Charting the Three Waves of Legal AI Transformation with Thomson Reuters’ Raghu Ramanathan

Blue Sky: ⁠⁠@geeklawblog.com⁠⁠ ⁠⁠@marlgeb⁠⁠
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer (00:00)
Hi, I’m Marlene Gabauer from The Geek in Review, and I have Nikki Shaver here in the studio. Hi, Nikki. What’s going on?

Nikki Shaver (00:05)
Hi Marlene, thanks for

having me. Well, know, something kind of exciting. Vendor Hub just launched on Legal Tech Hub. And you may well ask, what is Vendor Hub? It’s a set of content developed especially for vendors to support them with their specific needs, which if you think about it is interesting. There’s all kinds of content out there in the Legal Tech market for buyers. And in fact, Legal Tech Hub until now has mostly provided information for buyers.

but there’s very little to support vendors and yet they have their own pain points, many of which are in common with one another. For example, they all deal with security questionnaires, they deal with a long sales cycle of law firms, and they also have areas where a lot of legal tech startup founders and CEOs need information, but there’s not a lot available. For example, how do you value your startup? How should you prepare for or seek a successful exit?

How do you approach the legal market in terms of segmentation? So what’s a large firm compared to a mid-sized firm? And how does that differentiate them in terms of sales targets? With Vendor Hub and the content on it, we’re providing custom content specifically for Legal Tech vendors to help them navigate their journey more easily. So that’s available as of now, as part of a premium membership on Legal Tech Hub for vendors, or as a standalone offering.

So any vendors listening who would like to know more, contact info@legaltechnologyhub.com for more details. And for buyers, it helps you too because hopefully with more educated vendors, whole market runs more smoothly.

Marlene Gebauer (01:48)
Sounds great. Thank you, Nikki.

Marlene (01:58)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer

Greg Lambert (02:04)
And I’m Greg Lambert. And today we are delighted to be joined by Raghu Ramanathan, who is president of legal professionals at Thomson Reuters. Raghu, welcome to the Geek in Review.

Raghu Ramanathan (02:18)
Thanks for having me.

Greg Lambert (02:20)
joined back in February of 2024 and you had a distinguished career before TR at SAP. So it must be exciting to make that transition.

Raghu Ramanathan (02:33)
Yeah, absolutely. It’s been a year since I joined Thomson Reuters and I’m unashamed to admit it’s my first foray into the legal industry as well.

Marlene (02:43)
Well, I mean, we talked earlier and you have really a very interesting and wide variety of experiences in different industries. So this is a great origin story. So can you tell us a little bit about that and how your journey led you to this role?

Raghu Ramanathan (02:57)
Yeah, absolutely, Marlene. So I started off as a computer engineer in the 90s working on neural networks, which is strange given that we’re talking about AI after all these days. But I had a very, very short stint in engineering because immediately after that I did my MBA and went into the world of business. I started working for McKinsey & Company as a strategy consultant in the 90s in Asia.

And if you remember, that was the time of the Asian growth tigers, the economy’s very, very exciting times. And then I shifted to banking in the UK, shifted to then the tech sector, where I was working in a startup in an Israeli company, and then ended up in my tech journey with SAP, as you mentioned, but I was there for quite a while, most recently as the head of the platform division.

building up their platform solutions, including AI, from a 200 million to a 3 billion division in the course of five years before I joined TR, And I think maybe part of the origin story is why did I move to legal? Why did I move to TR after doing all of that, right? And part of the excitement is around AI. Part of my calculation prediction, let’s see if it’s right or wrong, is that

Two industries will be at the front line of AI transformation. One is legal, the other’s healthcare. So that’s why I joined legal.

Greg Lambert (04:19)
If you had to bet who’s going to do the better job of implementing AI, it to be healthcare or legal?

Raghu Ramanathan (04:26)
I think it’s legal because, you know, really good discussion, right? And I think the challenges in healthcare are significant around the regulatory aspects, the data privacy aspects. It is less challenging in legal. There are, of course, other challenges. I’m sure we’ll talk about it. So I do think legal will be having the nose ahead of healthcare.

