#44 - Change and Innovation in the Age of AI with Ashley John, Head of Legal Ops at Anglo American

Hello from London, where I had the opportunity to sit down in person today with my friend and legal ops leader, Ashley John, who is the head of legal operations at Anglo American. What is Anglo American? It is a leading global mining company and another one of those biggest companies in the world that you know but you think you've never heard of. Their metals are the essential ingredients in smartphones, electric cars, wind turbines, and they also own a company called De Beers, of course, the world's largest diamond company. Remember that slogan, a diamond is forever? That's them. Ash is a legal operations leader with experience in orchestrating transformative change within large corporate environments. Leveraging a consulting background that spans diverse functions and sectors, Ashley spearheaded the establishment of a global legal operations function as part of the broader transformation at Anglo American. There he has established the strategic vision created fit for the future legal processes and structures across the multinational team, thereby enhancing efficiency and fostering collaboration. Ashley's dynamic approach, cultivated through years of navigating different sectors, positions him as a catalyst for change, translating his consulting versatility into a deep thinker in the realm of legal operations. Prior to consulting, Ash came from a career in mining and geology. Really unusual. And then, like so many of us, fell into this world as a result. He comes to the profession with a keen eye towards examining the why behind how we currently provide legal services. Ash has always had a strong natural curiosity, and he has this desire to dig in and understand why do we do the things we do this way and is very quick to be creative in offering alternatives. Today we get into things like, why does it feel like some legal ops leadership roles are being eliminated at big Fortune 500 companies? And what can we do about it? The language that we choose to use in our industry, why does it hold us back, including terms like non lawyer or alternative when it comes to alternative legal service providers or alternative fee arrangements? And we tackle the big questions facing law firms today, things like the billable hour and the increasing pressures that AI is putting on all of us to rethink how the law firm business and the model might have to change. I had a ton of fun talking to Ash today about these big topics, and I'm excited to have you listen in with that onto the episode.

All right. Hey, Ash.

Morning.

It's good to be here in London with you.

Glad to host you.

Yeah, it's always nice to come, but every single time I come, it's cloudy and rainy.

I mean, this is a good day. It's not raining yet.

It's not always like this. Honestly, I hear all the time?

Yeah, it's. I mean, give it 10 minutes. It'll be raining, but we're doing okay.

Yeah. So nice new building that you guys moved into. Anglo American, De Beers, the. The mining company. Diamonds. Do you give your visitor diamonds as sort of swag? I do. The pearls.

I'm happy to wear diamonds Spin off podcast.

So I thought what we would do today, kind of go through some of the hot topics that are on everyone's minds here on LinkedIn. You and I are both really active on LinkedIn. You see a lot of the chatter on social that people are chatting about these days. Most recently, I mean, to this, the end of April. We're getting ready to have clock. You're going to clock?

I am, yeah. Yeah. Looking forward to it.

There's a lot of talk about companies. I mean, the economy. Whenever something happens like this, economy down, you see roles eliminated. And there's also a lot of people adding roles. I actually just got pinged from a couple recruiters this morning asking if I knew. So you see both bits, right? You see a lot of folks saying we need to expand, we need to do more in tech, we need to hire legal ops. But we're also seeing a bit of contraction, so particularly in senior roles where either someone is leaving or the role is eliminated and not being backfilled. Even Fortune 100 companies think this is happening.

To have 15 years in legal experience, blah, blah, blah. The reality is, if we go back to absolute fundamentals of what a legal ops role is, it's a change role. It's a change, as you said, change leadership role. It needs to be broad. It needs to have a lot of ability to understand supply chains and external markets and elements of procurement. It is a bit of a jack of all trades type role. I think that's what's difficult about it because it's very value if you have your one thing, the specialization. Exactly. So you are the ultimate generalist. And I think that actually works against.

That's a good point. So how, as we try to help all the GCs and CLOs that are listening and wondering, okay, I get it, I want to hire this. How do I find this person? How do they hire? What should they look for? I agree the generalist, but the generalist resume doesn't jump at it. I do a lot of things pretty well.

I think transformative experience or transformation experience, sort of project director type roles where you work across a number of different disciplines and help bring things together to a shared outcome. I think if you start there, I think the Value or the benefit of actually being willing to look outside legal. Up legal? Yeah, absolutely. I know I'm sort of spouting my own background a little bit here, but I talked to quite a few people and you'd be amazed at how many people got into legal ops through a consultancy group or a change management type role and worked their way up or things of that nature. Because actually, I hate to break it to a lot of people who might be listening, but legal isn't that special.

