Ep #20 Generative AI and the Coming Disruption with Mary O'Carroll and Craig Katerberg

Greetings friends. This is Chris Batts and you are listening to episode number 20 of the Future Is Bright podcast. In today's episode I spoke with Mary o' Carroll of Ironclad and Craig Katerberg of Budweiser apac. The bulk of our conversation was around generative AI Mary and Craig's impressions about it and how it will disrupt the legal industry. We touched on several other topics including legal ops, LinkedIn, modernizing corporate legal departments, scaling teams, professional development goals, and people who inspire both Mary and Craig and so much more. If you haven't already, please subscribe to this podcast and leave a review on itunes and also YouTube.

So welcome Mary Craig, to the Future is Bright podcast. It's great to have you both on the show.

Thanks Chris. Great to be here.

Love it. Chris, great to see you. Mary, great to see you again.

Great to see you both. So I would love for you to to provide just a brief introduction so my audience has some context and then we'll go from there.

Great.

Happy to go. First, I'm Mary o'. Carroll. I'm the Chief Community Officer at a company called Ironclad, which is a contracts lifecycle management software company. Prior to joining Ironclad, I spent the last 13 years as director of Legal Operations, Technology and Strategy at Google where I built up that function from just me to a team of over 60 people supporting a department of probably 1,500 by the time I left. On the side, I also helped to build and create what is now the world's largest and fastest growing community for legal operations professionals that is called clock, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium. Over to you Craig.

Good, thanks Mary. So yeah, Craig Katerberg I'm the Chief Legal Corporate Affairs Officer for a company known as Budweiser APAC. It is a Hong Kong listed company. We IPO'd it in 2019 on the Hong Kong Exchange. It's actually the fourth largest beer company in the world even though we are focused on Asia Pacific and our parent company is AB InBev, which is the world's largest breweries. As brands such as Stella Artois, you can see over my shoulder Corona Budweiser and about 500 different brands. I've been in this role about two and a half years, but candidly I've been with affiliated groups in China, in Australia, in the US, Europe over the last 12 years and have really worked with a lot of different lawyers, with communications professionals, a lot of different folks in the team and then working with senior management boards of directors over, over that period of time. So A pleasure to be here and to have some chats.

Wonderful. So we're gonna jump into and we're gonna kind of do.

A shotgun approach to a number of Q and A questions. And so first we're gonna start off with. So both of you are have large followings on LinkedIn and there's a lot of respect for both of your journeys professionally. I know you're generous givers in different ways, professionally and personally. And so I would love for you to share for my audience how.

They should posture their hearts and thinking their mindsets around professional development, branding and how should they should think about LinkedIn. If you both would share and I'll. Mary, start first.

Yeah. A lot of people ask about like personal branding and such, which is never really how I thought about it when I got into LinkedIn and frankly, I really don't think about it that way either. For me, it's not about growing a following, it's not about growing an audience.

My goal or what I really want to achieve. At Hart, I'm an advocate for legal operations and transformation in the legal sector. And what I have discovered over my career in this space of now, over two decades in legal, is that.

There'S so much education that needs to take place about what is possible and what changes can take place in this world. And I have found that LinkedIn is a great platform to get your voice out there to share, to educate, to kind of rally the troops to get people excited about transformation. So that's kind of how I look at LinkedIn for myself and why I try to build an audience or why I put content out there. And I think that if you approach it with an authentic reason about why you're there and what your messages are about, you know, hopefully, hopefully your voice will grow. But yeah, I don't really see it as, you know, just building for brand. What do you think, Craig?

I love that answer, Mary. I think it's, it's spot on. I, I was a little worried with Chris's question because I don't think of it as personal branding. I was surprised to hear about the large following because I actually don't know what the following is on LinkedIn. And I got into LinkedIn as a. I think a lot of people do. Right. Was you kind of, oh, this job may be interesting in the future, that job might be. And candidly, I think my job has been very interesting. So I haven't really looked, you know, much outside of that, but then I noticed that there were a lot of really pretty authentic, you know, People and, and people who would engage with you in chat. And it was definitely one of those respectful platforms where it wasn't sort of just shouting into the void or having people shout at you. It was much more of being able to connect with people or follow or understand different perspectives. And, you know, one of the things I think about is not the personal branding or, you know, what does that look like for me, it's more about, look, I'm in a super privileged position and role and have had really great experiences and doing that with lots of amazing people over this time. And that's the kind of thing I would have loved to have had, you know, growing up or seeing what that path is like, or understanding that and kind of sharing those experiences and that knowledge that you, over time and hopefully people can learn from that. Certainly I learned from so many people on LinkedIn. Sometimes it's substantive matters, sometimes it's more like the procedural how people go about doing things or how you go about communicating. So there's so many of those. But for me it's kind of deeply personal in that sense of.