Marlene (04:27)
think healthcare is winning so far.

Greg Lambert (04:49)
Now, we ran into you at Legal Week and that was your first time going to Legal Week. So I would just like to know as a newbie to the Legal Week experience, what were your thoughts attending the

Raghu Ramanathan (05:04)
yeah, it was my first time at a legal conference and other than the fact it was a strange location, I would say I just loved the energy. felt like there was a lot of enthusiasm, optimism, curiosity among all of the attendees. Everybody was just trying to figure out where the next layer of wave of technology is going to lead them. I felt a lot of energy and in particular I walked the…

as you probably did, right? I walked all the floors and I saw so many interesting companies, which I guess I should have expected, but wasn’t expecting. There seems to be so much innovation happening and everybody led with AI. It doesn’t matter what they do, right? But the tagline was AI and it was very interesting to see.

Greg Lambert (05:48)
We processed your mail, but we do it with AI now.

Marlene (05:51)
mean, everybody should just

Raghu Ramanathan (05:52)
That’s

right.

Marlene (05:52)
have like a bubble over their head. It’s like AI AI. just all walk around like that. You recently, co-authored a white paper, called the future of the law firm. So what key insights or findings, did you, you determine that that law firms must embrace and how they doing?

Raghu Ramanathan (05:57)
Yeah, indeed.

Yeah,

Marlene, since you love origin stories, I have to say this was not my first crack at it. In 2017, about eight years ago, I authored a paper called Professional Services on the Brink of Disruption, very dramatic title. And it was about all kinds of professional services firms, of course, law firms included. And part of this was looking at where does the world of robotics, bots, AI…

Marlene (06:27)
Yes.

Raghu Ramanathan (06:38)
although we never talked about AI those days, was leading us, right? And if I can start with that paper, and that might provide a bit of context if that’s okay, I had made a few predictions in that paper. First and foremost, that 66 % of legal associates work would be done by bots, right? Like I said, we didn’t know how to call it better, and we called them bots at that time. And the good news is,

Marlene (06:47)
Mm-hmm.

Raghu Ramanathan (07:04)
Accounting as a profession I thought would be a lot more aggressive, like 90 to 95 % of the accountants would be gone. the other predictions was around the fact that law firms or all professional services companies have to change from time-based antiquated pricing mechanisms to outcome-based pricing. I also expected most professional services firms to become

tech companies and have apps and lots of technologies providing solutions through apps that you can download and use. And lastly, this was probably my boldest and my failed prediction. I said that, I was thinking that the largest taxi company, Uber, didn’t have taxis, largest hotel company, Airbnb, didn’t have any hotel rooms. So the largest…

Marlene (07:37)
Mm-hmm.

Raghu Ramanathan (07:52)
professional services companies or law firms would not have any lawyers. It would be a freelance network that they’re working in, right? Which of course didn’t come true. So I felt compelled, now that I’m in the legal industry, now that AI has advanced, to kind of like take a second crack at it. And that’s kind of like the origin story behind this paper, which we call the future of law, right? And what we found in this is, first and foremost, right, it was a

revalidation of the importance of AI. In across all our surveys, we found that 24 % of law firms already considered themselves leaders in pioneering AI and had already adopted AI. And 94 % of this 24 % were already getting concrete benefits, right? So it’s a validation that this is all real.

And we saw, and this is the gist of it, and I’m sorry this is long winded, but just to give you the gist of the paper, right? So it’s like, and we said there are three waves of how this is gonna go. So the first wave, which we are in the middle of right now, is what we call the optimization wave. But given the reality of this technology, people are gonna use this to make their work products better, to do it faster, doing exactly what they do today, but just…

Marlene (08:47)
No, this is fascinating. Yeah.

Raghu Ramanathan (09:10)
do it better, do it faster, right? That’s why it’s the optimization The second wave, which we think will shortly start, we call it the re-engineering wave, right? Where people will say, okay, now this is all working, how do I re-engineer what I do? How do I re-engineer the time that my lawyers are spending into activities which are more value-adding? How do I re-engineer my pricing?

