that part of the day.

Yeah, you've got good memory. You've had fantastic recall.

Those were just like so many things that I thought, wow, me and Liam.

Are like the same person.

So back, back to the work stuff.

For the law firms then.

Okay, so you also advise law firms as well as in house teams. And I know on our podcast we haven't had a chance to talk a lot about law firms, but their role in our ecosystem is certainly changing. We all know there are many things they should be doing differently.

Pavement here. Now, at least outside the United States.

A lot of clients are going to their law firms as advisors for tech roadmaps and you know, what tech they should buy, which I don't think we do that much in the US but it's certainly something I'm hearing more and.

More about what's happening in the world.

Of law firms and what are they and what should they be doing?

This might surprise people. So I'm quite an advocate for the validity and importance of the role of law firms in different levels. So this is the obvious one about the advice of law. That's obvious.

Okay, yeah, that'll continue.

But occasionally when people really are sort of like trying to give me a jab about this alternative thing, I actually say, well, I think of the alternative legal market as actually these advisory or legal ops or service centers or the technology strategies of law firms. And what I mean by that is that's alternative to their core business. Okay. Their core business is advice of law. I think there is a real understanding across most law firm leadership teams. And you know this because of your early career. There was some very pioneering work that was done by some firms about thinking differently about the delivery of legal services. I think that that is a lot of experiments. Not all of them have been successful. And I actually think they should be celebrated. By the way, I think it's hard to sustain in a business where you at the end of the year, pay out your profits to your partners. I Understand that whole feeling. I mean, I know it myself. I think about my colleagues. We spent years, years not paying ourselves as we were plowing the money back into the business. I understand there's a limit to how much money you want to spend in investing in building your alternative legal capabilities to the core of the advice of law. So I think some of those law firm experiments that our community, these people might not feel were great successes. I still commend them for having tried, learned something. And the only thing that they really discovered was the limits of that particular law firm partnerships investment appetite. Some of these businesses have been very successful. You've seen some of the service centers that have been built have really transformed the price point of delivering legal projects in some cases have made them doable in the regulatory or other timeline, which they wouldn't have been before. And I think there's a beginning of respect for the other disciplines that are part of these law firms. Whether or not it's the data science capability or whether or not it's the innovation capability or the software capability or, or the consulting and advisory capability. Being careful not to use names in this. But I think about some of the people who are running these law firm enterprises and they are world class. And what I mean by that is I would hire them to be at elevate and I think my peers would want them to be part of their organizations. They're great. And they have brought a lot of the experimenting from law departments, a lot of the experimenting from the law companies into law firms. And I know that the vast majority of law firm partners were sort of heads down, working the way they were working. But one project at a time. These lawyers are learning that there are sometimes working differently or as I call delivering differently delivers value. So I'm optimistic about law firms. Something like 40% of Elebase revenue is law firms.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I suppose again I got a dog in the hunt. So you can kind of take what I said with a bucket of salt. But I think that law firms are also real sources of innovation, innovation and collaboration. And I actually think these new ways of working have virtually insignificant impact on the economics of their core business. You know, I do occasionally hear, well, aren't companies like you? I was at a dinner with a management partner who was really in my face about well, your barbarians gate kind of law companies are clawing away at law firms. And I was like, I do not see that. I wouldn't even bother with you. I'm not an economist. I don't even bother with the argument that I made. There's more demand for law than ever evidenced in pricing, which seems to only go in one direction because of the laws of economics. And I think we have to find these alternative ways or this ability to deliver differently in order to meet the accelerating needs of the enterprise. And that is just becoming more digital faster. I think that my law firm friends, they embrace all of us, help doing a lot of the experimenting and then building.

I think they should. Yeah. I think for the first time I am seeing real change in the law firms and kind of their mindset and how they can work with other companies in the ecosystem and where they can add value to their clients. So I'm hopeful. I think it's great. There's a lot of change happening right now. It's exciting.

Yeah, I agree with you.

Well, Liam, thank you as always. I know we could probably keep talking, but this has been such a pleasure and so great to have you on the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

Talk to you soon.

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