#58 - Open to Weirdness: Brian Israel on Leading Legal at Anthropic

Hello everybody and welcome to Pearls on Gloves Off. I'm your host, Mary o', Carroll, Chief Operating Officer at Goodwin. Today we have an incredible guest, Brian Israel, the General Counsel of Anthropic. If you are following the AI tech world at all, you will already know that Anthropic is revolutionizing the world of artificial intelligence. Their flagship AI Claude is already being used by millions of people powering everything from complex business solutions to to creative endeavors across industries like tech, finance, health care, media, etc. They are not just developing AI though. They are reshaping how we think about intelligent technology and its potential to solve real world challenges. Brian joined Anthropic as general counsel in 2022 where he was the first lawyer there and amazingly in just two years, as we discuss on the podcast, they've grown 27 times in the legal department. Before that he spent a decade in public service in the State Department's Office of the Legal advisor and leading NASA's international national security and Space law practices. Between government appointments, Brian worked in tech startups including as GC of Planetary Resources. Prior to joining Anthropic, he also moonlighted teaching law courses at George Mason Law and Berkeley Law and founded Domain Labs as an experiment in producing online courses on optimized for busy lawyers seeking to break in to emerging tech fields. Brian is an innovator and an inspiring leader. We had a great time exchanging ideas even prior to the podcast, so I am just thrilled to have him on the podcast today. This conversation was a wonderful one. We get into the mission driven view of Anthropic and how that translates into how Brian runs the legal team, how he has always joined mission driven companies in his career, how he landed the job as General Counsel from a cold application, which I thought was fascinating. And of course we get to the idea of AI how it is affecting legal departments and lawyers in the future and what can we be doing and thinking about to get ready for that future. It is a wonderful conversation and I.

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All right Brian, we can just get started. It is great to have you on the podcast today. Hope you are doing well.

Thank you. It's great to be here and to catch up. Yeah.

So you're at Anthropic now. Like there could be no more exciting industry to be at the heart and soul of right now. But there are a few enterprise AI companies out there. I know Anthropic views itself as a bit different and separate from the rest of the pack. How would you describe what's distinctive about your company?

Anthropic was really founded and exists with a very tangible mission and one around a safe transition to transformative AI. The founders of Anthropic believed the externalities from this technology, from AI technologies would be greater sharper than technologies we're familiar with. Both both the positive and the negative. And they wanted to found a company just architected to do everything a company can do to make this transition to very powerful AI go well. And so that shows up in the way Anthropic is structured as a public benefit corporation. But it really is tangible every day in how we operate. This mission just drives everything and a greater extent than anywhere I've ever been. It is the most mission oriented place I've ever experienced. Which is interesting because I've also worked for the State Department and for NASA which are fairly mission oriented places. Our theory of change requires us to be on the frontier of AI and to be commercially successful to do that. And so we also have to build a historically capable business to fuel this mission. A lot of things going on all the time.

I always find like company culture and department culture so interesting and how something like a mission driven ethos translates its way through all parts of the company. I wonder how much of that was conscious versus it just happens. And that's the culture that you were handed. Can you tell? Do you know?

Well, the things that are conscious is like the reason for being from like the founders down is this mission. And we've attracted a lot of people who share that. And there's some like second order effects where it's having this sort of common alignment, common thing we're all working for. Even though we bring quite different disciplines to it. It just brings a certain alignment. It lubricates things that would otherwise be frictionful in a way I've also just never quite experienced. Everyone kind of feels like they're rowing in the same direction even as we just grow insanely quickly. Somehow it works in ways that it shouldn't work. And I think that that common purpose is a big part of it that's so important.

Hyper growth is exciting and painful. Not for everyone. I have lived it and loved it. And you wouldn't be where you are if you don't feel the same way. How does that translate into legal team and your culture? Like how does that look the mission.