How do I re-engineer my staffing models, my pyramid model, all of that, right? That’s the second wave. And the third wave is, I call this the new business model wave, right? Once you’re done with re-engineering, you start with more broader conversations around the role of law firms in the ecosystem, how they add value. And here we are talking about, like I said, and this is one of my original predictions, they will start offering

tech-based services, There will be a commoditized tech-based service that is offered. They will get into new lines of business, which go beyond where you traditionally think law stops, So there will be some related areas of business they will go into. There will be more, even more advances on pricing and, you know, to true outcome base as opposed to just fix fee models.

So these are some of the changes and I also anticipate and I’ve been talking to some of the more progressive law firms. They’re also taking interesting bets on how the value chain of the legal system might even change by perhaps even cannibalizing themselves in some cases, direct to consumer models. So there’s lots of interesting things in the third wave. again, apologies for the long winded answer, but I hope that gives you a bit of flavor of everything we’ve been thinking about.

Greg Lambert (10:54)
Yeah, I

Marlene (10:55)
I

was.

Greg Lambert (10:56)
just want to follow up on that a little bit because I think that the legal industry has probably gone through some type of the first two phases before where we’ve worked to optimize things and then kind of re-engineer. And so I can think about bringing in a

Raghu Ramanathan (11:09)
Mm-hmm.

Marlene (11:23)
Email. Yeah.

Greg Lambert (11:24)
Email. mean,

Raghu Ramanathan (11:25)
As

an example, yeah.

Greg Lambert (11:25)
I can see that we’ve kind of, but think we’ve said this before and I can’t remember if it was us or Toby Brown or somebody else that said this, but you could probably take an attorney from the late 1990s and time travel to right now. And maybe with a little bit of, you know, showing them what email and websites look like right now compared to like 1995.

It probably would take them a few days kind of back up to speed on practicing law. we were to take someone from, 2019 and plop them into 2028. Yeah. Do you think we would get the phase three by, by then? Do you think we would start to where we’re getting into a new business model?

Marlene (12:03)
or Phase 3.

Raghu Ramanathan (12:13)
Yep, I, 2028, that’s three years away. I think that’s probably slightly early. But I if you give it another five to 10 years is what we are predicting. So let’s say 2030 to 2035, I think that will happen.

Marlene (12:32)
Yes, like I wanted to follow up too, because the report does say that there’s going to be impact on staffing, but you’re also saying that there’s going to be new things that attorneys will do. I’m interested in this, this they’re working on technology because like, how are we, how, how do you sort of envision they’re competing with like the larger, the larger tech companies, sort of more generalized tech companies in the, in the ecosystem?

what are law firms going to be offering that is, it is different than those. And I’m also very interested, sorry, it’s a double question. I’m also very interested in the, the value pricing idea, particularly as it applies to big law, we do have value pricing in law as, as it exists, but generally that’s kind of more on the plaintiff side.

Raghu Ramanathan (13:07)
place.

Marlene (13:20)
but that’s really it. So how would that work in big law where they’re very used to getting paid no matter what.

Raghu Ramanathan (13:28)
Yeah, I think there’s a lot to unpack there, right? So there’s a staffing dimension, there’s the how do you distinguish with tech services and then the whole pricing model. Let me start with the staffing if that’s okay, right? So I can say very openly we had some disagreement between the authors of the report. And in staffing, my personal view is I think the pyramid model will have to give.

Marlene (13:31)
Yes.

Yes, please.

Healthy.

Raghu Ramanathan (13:54)
something will have to change. I do think it’s gonna become more of a leaner model and the pressure will be on hiring more partners, right? And this is where the talent war is gonna shift rather than associates. But I don’t necessarily believe that the number of people in the law firm are gonna go down. So my view, and I’ve seen this time and again, I can maybe give you an…

interesting analogy and if you have the time, right? Is that okay? Like from my experience in the software industry. So in software industry, we had something called the cloud, So the cloud wave hit and we had lots of consultants from Accenture Deloitte implementing very expensive pieces of software and they all said, with cloud we are out of a job, What we used to do in three years can be done now in six months.

Greg Lambert (14:20)
Please.