Sharing kind of those moments with people who want to learn and want to understand different perspectives, you know, and candidly that gets into much bigger themes. But I think there's a lot of echo chambers that can often happen in the world. And so trying to understand things from different perspectives is a great gift and something I think we need more of overall in the world. So it ties back. There's a great phrase from my college at Chicago which is, you know, let knowledge grow from more to more was like the school, the school motto that went in. And I think there's a lot of that that comes from just understanding different perspectives or experiences and trying to share, share that and showcase different people who might, you know, not, not have those same audiences or those same connections that you, that you have as you move to different countries. So it's kind of shining a light on different perspectives over time and then you meet amazing people.

I was going to add that I think you really can make genuine connections with people through LinkedIn. There's a lot of people that reach out to me and say, would you be up for a coffee chat? And I've made real friends that way. I've helped people, mentor people, et cetera. And then, I mean, obviously LinkedIn fundamentally is a job seeking tool. You have essentially your resume up there. And often folks ask me how to use LinkedIn to find a job. And I would say, again, it's not about personal branding, it's not about putting out content out there just so that you seem like you know what you're talking about. I think if you build out your page, you know that that makes it almost read like your resume. In fact, like, I don't know anyone who actually asks for a resume anymore. People just look up your LinkedIn background, right. And I think that's what recruiters do. They're searching for people through LinkedIn. So, you know, build out your profile and add the keywords or add the experience that you want people to know that you have if you are seeking a job. And that's probably the best thing you can do.

Yeah.

So Jet.

You'Re good, you're good if you want to reply.

No, no, no, I was going to say that also. Yeah. Because I think in a lot of ways you, Mary, you're spot on. People will ask me about, oh, what is a way to get a job. And, and in some ways I think LinkedIn is not necessarily the best for going and finding a job. There's a way to do that where you jump in directly into it. But I think in a lot of ways it's almost, you know, what are the types of careers or the areas or the types of jobs that are really interesting and having a sense of what is that day to day and connecting with those people I think can be really powerful. And sometimes that turns into a job, sometimes it turns into kind of, you know, a side interesting project that you're working on. But I think it gets you closer to sort of, you know, who are you and how are you contributing and who are the people that you want to surround yourself with. And that can lead to jobs, but it can also lead to community and those connections and you know, those friendships that you were talking about as well.

Definitely.

So being the one to point out, I'd love to bring to you both your attentions that you guys have over 10,000 followers each. Mary has about 23. Craig, you have over 10. And that speaks to the influence that you have and the respect that comes with both of your journeys. Um, Mary, you have an incredible platform and especially through CLOCK and your roles within large organizations, well known brands, that really speaks to it. And you know that that'd be a platform to speak out loud about legal ops and the mission of that. And for Craig, I know you have a gift for personal connection and I know you probably can't single handedly call every 10,000 person that's following you, but I know that that platform has been really powerful for you to get to know people and I know you guys both use it in extraordinary ways. So thank you both for sharing about LinkedIn. Love to have my audience learn from, I would say two masters. You may not carry that, but I just want to.

Have you guys share. So another topic, let's go.

So one that's dear to Mary's heart, but would love to hear Craig's thoughts too. But Mary, please let's touch on Legal Ops. What have you seen? I know there's such a an arc. We're probably in 2.0, 3.0 or 5.0 at this point, but can you please give us an update and where you see things with Legal Ops?

Yeah, this conversation is funny because I think Craig and I met through LinkedIn talking about legal Ops and he kind of reached out and then we met to discuss it. Legal Ops is both maturing and still in its infancy at the same time. So we've seen an explosion of this role certainly all over the globe, every country, every industry, every size of organization, really. We've started to recommend that you have this function established within your first five hires. So if you're a department of five people and you think you're too small, I don't think that's the case anymore. There's a lot of value that you can bring to an organization early on.

