Yesterday (4, 21,20), while I was putting the finishing touches on this post, the AmLaw 100 was released. As always upon release there was lots of analysis, conjecture and even some predictions about the future of the legal industry post pandemic. This post as you will read is not a prediction about the economic viability of firms, nor about the business models that will survive, but more about the cultural and human changes that are coming out of current moment and the good that I hope we can sustain.

“ You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the Facts of Life”

I’ve had the theme song to Facts of Life (one of my all-time favourite shows for dozens of reasons) running through my head for the last few weeks.  Nothing has prepared any of us for what the last several weeks has brought into our lives.  Like many I am scanning the TV/Newswires/Twitter stream for update real and fake news, and I have text streams and real-life conversations with various friends/colleagues all about what is changing in our daily lives – as parents, as professionals and as people.  We check in with one another to see how everyone is coping with the work-from-home with our kids/partners/pets and trying to keep our heads above water as we juggle it all. As we each deal with this crisis in our own ways, the legal industry, which is not known for being quick, adaptable or accepting of change is dealing with a whole bunch of challenges too.  For many firms the challenges were as basic as getting enough laptops for the whole firm – lawyers, paraprofessionals, assistants, business development practitioners, HR and so on to work from home. For other firms the stress came and is still coming as States individually declare what is, and what is not “essential” and whether law firms can stay open for business. For all firms the challenges are around keeping their people healthy and safe while still being able to access shared resources – documents, research, case files etc.  The challenges are many.  I have only touched on a few here to illustrate how quickly an entire industry had to literally change the way it worked. Face time (not the Apple application) was (is?) still so much at the core of the legal business and the physical offices were a point of pride for many firms.  It makes my head spin to think of all the people who have been putting long hours into moving firms to a work from home model in  an industry that until now rejected the notion of remote working.  I don’t want to talk about the complexity, the cost and the overwhelming nature of the challenges.  I would rather spend some time musing on what has changed for the positive in this very short period and how we can turn our collective energy to making those changes everlasting.

I want to applaud about how far the industry has come in such a short time. “Necessity is the mother of invention” said Plato, but in the case of Covid-19 and the legal industry, necessity is the mother of mindset and workflow change. Here are four shifts I have seen in the legal industry that I hope are not just shifts but will become Business As Usual (BAU) whenever we emerge from this period.

  1. Health, safety, and mental well-being are top of mind for everyone, maybe for the first time as a collective. Even before State/Provincial and city “Rest in Place” orders were made, firms and legal service providers were making sure their people were safe, not coming into the office unnecessarily and making preparations. Now that most people are at home – with all kinds of mitigating circumstances, I see many of those same firms, departments and companies instituting virtual happy hours or coffee breaks to make sure that people are connected, not just with technology but also socially. We are concerned about engagement on a whole new level.  We worry that people are getting what they need to work from home but also eat, stay healthy and active and that people are not feeling too anxious.  As Neil Sternthal noted in his interview with Greg Lambert on In Seclusion, keeping warmth and connectivity vibrant is critical and this is a leadership moment.   Prior to the arrival of Covid-19, the industry was all abuzz about the need for mental wellness, diversity and inclusion in the legal industry.  The numbers and facts were stacked against the industry in all aspects. We were over-worked, over-stressed and overly homogeneous.  Today, if the virus has brought anything to light, it is that we are all the same – the virus does not care who it infects in what corners of the world, the size of their office or their role in the world or the industry.  Mental health affects each and every one of us, we know our chosen industry is not an easy one, from the challenges of access to justice to the stress of Big Law hours and client pressures. We all need to work in environments that are free from any kind of discrimination, we need cultures that are inclusive, and workplaces that are flexible and nurture a healthy frame of mind.  Not just now when we are working still for client service of Big Law or access to justice under unprecedented circumstances – but always. Let’s hope that this moment has provided the catalyst for taking a pause and really paying attention to mental wellness in the legal industry and that much of the new found camaraderie and community rallying for wellness and flexibility continues well beyond a return to BAU and becomes the new norm.
  2. Agile and Quick(er) Decision Making – We’ve often heard that laws firms are slow to change. But within 6 weeks, law firms no longer look like they did two months ago. Who knew a law firm could take quick and decisive action? I’ve always believed it was possible, we would see glimmers of it here and there but nowhere as consistently as we have in the past month.  We have seen many different reactions from firms, as each firm culture and client needs are unique, but most firms have acted quickly in the context of this pandemic and demonstrated that they can make quick decisions and act on those decisions too. This is good.  Necessity is the mother of invention and decision; and while not all decisions need to be made quickly, I think it says a lot about the way firms will make big decisions in the future as well now that  there is a precedent in place, it is easy to refer back and act the same way a second and third time until habits change.  Firms have learned to be agile, to make decisions in the moment for the moment with an eye on the long term post Covid-19 recovery, but they are being responsive now, today to their clients, their partners and their staff. That’s a huge win for everyone. [For an insightful look at what recovery may look like and how decisions may be made, check out Law Vision’s Covid-19 Recovery Playbook.]
  3. FaceTime is what you really need. Or MSTeams, or WhatsApp, Zoom, iMessage, Skype, whatever software you are using to communicate and work remotely today should be the primary communications tool of offices in the future. Law firms and buyers of legal services are all in this together right now. We are all working remotely and it’s ok. Work had changed, but work is still getting done. There are two trends I hope remain once we are back to business as usual in this context. Remote work that allows people to balance work and life (see diversity and inclusion comments above) is the way of the future. Work anywhere, is still work; we are still productive but the measurement and KPI has flipped from time to output. I hope the industry learns to move beyond in the office face time and the long-term adoption of online collaboration tools continues beyond the pandemic. Problem solving is about getting to the right answers effectively, quickly, considering all perspectives and data inputs and problem solving is about the value of the results, not the time it took to get there. Maybe we can finally stop equating face time with productivity. To achieve this level of productivity, we need to embrace not just in talk but also in walk -the digital transformation – in the biggest, greatest possible way. This situation we find ourselves in, where people need to collaborate, work online and practice from anywhere (with all kinds of easy distractions) really highlights the need to reduce paper.  I am a writer, and still take notes all day everyday. In an AriKaplan #virtuallunch I recently attended someone commented that we should think of paper as a scratch pad, where we formulate ideas and scope out plans but the real work has to happen digitally.  I like that and while print publications, like paper will not go away, now more than ever we need to make content available in all formats so people can consume where they are rather than having to go to the content. Mobility, digital transformation and online collaboration necessitate the vision of a central repository for all software, easily accessible on any device – the interoperable Utopian ideal of end to end workflows for the legal industry is coming closer to fruition every day.
  4. Vulnerability. The practice of law is predicated on facts, on rules, on anticipated outcomes and mitigating risk. All of which has been replaced today by uncertainty and lack of clarity. No one has all the answers, and there is no precedent to study, no past cases to refer to and no previous outcomes to uphold. If we were to anthropomorphize the legal industry it would be a strong A-type character, bold and aggressive, properly sophisticated and highly valuing success with a formidable aesthetic.   All of which could no doubt explain the stress and difficulty around mental well-being in the industry which I already discussed.  Now, in the midst of this pandemic the legal industry is like every other industry. For the first time in my 20 years in the field, we can’t say legal is impacted differently. The challenges are the same – get people home and keep them safe while still maintaining client service as a productive business.  The legal industry is vulnerable and that’s an image, a self-perception, a definition the industry has not donned before.  But vulnerability is not a bad thing. In fact, vulnerability can be the birthplace of something new and fantastic. Vulnerability is defined as “uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure.” Dr. Brené Brown, renown for her work on the topic including several books and viral status Ted Talks says that “vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy and creativity.” These are all the things the legal industry needs to embrace, to grow and to continue to use as strengths when it emerges into a new business as usual.

Somehow we will all get through this and the legal industry will be in a better place (eventually). Of this I have faith, I have already started to see the changes in just a few short weeks. I know it will take hard work, determination, change, grit, more hard work and vulnerability. But in the end those are just the Facts Of Life.

Many of the Luminaries agreed that we are likely to see a big increase in demand for LPM services.

Legal Value Network Council of Luminaries Meeting Report: COVID-19 Crisis Series

As director of (what is to the best of my knowledge) the largest legal project management team of any law firm, I was not the source for the above. But it was music to my ears and consistent with my lived experience. My team has observed a spike in demand for LPM services.

There are, however, limits in the legal ecosystem’s overall ability to immediately satisfy this demand for better project management. The near-term constraint creates longer-term doubts about the sustainability of the uptick in demand in many organizations where there is no current LPM capacity to meet the urgent need. Sustained commitment is required, and worthwhile.

While I reflect here on LPM, I submit that what is true of LPM is equally true for many other items on the legal innovator wish list. Opportunities abound but an inflection point does not automatically translate into changes that best serve the collective interest. We face hard choices—followed, unavoidably, by hard work.

WFH was feasible and imperative

In considering the surge of interest in LPM (or anything else that addresses some of the fallout from the challenges we all face) it is worth examining why legal service delivery was able to pivot to work from home given that the speed of the transition to WFH is now being cited as evidence of how quickly legal services can adapt.

Consider two critical elements of the velocity with which WFH became standard operating procedure: (1) we had no choice and (2) the infrastructure was already in place.

The lack of choice is conspicuous. WFH is necessary. The alternative was ceasing to serve clients in a moment of crisis. Yet while I submit our current challenges, including the need to maintain the cohesion and coherence of completely remote teams, has made the compelling case for LPM all the more salient, I would stop well short of labeling LPM as “necessary.”

The infrastructure component is less prominent. Imagine if C19 hit in 2008 (as part of the Great Recession). An immediate transition to a completely remote legal workforce would have been unthinkable and an unmitigated disaster. The mix of hardware, software, broadband access, information architecture, and ways of working simply were not available at the scale necessary. Fortunately, we have the general WFH infrastructure in place now. In this narrow respect, we were mostly prepared for the pandemic. Unfortunately, we lack a general LPM infrastructure—for now, we only have discrete pockets of LPM excellence, unevenly distributed.

Thus, while this crisis should accelerate the integration of LPM into the multi-disciplinary delivery of legal services, this ascension is not assured. “We’ve always done it this way” remains viable, if sub-optimal, in many respects. Conversely, organizations that have not previously made serious investments in building their LPM capacity may be hard pressed to do so amidst a liquidity crunch and severe economic downturn.

The concise case for LPM

To leave no doubt, I welcome the increase in demand for LPM. I want to contribute to a period of industry-wide punctuational change, including the broader deployment of LPM. It can absolutely be done but requires sustained commitment. We need to “build.”  LPM is not a quick fix.

Quick or not, I submit the argument in favor of LPM remains fairly unassailable.

All projects are managed, the only question is whether they are managed well. LPM applies the disciplines of project management to legal service delivery. LPM makes legal work trackable, tractable, and transparent for lawyers and clients. Quality outcomes, on time and on budget, are the purpose of professionalizing project management of legal matters and portfolios. The larger and more complex, the greater the impact of LPM.

LPM is not “the answer” to every question because there is no singular answer. But a well-integrated LPM function can serve as connective tissue—instrumental in helping lawyers take advantage of, and optimize, the variety of tools at their disposal. A legal project manager involved in matter planning can assist lawyers in marshaling the full array of available resources, from technology to knowledge assets to cost-advantaged service centers, to meet client needs.

While a strong case, the foregoing is not simple, not obvious, and not easy.

LPM is not obvious

Superficially, the easiest sales pitch for LPM is: the legal project manager will take on many of the more mundane management tasks currently being handled by lawyers. And do so at lower costs.

Saving money while unburdening lawyers from labor-intensive tasks tends to land well—at first. But then many lawyers will, correctly, start to wonder about the additional costs, like communications overhead, associated with an additional team member. A new “non-lawyer”, in particular, raises questions about the divisibility of work (different than the division of labor). Is it really worthwhile to add a new person take on tasks lawyers were handling?

Yes. Yes, it is worthwhile. But not obviously so. The labor arbitrage is real. It should, however, ultimately be a minor consideration. Working differently and better is how LPM makes a major impact. But different is, well, different. Different is, almost by definition, non-obvious. And definitions do not close the obviousness gap:

Legal project management is a process of defining the parameters of a matter upfront, planning the course of the matter at the outset with the facts you have at the time, managing the matter, and, at the end, evaluating how the matter was handled (from both the firm or law department perspective and the client perspective). (here)

We define legal project management as a proactive, disciplined approach to managing legal work that involves defining, planning, budgeting, executing, and evaluating a legal matter. Simply put, it is a step by step approach to help lawyers clarify the scope and potential cost of services they are providing for a client, proactively managing the services consistent with the client’s expectations, and using each engagement as an opportunity for learning and improvement. (here)

Sounds great, in the abstract. But vague. What does this actually mean? How does it work? Like my “strong case” above, the standard definitions of LPM are not automatically accessible to the uninitiated. You only understand once you understand; everything is obvious once you know the answer. As is so often true across the ever-evolving legal service delivery landscape, this is ignorance in the least pejorative sense of the word—individuals lacking knowledge they should not be expected to possess.

The deficit of automatic understanding of what LPM can offer is only exacerbated by the divergent ways LPM is deployed. Even in organizations where LPM is well established, legal project managers can serve rather different purposes.

When I was consulting law departments on their legal buy, I put the following questions in RFIs:

  • How many legal project managers does the firm employ?
  • What specifically will the firm’s legal project managers do to add value to [client]?
  • What are the conditions under which LPM will be deployed to benefit [client]?

It is well established I consider such questions essential and have found considerable entertainment in many answers, good and bad, I graded over the years (though, candidly, I was a victim of my own bombast and reluctant to write about my new role until I was confident we could answer these questions better than our peer firms).

In surveying the landscape of LPM in law firms—LPM in law departments and ALSPs is more opaque; LPM at the Big 4 is a different story entirely and demands another post about segments of the market where LPM leaps from competitive advantage to competitive necessity—you find, first and foremost, most law firms employ relatively few legal project managers. Not that many law firms with over 500 lawyers even break double digits with respect to their ranks of legal project managers.

Next, you find the LPM remit varies greatly. At some firms, legal project managers are focused on process improvement. At some firms, they are more akin to account managers, supporting billing and reporting to augment specific client relationships. At only a small minority of firms are legal project managers regularly deployed to help actively manage the firm’s largest, most complex matters. There is nothing wrong with any of these (my team does all three—though we prefer to setup the client-specific processes for billing/reporting and then hand those off). But the diversity speaks to the intelligibility, or lack thereof, when busy lawyers first encounter the suggestion they incorporate LPM into meeting client needs.

LPM is not simple

For the initiated, the end state of LPM is appealing.

The lawyers get to lawyer. They manage by exception—i.e., address critical issues early while avoiding racing down rabbit holes to gain clarity on the status of the many items that are going to plan. They conduct constructive, data-informed conversations with clients because the necessary status and budgetary information is immediately available and well-organized into visually enhanced reports useful for decision making. The lawyers deliver quality results, on time and on budget, by ensuring the right mix of tech-enabled resources are working cohesively and coherently.

The legal project manager facilitates this by bringing the appropriate tools and templates to bear. They serve as a central organizing force, not only engineering but also refining and maintaining a workflow that results in a reliable single source of truth. The attendant ability to report on status, finances, risks, and issues, including dependencies and downstream impacts, lends itself to simplified dashboards that highlight where lawyer/client attention is required, and where it is not. This is a product of skill and savvy. It is also the product of intense, focused labor—the immense effort required to collect and collate disparate data while ensuring it is current, clean, and concise.

The LPM end state is appealing. The beginning, less so.

Where do you find that first legal project manager? This is not a rhetorical question. We have hired a couple dozen legal project managers around the world in the last year and need to fill a similar number of new openings in the years ahead. Locating quality candidates is a challenge. As mentioned, there are few legal project management teams and most of the ones that do exist are small. If anyone has recommendations for me, please share. Because we have the infrastructure, we are exploring how to ‘make’ legal project managers—legal project manager being both a role and a set of skills / disciplines that must be learned, applied, and refined.

