This week, we sit down with Kenzo Tsushima, Managing Director of Mind Factory at Morae, to discuss how AI is transforming legal operations and consulting services. Kenzo shares his unique career journey, blending a passion for technology with legal expertise, and highlights why the legal industry is positioned to leverage AI advancements more quickly than heavily regulated sectors like healthcare. With a background that spans consulting leadership and GC roles, Kenzo offers a rare dual perspective on how law firms and corporate legal departments can future-proof themselves by embracing emerging technologies like MorAI, Morae’s proprietary AI platform.
Kenzo discusses the creation of MorAI, launched in mid-2023, as a response to widespread legal tech “decision fatigue” — where an abundance of AI tools overwhelms buyers. Rather than pushing generic solutions, Morae designed MorAI around highly specific legal workflows such as contract review, RFP response automation, and internal helpdesk queries. Kenzo emphasizes the importance of “solutionizing” AI: showing real, targeted results rather than relying on hype. Using examples like their Helpdesk module, Kenzo explains how legal teams can instantly boost efficiency by querying historical RFP responses and deploying AI for natural language document reviews, significantly reducing administrative burdens across legal and procurement functions.
A strong advocate for servant leadership and human-centric AI adoption, Kenzo outlines how Morae’s approach goes beyond technology — focusing heavily on change management and upskilling legal professionals. Through programs like SEEDS (Skill Enablement Employee Development Series), Morae invests in developing both consulting and technology skills among its team. Kenzo notes that traditional legal professionals, often unfamiliar with public speaking or technology tools, can thrive when given structured, bite-sized learning opportunities. This consultative-first mindset, he argues, not only improves client outcomes but creates a more resilient and engaged workforce.
Addressing cybersecurity and data privacy concerns, Kenzo details Morae’s use of private Azure instances and multiple legally trained LLMs to ensure client data security and confidentiality. Unlike public AI tools, MorAI is designed to be a trusted legal companion that never co-mingles client data or trains on external internet content. Kenzo also explains why Morae’s strategy of multi-LLM deployment (leveraging OpenAI, Anthropic, and others) future-proofs clients against rapid developments in AI models — ensuring their legal technology stacks remain agile and powerful over time.
Finally, Kenzo shares his insights on the challenges ahead for the legal industry: decision fatigue, resistance to change, and the crucial need to align with younger generations’ expectations around technology use. He urges law firms and corporate legal departments to rethink build-vs-buy strategies, embrace commercially available solutions, and foster AI champions within their organizations. As new roles like legal engineers and prompt engineers emerge, firms that support AI-enabled upskilling and servant leadership will not just survive — they will lead the next era of legal innovation.
Listen on mobile platforms: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
[Special Thanks to Legal Technology Hub for their sponsoring this episode.]
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 from Legal Technology Hub in the studio. Hi Nikki, how are you?
Nikki Shaver (00:08)
Hi Marlene, I’m good, thank you.
Marlene Gebauer (00:10)
Tell me what’s going on.
Nikki Shaver (00:12)
So I’m here today to announce our release of a new competitive analysis for contract review in law firms. We started releasing our competitive analyses last year. These are what we call our quadrants. They’re essentially market reports where we look at leading products within a particular category of legal technology. And then we compare them on the basis of the completeness of the feature set we expect for that category, their maturity in the market, both from a longevity perspective and
in terms of market penetration and their stability in the sense of funding, revenue and also security. This week we are releasing our competitive analysis for law firm contract review and I think this will be a long-awaited one that people will be excited about but the most interesting thing in putting it together was how the market has changed from last year. So we actually had a draft of this quadrant from July of 2024 and what’s interesting is that although the incumbent
like Kira and Luminance are still holding pretty strong.
There’s actually been a rapid ascension of new startups that have moved from what we call our emerging quadrant to real contenders. In other words, they’ve really innovated and built in full feature sets, which means that they’re now genuinely viable competitors to the incumbents in the market. So that shift in such a short amount of time, less than a year, is quite remarkable. We think we’ll see that in quite a few more categories. Those of you interested in having a look at our competitive analysis for contract review,
and following along for new competitive analysis releases, please check out Make sure to follow along in our newsletters as well so you don’t miss anything in the future.
Marlene Gebauer (01:58)
Thank you very much, Nikki, for sharing.
Nikki Shaver (02:00)
Thanks Marlene.
Marlene Gebauer (02:08)
Welcome to The Geek and Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gabauer.
Greg Lambert (02:15)
And I’m Greg Lambert and this week we are joined by Kenzo Tsushima who is the managing director of Mind Factory at Morae. Kenzo, welcome to the Geek in Review.
Kenzo Tsushima (02:28)
Thanks for having me. it’s a pleasure. Greg, Marlene, it’s a pleasure to be on.