No, that's right.

It's process people, technology, data. Maybe not necessarily in that order, but they're the fundamentals.

Yeah. Which is. So is every other industry, every other vertical.

Absolutely.

What I mean, what are your thoughts on legal background being necessary and even. Let's just start with lawyer background being necessary. Helpful.

I think it's helpful from an empathy standpoint, but I would question whether the empathy of empathy is outweighed by the institutionalization. Is there unconscious bias through your own lived experience of being a practitioner? That means that you don't challenge strongly enough a status quo, whatever that status quo might be. So that's partly what I've enjoyed is actually I've got no, I'm a geochemist, nothing to do with legal whatsoever. And actually that's helpful because I'm comfortable enough asking the stupid inadvertent commerce question, but actually being able to just go, why are we doing that? Well, we've always done it that way. Ah, there it is. Okay.

And those aren't stupid questions. They're actually the right program questions.

But being able to ask it from a genuine, authentic, I don't know the answer.

Help me understand.

Yes, as opposed to, I know I did this 10 years ago and I get it, but let me ask the question anyway. You get a different answer from people. So I don't think it's that the willingness to immerse yourself and learn and be vulnerable in that space and be comfortable with that vulnerability is absolutely vital. But I personally, I don't think it's as important as some people may count.

Yeah, well, and I think you, you just answered my next question, which is the lawyers will always turn around and say, how could you possibly understand what I do day to day?

Help me understand.

That's right. That's right. Let me sit in your shoes. Walk me through it. How do you do this? That's right.

With compassion and authenticity. But don't allow it to drag you in. You've got to be able, and it's slightly counterintuitive. I've just Said don't be an island, but you kind of need to be in a sense of an outside in perspective is so powerful.

Yeah. So it's okay. So we don't think you have to actually have been a practicing lawyer. What about just experience in legal? Maybe having worked as a paralegal or working at a law firm or working with contracts. Is that even important?

I mean it's beneficial obviously, but I don't think it's a must have because as I said, process, people, technology, data, the rest of it is context actually. If you can deal, if you can do those, if you know how to build a culture, get people bought into a vision and building skills and all of that piece. If you know how to transform, analyze, assess, transform process and you know how to assess technology that will enable that. Not necessarily tech first, but enablement of process. You can do that anywhere. Really.

Yeah. So look outside and I couldn't agree more. And I try to tell folks this as you're hiring, you don't need to look for legal background, you don't have to look for legal experience. And yes, it's helpful, It's a nice to have and fantastic. If you find the unicorn who's done this already for 10 years, that also is very rare and doesn't exist. But look outside for people who have done things similar, but maybe not in your industry.

Absolutely. Because you get a unique perspective. Yeah. We talk about diversity around sort of much more around physical characteristics, but there is an element and I'm not saying it's more important, but having a diverse background is very valuable when it comes to transformation and change.

Yeah.

And I think that's something that is not necessarily being thought about too much is unlike lots of other professions, the legal profession, it's almost a single route profession.

Yeah.

If you look at HR or you look at tax, maybe to a lesser extent, but finance, supply chain, there are diverse career paths that get you to that. Legal doesn't necessarily have that. And there is that. I mean there's legal literature out there that says law school changes the physiology of the brain to that extent. We won't get into that. But you are looking at a piece of. You get a lot of people who have been trained to think in a very similar way and you are in a confirmation bias echo chamber.

That's right.

And I think having someone who hasn't got any of that to be able to come in and not necessarily bulldoze through that, but be able to probe and be willing to be. It's insider outsider dynamics ultimately Yeah, I think that's really powerful.

Yeah. So that brings us to the next controversial topic that everyone's talking about.

Oh, here we go.

Lawyer terminology.

I'm not a fan.

You're not a fan? Okay, tell me more.

I think ultimately nobody should be defined by what they're not.

By being non anything. Yeah. Just to back up, I guess there's been a lot of chatter externally, socially about should we ban the term non lawyer in the legal industry? Because where else do you have doctors and non doctors? We have lawyers and non lawyers. So that's been the talk. And so you're on the fence of let's ban it?