Next comes the first project. The new legal project manager is unlikely to have available the fit-to-purpose tools or templates that underpin a well-structured matter. These are born out of experience. Iteration. Operationalizing lessons learned. Finding what needs to be fixed and fixing it in ways well calibrated to the lawyers and matter types being supported. The new legal project manager can add value immediately. But their contribution will be circumscribed. Repeatability is central to the LPM value proposition—but there is nothing being repeated on the maiden project.

Then comes the paired challenges of growth and teaming. Having one legal project manager in one location working in one practice area is not an LPM function—which consists of individual legal project managers but also, in aggregate, assumes responsibility for more systemically instilling project management discipline and process excellence, including for the large majority of matters that will never have a designated legal project manager. The individual journey must be reproduced with different lawyers working in different areas of law. Then, at a certain point, to reach its potential as a contributing team, LPM has to establish and enforce consistency across the organization. This is far harder than it sounds. It requires legal project managers, who are cast in a supporting role, to be proactive in shaping the way legal services are delivered at scale. The legal project managers not only need to supply their lawyers with good tools and processes, they have to shepherd lawyers into standardized tools and processes, which are then fine-tuned to specific needs [I’m getting nodding agreement from peers in legal operations, technology, pricing, knowledge, et al. who appreciate the vigilance and fortitude required to maintain consistency in large organizations populated by smart, successful, autonomous, action-oriented professionals].

This maturation occurs against the backdrop of the siren song of gap filling. To the extent legal project managers prove themselves adept at unburdening lawyers, there is a natural tendency to look to LPM to solve whatever problems arise. A continuous dialogue about continuous improvement should be encouraged. But, unless some level of rigor is maintained, mission creep can undermine LPM being put to its highest and best use. This is a delicate balance—pushing a burden back on the lawyers tends to be the worst possible outcome—that speaks to the need for parallel investments in complementary aspects of the legal service delivery infrastructure (those other resources LPM is meant to help marshal). There are many questions to which LPM is not itself the answer.

Creation and subsequent progression of an LPM function is worthwhile. It is also entirely achievable. But it can only go so far, so fast. The commitment required extends beyond the momentum of this crucial moment.

LPM is not easy

On-boarding new people is time and labor intensive. Legal project managers more so. Legal project managers do not merely need to be acclimated to “what we do here,” they are required to ask why things are done the way they are. In the beginning, these will not all be good questions or always lead to useful conclusions. Yet even where the legal project manager identifies a better way, better is still different. Different comes at a cost. The implementation dip is inevitable. There is no LPM pixie dust.

Ramp-up requires investment. Iteration never ends. But no matter the maturity and stability, hard work remains.

Take, for example, the insights from Alexandra Guajardo, Pricing & Analytics Officer at Shell, on a Legal Value Network webinar that preceded the Council of Luminaries report I quote at the beginning of this post (also, pay attention to LVN). In commenting on the impact of the current crisis, Alex zeroed in on the importance of law firm “LPM reports”—which she defines as matter status and financial updates broken down by phase, workstream, jurisdiction, etc.—to facilitate data-informed dialogue between inside and outside counsel.

In addition to applause for Alex, I offer an observation: these types of reports are hard work, especially on the large, complex matters where they are the most useful.

For this detailed report to be provided quickly and accurately, it must be anticipated. At the beginning of the matter when everyone is keen to get moving to meet some important business objective, the stakeholders need to pause, sit down, and have a conversation about what kind of reporting will best serve the project/client needs. These decisions will demand trade-offs and ultimately drive the matter’s data strategy.

The data strategy then requires ongoing data discipline. In particular, in the example Alex offers, the time recording protocol will need to be setup in a way that will enable closed time to be mapped to the appropriate phases, workstreams, etc. Then all the timekeepers will need to be diligent in closing their time in accordance with the protocol. This is doable but not easy. [More nodding from everyone who has ever been required to regularly close time with numerous mandatory fields (e.g., task and activity codes). Even more vigorous nodding from anyone who has been responsible for getting a large number of timekeepers do so consistently.]

Doable but not easy. Not easy, in part, because there are strict limits to what LPM can offer on its own. The reporting example—with its reliance on leadership buy-in and stakeholder compliance—illuminates how LPM is not an independent variable that delivers independent value. LPM must be integrated and integrative. My friend John Grant once phrased it so well, “LPM is something we do with you, it is not something we can do for you.” John shared that wisdom with me after he penned a marvelous essay about a failed attempt at establishing real LPM at a large law firm—my RFI questions above played a starring, if unfortunate, role in that situation coming to a head.

LPM is about not just coordination but collaboration. Collaboration has a cost. The cost is well worth it. The return on investment in good LPM is substantial. But the return is hard earned—over time. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Wrapping Up

I’ve meditated on LPM. I agree with the Luminaries that now could, and should, be a moment for LPM to shine. While the crisis warrants our attention and our effort, it is worth projecting how our re-actions today will shape our tomorrow—a concern that extends well beyond LPM.

My desire is for near-term needs to translate into long-term investments that serve the sector and our clients well, in good times as well as bad. Yet I know from plodding through the Great Recession and its aftermath that strategic innovation is far from a natural consequence of hard times. The Great Recession changed a great many things but not always in ways or to the degree so many hoped.

Hope—that I still have. My career is premised on the genuine belief that, over time, constructive dialogue and deep relationships can drive systemic improvements that serve our collective best interest. We can, and should, pursue better together. But I am not a naif. I do not believe in magic. I do not expect spontaneous, organic, and immaculate transformations that are quick, clean, and free. I recognize the limits of incremental improvements. I know obvious ≠ simple ≠ easy. But I also know complicated ≠ hard ≠ impossible. This is complicated. This is hard. But it is not impossible.

I began with an observation that WFH took so quickly because it was imperative and the infrastructure was already in place. I noted we would not have been able to meet a similar mandate back in the Great Recession. While I know, generally, we are not where we would like to be with respect to evolving the way legal services are delivered—the mandate of the moment is murky and the infrastructure to meet it uneven—we are closer than we’ve ever been. The last decade-plus has not been wasted. We’ve been laying the groundwork for today. The readiness is all.

 

It’s not unusual for law firms to invest $1M or more in recruiting, hiring, training, and retention of Associates over the first four years of their legal career. However, if you look at the actual retention rates through the fourth or fifth year, it is essentially a coin flip on whether the firm retains, or loses that talent. Bryan Parker, CEO of Legal Innovators thinks that it is not a good return on the law firm’s (and the Associate’s) time and capital investment. Parker believes that you can take a more holistic approach to the recruitment process and evaluate the best talent out there, in particular, women, minorities, and those from underrepresented backgrounds through a two-year process that more resembles the European apprenticeship model than the US on-campus recruiting and Summer Associate method.

In addition to this fascinating discussion, we also have a deep (and fun) discussion of Bryan’s sneaker obsession.

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Information Inspirations

The cancellation of in-person conferences is on the mind of all of us who usually attend these conferences for our professional development and networking needs. There are alternatives, however. For example, Stanford’s CodeX Future Law conference is available online, and Greg is on a panel for Litera’s April 23rd online event called The Changing Lawyer LIVE! Go check out both conferences.

We want to say how happy we are in David Lat’s recovery from his COVID-19 hospitalization. Bob Ambrogi interviewed David after his release from the hospital for his LawNext podcast.

Listen, Subscribe, Comment

Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Greg Lambert: Well, Marlene, it’s good to be doing a podcast back on a regular basis. So, you know, it’s good to be regular.

[00:00:08] Marlene Gebauer: Isn’t that what your mom used to say?

[00:00:10] Greg Lambert: Exactly.

[00:00:23] Marlene Gebauer: Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

[00:00:31] Greg Lambert: And I’m Greg Lambert. Marlene, it’s good to be doing the podcast back on a regular basis. It feels like everything has been turned upside down right now. So a sense of normalcy feels pretty darn good.

[00:00:43] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, it’s good to be back in sort of a regular swing of things. I know that a lot of people are really having a tough time right now. And, you know, listen. We’re all in this together and we’re going to get through it.

[00:00:57] Greg Lambert: As I’ve heard many times, this is a marathon, not a sprint. So, you know, pace yourself, people.

[00:01:04] Marlene Gebauer: So today we have a great talk with Bryan Parker, the CEO of Legal Innovators. I think this interview was very timely considering all of the changes we’re seeing in regard to the summer associate programs, the pass/fail grades in the spring semester of law schools, and overall changes that are going to certainly come out of this pandemic and the shutdown of the world economy.

[00:01:28] Greg Lambert: Yeah, but in addition to this interview, we actually had a good sub talk with Bryan.

[00:01:34] Marlene Gebauer: We totally did.

[00:01:36] Greg Lambert: On a completely non-legal issue. But it was so much fun. And man, do we need some fun discussions right about now.

[00:01:44] Marlene Gebauer: Exactly.

[00:01:45] Greg Lambert: But we decided to actually put the conversation at the end of the show and share it with everyone. So stick around for a little something extra at the end. But right now, let’s jump into this week’s information inspirations. Well, most of the conferences that we usually attend are being canceled left and right, you know, such as yesterday, the Legal Marketing Association announced that the P3 conference in June has been canceled. However, there are some online conferences and seminars popping up to fill the void. In fact, I just saw Codex just announced that theirs is online.

[00:02:28] Marlene Gebauer: Very good.

[00:02:29] Greg Lambert: I just happen to be on a panel for one of these. Latira is hosting a virtual conference on April 23rd called The Changing Lawyer Live. It’s all cast with an exclamation point. So I hope I said that right.

[00:02:44] Marlene Gebauer: Well, it’s got to be good. It’s got an exclamation point.

[00:02:47] Greg Lambert: Yeah, well, I’m going to be on a panel discussing our current situation and how it is accelerating knowledge management within law firms. The fun part is going to be the number of keynote speakers, which includes Molly Bloom, the author of Molly’s Game, which was adapted into a Jessica Chastain movie, by the way.

[00:03:08] Marlene Gebauer: Very cool.

[00:03:09] Greg Lambert: Scott Dorsey, the former CEO of ExactTarget and the issues they had in the 2008 downturn. And Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project. Now the event does have a cost. It’s a whopping $25. But all proceeds are going to go to the CDC’s Foundation Emergency Response Fund to battle COVID-19. So great content and a great cause.

[00:03:34] Marlene Gebauer: So Greg, my inspiration is short and sweet. Bob Ambrogi on his Law Next podcast was able to get David Latt to talk about his experience with COVID-19. And I’m sure many of our listeners are familiar with David Latt, who is a former editor of Above the Law and is now a legal recruiter. He contracted COVID-19 and has a very personal and heartfelt interview with Bob Ambrosi to give the complete experience from beginning to end. So I will say that we are all very, very happy that David is feeling better. And please, everybody, take a listen to this.

[00:04:17] Greg Lambert: Yeah, David’s a good guy. So I’m glad he was able to recover. He sounds still a little hoarse, but I think that he’ll take that. He mentioned that.

[00:04:27] Marlene Gebauer: He mentioned that. Exactly. And that wraps up this week’s Information Inspirations.

[00:04:38] Greg Lambert: Well, we know that when things get back to normal for law firms, we really won’t understand what normal is any longer. Brian Parker, the CEO of Legal Innovators, has worked in the industry for decades and is currently disrupting the recruiting and training areas of the legal industry. We have a great discussion about how this might be the time to transition away from our well-known routines for recruiting talent. from our well-known routines for recruiting talent and look at a more holistic approach and look at a more holistic approach on how we recruit, how we train, and how we actually retain that talent. And also we have a bonus section where we talk about sneakers.

[00:05:16] Marlene Gebauer: Sneakers! Sneakers!

[00:05:25] Greg Lambert: Brian Parker, thanks for joining us on The Geek in Review. We’re really happy to have you here.

[00:05:31] Brian Parker: Happy to be here. Nice to get to know you and your audience out there. So look forward to the discussion.

[00:05:36] Marlene Gebauer: Brian, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, including one fun fact and how you got to be the CEO and lead operations at Legal Innovators?

[00:05:48] Brian Parker: So, you know, my background, since we’re talking about law, starts there. I was a summer and then worked for Sherman & Sterling for four years and worked in the M&A group. When I was a summer associate, my mentor at the time, John Greenblatt, later became my partner. And so if you look at our whole name, it’s Legal Innovators by Greenblatt and Parker. And a part of what we talk about is training and his mentorship. For me, it started early on and Sherman was just a great training ground. John, who I’ve known all these years. And then when I got to Sherman, the head of M&A and then the head of the firm, David Heleneck, was a mentor. So it was good preparation, but going into school, I knew that I was going to get onto the business side at some point. So doing M&A was interacting with lots of bankers. So did banking for about eight years with Lehman and Merrill. And then during the dot-com, I led the software and internet infrastructure practice for SG Count on the West Coast. So that was fun. And then the rest of my career up until now, but the rest of the career has been getting on the operations side and using both the legal and the financial skills that I was able to gain. So I’ve been able to take a company or help take a company public, started on the COO track and did that for a couple of private equity and VC backed people. I had a mentor, again, mentorship that brought me to DeVito, which is a large player in healthcare, does dialysis. So at DeVito, I was able to run a billion dollar division for them. So this whole rigor around data and analytics and numbers, that was just a graduate level course in all of those things. And I’m always making sure that you have a track of the metrics that are telling a story around the business and the financial health. So after DeVito, dabbled a little bit in politics. I led a technology company, which is a software as a service model in California that was backed by KKR in Mithril. And when that company was in the process of being sold, I was thinking about what I would do next and looked at, again, a number of VC and private equity opportunities. And John and I started talking. And so for me, it became, do you take over the business that somebody else is kind of gotten up and going with whatever rewards it has on it? Or do you come back to, and for us, it’s a subject matter, something that I know as a lawyer. And then the partnership really has been perfect with John and I. He was a 40-year lawyer at Sherman and Sterling. So when we think about what’s going to work in the legal market, what kind of training, how do we develop a curriculum, that sort of thing, and what are some elements that need to change, right? I think he has a really good strategic perspective on those things. with my operational sense. And when we got together and some of our investors thought, look, maybe the division of labor that everybody became comfortable with, that I would run it as our CEO, but John is the chairman of the board. And we really run like a partnership. We just play things off of each other. And I think up until the virus hit, the conversation was going well and we were getting some real traction in the marketplace. It was good. And now it’s one of those things that everybody has to face at some point in their career if you want to do operations, and that is that something goes wrong. And that could be your fault, hopefully not, or that could be a more macro thing like what we’re experiencing right now. And I think that, look, the best operators, the best companies, the best law firms, they’re going to make it through because they have a strategic vision and they’ll be able to make a plan and execute. And that’s certainly what we’re thinking about. The challenges of a startup are obviously when you’re disrupted like that, and how do you think about liquidity and just making it to the other side of what does that other side mean? I think some of the operational experiences I’ve had in the past.

[00:10:01] Greg Lambert: Now you have a unique interview process that you do. It’s not the standard interview in person and how people normally think of landing a job. So can you tell us a little bit about that model and why you think that works better than the traditional model?