It is still in its infancy because I think, like I said, there needs to be a lot more education about what is the role and what can IT do. And so that's one of the reasons I'm out there kind of banging the drum on making sure you hire the right person. And you're not just thinking this. You know of this as a glorified administrative or office manager type role. If it is to be truly effective, you're hiring someone who comes with business acumen and expertise, strategic thinking, project management skills. And that person can come in and be sort of a right hand to the general counsel and help them run the operations of the department, but also optimize IT for efficiency, for technology, thinking about prioritization of the projects, working cross functionally with finance, with hr, with your IT teams, et cetera. And I think we're on a journey in maturity of where it's gone from. You definitely need to come in and establish best practices, processes, initial systems and tools to essentially like run the trains on time and service the lawyers as your client. But as your function matures, as I've been talking a lot about the movement towards strategic operations, you start to think about your clients from a legal operations perspective as the clients within the business, your stakeholders, how do you make the life of your salespeople, your product people, your engineers better? How do you give them more self service, how do you get them better responses? And then eventually when you're very, very mature, is starting to think about the goals and the leadership of the entire company and how can you as an organization help look cross functionally and help achieve the goals for the company and not just for the legal department to be reactive. So it's an exciting time. We're seeing growth and maturity, but I think continuing to need a lot of education.

Very good. And Mary, I made a compliment here a little bit and what I will say is I remember well when we met at the very beginning, because it was probably over a decade ago at this point, and I know you were heavily involved with Clock, with Google at the time as well during that period. And there was a New York group probably about 12 or 13 years ago that was working on doing similar things. And so I joined that one because I was in a bit of a project management role within, within Anheuser Busch InBev. And you know, I was the only lawyer within that group, which was not an advantage within the group either, I would say, but it was one of those where everybody was kind of focused on, you know, very much in the infancy. I think you, you said it very well that we still in some ways feel like it's in the infancy within legal operations. And candidly, this might be sacrilege, but I tend to shy away from Legal Ops even as a term or a concept.

And the reason why I think is what you were chatting about is you connect into those larger commercial themes and the strategic thinking in a lot of ways. I don't really, I advocate that for my general counsels is not to be thinking about it as what is it the legal team needs, but more what is the business need and how can we provide those legal tools or that, that thinking that comes with it or that awareness of where the risks would lie or how to prevent certain things from happening. And so I think we've done a lot of things in different areas around legal operations. There was a whole work stream, you know, back in 2020 when I was general counsel over at Anheuser Busch. And it was, you know, we called IT Legal Ops 2.0 as an example, but it was very much bottom up about what are the pain points in the business. And as you might be shocked to hear, there were lots of pain points in the business and people were more than happy to go about that. And so then it was identifying, you know, not just the 70 pain points, but what are the top priorities. And so that was a whole matrix. And there were a lot of great materials that I'm sure you'd know with from, you know, acc, the association of Corporate Council and many others as far as how you identify the materiality and then also the viability that comes in. So we did a lot of those and some of the things that came out of them I think were, you know, new software or new what would be traditionally thought of as legal operations where there were really, you know, capex investments in the business and other ones were things like a one page document that could sit on the marketing team's desk about the biggest risks that were there. And so it's literally a piece of paper with brands on it with the top that have things to be focused on. And that was one of the outcomes that came out of it. We had, you know, a lot of great, amazing energy that came through from several dozen people within the legal, the legal team at that time as well as, you know, more more broadly across the business. But I don't necessarily even think of that as, as legal operations. But folks, you know, there was a couple of folks in particular, you know, Bridget Halper and Darrell Offerman who really ran it like a project and it was project management and it was identifying those, those game changing things. And the business loved it just because it was things they didn't want to think about, but they just made it smoother for everybody and especially the legal team loved it, both lawyers, paralegals, kind of everybody, because it just reduced down all that friction and all those annoyances where you get asked the same question 40 times coming over. And so that's, that's kind of the mindset when, when thinking about legal ops that I think about it in those ways because it's almost for me trying to build in those preventative tools into the commercial systems and getting there on the front end to just stop any of the, the issues that come out later. And of course issues always come out but you know, you, your best to prevent a lot of those. So I hope that's not offensive to, to push back on legal ops. Chris, on your side and Mary, certainly I agree that you're very much an expert in this space.

So I'd love to ask both of you, but Mary, just with your purview into Google and to probably other legal departments, I'd love to hear from both of you, are, are legal departments modernizing or where are we in that arc of modernization of legal departments, I have heard stories from general counsel who say two giant competing brands and one of them is modern and the other one is like 30 years old doing.