Of Anthropic drives what the company needs from its legal team in a very tangible way. Sometimes the right answer for Anthropic would be things that like 99% of tech companies wouldn't even consider. Members legal team need to be appropriately open to weird things, or the weird being things that most tech companies wouldn't even consider. Oftentimes the normal thing is actually the right answer for us too. But sometimes. I'll give you an example. I'm not sure if you followed the news around SP 1047. This was California's effort to enact legislation to regulate some of the safety aspects of AI.

Okay.

And none of the AI labs, no one in tech came out in favor of it. In fact, there was this quite broad opposition and there were many flaws in the original version of legislation that was orthogonal to AI safety. Other things just added in. But there was a core that was fundamental to what we're trying to achieve in the world that we thought was important to preserve. And so we really leaned in and leaned out and worked with Senator Weiner's staff to try to refactor it in a way that preserved that core functionality in a way that stripped away some of the things that weren't related to safety that I think were the cause of the controversy in a way we hoped would allow a coalition to support. But even in doing so, there was a lot that would make lawyers uncomfortable. There's not a lot that lawyers would normally just wish for. But we have to view all of this in the context of what we're trying to achieve in the world through this mission. I think that's a very tangible example.

And you sometimes describe your team's culture as like being a little bit open to weirdness. Is that kind of what you're referring to is going against the grain?

I think, like appropriately open to weirdness. Right. Because like, oftentimes the normie thing is just going to be the right thing. Not weirdness for the sake of weirdness, but just like stopping to think. And remember that just always being tied into the big picture of what we're trying to achieve is a more important thing here than anywhere else I've experienced.

Yeah, I love the way your brain works. You think in a lot of analogies. And you looked at your department a little bit like how you think about software with front ends and back ends. Let's chat about that a little bit because I really loved your perspective on that.

One of the things that's like, just very central to my vision for anthropic's legal function. And I think a thing that leaders at Anthropic and really people across the organization really appreciate about our team is we're very attentive to what I think of as user experience. And of course I'm like borrowing concepts from software here. But one way I think about how we do what we do as in house lawyers, is separating that out into backend and front end. I'm not sure how techie your listeners are, but this is an analogy to software architecture. Backend are things like databases or a large language model or a maps API that determine whether the software you're interacting with gives you the right answer. In lawyers, it's really just like legal technical expertise. The front end is the user interface, the design, how easy and intuitive is it to work with? And this is a place where I feel like certainly in law school the focus on the front end was a very sort of lawyer centric or like lawyers in organizations with other lawyers thinking and communicating about very lawyerly technical things. And things I found not just in Anthropic, but especially in other startups, it's just very important to translate the concepts we lawyers think about into the concepts that leaders or our colleagues across the company think about so that they don't have to do this translation and follow along, put a lot of emphasis there and is constantly trying to like see how good can we make this experience as far as meeting our colleagues where they are giving them the information they need and the format that they needed for thinking. There's other experimental things. We're trying to see how far we can drive this forward. Something called a legal risk code that we're experimenting with, which is really trying to compress the many words lawyers use to describe risk into four colors. And then there's a decoder ring. And each of those colors embeds two important pieces of information. One is like, how big of a deal is this? The other is who can decide what to do with this, Whether we mitigate the risk, don't do the thing and accept the risk. One thing I found like in observing the provision of legal services in a very, very fast moving startup environment is I think that like when lawyers speak about risk very precisely, say a product manager who's just like moving very quickly is like well, the lawyer didn't say no, the lawyer didn't say yes. They said like risk. Something like what do I do with that information? So we try to like make it pretty clear. There's a calibrated scale and the calibration actually Comes from not from the legal team, but from the executive team. Set up a session where made a Kanban board with bad things that could happen like consequences. It was kind of this translation exercise from detective illegal things to what is the thing that leaders think about? And four colors and we dragged and dropped. Try and get a calibration of how big of a deal is this? And then who should be able to decide this, accept this risk for the company. So we'll see how this goes. But I'm very excited about this. I think this is going to be a huge unlock as we, like, pursue efficiency and clarity of advice and decision making.