Yeah. Oh, I'm not on the fence. I'm definitely on one side of. Yeah, it's. It adds no value. It's a lazy term that has unintended consequences. And I think if we're going to really acknowledge and recognize the value of everyone who, who isn't a practitioner, then we should do. And we should not be defining them by sort of second class citizen status almost.

Yeah.

And I'm pleased to see that it started. I think we might have even had an initial conversation on it. But yeah, we don't need it.

So my thought. So I don't like the sort of idea that because you're a non lawyer, you're anything less than the lawyers in the room. Paid, less, respected, less, less intelligent. All those sort of implications I can't stand. That said, I do think there is a need for some term that collective now. Yeah, yeah. But distinguishes people who are not lawyers because of the idea of privilege or, you know, that the work that can be done by certain role in person. And there's been talk about, oh, let's use business professional, which is a fine term, but there are going to be people who are practicing lawyers or licensed attorneys who are now not practicing and are business professionals. To me, you. My idea is you can't have a Venn diagram. It actually needs to be two separate buckets.

Right.

You can't have someone who's in the middle. You have to have the lawyers and the non. And it's not the right term. So do we need to come up with a new word for people who are not lawyers? And my sort of parallel is, you know, in the military or the police, you have civilians. It's a perfectly fine word for people who are non military or non law enforcement. Right. And there's nothing pejorative about that word.

Exactly. But it's a positive term. Right. It's not a non military. It's a term in itself. So.

So we have to make up any word.

Well, just find one, you know, practitioner and professional or I don't know, but something like that. I've tried very hard to even move away from lawyer because there are people who practice or deliver the practice of law who aren't necessarily trademark practitioners or patent attorneys and that sort of stuff. That collective noun is practitioner. From my perspective, and this is just my own opinion, I think professionals or something akin to that, it's suitable.

All right, so we need new words to be made.

Yeah. Comment in the freddle. I don't know how we do this, Mary, you tell me.

But yeah, we take the word lawyer, reverse it, read it backwards and that's fair. We can try so on. On that same thread about the words that we choose to use.

Power of language.

But you've wrote, written a few posts on this and, and I love it. The other one that you commented on was the idea of alternative alsp. Yeah. These are common terms for those who are new. The alternative legal service provider, which is anything that's not a law firm that is delivering legal services. There's AFA for alternative fee arrangement, which is. I think that's a billable hour.

Sure. There's others.

Yeah, I'm sure there's others. But your comments on why we should.

Eliminate the word alternative, it reinforces the status quo.

That's right.

Ultimately, you know, if, if you take it out of the legal profession and we start to think about use of alternative alternatives, music, alternative societies, cultures, all that sort of stuff, it is in effect away from the mainstream now. The unintended, the implied message there is risky, dangerous, oh, don't go there, there'd be dragons. The crazy people are over there doing something and stay here where it's safe in the mainstream and we'll take care of you and all of that kind of thing.

Thing.

And actually I don't know off the top of my head, but the ALSP market must be billions of dollars.

Right. And the way they define themselves is so broad.

Yeah, that's not an alternative market. That is a fundamental pillar of the market itself. I don't think it's not a break in or a startup upstart even. Yeah. So calling it alternate just. It was a valid turn back in the day, let's be honest. When it was a break in is absolutely fine to define it in that way, but times change and I think that one especially we need to move on from because it's just not alternative. And the same with afa.

Right.

I think to quote Chris Grant from hsbc, he spammed the term. I think he now has efa, which I hope to get right, is, is either effective or efficient for your arrangement because it's not alternative and actually from my perspective is better. It's fundamentally, it manages costs, it could help control costs, it manages the risk potentially better than a billable hour where you're dependent on scope management and project management from the client side, which I think we can all do better at. So again, another example where at the time when it was an insurgency concept, absolutely fine. But now it's just a fear, it's a commercial model, it's a fee arrangement, it shouldn't be defined as something difficult or risky or not the norm because it is now billions of dollars going through both LSPs and is that what you're calling them?

LSPs, yeah.

Legal Service providers, collective nouns again.

Yeah. Liam on Elevate, he tried to change the terminology to law companies, which I like. So you have law firms and law companies. I think that works.