C prompt DOS or something like that. Where are we? Are we moving forward? Is, is this process of what you describe legal ops, Mary, actually a vehicle of innovation that's now transforming companies too things?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, one of the biggest catalysts for hiring a legal operations person now is digital transformation. And in fact, that probably is the biggest theme that we hear. And because of that, you know, Craig, to your point, I think the, the role, the projects that are being worked on, the, you know, positioning of it has changed. Even the background of the people, you know, it's sort of less attorneys, frankly now because it's more about tech and transformation. So it is happening. There's a ton of pressure to do that. It continues to be a mixed bag. I mean, I come across companies all the time now who are doing something really unique, really high tech, really just like forward thinking, great processes, a lot of streamlined behavior. And then the next thing you know, you talk to a company that's got paper in boxes under desks or still using spreadsheets to hobble things together. And I would even add, there's probably no legal department that has completely modernized and is the model of success. And that's one of the reasons I could go off on a tangent about why I don't love benchmarking. Because we're not benchmarking against anything good right now. We're all kind of benchmarking against. Okay, you know, and even looking at Google, we were at it. I was there for 13 years. We were at it for a long time. And certainly there were areas that I was very proud of and there were certain areas that, you know, we couldn't get to. To Craig's point about you're so many things to fix and so much to prioritize. There were a lot of areas where I was like, please don't look under the hood here. It is a complete disaster and a mess. But you know, everyone, if we can get people to the mindset that it, that you do need to change and that there are better ways of doing things, that's kind of the most important thing. We don't want complacency. And then, you know, with the advent of generative AI and large language models, that's a whole other conversation. But that is propelling us into the future, whether, whether we like it or not.

So before we go to that other point, Mary, there's lots of topics we can kind of move around. I'd love for you to provide and I'd hate for this to be dumbed down or somehow deminimizing the complexity of what you're talking about. With Legal Ops. What is the one takeaway that.

You can empower a corporate legal team to say how do they, how do they sell the C suite on the investment needed for Legal Ops and everything related to it? Because it seems like that's what I find. It's not the priority, not going to put the money there. We're going to put it on the product and move the business forward. What would you say?

Well, the advice I often give is, look, it's going to pay for itself. The first hire will pay for themselves within the first year, if not the first six months. There's just that much.

Fat, you know, to trim and so much opportunity to make things better. And there's a ton of low hanging fruit. I would say also talk to other general counsels or people who have had this role established, who are successful because they will tell you, you know, they wish they did it earlier, they wish they had more resources for this team. And then, you know, the most common thing I said is digital transformation. And where people are starting these days is contracts. And you know, that is part of the reason that I am actually at a contracts management company now, because there, that is a process that every single company has and it touches every single part of your company and it affects how you do business, how quickly you can close deals, how quickly you can buy things to get business done. And if you are able to streamline that, accelerate that, you're accelerating revenue, you're accelerating the speed of the entire company. And no longer having legal necessarily be know the bottleneck for things, you can speed things up and when that happens, well, you know, you can count the dollars of savings, but you can also then point to all your happy stakeholders internally. The CFO is overjoyed, the CEO is overjoyed. People are getting promoted. Like those are the types of things that you want to start with in legal ops because you want to show true.

Impact and return on your investment. And if you start with the right big priorities rather than honestly what a lot of people do, which is like small things on the side that won't bother anyone. Start with the big impact and show your savings.

Love it. That's great. Let's go to Generative AI. So chatgpt Bard, what else are you seeing? Would love to hear from both of you. How is this affecting your life, your world, your career and the business?

Craig, I'd love to hear your perspective of what your own lawyers or what people are saying on your team.

Yeah. So there's a couple of things that I'll mention within this one, and maybe, you know, the first one is I think it's a huge opportunity and moment for, for people, right. And for people who are really curious and creative and who, you know, can, who know what they want or can work iteratively. And I think that's generally the case across the board. And I think, you know, generative AI has only accelerated that in a lot of ways. And it does seem like the space is, you know, night and day difference than what it was six months ago and almost six weeks ago as well. So it's hard to see when things are moving so quickly within that space where it's going to go. But I will say, you know, and I would have said this about legal operations as well. I think it's a huge moment for people who are curious and want to play around and see what's possible.

From my side, we are very much aware about some of the downsides and so we want to protect that from a company perspective about not using proprietary data. And, you know, Samsung and others have gotten in trouble with some of these issues. And so we want to make sure, you know, that when people are playing around with it, they're playing around with it with acceptable tools and acceptable data.