Yeah, I love what you're saying about the front end and the user experience. And I think you're right. It is not something that's taught or like, explicitly thought about when you're training young attorneys, young associates moving up in their career. I'm curious if it's something you guys think about training folks in when they get to Anthropic. Is it something you interview for and do you have a philosophy or, like, principles on what makes a good front end?

I have my things I found to work, like, trying to create context on, you know, both why this is important and like, there are some hacks that have been found to work or be appreciated that leaders have expressed appreciation for. We don't have time for formal training as such. Usually the training is more like a hazing where you arrive.

Absolutely.

My experience with best legal organization culture is it can only be a few things. There's a few things that are just so tangible that when you arrive, you just feel them. I remember even arriving as an intern at the State Department legal offices where I spent the first eight years of my career and more experienced attorneys pulled me aside and said, okay, welcome as attorneys in Elle, which is what they was called in the State Department. This is what we do this way and we don't do this that way. And there was a sense of, like, definiteness and also, like, pride in, like, how. How we operate and how we operate is different than other places. So. So we're sharing that with you. It was like, got it felt that from the first day and you can see it playing out.

And is that what you try to do at Anthropic as well?

I think that's where I'd like to get a lot of. This is a work in progress and it can't be too many things. Although it's something I'm very. I'm very focused on because we. We're just growing very Quickly.

Yeah, there's just too much to do. Probably getting pulled in 10 different directions at this very minute.

It used to be when new members of the team joined, I'd take them for a walk and we like discuss some of these things. And we're just growing at a pace where that's. I try, but it's. I spend my whole day walking. And so it's trying to find ways to just scale and maintain this culture. Not over prescribe it because we hire just exceptional people who bring their own like contribution to this culture we're building and so don't want to like over prescribe. But also like there's a few through lines I think are just like very important to anthropic so that you can.

Also have like a consistent internal client experience. I think I'm imagining if you're hiring the caliber of people that I imagine you are, the excellence in the backend stuff, right? The legal knowledge and subject matter expertise that sort of goes without saying. That needs to be at a level of excellence. And then the front end piece is probably more difficult to suss out during interviews. But I have experienced the example you gave where you know, you're putting out like, this could happen and this risk could happen. I used to call that the 2 cents. You see these threads, my old job, where someone would have a question and then all the lawyers would like, here's the risk, here's what could happen. But on the other hand, this could also happen. And then they add in another lawyer and then that lawyer from, you know, some other country is chiming in about their perspective. And I'm like, this is just like a list of 2 cents. Everyone's 2 cents. And the client or the product manager, whoever it is on the other side is going, hey, this is great. I'm glad you guys are all having this lawyerly conversation amongst yourself. But what am I supposed to do with this information and how do we make it easier for them to digest?

Exactly. My. I gained a lot of empathy for this When I first became a client in my first GC role, I had many problems I have to solve and I'm trying to figure out what do I do. And I go out and get advice from outside counsel and sometimes it's in the form of like a rule statement, like, well, here is like the law. You're like, well, thanks, I could have gotten that from Westlaw. I have a problem and there's like some trade offs and like I don't feel closer to solving the problem. Of course the gold Standard is where lawyers apply law to facts, take on board the constraints you're operating under. What is important, like what are you trying to achieve and sort of walk with you in that to help you solve a problem.

And so you're uniquely actually both a client and you have clients as a lawyer. I mean you're a client of external counsel. Isn't part of when you're calling and asking is it tell me what to do? Isn't that kind of what you're looking for? Like give me the guidance, not just the facts?

I think that's very often the case. We have like long conversation about the incentives to sort of like risk calibration incentives of law firms and how that leads the advice to be fairly conservative. I often find that there's still a translation function the in house learning needs to do to find the right balance, better context on like what is important to the company. What are we trying to achieve here?

Yeah, yeah, I think that's really important and I'm hoping some of that is gonna change over time. The alignment of the incentives and how do we work together as better business partners. You guys are growing quickly. You were the first attorney I believe hired there and so you were a party of one as general counsel and legal department. And now you're what, eight or eight or more?