I think there's a UK firm or a firm we know in the UK that is sort of a professional services firm with legal at its heart or at its center or something like that. So they've spun it in that way as well because actually a lot of the law firms now have innovation services and all these sorts of things that are actually completely valid complementary capabilities to the practice and delivery of law. Yeah, but it's not legal practitioners marking up contracts or whatever on that side of things. So I think there's direction to travel, which is encouraging, but I think there's still more to do.

So yesterday on that topic, if we can go down that path for just a moment, yesterday here in London, I spent the afternoon at a FT roundtable with a bunch of managing partners from some of the biggest law firms in the world. And some of the commentary was the law firm of the future will actually not be a law firm because of all these other, not alternative but other services that they're adding to it. Advisory consultancies, innovation arms, helping tax, helping the client do more than just practice law, but really advise them strategically. Which is what we've seen from probably the big four going the opposite direction. What are your thoughts? Do you think that's true? Where are law firms going to go?

I mean that's following the trend of the in house team.

Right.

So the in house team is no longer this silo, inbox, process, outbox. They are a business partner, a business owner, an enterprise advisor, all of those terms. And I think the law firms are seeing that happening and actually seeing GCS and clos moving from the classic siloed advisor on demand to a business executive. And I think they're following that trend. I agree. I think diversification, I wonder whether it's, as you mentioned, the big four going the other way, whether that's actually creating an impetus, pressure, market pressure for the firms, the conventional law firms and classic law firms to look more broad or actually are they just looking at it and going well, the integrated nature of legal services, the way our clients operate, we can no longer be this tiny little pillar. We need to broaden and diversify to meet the demands of the complex nature of so many things that are being handled by the in house team. I don't really have too much of a view on it, to be honest. I think change and progress is always good and I think the pace that we're seeing things evolve, whether it's new regulations, the complexity of regulations, the integrated and interconnected nature of business, globally, globalization, absolutely nightmare for an in house team to keep on top of. So I think the ecosystem diversifying to be able to meet more of those needs through a singular channel has to be a good thing because it simplifies the world for the corporate team.

So what you just said, the singular channel, that's interesting because I think we've just talked about how the ecosystem has expanded, exploded. There's so many options now for an in house team. If you're a general counsel, you can build your in house team, you can hire outside counsel. But now there's plethora technology, there's flexible talent, there's law companies, there's all these different ways to think about how to. Right. Source your department. Law firms traditionally were the one option.

Yeah.

So what happens? I mean, I'd love to dig into this a little bit. Does the model change, does the serve, do the services that they offer change? And I think we're starting to see that the billable hour, is that gonna go away? So I know you have very strong views on the billable hour. We've been talking about this topic. I've been in legal for 20 years and we were talking about it when I started, you know, is it gonna ever die? Is it gonna go away? And it's very resilient.

It is, it is. It's great. It's sticky, that's for sure. Let's touch on the sort of the conduit point and that singular channel and then I'll give some thoughts on the billable hour piece. I think we're seeing it that diversification potentially by law firms is a way to make sure that they are hedging almost against the new entrants LSDs, all of this. But actually it's also client pressure. Right. So clients are no longer or even less willing I would say on a general basis to accept the army of junior associates doing doc reviews in a basement somewhere by the hour. So there's a maturity of purchasing by the client side. I would like to think that maturity is accelerating due to legal ops coming in and not being as embroiled as emotionally invested in the kind of person to person relationship. We can a little bit of add a bit of commercial tension in there without damaging the relationship side of things. But I also think that we have to evolve. The firms have to evolve, the clients have to evolve because the budgets don't scale with the scaling of the work that's required. So something has to give and ultimately that is the price point of the work delivered. And I think that will be the thing. The one lever that a lot of clients don't use necessarily is actually the buying power and taking the time because it is a higher effort state to unbundle a matter or look at it more on a task basis and go no, I'm going to send that repeatable, low value, low complexity piece of work to someone who can is set up to do it on a commoditized basis versus I want the strategic advice direction from tier one law firm. On the billable hour side of things, we've done really well. We haven't touched on AI yet so we were doing so well. But I do think in time that is going to have a sort of disruptive force on the billable hour because clients are understanding now that research does not take 2000 hours. When we know how quickly stuff can get done, we're not going to be willing to pay the conventional way. And I think we're seeing with the investment that all the firms are putting into that sort of space, they get.

That, they get it.