Marlene Gebauer (02:28)
Welcome Kenzo.
Greg Lambert (02:31)
Yeah, now we met at Legal Week and just made sure that we brought you on the show. know, Kenzo, before we dive into any of the details, let’s start with a little bit of fun things because you’ve had quite a fascinating career in legal tech and consulting. So what inspired you to pursue a career in this space?
Kenzo Tsushima (02:48)
Thank you.
Greg Lambert (02:54)
in in what do you use to kind of keep keep yourself passionate about it
Kenzo Tsushima (02:58)
It’s interesting because I had always been a fan of technology. mean, you know, my generation is the one really having to program routers for the first time and make sure, you know, technology stacks were set up. I think when I was really considering what I wanted to do for a career, I was looking at Big Law, obviously, but I knew that I didn’t necessarily want to take the traditional path. So I went into sort of a dual role. So prior to Morae, I was at a boutique consultancy in Atlanta, Georgia as the managing partner for consulting services.
but also serving as their GC. But the GC work was truly about 25 % of the role. The meat and potatoes was really running the consulting division. And I think focusing on that tech process optimization and then taking it forward to actually a legal specific ALSP here at Morae has really been fun. I decided to not let my legal degree collect dust for eternity. So it’s been good to really infuse what I had done in my prior career from a tech standpoint and tech architecture standpoint.
to now apply to the legal industry, which had historically been pretty behind. I would say legal and medical are really playing catch up, but boy, are they catching up now. mean, you had mentioned the legal week, one, the turnout, I mean, essentially double what we had ever seen previously. And second is seeing all the different, know, from the niches of niche, it can read this one thing and do this one use case to, hey, this is, you know, your AI assistant that can make your coffee for you, right?
I mean, we’ve seen everything across the gamut and I think that’s, it’s here now. In 2024 and even in, sort of in 2023, we had the hype, we had a lot of people waiting on the sidelines, we had a lot of observation and now people want to do something and it was really reflective during that week.
Greg Lambert (04:20)
you
Now you’re the second guest in a mentioned two industries that have really kind of latched on to the AI hype, and that’s the healthcare industry and the legal industry. So I’m gonna ask you the same question I asked him. If you were a betting man, who do you think’s gonna do it better? Who do you think’s going to be able to leverage the AI tools better?
Kenzo Tsushima (04:58)
It’s wow, that’s a really good question. I will say I think the legal industry has a little bit of a head start because they are not as boxed in with bureaucratic regulation. So obviously there’s an ethics code and obviously there’s, you know, you have to perform the regular legal standard of care, but there are so many HIPAA specific things or patient data that is going to create a bureaucratic hurdle for
aggregating all of the medical data or medical records or natural language processing that should happen within the medical field. So it will get there, but it’s just going to be easier to stand up legal instances of AI before the medical instances just because of those bureaucratic hurdles.
Marlene Gebauer (05:37)
Well, Morae has been leveraging AI tools like MorAI That’s a good one. I like that to streamline those legal workflows that you’re talking about. So can you share some of those examples of, of, you know, how the AI is transforming legal operations for your clients?
Kenzo Tsushima (05:42)
Thank you.
Sure. And I will say, I absolutely love the MorAI name. I won’t take credit for it because actually our chief strategy officer came up for it. I wish I came up with it. But we launched it last year in earnest. I want to say June of last year, we launched the entire suite of MorAI and it’s been in development ever since. The reason we did that is because to the aforementioned point about so much hype within the market, there wasn’t a lot of solutionizing. There was a lot of technology. There was a lot of
hey, you know, this can do this, this can do this. It was almost like the dot-com boom, You had, you know, hotbot, Lycos, AltaVista, you know, Google, Netscape Navigator, all these different things, And you have a lot of choice, but also a lot of decision fatigue. We found that we needed to solutionize it, right? We needed to have specific use cases or specific targeted industries or specific workflows to make sure that…
it’s you’re not taking this for granted sight unseen, like, oh, I believe the AI is going to do a good job. Well, how do you know other than me telling you or Greg telling you or Marlene telling you, you need to know because you need to see it with your own eyes. Right. So I have been thrilled to see the progress we’ve we’ve had in not only corporate legal departments, but law firms also. And it the simplest use cases you’re going to hear are contract interrogation or any sort of artifact interrogation. What LLMs are really good at at their core.
is holistic data aggregation, right? So if you have sets of documents or single documents or long form documents, you can query them and it can give you answers very quickly and it can synthesize that information. So we have that, we have contracts, we have red lines, but what I’ve actually found really interesting is applying this to the daily workflow when you already have existing repositories of information that you need to query. So for example,
In our one of the, I’ll call it a module in our MorAI platform is called Helpdesk. And we use it internally at Morae, but we’ve also, you know, stood it up in terms of client use cases for RFP review, RFP review is one of the most administratively burdensome things you can do. get an RFP from a vendor. They all are the same in some form of another, but there’s 60,000 steps you have to do to get this thing complete. It’s a lot of data. It’s a lot of copy and pasting. It’s a lot of just manual.