[00:10:21] Brian Parker: So, you know, look, I don’t think it’s, you know, maybe to say it’s different, it is, but, you know, many elements of the traditional model. I mean, our goal when we’re having these interviews, whether it’s a student on campus or lateral or wherever else you’re meeting legal talent could be a partner coming over, right? Our goal is always to do the same thing. And that is as professionals. And that is, is this person, can this person, you know, perform better above, you know, the grade level of their peers or the class level of their peers on, you know, on up the stack? I mean, the partner, you measure that by profits per partner. So can they bring over a good business? And, you know, one of the things that we’re trying to explore, and we’re certainly not, you know, foolish enough or, you know, so full of ourselves to think that people are going to throw out the summer associate process because we’re here and we say, hey, here’s a new mousetrap. I think it’s more about can you change the mix, right? We’ve gotten so, in our opinion, we’ve gotten so carried away with this salary wars that have gone on for the last decade plus, and sitting here now at 200,000. And so who’s the next top whatever, say it’s a top 30 firm, and they go, and they’re going to go to 225. Well, does somebody ever call an end to the madness? Or does everybody just follow to 225? Because we got to get the best talent and all that. And so for us, when you break apart the process, and, you know, you have these snippets, 15, 20 minutes on campus, and you invite those people back for interviews, and the partner is, maybe they’re busy, maybe they’re not. You’re getting to know them for eight weeks, eight to 10 weeks, and I’m extending it, right? The question just becomes, how much do you know about this person? How much do they know about you? And for us, leading indicator, the kid, you know, the canary in the coal mine of this whole thing, is look at the turnover rates at third and fourth year. It is almost the equivalent of flipping a coin, right? And so if you were going to invest in, you take Greenberg, Trowick, and it’s Jackson is your law firm, right? Jackson Walker. Yeah, Jackson Walker. And you say, okay, hey, look, we’re going to spend 100, 150 between recruiting and doing the summer program and get this person to the door. We’re going to, including that big salary, say, somewhere our carrying costs for this person, their first, second years is going to be 450 to $600,000. Let’s take a midpoint in there and say, that’s 500. So you got a million and you got the 100 to 200,000 you did in recruiting. Now, let’s measure what happens at third and fourth year. And if you say that I’ve just invested a million two in this individual, and I’m willing to live with a coin flips toss, that that person is still going to be here as a third or fourth year, I would say, forget about law, right? So take law out of it for a second. I would tell you, whatever industry that was, you’re not going to be successful. Because if you’re investing in talent that way, you’re watching half of it walk out of the door. So for the invested capital you have, you have half the people to make back your return. I have a hard time seeing the ROI in that, right? And so that’s really the premise of how we think about it. And so to your point, Greg, it’s in you guys have had, I don’t know, maybe you even had Bill Henderson on this, on this podcast, but you guys undoubtedly both know him, professor over at IU. He calls him a poor predictor of who’s going to be a good lawyer. And I think that that takes it too far. But our theology is, it’s one factor. And we need to understand all of the factors that make up someone, including when they hit things that may be hard for them, you know, staying up late, partner that’s a little disagreeable, whatever it is. Can they push through and then can they be a long term, you know, productive member of your organization to justify those kinds of investments that you’re making in people? So we have a process that, you know, I think our processes is a little bit different in the fact that we try to get to the partnerships with the school, allow us to hopefully get to know people a little bit longer. And then we try to just be a little bit more deliberate with the interview process, meaning that it’s stretched out over some period of time and we really get to know them and hopefully they get to know us. I talked to you about my DaVita experience at the beginning. I am, you know, a data and analytics guy. I think that there are predictive things that you can look at that will show us combined with this person’s grades, where they went to school, how they grew up, how they are just mentally made up to whether they’re going to be a successful lawyer. And in our minds, that takes more than just two weeks. I get it. You know, firms are bringing in 10, 25, 50, 100 people at a time and they’ve got to go, you know, sort of quick. Part of this, I think, can be proving, you know, running a little pilot that things can be done differently and that you’re not sacrificing, you know, quality at a little bit of a different level. Because if you stick to interviewing at the top 15 schools, top 25 schools, and you’re only going to look at people in that top 10, 15 or 20 percent, you’re going to miss some folks. And so ours, I guess the best I can say it is that we try to be holistic and we try to use all the tools that are available to make those determinations.

[00:15:48] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I do think that there’s a real opportunity now, given sort of the COVID-19 crisis, for firms to take a closer look at this, because many of them are just saying, you know, I don’t know if we’re going to have a summer program. And clearly nobody’s on campus right now. So this seems like a great time to really press this type of new way of doing things, both from the sort of long-term relationship with the students, but also the analytics end of things, because that seems to be like a really new twist to sort of the hiring process.

[00:16:28] Brian Parker: So let me just say, as the choir would say, amen, right? You know, from your lips to God’s ears, right? Like that’s back to Greg’s point about getting people to know us better. You know, I think that that’s part of the story, right? But we don’t want to be too cavalier. We’ve got a worldwide epidemic that’s really impacting people and their families, and we’re losing neighbors and that sort of thing along the way. But I do think that you are right. It’s forcing a conversation to say, okay, well, I can see the benefits. Let’s try it out to this, just prudent running a business, right? It’s going to be, how do we lower our fixed carrying costs so that the next time something comes along and, you know, God forbid, hopefully it’s not like COVID, but you know, we get something, right? There’s disruptions every few years. And the last one was the 08 real estate crash. And, you know, you guys have probably been around as long as me and go back to 87 and we can, you know, see Black Monday there. And, you know, we go to the .com and we go to, you know, 9-11. The question is, how do you prepare a business that can be flexible enough to thrive in those environments? And I think summer programs, we’re not saying that there’s no place for them, right? Because they are branding activities for the firm. They’re fun. People like to do. And the law is one of those industries that people, you know, they’re slow to change, right? So you can’t do too much at once. And if you asked me, which I didn’t see on the questions, but I’ll say it’s like, okay, what just keeps people from adopting this thing overnight? And you guys are, you know, sort of the next Uber or something. I’d say, well, you know, that’s great. But I think, and this is the prudence and you talk about analytics, right? So we can have a great conversation. We’re already having a great conversation here. We’ve done that before COVID. I think that this brings it to your point, more urgency to question. What is the role of analytics and how do we back up all the things that I’m saying? Some of those things are anecdotal. Some of those things have data with them, but anytime you have a new system, it’s the first three, four, five years of that system to where you have enough data to where if we’re going to look at this from a statistical perspective, people always focus on the end, right? What’s my count in this thing? So where is the insignificant? And then we want to try to say, here’s a mean of result and the standard deviation is where we can live. And that is by and large, you’re going to have people that are as successful or more than the people that were going in your old way. When you can, then people will think about it. I think this way, you’ll sit back and you’ll think about, well, I sell legal talent, right? And the best legal thinking and theories possible. There’s probably still a role. If you’re hiring 50, the question becomes how many of those 200,000 people do you need? And I think about as a business leader, that’s a mixed issue for me. That’s not a choosing. And so if I have 50, I don’t know if it’s 25, 25, I don’t know if it’s 40 my way, 10 the other way or reverse. But I think law is a business and you guys are sort of living testimonies of that. Marlene, what we’re seeing is that firms that will be best positioned going forward will be those that are investing in positions like you have, right? Investing in the innovation space, bringing over people that were mid-level associates. It’s the partners at the consulting firms, the Booz, the McKinsey’s, those kinds of people, having more and more professional people that are running it with the attendant power that are sitting right by side by side with the senior partner. And that will ripple all the way down. So when you have your chief talent officer, either that person is either from a different industry or they bring somebody in to partner and we’ve got to think this is a business that we’re running. And the American lawyer, we could say, I don’t know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, actually it was probably 20 years or more, they started tracking this statistic of profits per partner. Well, you know, like then that perverted, I think a lot of things because what you measure becomes what’s important and what manifests itself. And so if the only thing that the primary thing that we’re focused on is exactly how much profit per partner we have, then other things get obscured like the role of mentoring, the role of diversity and inclusion. And I think we’ve got to score those as well. But we can’t be duplicitous about the thing either. We can’t say that we’re comparing about profits per partner and then do this coin flip thing that I outlined at the beginning. And that’s the reverse of your draining profits at that point. So I think there’s got to be some consistency and some broader looking of the industry as a whole of the problems. that we’re trying to attack. And so that’s how we’re thinking about it.

[00:21:25] Greg Lambert: I’m curious, Brian, because we were talking about ROI on this and coin flip and you may not have a number. Is there a percentage of retention that you think would be an achievable goal?

[00:21:42] Brian Parker: Yeah. No, that’s a good question because I think that my statements in your question sort of beg the question, right? that we’re dealing with human capital. So I’m trying to choose my words carefully. But there’s always going to be some attrition, right? And some attrition will be forced because people are not up to the standard that you want, however they came in, whether that’s through legal innovators or another ASLP. I assume you guys have talked about alternative legal service providers and that’s where we find ourselves. So there’s going to be attrition. And by the way, this is a two-sided thing. So when we look at this, we look at our constituencies as the ultimate client, the law firm and the law student in their school. They may say, I mean, the culture has changed from when I was an associate. I’m sure as long as you guys have been looking at the industry, you’ve seen the culture change. It’s not for everybody. And so when people come in and some of this current generation, they’re still exploring. Maybe some will just pay loans off and then they want to go do what’s driving their heart. Some, like my classmate, M&A back in 96, he’s off in Hollywood writing scripts. So there’ll be attrition by people who leave and just want to do other things and people that get forced out. You’re saying, you’re asking the Jack Welsh management question of the year in what is an acceptable. you that you should be turning over the bottom 10 to 15% every year, no matter what. I think I think we are being that draconian when we’re talking about human capital, that’s probably not the right thing. But if we say it’s a coin flip, if you accept that and say that somewhere between 35 and 50% is turning over between those two. And we measure what the drag on earnings or profit that there is. Look, do I think 25%, 20% is achievable? I think so. That seems to me to be a more, and then that gives you a middle-of- the-road guidepost to go to between what is going on right now, and then the old Jack Welsh system where you’re saying 10, 15% no matter what. ‘Cause you have places that, they’ve got rockstar associates, I’m gonna go in and make an arbitrary thing, and I’ve gotta cut 10% no matter what. That’s probably not the right way to run a knowledge-based business, but I think it does instruct us that reality is, There’s going to be turnover and there’s going to be attrition. Some you want, some you don’t want, but how do you manage that? And I think if I could make one more point, when you think about this, and not to be shamelessly plugging legal innovators, but when you explore the model, and we set this up as taking lessons from the European system, the apprentice system. folks are getting to know our person for two years and vice versa, right? Lot more details and a lot more information than you get in eight to 10 weeks of the summer. And so what’s going to happen is you’re going to opt in, each side is going to opt in with some hopefully material portion of people that are coming through our program and then they’re going to add those. So all of a sudden, what’s going to happen is that you still have your attrition and hopefully we can bring that number down, Greg, to your point, the problems still persist, where do you go and fill the hole, right?

[00:24:45] Marlene Gebauer: attrition and hopefully we can bring that down, that number down, Greg, to your point. The problem still persists. Where do you go and get, where do you go and fill the hole?

[00:24:53] Brian Parker: And right now, before COVID came along the lateral market was white hot. What are we getting from the lateral market? It’s a little bit of a black box. You don’t know where the person is coming from, why they left all of those kinds of things. And so now you’ve developed your own kind of, I don’t want to call it minor leagues, but you’ve developed your own team and you can look at more of them to fill that hole than have to go outside. I mean, you’re always still going to go with lateral market, right? There may just be somebody that’s a rock star in a certain amount of… specialty or whatever. And we thought there’s partners that are coming over, even in this environment, because they’re people that bring big books of business that outlast whatever market disruption we’re going for.

[00:25:37] Greg Lambert: Yeah, I can verify the lateral market is still moving, even though no one else is.

[00:25:42] Marlene Gebauer: Brian, I want to bring the conversation back to sort of schools and firms and that kind of relationship. And we touched upon this a little earlier about sort of time spent with students and maybe the lack of use about analytics. Are there other challenges that you see for schools and firms to connect on talent? I know we’ve had many folks on the show here, you know, from the school side and, you know, and from the other side where they talk about like a disconnect in terms of, what folks are learning and how they’re being trained versus what the firms are looking for.

[00:26:24] Brian Parker: Is there anything there that you’re, that you’re noticing? Yeah. You know, look, I think that the disconnect is there. So first of all, I don’t think that every firm is not using analytics, that there are plenty of firms that are. I’m just saying that there’s probably a role more broad in the industry for it. I think that the disconnect becomes, it is a, it’s a very transactional relationship, right. Certainly with customers and then just down to the schools, meaning, hey, we’re coming here. We’re good. You know, they pick on, you know, where I went and you say, NYU, we’ve got to have five people, 10 people, whatever we want to get the top people in class, but let’s roll. And there’s during that interaction, how is the full person being valued? How are you thinking about, you know, where their career goals are? How are you thinking about the kind of things that excite their passions and that make them come alive? Because if you can capture in that, the work that you need to get done, but everybody’s kind of going to, you know, this bogey, I think it becomes a, you know, a better conversation and a little bit less transactional. And so I think if you had folks sit down and you could have a round table of law schools, lawyers, and clients, meaning, you know, GC, the corporate legal departments, and everybody was having a conversation, you’d much, much better have a better chance of getting on the same page. But, you know, those things don’t happen. It’s like, okay, here’s, you know, another cog in the wheel. You go through till you fall out, and then kind of next. I think we’ve got to just have a little bit of a change in that relationship, because, and again, let me come from the firm side, and in the client side. I think it’s gotten better. And you guys are, you’re in this knowledge part, and I’d be interested in your views, you know, Marlene, you’re trained in the law, you’ve got to get a certain amount of just black letter law down under your belt, and understanding the way lawyers think and act and reason and problem solve. I think law schools have gotten better in sort of practical skills, too, and writing and moot court, and just the stuff that you’ll do as a lawyer, but probably unfair for them to think, like, is it just a vocation, and you’re coming out purely, you’ve got to hit the ground running, and you just know all these things? Or do you want people that are smart, general, and they can, they can think as the situations are different. So I think if there was a conversation, then to the law firms and the client’s point, well, you could probably get some more practical stuff, even though then what’s going on in right now. And then from the client’s perspective, they’re saying, Look, God, I’m, you know, I’m having to pay for all this training and the places that you are. And so I think, in our view, you know, part of the model, and you guys have gotten this is, you know, probably one of the more straightforward parts is that if you can get more cost effective, law firms, again, are probably better able to earn the profits that they want, clients feel heard, and they can save some money. And then you’re putting people into the system. So you are putting more jobs in the system that is then that is there right now. And you’re creating that next cadre of really smart lawyers that by the time they’re third, fourth, fifth year, you know, they’ll be able to return some, you know, some real profitability, and to the client, then they’ll say, Okay, well, I recognize we all cut our teeth somewhere. And so I’m paying and people are learning on the job, I get it. But I think to

[00:29:46] Marlene Gebauer: ask people to pay premium prices for junior talent, and while they’re learning is probably a little bit unfair. Yeah, and it’s, you know, we’ve talked about this kind of struggle as to, you know, what type of work are they going to be doing? You know, should they be sort of focused on sort of the more theoretical and being able to think like a lawyer? And, you know, or, you know, are they really looking more towards something in the ops area? And, you know, are we preparing all of them adequately for those different types of jobs?

[00:30:23] Brian Parker: Yeah.

[00:30:24] Marlene Gebauer: And we also talk about the Delta lawyer model quite a bit in terms of having kind of all of those skills coming out of school to a certain extent and why that’s important. I mean, when I started doing what I’m doing, I mean, I never would have imagined being where I am now because things are so flexible and then things change. And so being able to have all of those skills is very useful.