The bit that I still don't really understand is growth versus scale from a margin, commercial model and margin standpoint. My background I was always fixed fee, high margin where I can do work efficiently in order to the more efficient I am, the better it is for the company and the client's outcome is exactly the same. That mentality we're not seeing, we're seeing still the target. I think the law society put a post out a couple of weeks ago that said productivity had gone down in the legal profession and their metric was the average number of billable hours had gone down. So that was what they were equating productivity.

Yeah, that's right.

I won't say what I thought when I read it. That to me is not productivity. That has no reference to outcomes. That is how much time has been spent doing things, not how many outcomes have been delivered. And I think that combined with the AFA efa, that evolution will be where that commercial model has to change because it's also a well being thing. The market is constrained. From a legal practitioner perspective, you've seen, I think the US law firms are taking trying to sign up first year law students for their second year summer internships or something like that. I saw bonkers. But actually billable hour is in effect a fixed margin volume play. So the only way for a firm to grow more people buy one seats, more rent. But if you can disconnect that and focus on the outcome, you can make more margin on the same people by working more efficiently. There was an event in London last week where I won't mention them because they asked us not to, but someone from the law firm side was on a panel and said the bill of allower rewards the inefficient.

Absolutely.

But why are clients as a professor, as a cohort, and I know there's ambiguity in certain places and sometimes you just have to do it, but we are not holding people to account sufficiently as a cohort of people.

And why is it so hard? So again, I started in this world 20 years ago @ a law firm. In my first week I said how are we getting away with this? Because the incentives are so misaligned. I said, how is it that the less efficient you are, the more the client pays? How does that make any sense? So from an outsider perspective, again, when you are not embedded in legal for this long, you come in and you say this is bonkers, this is crazy. Why hasn't this changed? And yet we just talked about how sticky it is. Absolutely. There is a time and a place for billable.

Hours. Yeah.

Completely.

Completely. There's always going to be some percentage of the work that is always going to be that makes sense. But a large amount of it should be some efa, some fixed fee, some set budget. Is it because we have such trouble in this industry being able to understand how to scope and budget well and to set that fixed price. Have we just not been tracking what it should cost? And yeah, absolutely. AI seems to be the thing that is creating more conversation about the billable hour than ever, at least in my experience. And we've had, we've had fits and starts of oh, more work moving in house. This is going to change things. I do, I believe, like you said, that AI will start to force the conversation. But why has it been so hard and even now, I mean I just remember even when I was at Google talking to a firm and said we'd like you to propose us an efa, you know, show me what this would look like on a fixed fee basis. It was so challenging. Not just for the firms. I'll even say our in house teams, equally challenging. And our in house teams would always say, I don't know if we're going to get a good deal, let's just go back to the billable.

Hour. Yeah. Status quo thinking.

Right?

Yeah. Why do we struggle so.

Much? I think there's an element of going back to what we were talking about earlier. There's an element of confirmation fire. When you were a practicing lawyer as an associate in a law firm, I couldn't possibly think, one couldn't possibly think of how to do this on a fixed fee. But I don't know how long this would take, therefore build a lab. I think there's a, I do think there's a point there around scoping and as a profession whether scoping, the ability to scope, how to define robust assumptions, how to actually manage change on the scope from project management.

Principles.

Absolutely. I feel like that's an area of weakness, should we say of corporate teams in a. In general sense and it's all over the research and for leadership. That is a, is an element again though, that's where legal ops can, can play great role in terms of setting, setting people up for success and actually helping to manage the delivery as opposed to the substantive decision making on the, the merits and the, the.

Issue.

Yeah. And actually if you can get that partnership working where you've got sort of the delivery capability and the subject matter expertise in parallel, that's a really powerful model which is in effect the entire business case for project management within legal. Again, power of language. Why do we have to put legal in front of everything? Legal project management, project management within legal. We don't have tax project.

Management. That's right. I agree. Shake it.

Out. But yeah, so I think there's a big piece around that. But actually again, one of the ways that the technology can help the law firms in my opinion is they can actually put a layer of insights over the vast databases of time taken timekeeper records and note and annotations and all of that. You put the biops, the background and the context of a case into a whatever solution, crank the handle and it goes. We've done 9,000 of these that are 4,000 are basically similar. We estimate X. Your team that you might need is Y. These are the capabilities to look for. This is what you can automate. And all of a sudden you're off to the races. You're making margin hand over fist, but for the same outcome that the client is willing to pay.