Right? Well, what if you just loaded your previous RFP responses into a MorAI tool, queried it and could get instant natural language output that you can just put in the RFP response, right? So it has saved our internal team so many hours and clients where we’ve stood it up. Absolutely love it because it’s changed not only their legal process flow, but their procurement process flow. So you have two separate departments who are realizing the time and efficiency savings. And I think it’s really gone a long way. Now that’s just one use case, but I think
You know, because of the way the Generative AI works, there’s so many different use cases. You’re never just boxed into one thing because it can query all of language and give you responses in that natural language format. The possibilities are infinite.
Marlene Gebauer (08:52)
I have a couple follow up questions on that. So getting information from clients about their workflows and how they do things is notoriously hard. were you able to sort of get that information from your clients and also how did you make the determination this particular solution is more important than that particular solution? We need to work on that first.
Kenzo Tsushima (08:54)
Please.
One of the things and one of the reasons I’m at Morae is because at our heart, we’re consulting organization. So we were formed from the ex Huron consulting business unit. So really we employ a lot of different consultants who sometimes have, also attorneys like myself, and sometimes they’re truly consultants. And the reason I think we get our client base to trust us as trusted advisors is because we’re exactly that. We’re not just selling you.
one software solution because although we’re a tech company, a legal tech company, we’re not just a software company, right? We have at our core a professional services background. So I think folks have been coming to us for years and clients have been coming to us for years. Hey, how can we optimize our legal department, whether that’s CLM, whether that’s resourcing, whether that’s workflow development, whether it’s, you know, automated responses, anything of that ethos. And I think because of our standing within the market and because of the relationships we have.
we’re able to almost get a head start that we’re not just selling you technology that you don’t necessarily need and trying to fit a score pack into a round hole, but we’re actually assessing what your environment looks like. And even if we’re not providing the end technology for you, we’re going to point you in the right direction, right? So yes, we think there’s a lot of use cases for our MorAI suite, but if it’s not the right fit for you, we’re not going to try to fit that into your environment. We’re going to give you the optimal solution. I think we have to listen to our clients more and not just sell what our company is trying to do, right? That’s…
That’s a problem I’ve seen with other providers in the market. And I think everyone needs to go back into a mentality of client first and then product after.
Greg Lambert (10:45)
I to kind of pull on the optimization part when you’re doing your consulting. I’m wondering if you’re still seeing some common misperceptions about what the AI tools can be doing for them. I mean, if you’ve had conversations like I’ve had,
They’ll come at you and say, AI’s got a, I’m sure AI can solve this one solution when it’s really more of a workflow solution or a process, or you’ve already got technology that you’ve paid good money for that you’re just not implementing correctly. Are you seeing that as you advise companies on their AI strategies?
Kenzo Tsushima (11:24)
What I’m seeing, I think it’s a really good point. Essentially, there is a bifurcation perception, right? Either the use cases are so narrow and there’s not a lot of creativity on how to deploy it more enterprise-wide, or it’s so overbroad that people are like, I’m gonna lose my job because it can do everything I’ve been doing as an attorney for 20 years. So either approach is wrong, Sure, you have one use case, it can do that use case really well.
But think about kind of the logic and the underlying methodology of what it’s doing, right? If it can query this database, it can query that database, and it can aggregate that information and synthesize it, right? On the other hand, it is a tool. So I am a firm believer that we need humans in the loop. The humans just don’t have to be in the loop 100 % of the time, right? And I’ll give a very, very, very simplistic use case of this. So.
I have a little tool in my MorAI legal companion called Kenzo’s NDA Validator. So I’ve signed a lot of NDAs, but I never read them front to back anymore because I throw it in there, say, hey, I’m with Morae, is this mutual? Can I sign it? I literally ask the tool, can I sign it? It’s like, yeah, you’re probably okay because of this, this, this, look at section 5.3 or whatever. So I’ll look at section 5.3, but really I can give it a cursory glance and get it out the door. It takes me three minutes as opposed to 20 minutes,
It’s those kinds of things that we need creativity to do. what’s of a pain to do? What’s taking me a long time to do? And instead of just saying, I’m too busy to explore this, which is a common objection I see from a lot of attorneys, sit down for 20 minutes, you have an extra 20 minutes, and just start experimenting with it. And on the other hand, I think, especially at these conferences or legal week or Future Law or CLOC the trepidation around, I’m gonna lose my job is really palpable. And I think…
It’s really important to stake a step back and consider two things. One is we have a standard of care and we have a legal responsibility to be the best stewards of the law and transactional law and process, et cetera. So we are using this as our productivity tool to get better and to become better lawyers and legal professionals. At the same time, what is the quickest way to protect your own standing within your organization? Jump on board, become an AI champion.