That was the end of last year, was 8. Now we're 27.

20. Okay, now you're 27. Wow, that's tremendous. And how long have you been there?

Two years.

She's the enormous amount of growth. So I would just kind of love to hear how that has felt. You're trying to do things and grow and scale and train and interview. I mean it must be wild. But do you think it got easier as you got a bigger team to support you? Has it gotten harder in different ways? Like how does, how's that journey been in 2 years with such a 27x growth?

Not boring. It's been great though. Almost every day in anthropic are things where like if, if you just like gribed it to me, like what I'd be doing and say well that's like objectively miserable or just like crushingly stressful. But like actually it's, it feels very enjoyable because like doing this with just like really great people is just delightful. Very different. I once heard a VC describing the transition from being an operator into being a VC as a transition from stress to anxiety. Like stress about how am I going to get all these things done to anxiety about, like are these things going to Give a done. And I, I really identify with that. When you're the only in house lawyer, there is no ambiguity about whose job it is to do anything. That's like eagle ish. It's mostly like stress and like, can I turn all of these cranks in 24 hours before I pass out? And now with, with a larger and and growing organization, it's more of there are fewer cranks I'm turning myself and much more of thinking about are all the cranks being turned the way they they should. Having an exceptionally talented team makes it all much easier. There's just so many exceptionally talented people who want to come work at Anthropic. And that also makes the hiring process fun. It's hard, but it's difficulty in just like choosing among just exceptional people where you want to hire so many people.

It's a great problem to have.

Yeah, it is a great problem to have.

So now you have a larger team. You also have to play a leadership role and create vision and probably do some of the operations that I'm well familiar with. The role changes quite dramatically in the short, very short amount of time and in compressed timeframe.

Yeah, in that compressed timeframe, really. I mean the level of growth we've had 3 1/2 x is very fast. Although it feels kind of normal now, frankly. Like there's just nothing that we're ever not doing all the things at once all the time and it just kind of feels normal.

What are the attributes in team members that make them excellent and amazing and that magic that you're able to capture and making challenges fun to solve together? Because I know that feeling, you know, when you're faced with so much to do and there's no easy answers, but it's okay. We've got this great team.

So beyond the baseline of like backend excellent, like they're like demonstrably like technically excellent at, you know, something that we need or multiple things we need. There's just like not a lot of time to do all the things that we think are important to do to accomplish our mission. Just like living on an exponential very tangibly. It's a very, very intense feeling like where there's like always lots of balls that can't be dropped. And it's. Some people are like excited by that and energized by that. And I think some people would just like be terrified by that and so trying to find the people who are excited by that. There is this grace within our team and just like collegiality and caring. We Try and select for that. But even having selected for that, it's still just like a really beautiful thing to witness being uncomfortable, both as a consequence of being on the bleeding edge of law that's being written or writing or being litigated involving us, sometimes we do courageous things in pursuit of the mission that make lawyers uncomfortable. And so comfort with that discomfort appropriately calibrated is something I also look for.

Yeah, I can relate to so much of what you're saying. I'm just chuckling because the last call I was in before this, you know, we just opened up and the other party was like, how are things going? How are you feeling? I'm like, oh, it's just hectic. There's thousand balls in the air. And they said, oh, I'm sorry, you're gonna get a break from that at some point. And I was like, oh no, I like that. That's the fun part is like having all these balls in the air. And there are certain people that enjoy that. I would imagine with how much growth and how much responsibility and how many balls your whole team is juggling that accountability and ownership and the peace of mind that you can have to say like, Sally's got this and Joe's running with that and I don't need to check in because like they know their parts and we're all going to be coordinated and we're all rowing in the same direction. I can count on them and I know it's going to get done and it's going to get done well. And if something happens, it'll get brought to my attention. Like that's got to be a big part of it as well. And then I think we talk about the software company or the software analogy and certainly that front end and user or client obsess, but also founders mindset or an ownership mindset is at the size of your company and how much needs to get done. Like you can't drop a ball. You have to feel like you have some skin in this game. Right?