And candidly, you know, it's, you know, chatgpt as an example, is, is banned in China outside of Hong Hong Kong. And so really, you know, there's limited role within a big part of my business that's there and Baidu and others are coming up in terms of the technology, but it's not quite to, to the extent that you see really probably mostly from the Americas, but kind of from the West. So I think there's a lot that's, that's coming. Certainly, you know, we will use it in terms of different, even marketing visualizations. We're starting to see it within, within video as well. So from a commercial perspective, it's certainly there and that we're, we're playing around with it. We haven't really commercialized it and see where that, seen where that has gone yet. But I think we're so close to the beginning that it's hard to know. And candidly, within legal, you know, I think there's some amazing things that, that are required, but also the judgment about not just kind of Outsourcing it and going with that. You know, knowing the law and knowing where, you know, AI goes a bit crazy or makes up facts or things like that, I think is super important at this moment. And that will only get more so. So there have been folks like, you know, Greg Siskind is an immigration lawyer who's one of the, the top immigration lawyers in the US he does some amazing things in this, you know, kind of trying different prompts or looking for forums or types of subpoenas or things like this. And there's I think, a fair number of people both in the legal space and, and in the, you know, in kind of the more broad space. We're really doing interesting things with it and I don't know where it's going to go, but certainly I view it as transformative and a great moment for that curiosity and being able to be clear about what you want and then directing over time and playing out how different iterations of different generative AI play out. So as a non expert in this field, that's kind of what I'm seeing as a practitioner here in Asia.

I'm thinking this is a much bigger moment than a lot of people realize. And this is generative AI and large language models are going to have a huge effect on every part of our economy and every part of our world. Children are talking about it, our grandparents are talking about it. It is front and center right now. And if you've been following any of the news, a lot of the research and report are saying that, you know, legal services or the legal industry might be one of the first areas to really be disrupted. I believe that to be very true. If you think about how much legal work is still very manual or summarizing large amounts of documents or data, a lot of it can already be either. That work can be either eliminated or vastly simplified. I mean, overnight, like you said, it's been in a matter of weeks. Yes, the adoption is still coming, but the tech has a lot of substance in what it can do. And we are a contracts management company. It's already live as a feature using AI. That technology is already live. You can feed it contracts, it will extract metadata, it will redline automatically based on your positions in your playbooks, you can do that today. And the adoption, it's still new. People are still dealing with change. And is this scary or is this exciting? But what I found is that when the lawyers actually touch it, they may be very fearful because this is affecting their day jobs. When they actually touch it, they realize this is wonderful. It is getting rid of work that is mundane, that they don't want to keep doing over and over. And that is quite routine. And when you are used to that and you think about sort of any other part of our lives that has been made easier by technology, you don't want to go back to the old way of doing things right. Like if you can get food delivered now, it's much easier than driving out, sitting and waiting for your order. I mean, you name it. Whatever technology it is that has made our lives easier, and if it has now made your professional life easier, imagine that as a competitive advantage, as a GC or as a legal department when it comes to hiring or retaining talent. And how much of a setback that is for you if you're just, you've hired a bunch of young lawyers and they go, what you want me to do? What with the old way and paper and spreadsheets, like that's not going to fly anymore. So the expectations are going to change very quickly. The way we work is going to change quickly. And the ripple effects on the types of service providers, the types of roles and responsibilities you need in a department, the skill sets needed, what law schools need to do, how law firms will add value, all of this is going to change so quickly that I encourage people to get educated, get curious, start playing with things, and don't fear it. It's a real opportunity to usher in a new era of the way we work.

Yeah. And Mary, if you don't mind, I'd be interested to hear, actually, in terms of the skills that you see that are going to be most valuable for those people who, I mean, as you mentioned, are curious or want to play around with it. I have some thoughts based on even what you've said and from personal experience, but I'd be really curious to hear your views on that topic.

So, skills aside, I think you mentioned it earlier, the most important thing is to have an open mindset and to have that curiosity to play around with things and think that maybe there's a better way of doing anything that we're currently doing. And then the skill sets, I really don't think I have an opinion on that yet. Certainly I do think there was going to be an explosion of need for more lawyers in the short term. Right. The regulatory space and the responsible use of all this and the privacy and the data policies, that will certainly emerge. But from a legal operations and sort of like data analytics perspective, there's going to be a lot more project management, there's going to be Process improvement. There's going to be certain a lot of need in the short term again for program management, tech implementations, tech support, and then beyond that, like the next phase. It's anyone's guess at this point.