Guess what? No one’s kicking that guy off the team, right? So I think really becoming immersed in what is an emerging technology, again, just like they did in the dot-com boom, the folks who shied away from the internet, they had to find different options. The folks who jumped on board and became internet champions wound up being IT leaders. So I think we’re seeing the second coming of that, but the underlying methodology is the same.
Marlene Gebauer (13:58)
I’m so glad that you mentioned that because, you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about, ⁓ are, know, our organizations and firms, are they preparing their people for the changes that are coming? And, you are basically saying, you know, if they’re not, you need to, you need to sort of step up and do it yourself and sort of make sure that, you become the expert in the room.
Kenzo Tsushima (14:10)
Right.
Change management is hard. mean, this is even beyond AI. I mean, even when we’re just talking about workflows or CLMs five years ago, right? Even getting lawyers to get out of Outlook into a different system that’s maybe more effective or more efficient was such a heavy lift. So now with something that’s way past, you know, any sort of CLM and we’re talking really quick processing of information, the change management is probably the most important part. It’s why I like being, again, at its core consulting organization because
We can essentially be psychologists to a certain degree, right? We could say, hey, in six months, it’s gonna be okay. In fact, we’ve glorified working 12 hours a day for so many years, you are so nervous about going down to eight hours a day because you don’t think you’re gonna be value add anymore. What I can tell you is breathe, you can stay here for a long time, you can really make your niche, but guess what? You can walk your dog, you can hang out with your spouse. There’s so many things you can do now because you have an extra four hours a day because you.
wound up getting on board with great productivity tools. So if anything, it has so many interesting side effects for law firms and corporate legal departments where attrition is down. Again, if you buy into it, attrition is down, which means there’s less cost of churn, there’s less training costs, there’s all these ancillary financial metrics that are a little bit hard to track because they’re soft. But if you’re able to baseline some of the criteria around it, it actually results in huge financial savings outside of just the direct AI cost time savings.
Marlene Gebauer (15:46)
So cybersecurity data privacy concerns. This is, this is always a question when we’re talking about AI. mean, I’ve been seeing people posting things like, look at your, your big, your big providers, your existing providers. And, if basically they’re including it.
their suite, then it’s probably safe. So how does Morae ensure that sensitive client data is protected in a cloud-based environment? And how do you compete with that kind of advice that it’s like, well, you only have to go with the big guys?
Kenzo Tsushima (16:19)
So
it’s funny you mentioned this, this literally comes up on every prospective client call ever because it’s top of mind, especially for attorneys. And what you said is interesting, which is, hey, it’s a big company, it’s probably okay. We never want people to be like, it’s probably okay. It has to be 100 % certain okay. So I’ll talk about what we do for our company, but just more general after that. So for example, our flagship AI platform, MorAI Legal Companion, it’s a private Azure instance.
Marlene Gebauer (16:31)
Probably okay.
you
Kenzo Tsushima (16:48)
It’s all pre-trained. We’re never using client data to train certain clients’ models. We’re not using this client’s data to train other clients’ models, et cetera. So we’re never co-mingling data. And we’re making sure that that data is never leaking onto the internet, right? So it’s one of the reasons why you can’t just use ChatGPT to do all of your legal work, because you’re going to get crazy stuff from the internet in terms of…
Reddit blog posts populating your synthesis. And you’re also putting things out into the internet, which are using to train the enterprise LLM model. So while our software uses five different LLMs, those are locked down to specifically legally trained instances. So we’ve trained it on hundreds of thousands of, know, case law and statutory law and legally specific things, but it’s not mining the internet for people’s random cooking blog posts or Reddit or, you know, Tumblr.
whatever it is, and at the same time, the data contained there is a private container, so it’s never being used to commingle other instances. But what you have said is really important because essentially, in order to engage meaningfully with a tool of this caliber, you need to trust it. And if you’re afraid to prompt it in a certain way or to ask certain questions, you just won’t have the adoption. So you’ll have a lot of people who are skeptics.
who are ever afraid to experiment with a tool. And what you’re gonna wind up doing is you’re gonna see people paying for 30 licenses and maybe one person who’s comfortable with the tool is using it. But the data privacy portion is extremely important because people need to make sure that whatever they’re putting into it and whatever they’re receiving is only theirs, especially at law firms. So it’s something that when we show the underlying architecture of our tools, folks get comfortable with. But I think…
just saying, they’re big and they’re, you know, they are, other folks are comfortable. That is a little dicey because in the beginning of all of this LLM explosion, want to say it was maybe beginning of 2023, there was a provider who guaranteed, you know, all sorts of, this is the best LLM on the market. And, you know, your data is so private. It turned out, I think it was a team of 17 people manually chatbotting back in the Philippines to seem like natural language answers, but it wasn’t that at all. was actually just so.