[00:30:49] Brian Parker: Or just maybe not forcing people to do stuff that they’re not good at. I mean, there’s plenty of people like you that maybe made the transition and they know the law. But I would say if you populated your whole team, there’s probably some people just from a pure business background that could probably do a little bit better than lawyers, those ops roles. And so why are we trying to, in some cases, fit square pegs in round holes? Teach them the substance around the industry that they need to be in, but then let them bring their analytical and their quantitative and the other skills to the table. And I think you make a team there. And again, law firms start to look more like a business. more like a business. The old days of we had this partnership, and it was the lawyers that ran the business. you know, ran the business and some lawyers were great business people and great at numbers and some aren’t. But you’re also asking how you get to be a senior partner or managing partner. One of these people is like, you’re kicking butt, right? Clients are saying that you’re one of the best lawyers, and you’re bringing in great money. And then now you ask them to do this job on the top of it. Even if you don’t sleep, which some people don’t sleep very much, I’m not sure that that’s the most efficient. But look, we’re not trying to, you know, reconstitute the whole practice of law and field partners how to do their job at that level. But I think over time, look, law will morph like other things and other industries. It’ll just get more and more efficient and take on some of these characteristics, many of which many law firms have started doing it already. And we’ve talked about that.

[00:32:17] Greg Lambert: You’ve built some recent relationships with some of the top law schools, a lot of T14 law schools. So how is it that, or what is it that you, what’s your reasoning for picking the schools that you are?

[00:32:34] Brian Parker: Well, look, I think when you think about this, you know, you think about other people that are in the, this industry in the broad space, right, of the alternative legal service provider. And you might look at Axiom, right? Like they do something very different than we do, but you know, they have been for a while in every market in America and over in Europe and other places. So the needs really exist, but for us, you know, I want to make sure, and we want to make sure that we had the operations, right. So we said, look, let’s start in the East Coast for a lot of reasons, and then we can expand out from there. But Washington seemed to be a place that, well, look, you can touch Philly and Boston and New York and DC from there. So you’ve got lots of clients, you’ve got lots of law firms, and then, you know, there are a number of law schools in DC, if you guys hadn’t heard. And, you know, we were really… And a lot of lawyers. And a lot of lawyers. You know, I think we were really fortunate with the first three partners that we got. And, you know, it’s just like, they saw the vision, they saw some of the things that we were seeing, and they added things to us along the way. And so that’s how we started thinking about it in terms of a partnership. If you look at Georgetown and GW and Howard, which were our first three partners, we were talking to them before the business was incorporated, right? So we’re building the business case and doing lots of survey work and things 15, 18 months in advance of when we started the business, because we wanted to approach this like grown-ups. And part of the survey work and a part of what a partner can do is to say, okay, you know what? That’s a good part of the business model. Here, why don’t you think about this? Why don’t you think about doing this a little bit differently? So our first partners, they developed some trust and some belief in us and some respectful thoughtfulness of the model. Because again, you know, these are, you talk about T14, I mean, Georgetown is in that, it’s T14. I mean, Georgetown is in that, GW is a top 25, and then Howard has had its historic strength. For them to evaluate a startup and say, hey, you know what? We’re going to let you in our doors. You know, they’re putting a lot on the line and we’ve taken that faith very seriously. And then with the rest, it has to do both with issues of excellence and geographic expansion as we think about things, you know, down the road. And I’ll say that we got some of it, it’s always fortunate too, right? When the American lawyer profiled us, you know, a number of people took notice, including schools. And so some of the schools started the conversations themselves. And so we were fortunate, but any school that we partnered with and, you know, look, there are probably some others that we’d love to partner with that, you know, weren’t ready to partner with us. So I think it, you know, it goes both ways. Had to have that same commitment in that same relationship, hopefully, that Georgetown and GW and Howard did. And that is, can we go deeper? Will you tell us when we need to improve? Can we give you feedback about your model? And where we need to, always make sure that the students are at the front side of our interest. So when we have conversations, it’s how do we advance that? How do we all stay committed to the same principles? And, you know, look, our model is about providing cost-effective, you know, solutions where we help provide training and mentoring. But what’s also really important to us is diversity and inclusion, right? We have both diverse and non-diverse lawyers, but as a person of color and John, who’s not a person of color, but did found the diversity committee at Sherman back in the early nineties, we’ve seen by the numbers, there are still the same underrepresented groups. We wanted to do something about that. Firms, I guess the last thing I’ll say is about the partners. I’m a very mission and values driven leader. And so any partner that we’re going to get in partnership with is going to have to share those same values. And so that’s the last component that we looked at. Then we have conversations, they evaluated us and we evaluated them. And we were fortunate that you know some really good and talented law schools and their career development officers saw something and see something in us that they wanted to invest.

[00:36:54] Marlene Gebauer: You know our traditional partnership track model, you know how does your business model influence that?

[00:37:05] Brian Parker: So it works in a symbiotic nature, right? So when you think about, so part of, and we didn’t talk about this. You know, part of the conversation is because firms have been using contract and staffing attorneys and they use them right now, right? And those are both lower cost options. That’s not what we’re saying. We are saying we’re doing the exact same work. It’s a way to do it more cost effectively, but there’s a mix in terms of how committed all law firms are to formal training programs, right? We’re a big believer in it. And so if you partner with us, it’s both low cost, but training and continual training through the whole period. And so when you look at the partnership model, the premise of ours is, all right, we’ve got this apprentice program, two years. What we say at the beginning is, look, have a good faith look that if these people are cultural fits and they do a good job, then you’ll hire them. And if you do, then everybody’s in the same pool swimming towards partnership, right? You’ve got a bunch of third years. And we know who this partner, some people don’t want to be partnered anymore, but those people that do, you’re all in the pool. And you’ve got, I guess at the earliest now, it seems that partners get made at eight, but it’s anywhere from eight to twelve years. So if somebody’s coming in as a third year, you’ve got five to nine years to really prove yourself, right? And you’ll be measured on the same category and statistics as everybody else. Our goal is to make sure that from a competencies perspective, you have the same competency as anybody else by the time you’re starting your third year. So that’s it. I mean, it’s, we come recognizing that there is a law firm structure and even the law firms that want to change, they’re not going to change everything, right? So we’re not coming in proposing to change your partnership models. This is giving you a different launch point, helping you think about some different costs and rounding out your talent. Once they’re in the pool, they gotta prove themselves to make partner just like anybody else would.

[00:39:09] Greg Lambert: I’m just curious, Brian, if you were running a law firm today, would you have an alternative path other than to partner? Have you thought about how is it you can keep talent happy, funded but profitable, but keep them long-term?

[00:39:23] Brian Parker: Yeah.

[00:39:28] Greg Lambert: What other paths would you think there would be out there for them?

[00:39:32] Brian Parker: No, I think it’s a good–.

[00:39:33] Marlene Gebauer: How would you run the zoo?

[00:39:35] Brian Parker: Well, you know, so I do just, you know, just to help our business, I think about that question all the time. But, you know, look, I think just zeroing in right on your question, Greg, We say that all the time. So if you look at where I was at DaVita, right? And we had 65,000 employees, right? And so, you know, there’s lots of places for people to go. There’s vice president, senior vice president, group, you know, like this and that. So there’s just lots of other positions and titles that denote somebody has been successful. And you really raised the, you know, one of the central issues in law. And that is, if you don’t make partner or in some people even get more specific, if you don’t make equity partner, right? Have you been, have you not been successful? You know, likely you’ve been really successful. And I think some law firms are already doing part of this and, you know, our CEO at DaVita used to say that we’re sending forth ripples of citizen leadership, right? And so when I look at some of the people that were there with me at DaVita, and I look at all of, a lot of them are still in the healthcare space, but they’re the COO or CEO or some, you know, meaningful position that’s influencing the ecosystem. So even at corporations, we’re saying, look, our job is to create leaders that not only are going to stay here, that are going to go out and law firms do that, right? Like they help their lawyers get to in-house positions. And, you know, obviously there’s a, there’s a good symbiotic relationship there because if you have a good relationship, hopefully that firm will, you know, send you work. But I do think as you expand, Marlene, it’s like, Marlene, tell me if I got your background right.

[00:41:20] Marlene Gebauer: I read, read it quickly, but you, did you start out as a lawyer? I did. Yeah. I did it back. I did it backwards.

[00:41:29] Brian Parker: Well, no, I think it’s just, you know, to Greg’s point, I mean, that’s a little bit beyond the scope of, of legal innovators, but you know, we’re, we’re, we think about the question too. And so part of it is you want people that understand the nuances. So I mean, look at, look at John and I, and look at legal innovators. And I come in here and yeah, I did law for a little bit and I could come and have a hundred ideas. Well, it needs somebody that’s really been in the trenches of a lot of calibrate and give me some, you know, some, well, you know, we tried that back in 92 and that really just fell flat on its face. Well, John could, right, he could say that. And then on the other hand, I can push him to say, well, what about this efficiency and why are we doing it here where this is this much of a drag on earnings? And I can cite 10 examples and say, oh, okay. So it’s a good team. My point simply is when you take the Marlene’s of the world and Greg, this is your question, you’ve got this captive knowledge base. So she comes up, she goes into the knowledge management part of the firm. She knows a lot about law. That’s great. Well, you probably still want to pair up and have some people that have business opportunities, but how do you say that all of these things are, and I don’t know if it’ll be nomenclature. I don’t know if there’ll be other beyond just your equity and non- equity, if there’ll be other, you know, sort of partnership titles over, over time. But how do you make the folks that are contributing to your business going forward through comp, through titles, through everything else, feel like they’re valued and just as, as important set another way. Can that partner in M&A make as much money as they are going to make for the firm without having these other supports? And if you have a great leaders that are running those other areas and you don’t reward them, well, then you run the risk of leaving. Flip it. If you do reward them and you do elevate them and this, this becomes a business and all of these things are maybe on par or at least on par, then people say, huh, you know what? I really would rather be like doing the law, I mean, doing the business of law rather than practicing lawyer. you see, I mean, Marlene Smiley right now, like there was something that when you, I’m guessing when you went over into that new area that woke you up and, you know, I’m a big disciple of, of, of jobs. And he laid this, this philosophy out at the 2005 commencement of the Stanford business school when he said, you know, about the role of passion, right? You’ve got to get people and put them where their passion buckets can explore. And I think today’s law firm structure is probably just as a whole is a little bit limiting on being able to let that truly flourish. I think as over time, as people figure that out, you know, you’ll really have something where you keep your best talent and they feel valued.

[00:44:11] Greg Lambert: All right. You know, I think that’s probably the best place to stop right there, Brian.

[00:44:15] Marlene Gebauer: I know.

[00:44:16] Greg Lambert: Don’t get me wrong. I could listen to you for a couple more hours, but I was going to say really, it’s like we could talk.

[00:44:21] Marlene Gebauer: We can talk more often.

[00:44:23] Greg Lambert: Thanks, Brian. Appreciate your time. All right.

[00:44:26] Marlene Gebauer: Okay, thank you.

[00:44:32] Greg Lambert: Well, Marlene, I could hear the cogs and Brian’s mind churning as we were discussing his efforts at Legal Innovators. You know, this issue of spending seven figures on recruits to your law firm, you know, over the years and then having the retention of that investment essentially be a coin flip was something you could really tell bothered him about the current structure. So it’s definitely something that we’ve been saying for a long time now that’s ripe for disruption. And it seems like Brian is one of the people on the crest of that wave.

[00:45:03] Marlene Gebauer: Exactly. I mean, this is a perfect time to start examining that because you cannot do all of the traditional things that you have done before. And so attempting to look at this in a different way is quite, quite timely.

[00:45:19] Greg Lambert: Yeah. And now for the fun part.

[00:45:21] Marlene Gebauer: Yes. Now for the fun part. So I asked Brian for a fun fact about himself. Sometimes I do this with some of our interviewees and, you know, in all honesty, it took a conscious effort on our parts to bring us back to the topic that we brought Brian to the show to talk about. We could have talked about this for a long time, but, you know, it was so, so good that we didn’t want to leave it out. So here’s the fun fact about how Brian is a sneakerhead and how excited we all were to discuss it. You forgot the fun fact. Oh, yes. Or maybe you didn’t forget the fun fact.

[00:46:01] Greg Lambert: That sounded like a bunch of fun facts.

[00:46:03] Brian Parker: Right. I could give you, you know, the time that I showed up to be the CFO in this company and first day was in Hong Kong and found out that our financing deal had fell apart.

[00:46:16] Marlene Gebauer: But that’s not going to be the fun fact. That’s the un-fun fact.

[00:46:20] Brian Parker: This helps me. I think this helps me relate to the students that we’re recruiting is that I am, if you guys know what a sneakerhead is, I have a massive collection of sneakers, vintage, collectible. And sneakers that will be collectible. And you think about them as just like pieces of art and you try to evaluate which ones are going to have staying power, which ones are interesting to be able to be collected and that sort of thing. And so I have a collection that I’m somewhat proud of.

[00:46:50] Greg Lambert: What’s one of your favorite ones?

[00:46:52] Brian Parker: Well, that’s always an interesting question to ask.

[00:46:56] Greg Lambert: Just one of them.

[00:46:57] Brian Parker: Yeah. Well, I’ll give you two. And so the first one, it shows how the worlds of art and fashion and what was the hip hop community have come together. And you look at, his name will come to me in a second, but Virgil Abloh. So he created something called the Off-White brand, which was an extension of Nike. So Virgil is actually now the creative director for Louis Vuitton. So you talk about these worlds coming together. And so the first shoe that most people learn about is the Jordan, right? And so the Jordan one is sort of the seminal shoe. And so Jerry did a takeoff of the Jordan one. And so what the Off-White brand is doing is making fun of, people say Nike Air or this or that. And so it’s got writings and different things to make it a little bit whimsical. And so it’s in the color of North Carolina where he went to school. So that probably is my favorite one. And there was a second one that was done by a skate shop called Diamond Dunk in Southern California. When these shoes came out, canary yellow, and you look at them, you’re like, oh my God, why would I ever want to own these things, right?

[00:48:14] Marlene Gebauer: I would totally want to wear those things.

[00:48:18] Brian Parker: So when we talk about the ridiculousness that is in the sneaker industry. So they came out. So there are these conferences, just like we have legal conferences, there’s conferences around these sneakers and around the culture.

[00:48:30] Marlene Gebauer: And so this one was called Complex, there’s a magazine that writes a lot about the culture. And so they had this come out at Complex Con.

[00:48:37] Brian Parker: And so these shoes come out, they’re gonna have 250 pair of them only for friends and family. And so somehow people started selling them there and it disseminated into this brawl, like people were fighting over. So the shoe never got released massively to the public and the limited supply plus the story of how it came out, it just created this urban legend. And so when you can find them, usually you’re gonna have to pay about 10 grand for these shoes. And so I was at a consignment store, but when you think about it, this is like an asset. And so this person needed some money for their car or rent or whatever it was. And they were selling them for $2,100. And I said, okay, well, there’s a chance for some market arbitrage and that’s the only way that I would have them because I’m not paying $10,000 for sneakers. So anyway.

[00:49:31] Marlene Gebauer: All right. We can just do the podcast on this. Okay.

[00:49:34] Greg Lambert: This is all we need to talk about. After this is over, I’m going to go pull out some sneakers and I’m going to show them to you.

[00:49:41] Marlene Gebauer: Please do. Yeah.

[00:49:43] Greg Lambert: Well, Virgil, I know Virgil Abloh has a great storyline behind his, if it’s who I’m thinking about, it was one of his sayings was if one symbol of Louis Vuitton is good, then a lot of people are going to love Louis Vuitton. So if one symbol of Louis Vuitton is good, then a lot of people are going to love Louis Vuitton. So there you go. There you go. There that was Kiri’s favorite way to go after all. Laughter. There we go.

[00:50:27] Brian Parker: I guess it was last year of the fashion week in London. So Calvin Klein’s head, I don’t know if he’s the head designer or if he’s in charge of makeup, but whichever one. So he’s on the stage, Asian American guy, and he’s wearing, you know, the fashion people, right? He’s very fashion forward. He’s got these leather pants on, really cool shirt. And you look down and I’m like, oh, wait a minute. He’s wearing off- white sneakers with this. So now people just think about sneakers, either I run out or maybe, you know, I’ve got the old, so I can’t even think of where those are, not vans, but you know, just the old sneakers that you beat around in. And now people are like, I can go out to, I can go out wearing a tuxedo. Wearing my Chucks. Well, maybe not that.