No, you're absolutely right. Ownership is so important for any startup. But something that's especially important to me, I think of ownership is it's not my fault, but it's my responsibility. I see a problem, it's not within the four corners of what I'm supposed to do, but it doesn't seem like anyone else is solving it. So I'm going to solve it or cause it to be solved. Yeah, this is like absolutely essential in startups I find more common in like very large organizations. A mindset of like, well, this, this happens to me or this is being done to me versus, like feeling of agency. Like, well, I don't like this. I'm going to fix it.

Yes. And I can, I can't do something about it. Yeah. And that is, that sounds like that's what you all have there.

We have like quite different personalities on the legal team. You know, some of the common elements other than just like people who are like brilliant and technically excellent is like, there's this like empathy and grace. It's a very warm team.

Yeah. I'm really interested to watch your journey as you are no doubt continuing to grow and it will continue to scale. And the challenges of a 25 person team versus a 50 person versus 100 versus a thousand, like starts to look and feel very different. And the friction of how much autonomy you can give to everyone starts to change over time. How much are you leveraging technology, tools and like other things to help you leverage the people that you have? I couldn't get away from this conversation without asking, like, how is Anthropic using AI in their legal department, if at all.

Claude is a member of the team. Not in my headcount, but probably should be. I kind of see as I walk around Claude on the screens of colleagues doing many, many different things within our workflows. From just like processing news overnight, delivering very targeted feeds of. These are all the things that happened overnight that I need to know about to getting leverage in very quickly finding places in commercial agreements where we need to devote attention. I use Claude mostly as a thought partner.

I have it open at all times.

That makes me happy. I'm very particular about words and tone. I haven't like found that like Claude is a good purveyor of like words. Or I'm like, oh, I'll just use that. That feels right. I find it like much more useful though as like a thought partner. Like, here's what I'm trying to achieve. This is like the effect I want. Here's what I'm thinking and I'll like suggest something. I'm like, not that, but now I know what I want. Instead of just staring at a blank screen, just like thinking through a thing and just getting my thinking jump started.

Absolutely, yeah. It's helped me craft like just in the last day, a job description that was a new made up job. Like, you're not going to find this job anywhere else in the Internet. And I just wrote here's what I'm thinking and what I kind of think this role would be. Kind of similar to like this in a different type of company, but maybe more like this. And it was a great conversation between me and Claude and we actually got to a great starting point. So yeah, this is very helpful I'll.

Say though probably my, my heaviest use of Claude is for my parenting workloads.

Clauda's oh wait, say more, say more.

Just like trying to understand like what should I do? I found Claude to be very helpful but Also in my 10 year old is like I'm trying to like create a system for her to like get through the morning routine and seems to like buttons on screen. So I just like use Claude to code up an app. It's like a morning routine timer where it's like, you know, she can click through the buttons on the iPad and then it like generates a little positive reinforcements that she likes and specify what I was trying to achieve. And it was in a conversation about her and some of her challenges. And so it's incredible.

That is incredible at work for your legal team because you probably have a safe hosted security environment. Like you guys can upload whatever your own internal docs and have Claude work on stuff without worrying about sensitive data or anything. Right. In a way that probably most of us don't have that freedom.

We try very hard to make our operational security and that of our cloud partners such that like anyone who uses Claude can have comfort to put their most sensitive workloads through. As far as I know we use the same Rails as everyone else.

I get that at a law firm now we can't really put all our clients stuff in whatever we want without some permission. So it's a little bit more difficult. But I think on the in house side and then particularly at a company like yours that is they know how to use the tools really well and it's a part of your day to day that I bet you are. I bet you guys are using it in ways that others aren't probably.

I've been seeing this pop up on engagement letters. They're like long consent to AI services addendum.