I think actually understanding the meat and potatoes of the underlying architecture rather than just saying, it’s private, probably it’s good. Like we have to make sure, especially because we’re dealing with lawyers, that it’s 100 % secure.
Greg Lambert (19:14)
Yeah. You mentioned having five different LLMs that you’re using on the back end. I just saw the news recently where Google with their Gemini 2.5 experimental now has a million character input window and they’re talking about like within the next few weeks of doubling that to 2 million. ⁓
Kenzo Tsushima (19:37)
All
Greg Lambert (19:38)
It’s insane, right? How much these things change. With the larger context windows, with the variety of LLMs that you can use on the back end, how challenging is that for you just to kind of keep pace with the amount of change that seems to be coming every week in the industry?
Kenzo Tsushima (19:57)
So it’s interesting you mentioned that. one of the reasons we’ve gone with the, and by the way, thank you for teeing me up so well, because this is one of my favorite things to talk about. So what I know, these are softballs. I’m going to need harder questions than this. So basically one of the reasons why we decided to go with the multiple LLM model is because it’s exactly this. The development cycles for the underlying LLMs are not parallel. So when you have providers who are, for example, just using ChachiGBT or just using Gemini or something like that,
Greg Lambert (20:05)
I like throwing softballs.
Kenzo Tsushima (20:26)
as the underlying foundation for the tool. It might be good for a little while, but what happens when Anthropic makes Cloud better? Or you’re essentially locked in to the development cycle and the product roadmap of that LLM. Whereas if you leverage a lot of different LLMs that you can essentially substitute for one another and move up the priority level as they develop, you’re never locked into a single development cycle. So for example, if the default or recommended LLM within our tool is OpenAI,
but then Anthropics Cloud gets updated to its latest release and it’s outperforming OpenAI in so many different ways. Guess what? Now the recommended model is going to be Anthropics model, right? So we want to make sure that folks who are using our tool, especially because we want it to scale and be very sticky, is never too static. We want the legal use cases and the workflow developments and the actual adoption to evolve with the technology as well. So…
If someone is playing with something in April 2025 and in June 2025, we see quad becoming amazing or Gemini becoming, we want them to transition and see the capabilities of what the new LLMs can do with their legal data. So I think our ethos of having multiple LLMs is serving our clients really well because they can always evolve with them.
Greg Lambert (21:41)
you also are you’re leading the Morae SEEDS which is S E E D S learning and development program.
Kenzo Tsushima (21:48)
It stands for Skill
Enablement Employee Development Series, which is a little bit of a mouthful, but the reason we named it Seeds is because our HR development program is called GROW. So essentially, you plant the seeds to develop our employees skills, and then it grows. Again, I won’t take credit for any of this nomenclature if that’s our HR program.
Greg Lambert (22:04)
Is this, was this, I was gonna say, was this the same person
that came up with MorAI?
Marlene Gebauer (22:09)
Hahaha.
Kenzo Tsushima (22:10)
No, it’s different, it’s different,
but that would have been good. Yeah, it is good. It’s good to work with creative.
Marlene Gebauer (22:13)
Lots of creative people there. That’s great.
Greg Lambert (22:16)
⁓
But you know, part of this, like we were just talking about with so much, you know, kind of continually changing in the market. You talked about change management being such an important process in making sure that we’re able to turn the tools into success. Can you tell us more about what the SEEDS initiative is and why you see
know, professional development being so important.
Kenzo Tsushima (22:43)
It’s really important and unfortunately I don’t think it’s something the industry is focused enough on. And especially our legal industry. what I have taken the approach with in terms of our SEEDS program is really focusing on two things, consulting and technology. And the reason is because we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds globally of talented lawyers. So they…
went to law school, they went into practice, they specialized in a specific area of law, and they’re really good at it. And now all of a sudden, they’ve been doing something for a decade or two decades, and they’re expected to automatically upskill themselves to now be a consultant and technologist, which again, some folks are able to do organically and some aren’t. I would say the majority aren’t, right? They have the will, they have the desire, but they can’t just sit there one day for four hours and figure out how to evolve themselves. So…
we wanted to craft a program that allowed them to be more consultative and also allow them to develop their tech skillset so that ultimately when we staff clients, it is a tech enabled managed service where we’re staffing attorneys who know how to use AI platforms rather than just again, an extension of labor. So that is what we’ve done historically and it’s been a very successful model, but I think we want to separate ourselves from the others in the market where they’re just essentially legal staffing companies. Okay, great.