Yeah. So may I? Actually I love that answer because you hit on almost everything that I had in mind and I don't know the technology or the deep, the skills or the hard skills, but what you mentioned in a lot of ways were almost like the human skills, kind of like, to borrow that phrase often people think of as the soft skills, but almost those human skills. And Adam Grant kind of coined that. Right. But I think it's, I think it's spot on, you know, about like that project management, you know, you mentioned that one about that curiosity playing around. I think that is so important in this space personally. And you know, I might put in there kind of that stakeholder management or that EQ of understanding, you know, as you were talking about in the business, what matters, how the business makes money, you know, who cares about it, how you get people kind of on board that change management, whether it's digital or non digital, like all of those things I think of as essential, like the hard skills in some ways, you know, we'll find out what, what's needed within those. But all of those other things are candidly quite rare. And so if people have those or develop those and work that muscle a lot, I view that as eminently hirable from just that perspective. Those are exactly the kinds of people I'm looking to hire to bring onto my team who can kind of go in and, and figure it out and want to figure it out.

Right, right. I mean. Two quick thoughts. I mean, it just reminded me of a story about my daughter's in middle school and you know, ChatGPT is now available to everyone. And you know, is it cheating or is it just the new normal and people are going to use it? And I love that her school said we're not going to try and stop you from using it. We know you're all going to use it and you're going to have it as a tool for the rest of your lives. What we're going to now grade you on and teach you is how do you edit it? How do you go from that first draft to something meaningful and really good? And that also reminds me, it's a similar story of. You know, I talked to a tax lawyer recently who said, my God, Mary, my job is to interpret complex tax law, but now couldn't you just feed it into a system and ask it questions and it would spit back things in plain English. And I said, yeah, I think we can do that already. And he said, well, then, what value do I bring as a lawyer? And I said, if your only value is summarizing the law in plain English, you know, in plain English, then you might be in trouble. But hopefully you understand what your clients are struggling with and why they're asking about that and what position they're in and where their product or their company is in its life cycle and be able to advise on what that means for them. And it was sort of this aha moment of, oh, yeah, that is what I do for a living. I don't just spit out the information. And that part of the job is not that exciting. It's the other stuff that is exciting. So, again, it's, you know, that's the skill set that you were trained on. Maybe you actually get to use it now.

Absolutely. No, I love that example, too, because it's so much about like, the. Almost the empathy or the, you know, or trying to put yourself in the other person's shoes about what do you actually want or care about. And there's a huge amount of value that's there, and we'll see as AI goes, you know, but that's a very human skill that takes a lot of work and deliberate thought and intentionality behind it.

So I. I'd love to dig just a little deeper, Mary. And with your conviction around this technology disrupting the legal industry five, ten years from now, they're fully embracing it, or it's fully disrupting what is going to change, like, what's going to stay the same, which you guys are talking about, this relational connection with CL and the savviness of EQ and the value of that. But what's going to change if we're going to really jump into this full force?

I always say that legal is the dinosaur of the business industry.

And we are facing consolidation. Ditto. There's lots of different types of disrupting factors right now. But if you were just to say, okay, objectively.

What happens.

So I hate making predictions because I think no good can come out of this ever.

Yeah. So I will tell you what I. What I would like to see happen, which is, I think, what we've started to see over the last 10 years, and you've mentioned it, it's consolidation, specialization. It's an explosion of other options and different ways to deliver legal services. So we certainly have not just law firms now. Right. We have much bigger in house Teams, we have alternative service providers, we have technology helping with some of that. We have flexible talent where you can get someone to come into your in house team, but still kind of sort of be outside as well. All these will continue.

Law schools, law firms, those are kind of the slowest two areas in, in our ecosystem to have move and change. Law firms are, are showing signs of life and change. I do think this will be a big disruptor because of what it means for the billable hour. And God knows we've been talking about that for decades. And maybe here's hoping and being optimistic that this does force them to think a little bit differently because AI inefficiency has always been at odds with the billable hour. But you can't avoid this now. You can't do business as usual. So what does that mean for them to start thinking about it? Here's hoping. And then same for the law schools. Law schools haven't changed their curriculum again in decades either. And the skill sets that we need and the roles that they'll play, that we've talked about.

The curriculum in the schools and the way we teach and prepare young lawyers is going to need to change and be different. So again, maybe this is an opportunity to force some change there.

Yeah. Yeah.

Craig, any thoughts?

I am pretty far removed from both of them. Okay. So I can. Well, maybe I'll say as well, maybe one thought, which is it's always struck me a little bit odd how there's this very stark division between legal advice and non legal advice. And I think increasingly in a world with generative AI and with systems and technology, that gets far more blurred. And if there was ever a distinction of black and white between legal advice and non legal advice, it's going to be a lot more gray in the future as well. And we'll see how the legal profession responds to that.

Definitely, Definitely.

Well said.