Yes, yes, it's painful. Public service announcement Clients, please take that out.

I think this is something that at least I hope is becomes more normalized that people understand just like how this is plumbed and how this incremental risk profile of using one of these services compared to any of the other services. I think we're in a period of maybe some novelty driven fear at the moment.

Yeah, yeah, we, yeah, we've seen this play out before. So it'll Be a matter of time. The other thing I wanted to get into with you is you've got probably what most people would consider, not most people, a lot of people in our industry would consider a dream job working at the intersection of law and innovation and probably the most fast changing space in the world. How did this opportunity come about? Because it's not like you spent your whole life working on AI and stuff, but this is a fairly new space for all of us. Did it come to you? Did you seek it out? Tell me, how did this land in your lap?

I submitted a cold application.

Really?

It was in March of 2022. My whole family had Covid for the first time and so we were like homesick with COVID I was not looking for a job. I had a pretty nice job at NASA leading with their international law division. And I get this daily email, go in house. And I just saw this job posting of a company I'd never heard of that just really spoke to me like the. There was something about it that like left off the page of describing like what they were looking for in their first lawyer. I was thinking like, that is the lawyer I like aspire to be every day. I did some quick googling. There wasn't much out there about Anthropic and it was one of those things where I was like, I know if I don't do something now, I'll never do anything with this. So I just submitted a cold application and then forgot about it until a few weeks later when I got a. An email from a recruiter and then started a process of seven or eight or nine interviews that led me to join. And I think I signed in June of 2022. Humorously, it was not at all an obvious thing to do. In fact, I'd come out to San Francisco, I was living in D.C. with my family to spend a day in the office and I had dinner with a college roommate who's been a very successful software entrepreneur who was like, I wouldn't do this. AI is kind of applying to ally. And this is very researchy. It was unclear whether Anthropic would ever commercialize what it was doing, a safety research lab. But I kind of didn't. I don't say didn't care, but I was like, I can't not work with these people. I'm so compelled by this group of people, their mission. I just want to work with this group of people on this mission. And if it doesn't work, that's a risk I'll take. This is kind of How I've made most of my career decisions.

Wow. Yeah, that's fascinating. You had not worked at a startup type organization before either. Right.

So in 2017 I left the State Department and I joined a space startup called Planetary Resources as its first gc. And I got some experience with rapid growth and I got some experience with some rapid, whatever the opposite of growth is of a funding round fell apart and I had to rapidly shrink that company and eventually lay off almost all the employees and navigate it to an acquisition. And so that was highly formative experience. Incredible talent at that company, very strong culture. And so I was just like wide eyed at what like a talent rich group of people with the hunger that comes from being a startup and having to hit these milestones. Definitely felt like I saw things I couldn't unsee. But also the, the experience of crisis and having to do layoffs and then navigate to an acquisition was also like a very formative and educational experience.

Yeah. And coming from like NASA and the State Department, like those could not be, I imagine more different cultures, scales, missions, operation styles than. Than kind of what you're currently dealing with.

Very different cultures. I find the things I learned there useful and applicable in ways that would have been hard to predict. But it's a very different experience. I had a great time at NASA, but I also felt this like pull of having been in just like a very performant, very fast moving organization that's kind of like on a knife edge. I missed that. Even though NASA was a lot more comfortable, the comfort was almost uncomfortable.

Yeah, that's funny. I like the analogy of the knife edge. I was trying to explain how I like feeling like there's some risk or something that makes the job really hard versus clocking in day in, day out, same old thing. Every day is different and every day has a opportunity to fail. And I haven't been able to articulate why. I love that feeling, but being on a knife edge is a really nice way of saying it.

The ever present possibility of death makes one realize they're alive.