[00:51:15] Marlene Gebauer: There’s never a bad time for Chucks.

[00:51:17] Brian Parker: Well, you know, so I’ll give you an alternative. Prada made a pair of patent leather sneakers about four years ago. And so they made them in red and black. And so for a tuxedo, black patent leather, it just looks fantastic. And if you really just wanted to go out there, then red ones.

[00:51:37] Marlene Gebauer: I had a patent leather, orange pair of Pumas that I sold and I should not have, I have, should not have sold them. It was like for 10 bucks. This was a while ago. And it’s like, I’m like,

[00:51:51] Brian Parker: never too late to jump back in Marlene.

[00:51:53] Marlene Gebauer: That’s true. That’s true. You’re talking to the right person. Believe me, Greg knows.

[00:51:58] Brian Parker: Well, next, next one, we can, we can talk all sneakers.

[00:52:02] Greg Lambert: All right. I’m going to, I’m going to bring it, bring us back in here.

[00:52:06] Brian Parker: What you get for asking for a fun fact, you guys, I assume a lot of that’ll get edited out.

[00:52:12] Greg Lambert: Well, what I’m, what I’m thinking about is I may put this at the end of the interview and just say, you know, we had this great sub, sub talk here. Let’s, here it is.

[00:52:22] Marlene Gebauer: If you like sneakers and art and culture.

[00:52:26] Brian Parker: If you didn’t get enough of Brian Parker, listen to him hold forth about, about sneakers.

[00:52:30] Greg Lambert: Absolutely. Hey, we just go where the conversation takes us. Well, thanks again to Brian Parker for joining us today and sharing a few of his passions with us.

[00:52:40] Marlene Gebauer: And it was so much fun talking shoes with him and associate models. Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, that’s it.

[00:52:50] Greg Lambert: But before we go, we wanted to remind listeners to take the time to subscribe on Apple podcasts,

[00:52:56] Marlene Gebauer: Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, rate and review us as well. If you have comments about today’s show or suggestions for a future show, you can reach us on Twitter at, at Gabe Bauer M or at Glamberg, or you can call the Geek and Review hotline at 713-487-7270 or email us at geekandreviewpodcast at gmail.com. As always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeSicca. Thank you, Jerry. Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene. I will see you later. Stay safe.

[00:53:27] Greg Lambert: Okay, stay healthy, Greg. Bye.

Heidi Gardner, Distinguished Fellow and Lecturer at Harvard Law School, and Brian Stearns, Chief Commercial Officer at Workstorm, talk with us about collaboration when most of us are under a shelter-in-place order. There are definitely tools to make it easier to collaborate remotely, but there is a process that must be evaluated first. There’s also a human element that must be considered in who people react to the stress they are currently under.
As we have said before, never let an emergency go to waste, and Gardner and Stearns have some insights on how to evaluate your current structure, determine what works best for your environment, and to remain vigilant and empathetic to those who may be struggling.
It’s not all doom and gloom, however. This is an excellent opportunity to be creative. If you are looking for the right time to introduce new processes, tools, or ideas, now may be the perfect time to pitch those. The worst thing you can do right now is to try and stay the same.

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Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Marlene Gebauer: Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

[00:00:15] Greg Lambert: And I’m Greg Lambert. So we’re going to do something a little bit different on this episode and jump right into the interview section. I know I was a little busy this week with all these side projects that we talked about last week, Marlene. And add to that, I added one more podcast that I’m helping create with my law firm called Jackson Walker Fast Takes. So once again, my day job is getting in the way of the podcast.

[00:00:42] Marlene Gebauer: Well, that’s fantastic. Congratulations. That kind of busy is good busy.

[00:00:46] Greg Lambert: It is good busy.

[00:00:47] Marlene Gebauer: Believe me, I have been pretty busy with my side projects as well. So let’s jump right into it. We have Heidi Gardner from Harvard Law School and Brian Stearns from Workstorm on how to manage the remote working environment from both a technical and a psychological perspective.

[00:01:05] Greg Lambert: So let’s get right into the talk with Heidi Gardner and Brian Stearns. Well, Heidi Gardner and Brian Stearns, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us on The Geek in Review. It’s great to get you both on the show.

[00:01:21] Heidi Gardner: My pleasure.

[00:01:22] Brian Stearns: Pleasure to be here. Thanks.

[00:01:24] Marlene Gebauer: So before we begin, would you mind just telling me a bit about yourselves and what your focus is now that we’re all in a remote work environment?

[00:01:31] Brian Stearns: Brian, you start.

[00:01:32] Heidi Gardner: Well, I kind of bring a couple of different interesting perspectives to this. Workstorm is a collaboration platform. So designed to help teams connect remotely. In fact, our entire product was developed with a remote development team spread across the US, first using industry available products and then using our own platform to build it. So in some respects, we’ve hit our stride through this process in helping clients adjust to this market. So talk a little bit about the use of technology to support remote working or work from home. I’m not a lawyer, didn’t grow up in the legal market, but I did grow up as a consultant, first at Deloitte and then Boston Consulting Group. So I’ve actually been working fairly remotely since 2002. And so I have some thoughts around just managing dispersed teams and adjustments to moving between the home and the office. So I can share some of those perspectives as well, but I think primarily we’ll be coming at it from the lens of how law firms can utilize technology to not only manage through this situation, the current environment, but also to potentially increase productivity as a result of it.

[00:02:37] Brian Stearns: So I’ll pick up there. This is Heidi Gardner. I’m a distinguished fellow at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession, which is basically what I consider to be my research home at Harvard. And the whole university is now in remote working mode. And it’s actually working quite well for me. I’ve had a number of writing tasks on my plate and I’ve managed to pick those up quite productively while working from my home in the mountains in New Hampshire. I am delighted that my new book, it’s called Smart Collaboration for In-House Legal Teams. Hampshire. I am delighted that my new book, it’s called Smart Collaboration for In-House Legal Teams. It has gone to press as of this week. So I was working on page proofs and things while I was in isolation. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely thrilled. I feel like I’ve accomplished something while here in the mountains. And I’ve been studying this topic of collaboration for nearly two decades at this point. Like Brian, I’m also a former consultant. I was at McKinsey. I don’t hold the BCG thing against you, by the way, Brian. I appreciate that.

[00:03:36] Heidi Gardner: I still carry that chip on my shoulder.

[00:03:38] Brian Stearns: There you go. But having worked in client service teams for half a decade at McKinsey, I then left to do my PhD in London and started studying those very same teams. And over time, transitioned to looking at how highly autonomous, quite powerful people like partners in professional service firms or research scientists like at places like the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute or other kinds of professionals, how they come together and bring their unique expertise and are able to tackle complicated problems by bringing different perspectives together and creating these holistic solutions. And so having looked at collaboration for the past 20 or so years, primarily from an academic and from a consulting standpoint, this environment now is sort of like a little incubator of experimentation. And lots of what I’ve been writing about and studying and thinking about over the past years is now playing out in sort of grand color. years is now playing out in sort of grand color. And it’s fascinating for me to think about what happens in this remote working environment for people who don’t necessarily choose to work this way, or for people who have little experience doing this, and what’s the psychological impact, my PhD is in organizational behavior, and I bring that lens to thinking about all of this.

[00:04:58] Greg Lambert: So we brought you both on to discuss how law firms are handling business continuity. Well, I guess we don’t even have to limit it to law firms. The legal environment is handling the business continuity and the collaboration efforts in this new reality that we’re finding ourselves in. And obviously, we’re seeing something that practically no one could have anticipated at the end of last year, especially in the legal industry.

[00:05:23] Marlene Gebauer: Brian, as firms go for weeks in this work from home situation, what are some of the key considerations that they need to address, especially on remote work, collaboration, business continuity planning in the legal industry since COVID-19? hit us.

[00:05:41] Heidi Gardner: Yeah, thank you. It’s a great question. I think, first, for anybody who works in the legal industry, you realize that not all law firms are created equal. There’s big firms who have dedicated IT support and business continuity processes in place. There’s small firms that don’t. There’s lawyers who are litigators or everyday spend their going to courts. Others who in corporate practices may be used to sitting around conference rooms with their teams and clients and sort of that warm environment. maybe IP attorneys who do tend to work in more siloed fashion. So I think all of them are gonna react and respond differently to this. So a little bit of a need to generalize here. But I think first and foremost, firms have to tend to the health of their employees and the psychology, as Heidi mentioned. I’m very interested to hear what she has to say on that. Making sure that they’re, from an infrastructure standpoint, prepared for this and that’s making sure everyone has laptops or the ability to work from home, that infrastructure is there. But once all those sort of foundational things are in place and you start to think about, okay, how do we operate? It’s really about putting tools in place that make it easy to connect with your colleagues and can almost replicate that human experience. Video conferencing solutions are an obvious one that have gotten a lot of attention in this environment. Also, sort of integrated messaging platforms where you can build channels, so to speak, around projects or topics or roles that you play, help you get structure in what’s a relatively unstructured environment. And then in terms of what we hear from customers and prospective customers in terms of response, I’ll put it in kind of two camps. There’s some who are viewing this as very, very temporary and saying, let’s just get through this. We have email, we have a video conferencing solution. Let’s just hunker down, power through it, and then things will get back to normal. And I think it’s a bit short-sighted, honestly, for a few reasons. One, we don’t know how long this is going to take. I’m in Illinois, in Chicago. We went on lockdown two weeks ago with the notion that that was through April 7. Now through the end of April, a lot of statistical models are saying potentially through the end of May. So you don’t know how long this is going to go. So just struggling through is maybe not going to be appropriate. Second thing, and we talked about this in sort of the prelude with Heidi, as it relates to schools, schooling systems, a lot of them are preparing for the fact that e-learning may have to come back again in the fall. It could take 12 to 18 months for the vaccines to be available, and you could see when flu season hits again, the number of cases increasing again. And that might require, we’re back to work in the office for the summer, and then the fall, firms are being asked again to go work from home. So how are you preparing yourself from a technology standpoint, from a training standpoint, from a process standpoint, to move easily between homework and office-based work? And so I think the firms that recognize that and prepare themselves for that are the ones that can perform the best through this. To say we have to live in an environment that’s somewhat either flexible or in a hybrid fashion, and easily move back and forth. And so I think having a longer-term view is very appropriate. And then I really believe that this could change the way lawyers interact with their clients. I think there will be some people in the world who, as soon as the mandates are lifted, are like, I want to get out of the house and get back to life as normal. There may be some who carry that anxiety further and say, do you really need to come visit my corporate office as a guest? Can we just have this conversation or do this negotiation or sign this contract virtually? There’s efficiency gains there. There’s environmental benefits to not traveling a lot. And I think there could be health benefits that people say, let’s not congregate unnecessarily. And so if you’re a corporate lawyer, for example, and you’re used to sitting around a conference room table and being able to put the counterparty on mute while you have a sidebar conversation, how can you replicate that experience in a truly virtual setup? room table and being able to put the counterparty on mute while you have a sidebar conversation, how can you replicate that experience in a truly virtual setup? Or maybe you’re connected through telephone or video conference to your counterparties, but you need to have that separate second conversation with bankers or your client. And so you need to have effectively 2 communication systems running in parallel, maybe video or telephony plus chat. And I think this is a great training ground right now for lawyers and law firms to think about. How do they set themselves up for success long term?

[00:10:02] Greg Lambert: Yeah, well, there’s a lot going on. And like I said, at the beginning of the year, very few people would have imagined something like this. And so there’s a human toll on things. So Heidi, what are you seeing as the immediate effects on the legal industry from the Coronavirus? And especially when it comes to how we as humans are reacting to it?

[00:10:25] Brian Stearns: Yeah, absolutely. I think toll is the right word. And let me start by saying that I think we’re going to see a shift here. And it’s quite a somber thought. And I’ll come back to what some of the implications are. But right now, most of what I hear people talking about is inconvenience, you know, and that ranges from the inconvenience of the privileged, who, you know, have, you know, are worried about maybe their home office not looking great on a webinar, to, you know, to people who are, you know, really jammed into, you know, small settings, people who are trying their very best to make do and stay productive, despite all kinds of chaos happening at home. But right now, there’s a lot of talk about the inconvenience and the struggles associated with multitasking and sharing work responsibilities with family responsibilities and things. The somber note, though, is when you think about what the projections are for how this is going to play out through the healthcare system in our population, we’re going to be dealing with people who are not only grappling with inconvenience, but with grief. And as sobering as that is, I think we should recognize that that is coming. And that that’s going to have a very different psychological toll on people than what we’re facing right now. So you know, let me take those kind of stepwise. Right now, I think there are some clear implications that everyone’s talking about in terms of what it means to work in, you know, in a remote environment where you’re multitasking and so forth. And some of those distractions can be hard to handle and so forth. But one of the angles that I’d like to raise to people is the unexpected, unintended consequences that this kind of anxiety has on our group working and our group dynamics. And what I mean by that is, you know, there’s a lot of research out there that shows that when we’re stressed, you know, for all kinds of reasons, we tend to revert to what psychologists call their central tendencies, things that come naturally and, and sort of without thinking, almost, you know, subconsciously or unconsciously. And we know that human nature is such that one of those tendencies is that we prefer to interact with and we prefer to, to engage with and we tend to trust people who we think of as similar to us. And oftentimes, that similarity is socioeconomic, it is, you know, background, it is demographics. And when you play this out and think, okay, so now we’re all completely atomized, we can’t, you know, see each other, maybe we do through video, but we’re not constantly bumping into one another, who’s most likely to suffer from that? And, you know, the research tells us that people who are most likely to be forgotten in this kind of working environment, are those who are on the periphery, those who are not like the leaders and the powerful people that are the partners in the law firm. And it concerns me a lot, the effects that this remote working environment will have on, say, diversity efforts, unless we are incredibly diligent about even in times of stress, not going with our gut reaction about who’s the associate to pull on to the team, or which partner should I pick up the phone and, you know, check in on, or whose advice do I want to seek?

[00:14:18] Greg Lambert: Because if we, if we go with our gut, in times of stress, we will probably overlook some of the people who are, you know, more different from us. And that’s something I’d like to call out to people and make sure that they’re mindful of how they’re allocating work, how they’re allocating their attention and things so that we’re not subconsciously favoring people.

[00:14:21] Brian Stearns: So we might just go back to old habits.

[00:14:27] Marlene Gebauer: Old habits, yeah, old habits and, you know, and unthinking ways of working as well. Because you’re in crisis mode, right? You know, you’re trying to get something done quickly and get a turnaround quickly, and you don’t have time to be thoughtful and mindful in the way you might be able to at another time.

[00:14:38] Brian Stearns: Yeah, evolutionary psychologists tell us this is a really good thing. Because when predecessors were out, you know, hunting the beast, and we had to make some, you know, primal decisions about whom do we trust, we would trust our tribe. And some of that hasn’t apparently left our psyche. So when we’re under a great deal of stress, whom do we trust? Well, we trust the people who are most likely to be our tribe. And that, you know, that’s not gonna have great effects on diversity in the long run.

[00:15:02] Heidi Gardner: Yeah, I think it’s, I hope, hopefully, Greg and Marlene don’t mind me asking a question. But it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about, you know, just generally, and also leading up this conversation is, in any sort of shift, there’s people who really benefit and people who really suffer as a result of it. And if a long-term impact of this is, you know, changing the way people think about corporate offices, and, you know, law firms not having big corporate offices, maybe just smaller hoteling environments, what are the secondary implications on office security and maintenance and other workers who their livelihood depended on that? But Heidi, I’m also kind of curious, do you see groups that are maybe going to rise up and thrive this and really stand out? You know, there’s been research going back 10 years about video conferencing solutions, and how taking it out of the formal boardroom or conference room into a virtual conversation actually allows people who are less confident or more introverts to actually be more vocal, and bigger contributors, because that pressure of sitting around a table with your colleagues caused them to be a little bit more silent and internal.