I like that. Fascinating. Okay, so let's jump to another topic. Let's talk about scaling teams, let's talk about building teams. And you both kind of alluded to types of people that you want to hire and look for, but I'd love to. So, Mary, I know you've done a lot of building. Craig, I know you've done a lot of hiring as well. Would love to kind of hear your thoughts, especially at a time right now in our economy where there's a lot of laying off, particularly in the corporate ranks. We just came off of a huge boon of lots of hiring huge legal teams as well as law firms.

What is it my audience can learn from you or have you seen around scaling right now?

Yeah. Would you like to start?

Okay.

Yeah.

Whenever I'm building a team, I try to hire people who don't look like me when I say that. I mean, don't have the same background, perspective, skill set. I hire around my own weaknesses, if you will, trying to figure out, you know, building a team is thinking about what you need in terms of skill sets, experience, background, and where do you have gaps. And where you have gaps, you can actually fill in by hiring someone who is strong in that area, who brings that background. And a lot of folks who are new to building teams find that a little bit threatening. Like, oh, what if I hire someone who's smarter than me or makes me look bad? No, as a manager, that makes you look fantastic. You know, you're building out people who have the skill set that you don't. I mentor, coach, talk to a lot of general counsel who's immediate, especially solo general counsel, whose immediate thought is, there's so much work for me, I need to hire someone whose background is just like mine. I'm a corporate lawyer. I need another corporate lawyer so they can sort of clone myself and do more work. But I think that's my advice is like, think about what else your team needs. And that's why I'm always pushing for legal operations. It's not obvious to people to think to hire for that role because you just have so much work and you just think, throw more bodies, throw more lawyers at it. But this is the force multiplier. This is the person that comes in and makes four people be able to do the work of ten.

Thank you.

Yeah. And I think that's. I think it's great advice, Mary, and I'll compliment and maybe take it from a different angle as well. Right. Because we're know, my. My remit is largely China, India, Korea and Southeast Asia, with a few other parts around Asia Pacific thrown in. And so, you know, sort of start with what is needed in terms of the. The substantive skill sets that are there and then, you know, language and culture and a lot of other things that. That come in there as well. But once you kind of get over those. Those initial hurdles and you've. And you know, you have your pool of candidates, you know, one of the things I think a lot about is what is the team culture and what's the company culture and how are we going to build that? Because every single new person comes into your team immediately impacts that culture in very profound ways. And it's true you know, I'm, you know, I'm the sole practitioner where you have another person who you're there seeing every single day and spending lots of time with. And it's also true, I mean, we've got 24,000 colleagues across Asia Pacific as far as the business goes, we have over 100 on our legal corporate affairs team. And every single person that comes in changes that culture for positive or for negative ways. And so a lot of the things that I look for once we've had different levels of screening and skill sets that are. There are. Look, is this somebody who's going to come in and yes, be results oriented and sense of urgency and want to deliver and like internally driven and all of those things that I think everybody wants, you know, but then it's also, is this somebody who's going to come in and be collaborative and raise the, the elevation. And that could be someone who sees the positive side of things and maybe sees the negative also. But, you know, is about, like, what's the possible, like our, the purpose of our company, right, is dreaming big, to create a future with more. Cheers. And so if you don't have optimists who are positive about the future and who want to dream big, it's really not the place for somebody like that. Right. Like, you need that positive outlook and that belief that you can do really amazing things that haven't been done before. And it's that piece that if you get the right people, you can raise the whole team culture and then other people see that and kind of want to go up as well. And we do a ton of internal development. So it's the same whether you're hiring internally or from, from outside as well. But it's a lot of those things that I try to think about, about how you, you, you raise the team overall. And I think you said it very well in terms of, you know, identifying those gaps or those differences that are there because that's how you build a team. You definitely don't want clones. That's, that's really going to get taken out by generative AI.

So kind of last two questions more personal for both of you and you can answer them together if you like or separately. So looking for, say, professional development goals for you individually over the next, say three to five, 10 years, what are you aiming for? Where are you growing? Where are you focusing your effort and your time for both of you individually? And then who are you following or who's inspiring you to think big and to reach and to grow yourself? Like what's been inspirational for you as far as individuals and people that have spoken to you.