Raghu Ramanathan (14:43)
Why would they need more Accenture consultants? So the reality, what happened now is fast forward, like it or not Accenture had to shift to cloud, and now the business is two, three, four X bigger. Because lots of customers said, hey, if I can do such innovations in six months instead of three years, I have more projects for you. I think the same thing is going to happen in the legal world. There are lots of interesting problems that people need to solve.

And I think it’s going to open up demand. So I don’t see it as a doomsday scenario where you need less lawyers,

Marlene (15:16)
I had one follow up on that. So we’re, seeing trends that, legal departments are taking things in house. So how does that factor in to the extra work that we’re going to see happening?

Raghu Ramanathan (15:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yep,

yep. So many legal departments, and I’m sure there’s an whole assortment of them Marlene, right? Most of them I’m talking to are saying that the first challenge is that the budget is tightening. They just need to do what they’re doing more efficiently with AI, That’s the first challenge. And they also say that even if they take in more work, there is so many more issues for them to look into than the time that they have.

And more and more, they’re being asked to come into the CXO table in these companies and analyze issues which are much broader with a broader scope. And they’re saying, look, we’d love to engage with law firms, but because of the price value equation, we had to start later with them, I do believe that with AI, with the adjustment of the price value equation, more of that demand will come to the law firms as well.

Greg Lambert (16:22)
I’m curious, because you mentioned that you don’t foresee that there will be necessarily less of a headcount in the law firm. But I’m curious more on as we implement the technology and we start moving into re-engineering phase for real, what does the talent of the law firm? I know you said more partners.

Marlene (16:49)
What do they look like?

Greg Lambert (16:49)
But where

else are we going to need more and where’s that talent going to shift?

Raghu Ramanathan (16:52)
Yeah,

yeah. That’s a good question, So more partners, more tech talent, And this is harder in a law firm, as we know, to mix those two cultures. So part of the longer-term business model change, I don’t know how, so don’t ask me how, but I do think that the equity structure of law firms need to change in order for tech talent to thrive.

There’s no way you’re going to get tech talent to work in law firms if the other alternative is I get stock options somewhere else. So I do believe, and I’ve been speaking to some managing partners who are very progressive on this, and they’ve been looking at alternative holding structures, how to actually give more equity to tech talent. But more broader, if I can say, Greg, one of the realizations that I’ve seen everybody come to

is the lawyer of the future is different from the lawyer of today, Just simply put. Lawyers are, if you think about what makes them successful, they’re very analytical, very thorough, very detailed, but delegation is not one of the strengths that you can talk about in many lawyers, But with AI, AI is like an assistant, it’s by your side, you gotta learn delegation, If you try to do it all yourself, you’re not gonna be successful in this new world.

So it almost feels like technology, delegation, more broader unstructured problem solving are new skills that a lawyer needs to pick up. And that’s why I think the curriculums need to be different too.

Greg Lambert (18:28)
Yeah, that actually fits right into something I was doing right before we jumped on here. that, you know, was kind of consoling someone who wasn’t really understanding an effective way of implementing the AI that they knew that it would help them. But they haven’t quite gotten over that learning curve. And it was one of those things where it was like, well, you really shouldn’t be doing all the grunt.

work here, we should have a layer that’s coming in and is basically setting this up. Because, they’re paying you, you know, $1,000 plus an hour, much more for you for your brain for your being able to analyze what to do with the information, not to do the grunt work and getting everything, everything set up. But that’s a different, it’s a different mindset in in different

Raghu Ramanathan (19:07)
Mm-hmm.

Exactly. Yeah.

Greg Lambert (19:21)
kind of workflow that then we’re used to. So yeah, think you’re right. We’re on that edge of the re-engineering, but not quite there yet.

Raghu Ramanathan (19:30)
Indeed.

Greg Lambert (19:31)
Let’s talk, I mean, we’ve talked about you. Let’s talk a little bit about co-counsel and where we are right now. I know that you’ve implemented, know, a GenAI in multiple products there seems to be this bringing in of a tighter integration in with co-counsel. So.

I think we’re both kind of curious or we’re all curious what’s next on the front for co-counsel.