What is the value? Well, the value is one, we’re going to consult on what optimal looks like in your legal department. So it’s never stagnant. And second is we’re going to teach your internal team. our folks are how to use cool emerging technology. So it is almost a cheat code in terms of internal enablement on the client side on how to use emerging technology. So it’s been really gratifying to see the results of the SEEDS program because no, it’s not something people are comfortable with. So for example, in the consulting portion, a lot of it is
showing people how to public speak more effectively. Well, especially for transactional attorneys, that’s not something they’re comfortable with, but next time they’re on a client call, they’re able to project with authority more than they previously had, right? So seeing the tangible results of what we’ve been able to instill in our client-facing group from a consulting, from a public speaking, from a tech standpoint, has been not only valuable for their own career development, and hopefully our attrition numbers show that,
But it’s also helpful for actual product that we’re delivering and our service delivery because we want to be even better than clients or law firms, ⁓ legal departments. We want to be what they should aspire to be as optimal. So we are trying to infuse our workforce with as much of that as possible.
Greg Lambert (25:16)
Are you finding any kind of pushback on that? we can offer professional development and training, pinpointed to things that would make our attorneys and professional staff even better. But you run into that issue of, hey, I’m neck deep in doing my job. I don’t have time to do this. How do you kind of encourage people to
to take the time out of doing and back up and realize that by learning you can be doing better.
Kenzo Tsushima (25:49)
I will say it’s never gonna be perfect. I think we, if I had to break it down at very high level, I think we probably have 80 % excitement within our organization and 20 % hesitation like you’re talking about, right? What I like to do for the 20 % of people who are hesitating is make it really easy and bite-sized to just do something. So no, you don’t have to be an AI evangelist and champion tomorrow, but everybody has a free 20 minutes, right? So take 20 minutes today.
get yourself a login to this tool, try the tool, throw in one legal contract here and query it. That’s all you need to. I’m asking not for you to change your way of working, not for you to change your entire remit. I’m asking for 20 minutes of your time. And I feel like when we’ve made it much more bite-sized and achievable and have these goals that people can accomplish and feel good about themselves about accomplishing, it doesn’t make these wild barriers to entry to actually getting up skilled with technology. Rather, they can try us for 20 minutes, they can see success, they can be like,
It did exactly what I wanted it to do. I didn’t know it was going to give that sophisticated output. And then they believe it more. And then they see that one instance and they’re like, I want to try this tomorrow. So I think by giving people that satisfaction and then making it very digestible, we’ve found more success than we’ve had in the past. But I will say there’s always going to be detractors, right? I mean, if you’ve been a patent agent and an IP attorney for 30 years and you’re used to it, that’s heavy lift, right? So yes, we can encourage it.
and we can really try to come up with digestible things, but some people are just never gonna get on board. So we try folks who are open-minded.
Greg Lambert (27:22)
Yeah. And I can bet you, and
I can bet you that every listener, when you said that a name popped into their head on who that detractor was.
Kenzo Tsushima (27:30)
Right, right. Who
do I have a chance with and who do I have no chance with?
Greg Lambert (27:35)
Yeah.
As they say, if you don’t know who that is, it’s probably you. So.
Kenzo Tsushima (27:40)
Right,
Marlene Gebauer (27:42)
But I want to, I want to approach sort of similar question, but, sort of approach it differently. You know, have you seen with your clients have, have you seen sort of a movement into some of these more AI enabled type of, of jobs or AI focused type of jobs? Are you seeing that trend? And if you are, what’s the demographic?
Kenzo Tsushima (28:07)
It’s interesting. So the demographic is, is twofold. One is if it’s, if it’s attorneys, obviously the really tech forward attorneys, think skew a bit younger. However, if they have backgrounds in technology, then I think it really is across the board in terms of demographics. So it depends on the underlying kind of experience. So for example, people who have been involved in data privacy work,
are more apt to want to explore AI and legal technology over folks, for example, who have done litigation. It’s a personality thing. The folks who wanted to go into data privacy are just intuitively more into technology. I think it’s a lot of different demographics depending on the type of firm you’re looking at. So law firms are definitely taking a little bit longer in terms of
getting where they ultimately will be because the industry is changing so rapidly because they have a huge hurdle to overcome, right? So we can focus on infusing law firms with knowledge management, with their internal procurement processes, and that’s fantastic and they love it. What is still a struggle is getting a lot of law firms to think creatively about their billing models because it has been so historically effective, profitable, and just it’s been fantastic in terms of the US legal market, right? Law firms have been
truly a force to be reckoned with, especially big law firms. And having managing partners who have been there for 30 years, getting them to rethink about their entire billing model that has served them and their clients for multiple decades is a heavy lift. But there are certain jobs, whether it’s at a law firm, a corporate legal department, an ALSP like us, that never existed before. So a year and a half ago, a legal engineer was not a common job.