For. That's the key. And the client is really faithful. In some of the conversations I've had with firms, they've said, okay, if we can do something, let's say more efficiently, let's say it takes us five hours less, that should free up our time to do the higher value work, to do the thinking, the synthesis of the information. Now we take that five extra hours, we're still going to use them, but we're going to do bringing it all together. And why does this matter to the client and delivering more value to the client. The question is the client willing to pay for that.

Now? Because there's no or work on another client. Yeah, that's the other thing that five hours could be doing other work.

For another client and you still bill it, but you don't think about it as billing it. And I think that's the key. That always goes back to is it a good deal? You know, when we used to talk about fixed fees, let's say between the client and the firm, you're going to do all your X type of work on a fixed fee basis. The idea in every other industry, every word is you win some of you lose some. Right. If you are thinking about it against the billable hour, there's going to be somewhere, wow, you've done this 100 times. I can do this in 10 minutes. Yeah, it outcome for the client, as you said, and they're willing to pay other times. While this is new, it'll take you longer, you're working from scratch, it's going to cost more than it would have on a billable hour basis or the other way around. But the point is, you know, they kept coming back to comparing it to what it would have cost on the billable hour basis. And then who's getting the better end of that deal? You know, do we win this time? Did the client win that this.

Time? Why can't everyone win out of.

This mentality of comparing it to the billable hour and really thinking about the margins, efficiency, value, But I struggle with why that is so hard in our space versus every other professional.

Services. I wonder whether it's because structurally, and I am talking on no basis of authority here, just hearsay and conjecture from conversations, but having not been part of a firm of this kind, but when the, the individual performance metric is associated with the hour, nothing changes. Yeah. So if you, if a law firm wants to do this, you're going to, you're going to kill it. Honestly, just go for it. If you were to turn that round and go right on a arbitrary rate basis, because every client have different rates and all of that, which is probably why they stick to an hour, because it's a common denominator. But if you had an intern rate, like an internal carbon cost or something like that, you had an internal rate that you applied across the board for performance purposes only, and you applied that, you could take away the hour as the metric if you flipped it and went, okay, the 2,000 hours that you work equates to Y margin target. If I then gave you that target and said, mary, I don't care if it's billabla cap, fixed, contingent, whatever your job, because ultimately as a practitioner in a firm, the job is to bring in profit. So let's focus on that. So, Mary, you deliver. Why? However you want. If you've done one of these deals a thousand times and you think you can do it on a capped fee or a fixed fee and you can deliver it with 10% of the resources because you've got some of the tools in the tool chest, the methods sound, you know, where the skeletons are buried, all that kind of stuff, go for it. You make 30% more on that deal from a law firm margin perspective than doing on a billable.

Hour. That's.

Right. That's the way to break it. But until you break that paradigm of performance is assessed on hour and the hierarchy. That, that's how, that's the standard unit of measure in the profession. I don't know why, but that to me is the only way you're going to move away from.

It. Yeah. So interesting. I'll never forget my old GC would say, I don't care how long it takes you, if you pick up the phone and you call the other side or call the judge and you make this go away in one phone call, it's worth more than a million dollars to.

Me. But this is the fascinating disconnect is actually the client's outcome whether you're absolutely right. Make one phone call. If it goes away, I won't pay you the six minutes it.

Took. Exactly.

Yeah. You know, I think there's some creativity that needs to come in. And again, that creativity probably has to come from outside the.

Sector.

Yeah. And I think try and really push against, but that's an uphill.

Battle. Yeah. There is so much. And the structure and the incentives of how people are rewarded in the firms. There's so many things working against the change that it is going to.

Take a lot of pressure and a reset in sort of financial and business acumen around how that interplays between the commercial profitability and the HR element. It's not.

Simple. No, it's not.

Simple. But when you look at burnout rates and attrition from the profession, I mean, it has to have something to do with the fact that we're asking people in their 20s to work 18 hours a day, six days a week. I mean, that's not right.

Surely. I recently spoke with a bunch of law firm associates because I wanted to get back in touch with. It's been a while since I've spoken to law firm associates about what do you do all day and how can tools help you and what are you struggling with. And when I showed them some of the capabilities that AI has and they said, God, my entire day of what I have planned today, you just would go away in a matter of minutes. We're talking six to eight hours of work collapsed into a few minutes. They said this would change my life, I'd be happier. But they won't let me use it because they don't know what to do with the business.