Raghu Ramanathan (19:58)
that’s a really, really interesting topic, So I would say first and foremost, before I go into some of the details, the landscape is constantly changing and evolving. If you had asked us 12 months ago what co-consult should be and how it does adds value compared to right now, our perspective is very different because technologies are developing rather rapidly and what LLMs which are you could

call it the underlying engines behind co-counsel. For example, what they do, that bar is also moving, Now with that background, so one of the things that we are very, very keen to do is to make co-counsel the most comprehensive AI solution with the maximum number of AI capabilities or skills, as we call it. As of last count, I think we have about 20 skills, right? Skills ranging from

summarizing a document, creating timeline, legal research, several drafting skills, et cetera, et cetera. And we are constantly thinking about what’s the next skill that will be valuable to the customer, And because of the technology changes, what we’re being forced to do, Greg, is to take more risks if I can be very open,

So rather than the early set of skills which were like very straightforward and you know there was zero R &D If we invested in it, we’re going to get a decent answer. We are now going for skills which are harder, And the market is forcing us to do it because otherwise, you know, we won’t be at the cutting edge. And of course we have some hits, some we have some misses, but these hits are going to really pay off for our customers. Like one recent skill that we added.

is something we call claims explorer, if you’ve heard about that. And that’s a really interesting journey, right? Because you feed the AI a bunch of facts about your current situation, jurisdiction, and then the AI has to tell you what kind of claims you might be entitled to. And what we found in the first go is that the answer that we’re getting back from our AI from co-counsel was actually not that very useful,

So we kind of had to rack our brain as to why this is not working. And then we redeployed our editorial team, which you know about, which used to create all these editorials for Westlaw Practical Law, and said, can you create new, different content just to help us with the claims explorer? And they did. And then it started lighting up, and now we have the skill which really works. And it comes up with two times more valid claims than a lawyer can manually do in the time that they have.

and it’s really valuable, So I think it’s an interesting journey. We’re pushing ourselves. We are trying to be the most comprehensive. Any questions on that? And I just wanted to highlight a second area where we are going.

Greg Lambert (22:42)
me ask one thing because I know right now one of the biggest challenges for a company like TR is that you have essentially the LLMs that can process and work with documents that we upload. And then you have kind of a

another side of that where it’s more legal research. So you have a huge corpus of documents that you’re working with, cases, statutes, regulations, and so on. But I think there’s been like the bridging of those two systems to where you can take, say, a corpus of documents that we have and actually conduct real hardcore research

Raghu Ramanathan (23:27)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Lambert (23:31)
using those documents and being able to kind of mix and match the research and the analytics as well. And so that was a long way of asking because you talked about redeploying the cadre of experts that you have to work on that workflow. Do you also see the technology and the hardware

Raghu Ramanathan (23:39)
Yep. Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Greg Lambert (23:57)
improving enough to where you can have those bridges between having, you know, the documents that we’re bringing in, the core research corpus that you have, and being able to have the speed that’s necessary to kind of combine those two.

Raghu Ramanathan (24:08)
Yep.

Yeah, no, that’s exactly what you’re doing. That’s well summarized, Greg, right? So what we realize is for all of these so-called skills that we are talking about, it really lights up when you can leverage both sets of content, Content which is from TR, like Westlaw over years, content from the law firm, the documents that they have, but also any other public content that you have, So all three…

need to come together to your point, and that gives you the best results in terms of the output of these scales, So this is exactly what we’re seeing. So for us, it’s been a shift. Like 12 months ago, we would have said all these scales just run off TR data, but it’s no longer true. Today, all these scales run off TR data, the customer data, public data, all meshing together. And one of the things that’s really helped us is

the LLMs are making progress, So one of the advantages that we have is we work with all of the leading LLMs, and each has the strengths and weaknesses. And one of the things that’s good, like in Google, for example, is they came up with a long context window, which means you can upload a lot of the data without having to parse, without having to subdivide. And this has improved, to your point, the performance and how quickly we can get this thing.

the results as well. So I think that’s also paying back in terms of some of the early co-innovation we’re doing with some of the LLM providers.