Now it is a hot job. You want to be a legal engineer and that is a discipline that is sought out by old and young alike. So I really am seeing different sorts of skills and different sorts of jobs emerge. mean, prompt engineering, for example, prompt engineering is kind of a mixture of art and science, right? That was not a thing two years ago. No one needed to know how to prompt engineer. Now, folks who deal with big technology contracts or want to engage meaningful with AI.
Of course, a firm like us can design prompts for you and design sandboxes for you. But ultimately, if you engage with the tool enough, you want to be self-sufficient at some point, right? Which means you have to go and practice a little bit. So all of these skills are emerging, they’re new, and with anything, it just takes some practice.
Marlene Gebauer (30:39)
So Kenzo you have been described as a proponent of servant leadership. How does this leadership philosophy influence your approach to managing teams and delivering client solutions?
Kenzo Tsushima (30:50)
It, for me, it’s, all about credibility. I, the ivory tower management style of do this because I said so it’s, it’s just really not effective to me. So folks need to see you doing some of the dirty work. Right. So I’ll give a very rudimentary example at the end of last week, I really wanted to encourage internal adoption to use our legal companion tool to generate SOWs. And I knew that just suggesting it or advocating for it wasn’t necessarily going to do the trick. So I went in there.
I took 45 minutes, I built a new model based off of our latest SOW template and I disseminated it to our sales team and they loved it. They started using it already. So I don’t have the time or the bandwidth to do that every time, but I think folks need to know that you’re not on your own. You don’t have to be on an island. You don’t have to just say, know, Kenzo’s saying to use AI or the market’s saying to use AI and I have to use it. No, sometimes you need someone to hold your hand and make you feel like you’re not, you know, approaching a new discipline.
with so much fear. A lot of people in different industries, friends of mine, ex-colleagues of mine, have expressed like, yeah, I really need to upskill myself on technology. And this is outside of legal technology, but just technology in general, because I’m gonna become obsolete. But a lot of it is so fear-driven. And I think if we leverage a tactic like servant leadership and show, hey, no need to be scared. I’m gonna do it myself. I’m gonna hold your hand through this and I’m gonna give you…
the tools to succeed rather than just telling you what to do. It has a much more positive effect on our workforce.
Marlene Gebauer (32:20)
And that’s a trend in consulting, isn’t it? This is the servant leadership getting more involved rather than just saying, here’s the recommendation. Yeah.
Greg Lambert (32:20)
Yep.
Kenzo Tsushima (32:23)
It has its benefits and yeah, 100 percent.
Greg Lambert (32:29)
Yeah,
I’m curious on that Kenzo, because you probably saw the Shopify CEO’s letter to his company that is basically, what’s your take on that? Does that fall, I don’t think that falls in the servant leadership. I think that’s the do it because I told you to more or what’s your take on?
Kenzo Tsushima (32:39)
Sure did.
Greg Lambert (32:51)
that person approached.
Kenzo Tsushima (32:53)
So I was actually talking to my wife about this, I think over the weekend. I have mixed feelings about it, I do, because I, on one hand, I like needing to generate a business case for a lot of initiatives, right? Because take the, you know, in the beginning of the pandemic, for example, you know, a lot of firms went crazy hiring so many different people, and then two years later, going through massive layoffs. And I don’t like that because people really rely, this is people’s families and their livelihood.
So you can’t just hire, I’ll take Peloton for an example, right? So Peloton had huge demands in the beginning of the pandemic because obviously everyone’s at home, they want to work out. They forecasted linear growth over their next five years. And what wound up happening is they hired, hired, hired, got crazy inventory. And they fire all of these people because they didn’t make a logical forecast. A lot of other people did that. Microsoft did it, Facebook did it, whatever. So I like the discipline to…
Forecast correctly because these aren’t just numbers at the end of the day these are people’s lives and you have to respect that at the same time You can’t be so rigid to be like you need to make a business case for personnel every single time and say why AI couldn’t do that doesn’t make any sense like Obviously use your common sense. There are certain things that humans are just better at maybe AI in 30 years will be better at I don’t know, but there are just certain intuitive things where yeah, I need a person to do this This requires strategy this requires nuance
This requires the human in the loop and you can do both of those at the same time. You can make sure that human in the loop is leveraging technology to make them better, faster, stronger, but you can’t just exclude it and create such a huge administrative barrier where you’re flooded with business cases and you’re, basically your business goes to a standstill. So I agree with a part of it in terms of you need to be more disciplined about your hiring and firing process. Cause I don’t like playing with people’s livelihoods, but at the same time,
It can’t be so rigid where you’re not using basic common sense to be like, hey, I need this guy to do this. I need this woman to do that. It’s just, it defies kind of common sense.