[00:16:07] Brian Stearns: Yeah, and for sure, that research is playing out now. I’ve been on the phone with, you know, dozens and dozens of people trying to understand the effects it’s having on them and their teams. And quite a number of lawyers in particular are telling me exactly that is happening much to their surprise, because they weren’t aware of that research. That they’re hearing from people who weren’t the most participative in prior settings, and they’re actually, you know, managing to engage them. They’re also understanding that people, you know, have similar handicaps, if you will, when they are operating remotely. It’s a bit of a leveler in some ways. And so we can pay more attention to people’s faces, for example, if everyone is showing up on the screen. Whereas, you know, some people are a little bit more in the background, literally in the background in a group setting, depending how the conference room is shaped and so forth. And it allows us to be more diligent in paying attention to those things if we’re mindful about it. So I do think that there are people who can benefit from this. I think, you know, the other kind of person, if this is a type, you know, someone who is willing to take some experiments is really going to thrive in this sort of environment, because we need people right now to be conducting little organizational experiments all the time, whether that’s, you know, how we schedule the meetings, whether it’s, you know, what kind of reaction we have when a dog is barking in the background, right? Do we, you know, do we, you know, do we see the humor in that? Do we allow this kind of setting to humanize us? And I think it’s going to be fascinating to see across the board that different kinds of people will, I hope, use the opportunity to experiment and a little bit step outside their own comfort zone.

[00:17:58] Greg Lambert: Let me follow up a little bit on that. You mentioned something about people being in the background. One of the things that I’ve noticed on conference calls, or the Zoom meetings, or whatever you’re using, is there’s the people who had the video on and are interacting. And there’s those that had the video off. I’m just curious, do the ones who had the video off, are they harming themselves by doing that?

[00:18:27] Marlene Gebauer: That’s a bad hair, no makeup day. I’m sorry. That’s why they’re not on video.

[00:18:34] Brian Stearns: Yeah, I think, you know, I do think, you know, it’s speaking of the great leveler, this is going to be a really interesting experiment to see who actually keeps the video on, you know, a month from now when their Botox is wearing out and their gray hair is showing. So, you know, let’s see.

[00:18:50] Greg Lambert: Too late for me, too late for me.

[00:18:54] Brian Stearns: You know, I think that, I think that, in general, giving other people rich opportunity to see your expression is a good thing. You know, even if, even if your expression is one of concern, or anger, or some other sort of negative emotion, generally, or boredom. Letting people know and being a bit transparent about that is actually helpful for group dynamics. dynamics, provided that two things happen. One is that the other group members are attentive to that, and two, that they have trust in each other to be able to work through some of that negativity. And, you know, and I think one of the possible benefits of having functionality like video is that we are able to pause and in some ways have license to say, wait a minute, you know, what’s that face? Or, you know, and in ways that we may not do if we were literally sitting across from one another, and I hope people take advantage of that.

[00:19:55] Marlene Gebauer: What are issues arising from the coronavirus for the legal industry? That are sort of unique to the legal industry? You know, they’re not being talked about, you know, elsewhere. Are you observing anything sort of special about legal that doesn’t exist elsewhere?

[00:20:11] Brian Stearns: Heidi, do you want to start? Yeah, I could just think of one thing, which is it’s the legal leaders, the managing partners and the chief talent officers and others who are more worried than in any other kind of organization I’m in contact with about the gap between people who are accustomed versus unaccustomed to working at home. You know, I think legal is interesting to me in that so many law firm partners

[00:20:41] Heidi Gardner: hadn’t chosen to work from home, perhaps ever, and indeed held pretty strong negative views about their colleagues who did.

[00:20:51] Brian Stearns: And, you know, Brian, you were saying that, you know, in consulting, we were remote all the time, whether that was at the client or just on the road or you name it. in the other professional arenas where that’s true, this is less of a culture shock than it seems to be in law firms. At least that’s my observation.

[00:21:08] Heidi Gardner: I would agree with that, just in having conversations with various folks, it’s been a little bit more jarring for some, not everyone, but even within a law firm, especially a big corporate firm that has many different practice groups, different people in different groups will respond to it differently, but then you have 60% of most large law firms are kind of office-based staff who were never given the option to work from home. who were never given the option to work from home. Their job was in the office, and they were kind of tethered to workstations and desktops. And now how are they changing as a result of this? You know, there’s sort of HR implications too, especially when you think about non-exempt workers and how to deal with that. But some of the ones that are a little bit maybe lighterhearted, too, is this reliance on paper that I’ve heard about and seen. That’s been sort of–.

[00:21:55] Marlene Gebauer: What is this paper that you talk of?

[00:21:58] Heidi Gardner: Do they have printing stations at home? What are secure scanning solutions that I can buy from my home office? These are types of things that I think, you know, most companies that have embraced digital work for a much longer period of time aren’t even thinking about that. I think, you know, some lawyers are now facing in somewhat of a sort of humorous way, but all the different.

[00:22:16] Marlene Gebauer: in somewhat of a, you know, in a sort of humorous way, but all the different, you know,

[00:22:21] Heidi Gardner: back office support and administrative support and technology support that you had in the office you don’t have anymore? And how much is that slowing down the ability to work?

[00:22:31] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, I definitely agree with you on the security issue. I mean, you know, we’re already hearing about like, oh, with Zoom meetings, you know, someone might kind of jump in on your Zoom meetings. So I was before this, I was telling Greg, it’s like, are we locked down? I think so. definitely they’re thinking in terms of security that way. I’ll throw something out there for consideration too. Just the whole idea of client support. So it isn’t just sort of doing work, but it’s doing your work, but also supporting but it’s doing your work, but also supporting the client and being able to interact with a client, which, you know, may be experiencing, you know, maybe experiencing a work slowdown or other challenges. So that I think is one of the key things that firms are struggling with. I think about the courts, you know, everything being closed and everything being kind of postponed and, you know, how do you manage that? You know, that’s like a total third party. How do you manage that with your client? Yeah.

[00:23:32] Greg Lambert: There’s nothing you can do if the court’s closed, right? Right. And then you, I think I’ve talked to some lawyers now.

[00:23:38] Marlene Gebauer: You can settle actually.

[00:23:39] Greg Lambert: I guess that’s an option. But there’s so much attorneys now whose practices have picked up quite a bit.

[00:23:45] Heidi Gardner: and they’re busier than ever. And then there’s, you know, we’ve seen the headlines that there’s a lot of firms who are furloughing employees or reducing partner pay in order to not do that. reducing support team pay in all an effort to not have to lay folks off and install it into the pain together, which is difficult. But as a professional services organization, a law firm or consulting firm, your business cycle is tied to your customers. And so I think, you know, that’s a very interesting dynamic now where you want to be reaching out to your clients to offer help through this. And your clients may or may not be able to hear that or have the time or the attention to listen to what you have to say. And so I think there’s additional stresses on an attorney right now to just think about how do I be empathetic towards my customers and be available to be helpful without being a burden.

[00:24:33] Brian Stearns: How do I be empathetic towards my customers? And be available to be helpful without being a burden. Sorry to jump in, but I have a kind of positive story on that. One of the partners who is attending the Accelerated Leadership Program, which may go down in history as the last ever in-person executive education program at Harvard Law School, at least for this academic year. I was chairing that earlier in March. And we had a check-in with all of the participants last week. And one of those partners in a U.S. law firm was giving a great example. He said, I’d always been told never to do a meeting on the phone if I could do it in person. He said, and so there’s this whole list of clients that I have stored somewhere that I think, okay, so when I get to Chicago, I’m going to see these three people. When I get to San Diego, I’ll see these three people. He said, now I don’t know if or when. I’m going to get to Chicago or San Diego at all this year. So I just started picking up the phone and calling them, he said, and it’s fantastic. He said, you know, now I’m just, you know, checking in with them. I have closer client relationships with quite a lot of people because of this than I had previously. And it makes me wonder how many of those other kind of pent-up calls or points of contact might get cleared off the list. Because now we say, well, you know, I’m not going to wait until I’m in their building to pop in for coffee. Why don’t I just, you know, ping them and, you know, see how they’re doing and so forth? And I think if people think about this as an opportunity to do the best we can right now, it might give us the leeway or the license to do what would other times be considered slightly suboptimal.

[00:26:15] Heidi Gardner: What would other times be considered slightly suboptimal,

[00:26:18] Brian Stearns: but at this point in time, it’s the best we can do. Let’s just crack on.

[00:26:22] Heidi Gardner: Yeah, good is the enemy of great or whatever.

[00:26:24] Brian Stearns: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[00:26:26] Heidi Gardner: Yeah, I think, you know, lawyers tend to be perfectionists and want work quality to be perfect before it’s put out there. And that kind of triggered a thought to me, which is lawyers have been, I guess, legal clients, so the corporate customers have been asking law firms to be more collaborative. I think this is a trend that’s been going on for a while. And, you know, there tends to be a lot of silence in between, you know, the kicking off of a new matter and when the deliverable, whether it’s a contract or a deal or, you know, a settlement or whatever comes about. And now you have this license to, I think, communicate more effectively and even offer a service to customers. So I always take a technology lens to this, but there’s a lot of tools out there, including our own, which firms can offer to their customers as a service. And that may be even opportunity to drive more stickiness in the relationships to say, it’s not just an email-based or an in-person-based relationship, but we have these other tools available to us where we can share knowledge and insights and have real-time dialogue. And, you know, that may be a way to even sort of strengthen relationships through this process.

[00:27:29] Greg Lambert: Yeah, well, and I know there’s a lot of us that have tried to say, we’ve got to find a different communication other than email to use. And, you know, email has probably been one of the biggest transformation tools in the legal industry ever. It’s hard to make them give that up and try something.

[00:27:49] Marlene Gebauer: People love their email.

[00:27:50] Greg Lambert: Yeah.

[00:27:51] Marlene Gebauer: So I want to try and sort of wrap this up for all of us and ask you, what’s next for remote work? And I know we touched on this a little bit earlier. Do you believe the current crisis is going to have a more permanent effect on how work gets done in the legal industry? And do you have, you know, a couple of concrete lessons that firms can take from the current environment and apply it to the processes moving forward?

[00:28:19] Brian Stearns: I’d like to think that the current working environment in firms that really embrace it is going to increase trust. And we see so many cultures in firms where if I can’t see that you’re working hard at your desk, I don’t trust that you’re actually working. And I thought kind of, you know, presenteeism, FaceTime culture. I would hope that people understand now that the productive work can get done remotely and that people who have, you know, whatever reason for wanting to operate like this, it’s not because they’re slackers, it’s because, you know, they might be more productive working from home or they might have an aging parent or, you know, you name it, all sorts of legitimate reasons. And I’d like to think that this helps us shatter some of those myths about, you know, who it is that works from home and what they can or can’t accomplish. I’d also like to think that it increases trust in a very, very different way, which, you know, the definition of trust, one definition of trust is the willingness to be vulnerable with other people. And, you know, as we were talking about before, this is a human crisis. even more than it’s an economic crisis. And I hope that through this and our ability to support one another and empathize with all sorts of situations that come up and to open up about what some of those challenges are. I hope that one lasting implication of this within firms and between external counsel and clients is that it increases that level of interpersonal trust and that that lasts for quite some time.

[00:30:00] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, I hope so too.

[00:30:04] Heidi Gardner: Yeah, I agree 100%, it’s hard to say it better than Heidi said it, but that trust piece, I think, is huge. And for technology solutions, we often get asked about presence in our system. And then there’s some people who want to know that the other person’s online and available, and others are like, I don’t want my boss to know when I’m on and offline if I’m running an errand and they’re thinking I’m not working. And so there is that fear that if they’re not in the office, they’re not available. And I experienced this shift in my own career where when I was in my 20s and I was single and without kids, I would work in the office until I was done. That could be six o’clock. That could be midnight. And then I’d go home. And then as I built my home life, I had to start to build different expectations around leaving at a certain time so I could have dinner with my family, you know, but maybe I have different expectations for how I work on the weekend. I may be doing things on Saturday afternoon because my kids are napping and that’s when I have some quiet time. That doesn’t mean that I expect my team to be working as well. And so it forced me to start to set expectations better and become a better manager of my own time but also my team’s time. And that led me to every time I worked with a new team or onboarded someone new to really be good about setting, you know, expectations around accessibility and communication norms, how I prefer to be communicated. You take those things for granted when you’re on the same office. But when you’re not, I think it’s an opportunity for, you know, teams to be really explicit about expectations, cultural norms, things like that, that ultimately I think will make the team stronger.

[00:31:40] Greg Lambert: I had a recent interview with a consultant who said that law firms, we’re going to have to figure out a way to not manage by the clock. That it’s more that we need to be more project-based and understand that there might be times where it will take a long time to finish a project and sometimes it takes a shorter time to finish a project and you can’t just say, well, you’ve got eight hours, you’ve got to fill it with everything that you can do. I’m just wondering, do you think the legal industry can make that shift eventually?

[00:32:17] Heidi Gardner: Well, I’ll let Heidi answer the longer term question, but the way I’ve always thought about that is management by inputs versus management by outputs. And when you’re not in the same room, it’s almost impossible to manage by inputs. So time invested, you have to manage by outputs. And that’s, again, requires really good goal setting. What are our objectives? When do we expect things to be available? What is our review cycle as a team? It’s sort of those management 101 type trainings, but they can be taken for granted, especially when folks are very busy and under lots of pressure. And so I think, I hope to see some portion of the industry moving towards that. I don’t necessarily believe that this is enough of a catalyst to push the industry there quickly. Wow.

[00:33:02] Greg Lambert: What would it take?

[00:33:05] Heidi Gardner: I just, there’s, I think there’s so many, so much difficult, like, how do you do it? Do the firms have the data to do it appropriately? Are they willing to take risks on, you know, new billing structures? I think that data is being built right now. I think I’ve seen a lot of firms putting new systems and new people, so new capabilities in place to help to build that. But I think you actually need some period of time with good data to do it effectively. And I don’t know that firms are going to just jump into it without confidence that’s going to work well.

[00:33:36] Brian Stearns: I would love to see a legal arena where we are much more confident in our ability to believe that what lawyers produce adds value and to find some ways to think about how to capture value from the product, you know, commensurate with its actual value and not its inputs. And, you know, again, complete bias having come from McKinsey where we didn’t bill, you know, on the clock. And we tried very hard to link our fee structure to the value we were creating, the client believed that we were creating. And I think that puts a very, very different perspective on what even work looks like. You know, there’s some great research out of Stanford University initially that measured what happens when people have to think about the economic value of their time. What happens when people have to think about the economic value of their time. In other words, if you’re billing by six minute increments, what does that do psychologically to you? And it turns out, they ran a whole bunch of experiments and the upshot is that when people are primed to think about their work strictly as a function of the time they put in, they then tend to look at pretty much the world around them in that same system. And so they start to put opportunity costs on everything. So you end up hearing people say, it just cost me $800 to watch my kid’s soccer game because they could have been billing $800 instead. And that’s a sad state of affairs for, not just for the parent, but for the kid. Let’s face it, a little bit of pressure there, kid. Better play well. And more generally, they know that when people have to think about their time and the constant pressure to essentially commercialize their time, they end up getting less pleasure out of pleasurable activities. And so in these experiments, people who had been primed to think this way and had gone through a series of tests and so forth, they were asked at the end, ostensibly in an unrelated task, what do you think of this piece of music? Or help us pick a piece of art to decorate the waiting room. And compared to people who had been paid just for the outcome of their task, people who’d been paid on a minute-by-minute or so forth basis, they rated everything as less pleasurable. had been paid on a minute by minute or so forth basis, they rated everything as less pleasurable. The music didn’t sound as good. The food didn’t taste as good. And gosh, is that what’s happening to the entire legal industry when they have to bill by the hours? They end up essentially losing a sense of humanism. So that’s sort of a sad state of affairs. And maybe if we could change this around, you’d end up not just with more productive lawyers, but actually happier ones too.