Marlene (25:45)
I have a follow up. So, you know, each of these new skills that you’re, you’re teaching co-counsel, you know, you’re mentioning that some of these are more complex. and I imagine there’s a lot of time and effort that are put into these things. So how do you make the determination? And I imagine there’s multiple information points that you have, but how do you make the determination that this scale is going to be something that’s going to be.

Raghu Ramanathan (25:51)
Mm-hmm.

Marlene (26:10)
important for our client, for our customers. And this is going to be something that’s important in the market because in the market, there’s so many, you were saying in legal week, there’s tons of innovation. You’re seeing lots of different explorations into two different areas and different skills that different things do. how do you kind of keep that focus when there’s just so much to be able to do? It’s just kind of like squirrel, squirrel.

Greg Lambert (26:34)
Hahaha.

Raghu Ramanathan (26:35)
Yeah,

now that’s a really good question because if we were to say yes to everything our product team suggests, right, you know, we’ll be bankrupt. They want to do everything, right? That’s right. So I think there are two very, very important, obvious, simple criteria that we always look hard into. One is what’s the value? If we could do this, how much of a breakthrough difference is it to the workflows of our customers?

Marlene (26:43)
You’d be doing everything and then you’d do nothing. So yeah.

Raghu Ramanathan (27:03)
is this transforming, right, and adding a lot of value. And the second thing is technical feasibility, because otherwise the product team will go with some amazing ideas, but perhaps very, very low chance of realizing in the next six months. So we tried to combine both. On the first one, to your point, Marlene, so we always prided ourselves in working closely with a set of core innovation customers. So we have,

our friends you could say, in a customer community that we immediately go back and we say, hey, we just had an idea, Here’s the idea. Would you be interested if this works? If this works, right? And then they give us immediate feedback. So that’s really a source of strength for us.

Marlene (27:44)
So to switch gears a little bit and focus on the we know the technology innovations continuing at this rapid pace. How is it going to impact the courts, who are not known for their rapid pace of change for a variety of reasons? How are they using this technology or will be using this technology?

and what do you think the benefits are? And I imagine they’re gonna have to do something, if they’re, if council are using this, they’re gonna have to be on board as well.

Raghu Ramanathan (28:19)
Yeah, Really, really important topic and this is something which is also closer to my heart, which is I think we’re all at a time when we are trying to strengthen and reinforce the judiciary and the role of the judiciary much more broadly. And I would even say the AI for codes is even more important than the AI for law firms, right? The reason is

If you think about it, I was looking at some data, Compared to 2020, in four years, we have 40 % more pending cases in the district Courts in the federal codes, and there is a real issue of access to justice, and the budgets are not going to get any easier, So therefore, AI provides a very, very nice way out for the problem that we find ourselves in.

And we find that in general, in all our conversations, the courts are actually extremely enthusiastic about thinking about AI as a solution to the problem. there’s some real openness and willingness to this, right? We just, by the way, we just recently announced that we have an agreement with the federal courts. So the federal courts are going to deploy

Thomson Reuters AI across 25,000 users, judges, and court staff to help them in their AI journey, across the Supreme Court, across the circuit courts, the district courts, all of them, So, you know, they are very, very active. In addition to that, you may know that we have a partnership with the National Center of State Courts. We call it the Thomson Reuters Institute.

National Center of State Courts Partnership. And this partnership is going from strength to strength. So one of the things that we’ve done is to bring this partnership together is to inform and educate judges and again, court staff. it’s going even beyond that, right? That was the purpose in which it was set. But more and more, this association is now getting into the heart of helping understand policy developments.

how to shape policy developments as well, and to influence the entire ecosystem. And these are becoming real big transformational events, like we do a monthly webinar through this consortium. And in the last six months, Marlene, we’ve had over 10,000 judges and court staff join this, and the feedback has been awesome.

Marlene (30:48)
Wow. That’s great.

Raghu Ramanathan (30:51)
The feedback is from judges calling us and saying, can you come to my office? Can you show this to other people? To test running, working in a sandbox, getting their hands dirty. So it’s been really impressive to see. And on the state court side, as of last count, 45 out of 50 states now are using AI that we have provided with co-council and Westlaw AI.