Model. Yeah, absolutely. And I think eventually. And we're not. I don't think we're too far from this eventually. The digital native, I get the generations wrong, the labeling, but the digital native, who's had it their entire completely informed, formative life is going to rock up. Probably having had access to it at law school, because I think the law schools are catching on pretty.

Quick. Oh.

Yeah. Whether or not the law schools are teaching it, the young students are playing.

With. They're playing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And there's some really some fascinating stuff that's been done by some of the business schools and law schools. You see it on LinkedIn and you just like, what? Yeah, I think that will become a real differentiator. It'll be a USP for the employee value proposition of come and work with. We are digital first as a firm, as a company, as a client company, as a corporate. That has to be something that people are considering. I think on the corporate side, on the in house side, that is Legal Ops challenge is the in house lawyer of now. Sorry, let me rephrase that. The external law firm lawyer of now compared to what it looks like in the future is probably less different than the in house lawyer of now versus the in house lawyer in the future. I think the in house law lawyer will evolve or need to evolve more. Yeah. And to a greater extent as well than potentially the law.

Firm. And we've already seen that. Right. I mean even in the recent years, you certainly heard of as you're attracting talent or retaining talent in house, one of the factors that they will bring up in interviews as a lawyer is what is your tech stack? How are you using technology? Because they don't want to come in a job where everything is manual, especially if they've come from somewhere that has already digitized. And imagine going back to paper after you've digitized in your next job. Yeah, no thanks. And that's another rallying fight for why you need legal ops because it helps to retain the talent and keep you modern, up to date. And certainly I think you're right that there will be pressure on the law firms. If not, I mean there already is to do that, but the pressure on in house teams is stronger and so they will always move.

First. Yeah, absolutely. But also the innovation cycles are getting shorter and shorter. All the pace of change and futurist curves and graphs, all that sort of stuff. But the reality is it's going to happen to us. Before the OpenAI just took a bazooka to the professional world, you'd go and you'd have an anecdotal conversation with someone and go, what are your thoughts on AI using it at work? It's all that couldn't.

Possibly.

Yes. Meanwhile they're talking to Alexa at home. Yes, they're using Google. You know, all of these things were actually the understanding and the tolerance is so wildly different. I think we're going to see an increased pace of disruptive change, not just normal change. That's right, you can say that to the point where actually one of the bigger challenges for Legal Ops is how do you create a culture within the team that doesn't get change fatigued and has an inherent and underlying resilience and curiosity for whenever something new comes up. Because new stuff is just going to keep coming every day. Gone are the days of the 18 month implementation plan because within three weeks it's probably obsolete by.

Now. That's so.

True. So how do we get to a stage where people are just willing to roll with it and see the positives in the.

Opportunity.

Yeah. I mean the saying now is the risk of inaction is greater than the risk of action. And so how do we create a culture of that? It's a great point. It's a mindset. It's a culture. And we have to be really be conscious of studying that and the ability to fail fast and move on. This is Silicon Valley.

Mindset. And be willing. Failure is a fascinating topic in legal, isn't it? And that's I think, where conventional practitioner thinking versus legal ops thinking, that's probably the first place it butts head. And perfection, perfection versus good, getting mucky with change, all of these sorts of things. And actually the way that we are going to move forward as in house teams generally is by creating environments where people can fail safely because failure, you can see them start itching when you talk to practitioners about failing stuff because it's just.

Not. Well, you hear that with Gen AI, it's not perfect, it's not good enough. I've run it twice. It gave me two different results. That's not the.

Point. Yeah, exactly. That it's giving you two results. That may be right, but ask.

It a better question and how long would it have taken you to do that without that.

Anymore?

Precise. Did it get you closer to the.

End? Yeah. And I think there is a perception around Gen AI that is slightly inaccurate because when it first came out, people were like this is going to Google's done. But it's not trying to be that. It is not a knowledge solution. That's right, it's not a knowledge solution. It can do that kind of thing. But it is not designed to be a knowledge solution. It is designed to be an opinion solution because it creates a version of knowledge that it deems right. So if you think about that in a human basis, that is an opinion. I understand this knowledge. I convey this knowledge in a way I think is appropriate to based on input. That's an opinion. Now a knowledge system can be right or wrong. An opinion system can be bad or.