I think that's very true. And in a work setting it seems like some sort of sickness that I have, but I do enjoy that and sounds like you do too. What is kind of top of mind as you go into 2025 and wrap up this year? What are the big priorities? Is it just survival or like how are you thinking about the next 12 months? And I've also, just as a side Note, heard that 2025 is the year that everyone thinks AI is going to actually turn like the speed of adoption and usage and how we see it in our day to day lives and workplaces starts to really accelerate if it hasn't already. If that's a crazy thought, but yeah, what do you think about that?

That's what I see and I think also capabilities in 2025 we'll see Will, will be surprising. I think we like largely think of just like the way our brains are tuned is to think about continuous refinements of the paradigm we know, which is this kind of chatbot brain in a box, ask a question, gives you an answer or can make a video or Apple see that gets incremented better. But I think we'll perhaps start to see just like new paradigms of capability from the models. I'm thinking a lot about scale and I don't think we're done growing. I think we're going to continue on a similar pace and I'm thinking a lot about culture and how to scale and maintain this very special thing we have even as we need to get much bigger very quickly.

It's good that you're thinking about that because you do have to really be conscious of that and it can get away from you. I think that they're very lucky to have a leader like you. For the rest of us in this legal ecosystem where I think we see, as I've kind of been saying for a while now, this tsunami of change coming towards us in the way that we work, the way that we deliver legal services, you know, do you have any advice or thoughts about what the rest of us should be doing to prepare for that change coming?

I think tsunami is an interesting word to use today as we're sitting here under a tsunami, one that's true in the Bay Area, what I would encourage anyone to do is just to work with the technology too. Like there's, there's nothing quite like playing with it to understand its utility and its, its limitations generally. And an hour of that is worth many hours of reading someone else's take on it. I think that for lawyers and legal professionals, legal ops professionals in particular, getting like a clear on what I think of as like the plumbing of these things. For all the like transformative magic of frontier AI models, the like data mapping is actually pretty simple and I think there's probably just like a lot of fear born of uncertainty or just not understanding. And I think it's very understandable and I think that understanding can be power as far as guiding an organization and trying to decide how do we adopt this capability consistent with our Risk tolerance in different dimensions. I think the sentiment of people who I look to, because they've been most accurate as projecting where things are going so far, is that this is a augmentative capability, that this will make capable humans more capable, it'll be a source of leverage. And of course we'll want to be those humans who are getting this leverage and being more competitive through our facility with marshaling these tools and no time at the present just to start that experimentation.

What are your thoughts on this technology, changing the role of lawyers, changing what lawyers do? How fast is that going to happen? Is it not really going to happen?

I think there's, there's relatively like mundane things that we do or have done at points in our career that I think that we will not spend time doing, which you know, frees us for the higher leverage and harder to replace thing that we supply, which is judgment. And there's an element of, I think bedside manner that should not be overlooked in doing what we do. I think to date the training ground for lawyers has been in doing a lot of that mundane work. And so if that is not a thing that explains clients will pay a lot of money for, we will have to re architect how we train young lawyers, how we take law school graduates and make them into lawyers.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think you've nailed it. Where I think the subject matter, expertise becomes less important than the judgment that you bring to the table. And so we have to start to think about how do you teach, how do you train for that piece of it.

And I really think, I really think it's seat time. I mean, I think judgment is like almost everything. One of the biggest and most delightful surprises when I went from the State Department where I was working on climate and outer space and ocean governance, to being a GC and thinking like, how am I going to do this? I've never done many of the things I now do. I found that like it actually felt pretty natural. It just drew on the same muscle groups that I developed as an in house lawyer in government, a judgment muscle group. Knowing how important is this thing, when to tap the brakes and when to keep driving, very important in a startup environment. But that was also important in say like a climate negotiation or something like that. And so I really do think judgment is at the core of what we provide. And this will in giving us leverage in some of the more mundane things we do, give us more capacity for that insofar as we can be effective at marshalling it.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Such an interesting time, Brian. It's been such a pleasure having you on the podcast and I know there's a lot going on in your day to day. So appreciate you sharing your thoughts and your leadership with us today.

Thank you Mary.

All right everyone, thanks so much for listening. We will catch you next time.