So I would say it’s actually been fascinating because normally you would expect the government to be behind, but they all see a big problem and they see AI as solution to the problem and they are very much in it.

Marlene (31:33)
Yeah, well, it’s very refreshing to hear you know, so many are really engaged and enthused and kind of want to get their hands on it. I think that’s terrific.

And another thing that you’re doing, you recently started a customer success initiative for clients. tell us a little bit more about that and how it’s going to impact those clients. Cause we’ve always heard about customer success in a lot of different vendors. So like, what is this and how is it different?

Raghu Ramanathan (31:57)
Sure,

Yeah, part of this is bringing, simply put, right, bringing best practices from the cloud world into the legal industry. And this is what I’ve done in my previous jobs as So I think the realization in the cloud world is that it doesn’t matter how much you sell, how good the products are. At the end of the day,

if the customer, the end user, the lawyer is not using it or the judge is not using it, it counts for nothing, especially I would say it is even more challenging with AI solutions compared to maybe solutions like Westlaw, which we had in the past, Westlaw was rather straightforward. Everybody knew how to use it. AI is interesting because it has immense potential. There are thousands of use cases, which is great.

But there are thousands of use cases, so it’s also tough to know where to start, what to do, right? And like this paralysis, and lot of people are you know, stuck. So this is kind of like why we think customer success is very important. And in Thomson Reuters, we’ve gone from having, I would say, less than 10 people beginning of last year, to now over 200 customer success specialists at this point of time.

Marlene (32:50)
People just get overwhelmed, like I don’t even know what to do yet. Yeah.

Raghu Ramanathan (33:14)
And their role is very simple, right? Their role is to spend a lot of time, either in person or remote or through digital tools with the lawyers, We care, if I can say very openly, less about partners and management and CIOs, but it’s actually the lawyer who needs to do the work. And so they need to spend more time with the individual lawyers saying, hey, how can we help you get started, From simple things like, do you even have a login? Have you set it up?

to then more advance things like, okay, now that you have a log in, you have access to this, what’s on your mind? Like, what are you working on today? Let’s talk about it. Part of this is, and you know, and this is standard practice in the customer success industry outside, right, we are building what we think is the best and the largest library of use cases, cutting across various practices.

So it also allows us to share best practice and say, okay, if you are an M&A lawyer, maybe this is something that might be helpful if you want to try it, So that’s what it is. And it’s a way of aligning ourselves closer to the customer, And not get carried away with how much we are selling or how good or great our products are, right? But to say, look, are we adding real value?

Marlene (34:28)
So use cases, are they gathered strictly from clients and then generalized in terms of being able to be referred to in other instances? Or do you have SMEs that are part of this customer service initiative that understand the workflow in certain segments?

Raghu Ramanathan (34:44)
Yep.

Yeah, good question, right? So in many cases, the team that we are building up is kind of ambidextrous, So they know enough about law and they know enough about technology, Maybe they’re not the best lawyer, maybe they’re not the best technologists, but they know enough and that’s what we need. And because many of them are ex-lawyers who’ve been in our company for a while,

Many of them actually very smart in coming up for these use cases. They are actually powering up the use cases based on their personal experience, and the conversation they have with their networks. That is one big source for it. Second is, it is also customers to your point, We are, of course, very sensitive. If a customer says, hey, this is a use case that’s proprietary, I don’t want you to share, we don’t share it.

But what we are finding increasingly is it’s like a forward lawyers want to talk to other AI forward lawyers, whichever firm they are in, and to share their experiences. So partly we’re thinking about giving them an opportunity or forum to share the fact that what they are doing and then customers seem to like it and appreciate it and want it.

Greg Lambert (35:58)
Well, we talked about customer success. Let me flip that a little bit here and talk about benchmarking and the AI tools. I know it’s been a hot topic at last year. So you looking at both external benchmarks where you’re being compared to what else is on the market?

And then also what kind of internal benchmarks are you setting up and what’s your thoughts on the transparency of being able to show those benchmarks to everyone?