[00:36:26] Greg Lambert: Well, I think that’s a good place to wrap this up. Heidi Gardner and Brian Stearns, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us.

[00:36:34] Brian Stearns: Oh, thanks so much. It was fun.

[00:36:35] Heidi Gardner: Thank you. I’m a big fan of your work, Marlene and Greg, and also Heidi. So for those listeners, you know, I think follow these groups. There’s lots of good content being put out, especially through this current crisis.

[00:36:47] Marlene Gebauer: Well, thank you very much.

[00:36:49] Heidi Gardner: Thank you.

[00:36:55] Greg Lambert: Marlene, I have to say that I actually feel a lot better about our situation after talking with Heidi and Brian. I know there’s still a lot of struggles to come, but I think as long as we remain empathetic and alert to the needs of those that we’re working with, we can definitely make it through this together. So I really like the fact that Heidi mentioned that this is a great time to be creative and bring new ideas to your firm. I think that’s something that successful people will find out.

[00:37:27] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, well, I mean, as we have said before, never waste a good pandemic. And this is really an opportunity to look at, okay, how were we doing things and how does this situation allow us to experiment in some of these new ways of doing things. Because again, it’s a little easier to make the argument right now, you know, right?

[00:37:57] Greg Lambert: Yeah.

[00:37:58] Marlene Gebauer: ‘Cause it’s a little easier to make the argument for experimentation now when regular systems aren’t working the way they should be.

[00:38:05] Greg Lambert: Yeah, yeah. I would say the worst thing to do right now is just stay the same.

[00:38:11] Marlene Gebauer: Yes.

[00:38:12] Greg Lambert: Well, thanks again to Heidi Gardner from Harvard Law School and Brian Stearns from WorkStorm for coming on and sharing their ideas with us.

[00:38:19] Marlene Gebauer: Before we go, we want to remind listeners to take the time to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Read and review us as well. If you have comments about today’s show or suggestions for a future show, you can reach us on Twitter at @GayBauerM or @Glambert, or you can call the Geek and Review hotline at 713-487-7270 or email us at geekandreviewpodcast@gmail.com. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeSica. Thanks, Jerry.

[00:38:54] Greg Lambert: Yeah, thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene, I will talk to you later. Stay safe.

[00:38:58] Marlene Gebauer: Shelter safe, bye. Bye.

There is no reason why we should let an emergency go to waste. So, we’ve both taken on a side project while we work remotely. Marlene’s new daily ILTA blog presents a quick update on the skills we need to work on while we’re working from home. Her first post, Be Sheltering: Not Sheltered discusses a number of initiatives going on which we all can contribute. You can find out more on the ILTA blog page.

Greg began his daily podcast miniseries, In Seclusion, this week. These are short, less than 15 minutes, interviews of an eclectic group of people ranging from bar and professional association leaders, legal information professionals, vendors, consultants, lawyers, etc. Pretty much anyone who works in the legal industry and has a story to tell about their new work from home situation. The first episode is included in this podcast. Greg talked with Jim Calloway from the Oklahoma Bar Association regarding how they are helping their lawyers, courts, and community continue to work in this new environment. You can subscribe to In Seclusion on Spotify, or Apple Podcasts, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

Of course, we’ll still be doing The Geek In Review Podcast as our primary, secondary, job.

Stay safe everyone!

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts LogoApple Podcasts | Overcast LogoOvercast | Spotify LogoSpotify
Listen, Subscribe, Comment

Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

 

Transcript

[00:00:00] Marlene Gebauer: All right, let me see. Show them again. That’s a nice cup.

[00:00:03] Greg Lambert: It is. It is. I’ve got like three of these.

[00:00:06] Marlene Gebauer: It’s got a good shape.

[00:00:07] Greg Lambert: It does.

[00:00:08] Marlene Gebauer: Then you should give one to your second favorite podcaster then.

[00:00:12] Greg Lambert: Ooh, Bob wants one? Shut up.

[00:00:24] Marlene Gebauer: Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focus on innovative and creative ideas in the legal profession. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

[00:00:32] Greg Lambert: And I’m Greg Lambert. So Marlene, before we get into this special episode of The Geek in Review, we want to take just a moment and say that we hope that everyone is staying safe and healthy out there. and staying sane in this really bizarre time we’re living in right now.

[00:00:49] Marlene Gebauer: Absolutely. I can say that we’re safe and happy. I don’t know how sane I am right now, but healthy.

[00:00:56] Greg Lambert: Yeah. Well, it’s weird because we started talking about this work-at- home scenario last month. But I got to say, the speed at which this hit us was really surprising.

[00:01:06] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah. I mean, we were really ahead of a giant curve. I don’t think that was the intention, but certainly that has been how it’s played out.

[00:01:16] Greg Lambert: Yeah. Well, that being said, I think the people that I’ve worked with and the people that I know around the legal industry, they’re adapting pretty well to this new work model. I know around the legal industry, they’re adapting pretty well to this new work model.

[00:01:25] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, I will agree with you. I think, and I, you know, I got to give props out to sort of technical support. It has been remarkably smooth getting so many people online and remote in such a short time. I mean, certainly there’s going to be hiccups, but really not as bad as you would think.

[00:01:46] Greg Lambert: Yeah. So yeah, hats off to the IT people. So Marlene, I think both you and I subscribe to the thought that, you know, never let an emergency go to waste. So we wanted to bring the listeners a special episode of the Geek and Review, where we talk about the individual side projects that we’re both working on to help us and to help others understand what we’re all going through. So Marlene, tell us about your new side project.

[00:02:13] Marlene Gebauer: Yes, so I have a blog on ILTA now, and it doesn’t have a name yet. So, you know, Marlene’s extra special COVID-19 blog. Exactly, that’s about where we’re at. So if anybody has any ideas, you know, send them to me. Literally, I was just struggling with the titles of the actual entries this past week. So yeah, it’s a short form. So basically, I’m looking at this. This is my Seth Godin blog, short form, just sort of musings on COVID- 19, but also kind of how it relates to technology and KM and design thinking and just something, just a little bite for people to take a look at each day.

[00:03:04] Greg Lambert: Just out of curiosity, do you have to be an ILTA member to get to the blog?

[00:03:09] Marlene Gebauer: No, I don’t believe you do.

[00:03:10] Greg Lambert: Okay, cool.

[00:03:11] Marlene Gebauer: But we’ll find out because we’ll put a link to it and we’ll find out if people can access it or not.

[00:03:18] Greg Lambert: I think probably most of our listeners are ILTA members as well. So, all right. So let me tell you a little bit about my special side project. I’ve decided that I really wanted to talk with a number of people to see how they’re adjusting to this new situation of working from home. So one of the best things about being a blogger on Three Geeks for the past dozen or so years and, you know, being a crazy extrovert. You’re a crazy extrovert? I know. Surprising, isn’t it?

[00:03:48] Marlene Gebauer: Shock.

[00:03:49] Greg Lambert: Yeah. But I’ve, you know, I’ve met a lot of really smart and interesting people in the legal industry. So I decided to begin a daily podcast mini series that will last until we get back to some sort of workplace normalcy, you know, once this pandemic dissipates. I’m calling it the Inseclusion Podcast and it’s going to be…

[00:04:09] Marlene Gebauer: Good name. So you figured out the name.

[00:04:11] Greg Lambert: I figured out the name.

[00:04:12] Marlene Gebauer: Good job.

[00:04:12] Greg Lambert: Yeah, I can help you on yours.

[00:04:15] Marlene Gebauer: Thank you.

[00:04:16] Greg Lambert: So this is going to be a daily podcast, typically less than 15 minutes long, you know, because I got a day job and a blog and another podcast.

[00:04:23] Marlene Gebauer: I got a day job and a blog and another podcast and, oh yeah, I got family too.

[00:04:31] Greg Lambert: It’s like, all right, hashtag overachiever.

[00:04:35] Marlene Gebauer: But I really felt like this was something that at a minimum would help me cope with learning as we struggled to find our footing in this brand new work environment. And, you know, and again, no one really anticipated that at the beginning of the year.

[00:04:49] Greg Lambert: I will say, so I was running yesterday and I actually listened to all three that were up at the time and I found them incredibly useful. All three of them. I’ve actually passed different ones on to different people I know based on feedback I’m getting from them in terms of what they’re kind of dealing with. I will just say one example that the, you know, for people who have kids at home and who don’t have space, like their own space to do their work, I feel for you because in my old house, that’s exactly what I had. Now I do have some space that I can shut the door, which is great. But if you don’t, just rearranging furniture, bookcases or sofas or something that basically carve out that space for you and setting parameters and setting times where, okay, you know, at this point, this is when I do work. And at this point, this is when I, you know, I interact with my kids or my family.

[00:05:51] Marlene Gebauer: Really, really, really good advice.

[00:05:51] Greg Lambert: Yeah.

[00:05:54] Marlene Gebauer: And that was Andrea Canovina.

[00:05:54] Greg Lambert: Yes. Giving that advice. Yeah, it’s going to be an eclectic group of guests. And so as long as they’re- That’s the best type. Yeah, as long as they’re doing something in the legal industry, they’re welcome to be on the show. And I think since the episodes are short, I’m going to play one of the first ones here. In fact, the very first ones.

[00:06:14] Marlene Gebauer: The inaugural one.

[00:06:15] Greg Lambert: The inaugural one. So here’s my talk with an old Oklahoma colleague, Jim Calloway from the Oklahoma Bar Association. Hey everyone, I’m Greg Lambert and this is the In Seclusion podcast mini-series. Over the next few weeks, or however long it takes us to get back to where we can return to our office locations, I’ll be talking to legal professionals to find out how they are coping with this new work-from-home model. The interviews are about 10 minutes or so, and we’ll hit the highlights of how things are going across the spectrum of the legal industry. Today, I went back to the start of my legal career and brought in an Oklahoma colleague. All right, Jim, you ready?

[00:07:01] Speaker D: I am.

[00:07:02] Greg Lambert: All right. Well, first of all, thanks for jumping on the call so quickly. I appreciate that.

[00:07:06] Speaker D: Well, I’m happy to do that. And we’re going to have to, our members are going to require a lot of support from the OBA and all lawyers across the country, particularly solo and small firm lawyers.

[00:07:17] Greg Lambert: Jim Callaway is the Management Assistance Program Director at the Oklahoma Bar Association and is a well-known tech and law practice management guru in the legal industry. and is a well-known tech and law practice management guru in the legal industry.

[00:07:28] Speaker D: I think this is an odd thing for us people to try to be organized and plan in advance or whatever. You literally can’t plan for six months from now ’cause there’s so many potential futures out there. But where the OBA, our lobby is closed and visitors and public are not allowed in, but we are still mostly working from home and we’re providing a lot of services. I’ve also found, Greg, that having the tools and knowing how to use all these tools is actually a little bit of a curse. You got a lot of work to do. I see all these other things of people trying to fill their empty time. I haven’t had that yet.

[00:08:00] Greg Lambert: There’s definitely a blessing and a curse being the guy that knows the technology. Was there any key event that happened that really let you guys know that what we were about to experience is just gonna be different?

[00:08:15] Speaker D: We were monitoring the news and started working on our disaster plan, remote working plan several weeks ago. But I really think, like most of America, a lawyer told me the last six days seem like six months. And I think that’s probably what it seems like for a lot of us, Greg. So we’ve been planning for weeks, but now we’re trying to protect our staff because even though there’s temporary inconveniences now, we’re gonna be needed to help our members as well, or all of the Bar Association and Law Library and other people across the country.

[00:08:47] Greg Lambert: What are some of the core things that, especially there in Oklahoma, you have a majority of your lawyers are going to be solo and small firm attorneys. What is it that they need to think about when working remotely? And what’s kind of the equipment that they’re going to need on hand over the next few weeks?

[00:09:05] Speaker D: they’re going to need on hand over the next few weeks? Well, definitely, I came up with kind of six real quick key points. And I’ll go with, or five, I think I’ll go with you real quick. First of all, if you’re one of the few lawyers who hadn’t set up to accept credit cards and e-checks, you need to do that immediately. And so that’s a really urgent thing. And again, some of your older clients who may be sheltering in place, the e-check method may be easier for them if your credit card processor hadn’t set that up yet. Because we’re at the point now, how odd this sounds, but an electronic payment is more valuable than a check mailed to the office, because that has to be dealt with and processed where you can deal with your electronic payments from home or any remote location. So I think that’s a good deal. We have a credit card processor we like at the bar, as do many other bars. So that’s the first thing. And this credit card processor, LawPay, helps you set up online payments. And I think that’s really important. So if you’re not set up for online payments, I think that’s a priority. And then I think the next priority is if you’re working from home, look around and figure out what you really need there. Because we’ve always worked, most lawyers have worked from home as a, you know, I’ll be there two days working on a brief or I’m sick or that kind of thing. And the sustained work there is going to be a little bit different. So for example, if you’re already locked into your house, and you’ve got to kind of practice where you’re not having to go out, you may want to think about ordering some extra printer cartridges I haven’t delivered your home just so you have a printer. If you’re still at the office, you may want to bring home a ream of paper, take some mailing supplies and envelopes home, you know, we hope the post office continues to function there. They have a tradition of doing that. And also, if you run out of stamps, don’t forget, you can go to www.usps.com and buy stamps, and they’ll deliver them to you. Or it may be time to set up for e-stamps or like that. Then I think too, if you’re going to be working from home for an extended period, you need a good laptop. And so if you’ve never bought a laptop, there are a lot of these computer companies that are doing, you know, 24, 12 months free financing and that kind of thing. But buying a business class laptop, I think is really important. And then finally, if you haven’t yet committed to cloud-based practice management software, that is a very important thing to look at. And so for some of the lawyers who are going to be home without enough to keep them busy, which hadn’t been me so far, setting up a practice management solution. management solution, figuring out how password managers work, if you haven’t done that yet, schedule’s gonna be really important. And so your schedule may look a lot different in a week or two where you’re dealing with client matters or whatever, just two or three hours a day, and you’ve got some other time. And so scheduling two hours where I’m finally gonna decide which password manager, buy it and download it, that type of thing. Probably more you want to hear briefly, but I think those are kind of the urgent things that I see for solo and small firm lawyers.

[00:11:57] Greg Lambert: How about lawyers connecting with their clients? Especially if they’re not going to let clients come in and meet them face-to-face, which I think is going to be the norm now. Yeah, and I think once people and the shelter at home for 15 days, you’re going to have a hard time getting them out for anything.

[00:12:15] Speaker D: So I think that clients will feel the same way. So we’re connecting through Zoom video conferencing. It’s probably been amazing to see that Zoom has kind of been the go- to video conferencing solution, even though there’s many of them. It’s nice and easy to run. And I think letting your clients see your face is good. Even if your clients are at home and don’t have a webcam, if you’re just having a conversation where they can see your face and whatever, it’s a more personal situation. We’re gonna see a lot of changes in rules temporarily. I already saw a court, I believe it was in Virginia, a bankruptcy court issued an order saying, we don’t need wet signatures on bankruptcy petitions anymore. That’s just an unnecessary danger. And so figure out a way to get your e-signature or some other process where the client can’t later say they didn’t sign it. And so boy, with e-filing and electronic signatures, you know, that’s good. We also have been talking about a lot of people staying home, worried about their mortality. I’m not trying to use this as a marketing opportunity, but some of those people are going to think it’s time to get their last will and testament done. So I think lawyers need to think about that. We have an electronic notary provision that few lawyers in Oklahoma are that familiar with, because it’s pretty new. And I bet we all get pretty familiar with that. And I asked a probate lawyer, I said, so if your witnesses stand outside and watch you sign through the window, and then you toss the will out the window for them to sign it, is that good? The probate lawyer said, yeah, I think that’s good. That’s actually not a bad idea. I think a lot of creative out-of-the-box solutions are going to be coming down. But we don’t know if this is a two, four, six, eight week thing. And of course, the worst prediction you hear is we’ll still, until there’s a vaccine 18 months from now, life may not change totally.