For me professionally, it's just always learning. Can I be with people and be learning from them all the time? And I think I learned from people all around me at different levels of an organization and even just generally in the ecosystem. I'm a builder at heart, and, you know, having the opportunity to build something here is great, but I'm also learning from people who have gone ahead of me. And one of the reasons I joined my company is because I thought our CEO is such a visionary, and he's so good about thinking two steps ahead. And I am learning a ton from watching and working with him. In terms of people who inspire me, I've been on a bunch of podcasts and said this. I'm. I'm a big nerd for Navy SEALs and military and special ops teams that I follow David Goggins, who's really hardcore, and so I'm not sure he's for everybody, but just really mind over matter, discipline. Put your heart into everything. And, you know, he has a saying, embrace the suck. You just get up and do it and keep doing it over and over. And I just. I love that mentality of just being. Having a strong mind and knowing that you can get through anything.

Yeah, very good. So on the professional development side, I will say, you know, one of the key ones is continuing to grow the beer category. That is obviously one that, you know, both personally and professionally makes a lot of difference. You know, I love talking about Goose island and so many of the brands that we have. Unfortunately, that is my job also, so that is great. But one of the.

We can. We can all help you grow the beer industry. Thank you personally.

Very much appreciated.

Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. Please continue.

No, no, if you want. If you want to cut me off to talk about growing the beer industry, just jump in. Anything, no problem. Yeah, no, that's. That's very top of mind, you know, and the beer industry is growing, if you look at it kind of across the world, and there's so much opportunity, especially in Asia, but, you know, candidly everywhere. So it's great to be a part of that and be on the front lines with our whole team during that time. So that's. That's the immediate focus, is what I would say. And, you know, part of that is also then understanding the perspectives of different people. And for me, a lot of that is within the company, right. Of, you know, where are the pain points and understanding, you know, what Is that to, to be selling beer in Vietnam at 8pm, 9pm at night as you're going around and understanding. So it's a lot of those perspectives and understanding, but you can almost take that example and, and pull that out a lot more. I mean, one of the things that I end up doing a lot of is, you know, getting to know ambassadors and consul generals and dignitaries from lots of different countries in Asia and in the west, but principally in Asia, and understanding. All right, what is that perspective and what's kind of the cultural history or the, you know, how does that shape kind of a point of view or informed decision making? And so that gets very much into policies that impact the beer industry and our company, but in a lot of cases into, you know, much larger issues also. So on the professional development side, it's trying to increase that understanding and different perspectives that come in and then on the, you know, who following, I mean, there's a lot of different folks that I'll mention. I think Brene Brown is amazing, very inspiring and kind of a lot of the skills that I think we're going to need as we navigate the years and probably decades ahead also. And, you know, she's, she's got a bit of a crew that, you know, she works with, you know, Adam Grant, I mentioned this one before, and Simon Saidk, there's some really like, really inspiring folks who think similarly, but slightly differently within that space about what work is and what, you know, what the value is and what purpose means. All of these kind of very big words, but that matter a lot when you're spending so much of your, your lived existence in your day to day you know, working on something, you want it to be meaningful and to contribute to something much bigger and you want to leave it a bit better than you found it. So I think they're, they're all amazing. I would also call out, you know, Mark Rolig, who's been a general counsel for many, for several companies, I would say, who does a great job of mentorship for many different types of GCs, those who've just started in or aspiring and who've been GCS for a long time. You know, I think he has a lot of wisdom about how to, to navigate different aspects as well. So that's sort of another person I would specifically identify.

So appreciate you both. We're kind of bringing this to a close. How can people find you, follow you, reach out to you? What's the best way?

Well, thanks for having us on this. This was a really fun conversation. I, as we started off with, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can definitely find me there. I really do my best to respond to people, so if you do reach out and you want to meet up, I make every effort to do so.

Yeah. As with several of these answers, I will say mine's not so different from Mary's, so thank you, Chris. It's been great chatting yourself with Mary. You know. Yes. LinkedIn, for the most part.

I get, you know, people should ping me, especially if they want to work in the beer sector or in. In Asia, and they have the. The skills that are, that are needed to be able to do that. You know, I love hearing from people. We have lots of different roles, so we are always either actively looking or kind of keeping an eye open for folks who have passion and would love at some point to join the company. So, you know, it's pretty easy to just shoot a message over and say, hi. And I will say the messages really vary. You know, you get the sales pitches from, you know, hello, insert name here, three paragraphs of text to those ones that are personalized. And it's not like, you know, we have screeners or other people. It's pretty direct. So that's the impression that people make on that. But I would say definitely reach out and, you know, you know, I love hearing from people and making those connections. So it's great when you can have one of those genuine connections and build up a relationship over time.

So, Mary and Craig, it's been an honor and pleasure. Thank you for your time today.

Thank you, Chris.

Thanks, Chris. Pleasure.