Raghu Ramanathan (36:35)
Yeah,

Yeah, so good question, Greg, and very timely, right? And I would say first and foremost, we and I personally support industry benchmarks. We are at a phase where the whole industry needs to demystify AI, and I think we’re in a market expansion phase for everyone, so benchmarks help.

We participated in the recent VALS AI study and all leading future benchmarks, we will be part of it. My view is, while that is the case, the benchmarks also need to evolve, Am I fully happy with the way the benchmarks are done right now, right? Not 100%, some are better, some are not so great, And there’s an education process in terms of what benchmark is actually valuable in real life.

If I can say some benchmarks are slightly more academic, and some benchmarks actually make a difference to their real life lawyers who will use it. And more and more, one of the key principles that I’m proposing is we are not in a phase where AI is replacing the lawyers, at least not in the next couple of years. So rather than just benchmark the AI output,

the AI output is one step of a multi-step legal workflow. Why don’t we benchmark the end-to-end impact of that AI output across the entire matter or entire outcome and see what difference it we are, know, I’m, you know, more and more we’re working with people doing benchmark to move in that direction, if that makes sense.

Marlene (38:05)
Well, Raghu, we have come to the time in our interview where we have the crystal ball question. And since you like to do predictions, guess you’ll like this. You’ll like this one. You know, what changes or challenges do you think the industry will have to address in the next couple of years? So very broad. You can take that wherever you want.

Raghu Ramanathan (38:15)
Ha ha.

Yeah, yeah. I think the…

I think there are two big topics, right? So one is how will the legal value chain change and how will even the division of business between the different size of law firms work? One of the observations that I have is that small and medium law firms are moving faster with AI, So they are seeing this as a competitive tool, weapon, an equalizer, whatever you want to call it.

And that makes me feel that large law firms will have to up the game and change things quite fast because otherwise there will be me to versions very quickly, right? So which means just like I talked about how we are being pushed to do more fundamental research in terms of where we go with AI, I think you’re going to see more bolder moves by the larger law firms, So I think that’s…

That’s one thing. The second big prediction that I’m, I don’t know if it’s a prediction, but what I see, what I sense is it is becoming less and less about technology. It is more about change management. And I think those law firms who are investing in a strategic clarity in terms of upfront, like where are we going,

that kind of exercises to get everybody on board, but also operational change management to make sure that the rank and file of the organizations actually benefit, embrace, get, know, and move in that direction. I think it’s gonna be key and that’s gonna differentiate winners from people who are lagging.

Marlene (40:06)
like how well they prepare their resources for the coming changes.

Raghu Ramanathan (40:11)
Yeah, maybe, and more broadly, right, and maybe this is another way to finish this, which is, I joined 12 months ago high hopes for the legal industry and AI, and I feel it has met or even slightly surpassed my expectations, because when I joined, you could say the adoption of AI in the legal industry was in the very low single digit, probably one, two, three percent.

And what we are finding with our own data is now 20 to 23 % of law firms have access to AI. That’s like a big leap in a short period of time. maybe that’s the biggest prediction is this is going fast, and this will make a big difference. Back to Greg, what you were talking about, email versus what’s happening now.

Greg Lambert (40:58)
Yeah, this is a light speed compared to how we’ve reacted in the past. So, well, Raghu Ramanathan want to thank you very much for taking time out of your busy schedule and talking to us today. It’s been great.

Marlene (41:00)
Yeah.

Perfect, thank you.

Raghu Ramanathan (41:13)
Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Marlene.

Marlene (41:15)
And of course, thanks to all of you, our listeners, for taking the time to listen to the Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoyed the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you, so reach out to us on LinkedIn and Blue Sky.

Greg Lambert (41:27)
And Raghu we’ll make sure we put any links that we need out there. But if listeners want to learn more about you what’s the best way for them to find you.

Raghu Ramanathan (41:37)
Yeah, so I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. So I think that’s where you’ll find me, my opinions and anything that I wanna share or if you wanna reach out and contact me as well.

Marlene (41:46)
And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry.

Greg Lambert (41:50)
Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene, I’ll talk to you later.

Marlene (41:52)
Okay, bye.