Good.

Okay. And I think that if we can change that mindset and obviously the branding around sort of copilot and thinking about it as that sort of virtual assistant or virtual co worker really helps with that cognitive reframing. Because actually it's important to not think of it as getting stuff wrong. Think of it as not giving you exactly what you needed. But it's also not a mind.

Reader. Right? I mean, if I asked you to draft me an email Right now. And then I asked you to draft me an email tomorrow. You're probably gonna send me two different.

Things.

Exactly. It's just like a.

Human. And to take that a step further, it's that one. You can write that first draft of the email, go walk away for half an hour, calm down, read it and go, I might not send that and write something else. And it kind of works in the same way. And I think that's going to be a fascinating mindset shift for everyone involved in knowledge.

Work. Really, what a fascinating time to be part of all this, isn't.

It? It's mind.

Bending. I feel like we're really lucky to be working in an industry that is in need of transformation and then to have it be disrupted so much from so many different.

Angles. Yeah. And I think it'll be fascinating to watch whether the profession as a whole or whether it be law firms or in house teams are willing to look at the opportunity to leapfrog because we're kind of skipping a horizon a little bit, aren't we? So if we had the opportunity to leapfrog and just go, do you know what? We're going all in. Let's have a go. That's going to be really complicated and probably really hard, but exciting, Exciting. And the opportunity that represents is one that I didn't see coming three years ago. I mean I remember being on a panel and they was what's your big bet for 22, 23? And I just started to hear whispers about Gen AI and I went, this is something, I don't know what, but there is something that is going to happen here. But I think what's the next one? That's the question. If you think about how quickly these things are coming round now, what.

Is the next, what's the next one? But it's also leveled the place playing field for. If you think about all the firms, the departments that are out there, some of us who have been transforming them for, you know, 10 to 20 years, you're no longer ahead of everybody. No, you know, who hasn't even.

Started. That's the leapfrog opportunity. Right. You don't have to unlearn or unbuild anything to take this.

On. And you don't have to do what the playbook that we wrote for 10 years ago and that's, you know, my next blog that's coming out soon. But that's the whole idea that let's hire someone that's done this before at another company so they can repeat it. Don't do.

That. High.

Point. No, we gotta have new ideas now because the game has.

Changed. Fundamentally. The game has changed. Yeah, absolutely. And that is extremely cool. But that's a mindset thing. We're sitting here and going, this is exciting, this is cool. You know, I'm not. The team downstairs really bought in and quite open and intrigued and curious, which is.

Great. Terrifying too for a lot of.

People. But there are a lot of people who are like, oh.

No. And I totally get that. You know, what does that. When you start to think about what does that mean for me in my job and do I have to learn a new skill set? It is.

Scary. But on that mindset thing as well though, because there was. I can't remember the quote, which is not great, but. Or who said the quote. But there was that quote early in 23 where someone showed Genai to doctors and they went, this is amazing. What can it do for patients? And then the same person did it for lawyers and it was, oh no, what will this mean for me? And whether that's true or not or just Instagram hearsay or whatever, but it is somewhat symbolic of the nature of thinking around the profession is actually how can we make it about access to justice. There's a huge piece, there's a growing progress potentially around that. Democratized, brilliant, great democratization of legal, all this sort of stuff. But there are risks that come with that. And I think that for big corporates and other companies where it's okay, we could roll out Copilot or something like that, but how do we make sure that someone thinks using AI is a legal opinion or is legal advice from the in house team versus it isn't the reality. And how do you build a kind of AI for legal, bi legal and for the business by legal and keep those two things very similar. That is a complexity that when you consider global natures of big enterprises as well, that you get into some headache.

Territory. Certainly none of this will be easy and there's a lot of questions that still haven't been answered. But I really believe that we will get there because we have to, have.

To.

Absolutely. And so the question of how will this work and if it will work. It will. It's just a matter of.

When. Yeah, yeah. And willingness to lean into. We will figure out.

Eventually. Well, actually this was a really fun.

Conversation. We've covered some.

Stuff. I feel like we could keep going, but I don't want to keep you from your workday. That was a lot of fun. Thank you for being really open, transparent and sharing your sometimes unpopular opinions. Until next time. Thanks so.