Greg Lambert (34:55)
Yeah, good. I think we run parallel on that then. Well, speaking of rigid forecasting, I’m going to ask you to pull out your crystal ball and ⁓ predict with absolute certainty what you think is going to be the challenge or change on the horizon for the legal industry that we’re going to need to be prepared for in the next couple of years.
Kenzo Tsushima (34:58)
Excellent.
Right, I’ll grab it.
you
What, that’s a really good question. I think the major, major change is that the technology is coming, right? It’s no longer a function of, know, should we adopt, should we not adopt? It’s coming. Really what I think the challenge is gonna be is where is that investment going to take place? So I hear the build versus buy argument all the time. And I’ll just give my perspective on this. I know a lot of people disagree, but.
with so many different technology partners, building software and solutions as their core competency. I don’t recommend building at all. I always say, even if it’s not with us, please don’t build from scratch because you’re a law firm or you’re a corporate legal department. Focus on your business. There are folks doing this every single day that make the best platforms on the market. Go with them. They’ve already built it. So build versus buy is a really good one. That is a challenge that people are actively assessing.
What I have seen the biggest problem so far, and I continue to see it a lot in mid 2025, is there’s decision fatigue, right? There’s so many different providers, there’s so many different pilots, there’s so many different use cases, and it’s too open. So folks just are like, ah, I’m overwhelmed, I just need to do my day job. I can’t analyze these eight different providers and which one’s the best, I just need to focus on my daily reading, which I get.
But I think getting caught up in the decision fatigue and maybe just choosing the third best. No, you didn’t do like the full analysis on which of these eight is the best. But if there’s a 5 % difference between the third best technology and the first best technology, just go with the third best one if it’s right in front of you and it’s easier to stand up and try it, right? So I would like to see the decision fatigue resolve itself a little bit and people get a little bit more creative. The other area where I see…
there being a challenge and the market needing to adapt to it is we have folks in their personal lives using these tools all the time, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude. And so they’re using it for personal queries. They’re talking to their phone. They’re just, instead of Googling, they’re GPTing it, right? So, and it’s become such a natural way of life. And having firms that are restricting folks, maybe especially younger folks or younger attorneys as well,
from using the tools they use in their everyday lives and saying, you’re not allowed to use that here, that’s gonna cause a lot of frustration and they’re going to look elsewhere to explore firms and companies that are more willing to let them engage with the tools they know produce optimal, right? So if a law firm wants to have a good attrition rate, they need to make sure that their junior attorneys are engaging in the tools that they grew up with and that they know how to use. So I would like to see, you know,
with our emerging workforce especially, and all the thoughts on Gen Z aside, we all recognize they have interesting working styles. But that being said, they are the next generation of lawyers and legal professionals. So we need to make sure that we’re not just putting them in the environment saying, deal with it. Yes, that might’ve been the historical way to do business, but we need to make sure that we’re setting them up for success so that they don’t just jump ship.
Greg Lambert (38:29)
Well, Kenzo from Morae I want to thank you very much for joining us on the Geek in Review. It’s been a great conversation.
Kenzo Tsushima (38:37)
No, thank you for having me, Greg. I really appreciate it. And thank you, Marlene.
Marlene Gebauer (38:42)
And 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 on LinkedIn or Blue Sky.
Greg Lambert (38:53)
And Kenzo, we’ll make sure that we put some links on the show notes. But for those listening or watching, what’s the best way that people can learn more about Morae or reach out to you?
Kenzo Tsushima (39:03)
Sure, so you can find me on LinkedIn. I have a unique name. I don’t think there’s anyone else in the United States named Kenzo Tsushima, so it shouldn’t be too hard. You can go to morae.com which is our company’s website, or you can go to morai.com which links directly to our gender of AI practice. So that’s a really easy way to find the solutions we’re doing. So LinkedIn, Morae or MorAI
Marlene Gebauer (39:24)
Thanks Kenzo. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry.
Greg Lambert (39:31)
Thanks, Jerry. And actually, I’ve got Jerry’s new album. So I’ll put a link to that as well.
Marlene Gebauer (39:33)
Yeah, I listen, I actually listened to it over
the weekend.
Greg Lambert (39:37)
All right, talk to you guys later.
Kenzo Tsushima (39:39)
All right, you, thank you so much.
Marlene Gebauer (39:39)
Bye.