[00:14:00] Greg Lambert: Well, let’s hope it doesn’t go to that, but I guess prepare in case it does. Let me ask you about the courts there in Oklahoma. One, what are they doing to reduce the risk of the spread of the virus? And then two, how are they going to make up this work from the dockets?

[00:14:30] Speaker D: You know, I think at this point, we have to focus on life-saving rather than other things. But right now, we have a court order. In fact, if you let me give you two resources real quick, the Oklahoma Bar Association, www.okbar.org/COVID-19, has a resource page that we will be updating. www.okbar.org slash COVID-19 has a resource page that we will be updating. And then our Supreme Court network, a place where you actually used to work.

[00:14:51] Greg Lambert: Yeah, I’m very familiar with it.

[00:14:53] Speaker D: They have a set of links of all the courthouses and how they’ve reduced their operations. And of course, our court entered an emergency order, suspending most civil things and non-emergency things. But closing a courthouse, some of these people whose restaurants have been shut down may want to sue over it. If somebody’s been arrested, it’s more important than ever now to get them arraigned and if they can post bond. to get them out of the system. So, you know, in terms of closing courthouses completely, that’s out of my pay grade, but I do think that it’s something that is problematic. Now, our court entered an order tolling all statutes, or extending, I think they said, all dates in all courts in state for 30 days. And civil cases are largely shut down, but, you know, at some point, there’s going to be some challenges. There were some dysfunctional families that are now sheltered in place together that is going to create a problem. Lawyers are going to have to help. And then finally, one more resource to my blog, Jim Callaway’s Law Practice Tips, you can Google that. lawpracticetipsblog.com. I’m going to gear that up next week, and I’m also going to start doing some video things for our members. So most of our stuff will be outside of the firewall, free for any lawyer anywhere to use. And so we’re hoping that that’ll work. I’m now setting up a video page. I plan on doing it anyway, but like so many things in life, my timing changed now.

[00:16:14] Greg Lambert: changed now. I completely, I think we all understand. Last question for you. What do you think is going to catch the attorneys or others there in the legal industry and what do you think may catch them off guard?

[00:16:28] Speaker D: I think the problem is going to be with huge unemployment and all businesses closed, that their cash flow is just going to drop off the cliff. And I think that’s one thing that’s going to catch them off guard. I also would, if we’re talking about closing though, I’d urge lawyers to understand that this, whether it’s two weeks or more, this is a marathon, not a sprint. And I have read a tweet series from a person that’s been through many types of disasters in other parts of the world. And he noted the first five days, you’re just kind of coping. And if you just try to work as hard as you can and burn yourself out and you’re in a panic, you’re just going to harm yourself. And so, I think we all need to pay more attention than ever to our mental health. And if you’re at home, you need to work for your clients, but that may only be a six-hour day in the future. So, think about something you’ve been meaning to do, that garage cleaning out project or whatever it might be for your office. And really, I’ve lost two hours of, you know, 25 minutes each way at a good day and an hour each day at a bad day of commuting time when I finally get to 100% working from home. And so, I need to do something else with those two hours rather than say I got to binge watch Orange is the New Black or something like that. So, I’ve seen a lot of lawyers who are literally talking about having a headset attached to their phone and they’re just walking in circles around their house just to get some physical activity while they’re talking to their clients, you know. So, take care of the main part of your law firm.

[00:18:03] Greg Lambert: law firm, you. Right. All right. Hey, Jim, again, thanks for jumping on the call with me. I appreciate you taking the time.

[00:18:12] Speaker D: Happy to do that, my friend.

[00:18:13] Greg Lambert: Talk to you later.

[00:18:14] Speaker D: Stay safe.

[00:18:18] Greg Lambert: Thanks for listening to the Inseclusion podcast, the inaugural episode, Marlene. It is available on pretty much any of your favorite podcasts. It took Apple Podcasts a little bit to get us going, but that happened last night. So, I’m happy. So, contact me if you want to be on the show and would like to share your stories about working from home.

[00:18:39] Marlene Gebauer: And also, please take a look at my new mini blog series on ILTA. We will have the link on the 3Geek site. And I just want to note, we will be continuing with the Geek and Review, maybe not on a weekly basis, but definitely we’re going to continue with it. So, you know,

[00:19:04] Greg Lambert: Yeah, this is our primary second job.

[00:19:07] Marlene Gebauer: And before we go, we want to remind listeners to take the time to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Rate and review us as well.

[00:19:17] Greg Lambert: Yeah. Everyone should have to have time to rate and review.

[00:19:19] Marlene Gebauer: Yes. Plenty of time. Plenty of time. If you have comments about today’s show or suggestions for a future show, you can reach us on Twitter at at Gabehowerm or at Glambert, or you can call the Geek and Review hotline at 713-487-7270 or email us at geekandreviewpodcast at gmail.com. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeSicca. Thank you, Jerry.

[00:19:45] Greg Lambert: Thanks, Jerry. All right, everyone be safe. Talk to you later, Marlene.

[00:19:48] Marlene Gebauer: Be well. Be well and happy. Bye, everyone.

I am launching a podcast miniseries called In Seclusion.

The first episode dropped this morning.

This is a Marathon, Not A Sprint – Jim Calloway – Oklahoma Bar Association

#oklaHOMEa

In the inaugural episode of In Seclusion, I talk with Jim Calloway, the Director of the Oklahoma Bar Association’s Management Assistance Program (MAP). Calloway and I go back to my early legal days with the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network. He discusses the issues facing the state bar, the courts, and the members of the bar as everyone faces the reality of working from home over an extended time period.

Jim reminds us that this is going to be a marathon and not a sprint. Take care of your practice’s number one asset…  yourself. The primary focus on most institutions is “life-saving” processes, and that means the legal system is going to be backed up.

Products Discussed:

Remember, we may all be In Seclusion, but we’re in this together.

Host: Greg Lambert (@glambert)
Producer: Janice Anderson
Artwork: Dean Lambert
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Twitter: @InSeclusionPod

We try… and fail to stay off the COVID-19 topic this week, but it’s just too ingrained in our lives right now. For those of you out there doing the remote work thing, we understand and hope you are adapting to the new work mode with little interruption. We, too, are working remotely, and hope there are not too many background noises of kids, refrigerators, or pets making cameo appearances on this week’s show.
We have a great talk with Charlie Uniman, Legal Tech Startup Evangelist, and founder of Legal Tech Startup Focus. LTSF is an online community of nearly 1,000 legal startup professionals that gives its members a place to find like-minded individuals and bounce ideas off of one another. Charlie also produces the LTSF Podcast. We cover the issues of how law firms and legal startups communicate with each other. Charlie details the basic processes that law firms and legal startups need to take to build a solid relationship that is beneficial to both parties. While some of what he lays out may seem like common-sense to Charlie, it is insightful to those of us who may not have the constant relationships with startups like he does.

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts LogoApple Podcasts | Overcast LogoOvercast | Spotify LogoSpotify

 

Information Inspirations

PwC launched its COVID-19 Navigator this week. This online resource shows some of the flexibility that the Big 4 accounting firms may have over law firms. The COVID-19 Navigator allows business leaders to answer a survey of questions to determine how prepared they are for the COVID-19 business disruptions. PwC says that this “digital tool contains 3 sections of questions that will help you understand where your company stands as you respond to COVID-19 in the areas of: crisis management and response; workforce; operations and supply chain; finance and liquidity; tax and trade; and strategy and brand.” Can you imagine law firms using an iterative software design like this to leverage their subject matter expertise with technology to assist customers and potential customers with major issues like COVID-19? If not, it’s time to start thinking about it.

Marlene’s inspiration this week is for all of us to stay healthy and work through our transition to the remote working that many of us are not accustomed to doing. If you’re struggling or want to share your experiences, please reach out to us and we’d love to have that conversation.

Listen, Subscribe, Comment
Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Greg Lambert: Do you remember anything you want to talk about?

[00:00:03] Marlene Gebauer: Do I remember anything? I can probably come up with something.

[00:00:08] Greg Lambert: Okay, I’ll start off and then we’ll see where it goes.

[00:00:10] Marlene Gebauer: Okay. Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

[00:00:25] Greg Lambert: And I’m Greg Lambert. All right, Marlene, let’s try to get through this without even mentioning coronavirus or COVID-19.

[00:00:34] Marlene Gebauer: You just did.

[00:00:35] Greg Lambert: All right, well, so much for that.

[00:00:38] Marlene Gebauer: Well, but before we get into that, what we should tell everybody is that we also are on a work from home schedule. So disclaimers here, you may hear children in the background or pod dog or pop tops or whatever.

[00:00:57] Greg Lambert: I did turn off the dishwasher, so we’re good there. But I do have to say that our podcast from last month, actually, our interview with April Campbell from the Association of Legal Administrators, that podcast has held up pretty well.

[00:01:13] Marlene Gebauer: Yes, actually, that’s, I think that topped the most listened to, did it not?

[00:01:18] Greg Lambert: Yes, it has. And if you haven’t listened to it, I really suggest that you do, because I think there was a lot of stuff that we said in there that is coming to fruition.

[00:01:28] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, and the advice is all still very timely. On today’s podcast, we have Charles Uniman, legal startup evangelist and founder of the Legal Tech Startup Focus, which is an online community for people involved and interested in the legal tech startup industry. So before we talk to Charles, let’s jump right into our information inspirations.

[00:01:54] Greg Lambert: So Marlene, I did want to stay away from the discussion of COVID-19, but.

[00:01:59] Marlene Gebauer: Impossible.

[00:01:59] Greg Lambert: I know, it’s pretty much impossible. So what I did was I wanted to tie in today’s guest with an inspiration that I found with the help of our friend Patrick Fuller from ALM. So he pointed out an agile design application that was actually pushed out by PwC called the COVID-19 Navigator. Patrick said that this Navigator is a, quote, logic-driven application, meaning an expert system that scales expertise while intaking information from current and potential clients, yielding recommendations and assessments. That’s just some fancy talk for saying, hey, they give you a survey, then they assess how well you’re prepared for COVID-19 and related business issues, and then they learn from the information that you’re putting in. A really interesting piece of, or a way of iterating a piece of software directly to the customer, potential customer. I doubt what PwC has put out is a perfect piece of software or even perfect in its analysis. But what they’re doing is leveraging that expertise or their own expertise in a way that will answer a big issue facing a lot of businesses. It’s this sort of iteration that we expect to see in startups, which may or may not have the subject expertise that, say, a law firm has. But we really don’t expect a law firm to do this sort of thing, although maybe they should. Luckily, I think Charlie talks about this later in the episode. To me, this is PwC taking a calculated risk decision to attack a problem head-on in order to allow its customers to make better decisions based on the results that they get from taking the survey. I’m sure that the answers provided are probably pretty basic and probably have a disclaimer at the end that says, please call PwC’s helpline to get a paid consultant on board.

[00:03:59] Marlene Gebauer: Right, of course, of course.

[00:04:01] Greg Lambert: But at least they’re doing something. What can law firms do to attack the problem that our customers are facing? that our customers are facing? Even more importantly, will we actually do it?

[00:04:12] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, that is a very, very good question and kind of leads into my inspiration. This is not ripped from the headlines, but it’s more of experience that is happening. I imagine many of you out there have been swamped with dealing with access issues, maybe training people on tools they’ve never used before, looking for ways to collect necessary information and train people on how to access that, talking to your users in terms of what they need right now in this critical time. I just want to give you all a shout-out and say, good for you. I know that this is what I’ve been doing over the past few days. It’s definitely a challenge, but I have to say that we’re definitely all on board in terms of looking at how can we make this work for our immediate clientele and how can we make this work for our firm clients. Just a shout-out to everybody. Keep up the good work.

[00:05:16] Greg Lambert: Yeah, can’t agree more. All right, well, that wraps up this week’s Information Inspiration. So, it only took our next guest about roughly four decades to realize that he had another

[00:05:32] Marlene Gebauer: calling besides the practice of law. Well, hey, what? Grandma Moses was like in her 90s before she started painting, so, you know, it’s never too late to start. Never too late. So, Charlie Uniman

[00:05:43] Greg Lambert: is a former big law partner who is now a self-proclaimed legal tech startup evangelist. He is the co-founder of Deal Stage, a productivity and workflow tool for corporate lawyers. And most recently, he created a professional networking tool for legal startups called Legal Tech Startup Focus. He also produces a podcast under the same name. So, let’s hear what advice he has for lawyers, law firms, and legal tech startups to actually work together.

[00:06:17] Marlene Gebauer: We are happy to have Charlie Uneman, a successful New York attorney in big law for four decades, founder of the Legal Tech Startup Deal Stage, and most recently, founder of the Legal Tech Startup Focus, a free, free Greg, online community of nearly 1,000 members worldwide devoted to the success of legal startups. Welcome, Charlie.

[00:06:38] Charlie Uniman: Well, thank you very much. Delighted to be a guest and talk to you both.

[00:06:42] Greg Lambert: Hey, Charlie, welcome. And I’m not really aware of another online community that’s quite like the one you’ve set up. So what prompted you to start this community? And really, what is it that you hope to accomplish?

[00:06:55] Charlie Uniman: Well, when I was practicing in New York City for those almost four decades, I was a corporate lawyer, and much of my practice was devoted to transactional work that oftentimes involved representing startups and on the other side, investors. So I came to feel a lot of empathy for the process, the trials and tribulations that startup folks had to face. And I, together with that, had become a techie about a quarter of a century ago and fell in love with technology. So once I left the practice of law, it took me only four decades to figure out that I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I decided after DealStage, the startup that I worked on with two other co-founders, created, learned a lot from that. I decided that I would try to marry my interest in technology, having been at times a lone voice in the wilderness when practicing law and asking my partners to adopt tech and often hearing them say no.

[00:07:55] Marlene Gebauer: You found a sympathetic audience here.

[00:07:59] Charlie Uniman: Right. Yeah, the byword then was we build by the hour. Remember, Charlie? So with Legal Tech Startup Focus, I wanted to create a community where startups in the legal tech area, together with their investors and their customers, could find a way to help one another, share ideas, best practices, celebrate together, commiserate together when things don’t go well. and their customers, could find a way to help one another, share ideas, best practices, celebrate together, commiserate together when things don’t go well. It began about 2 1/2 years ago. And with that, we now have, as you mentioned, almost 1000 members. Fortunately, not only membership has picked up in number, but also engagement. So people are sharing questions and answers and posting and helping one another, and that was the purpose from the outset.

[00:08:43] Greg Lambert: If I’m a member, can you give me an example of how I interact with the community and how that actually helps me?

[00:08:51] Charlie Uniman: Sure. Well, the community runs on a white-label social network, a private company that, for a modest sum, permits me to use their software to create the community. And with that software in place, people, when they register, are able to post articles, short posts, ask questions. The posts can be tagged with categories relevant to LegalTech and startups. And what I’ve discovered is that people generally ask questions. How can I find a venture capital investor who’s willing to invest in the United Arab Emirates, for example? Or I am an executive with years of experience working in technology. I used to be a lawyer. I now want to get into LegalTech. How do I do so? Others are asking, I’ve got a hiring question. What should I do to solve, to answer that question and solve the problem that it poses? So it’s really a back-and-forth, principally through posts that I’m doing on the network. And some people want to write articles, which they’ve done to express their feelings, thinking about LegalTech. So it’s a community. And like many other communities online, it’s a matter of posting, participating, and getting a little back-and-forth going.

[00:10:18] Greg Lambert: So, it’s definitely a professional network, based on a social network.

[00:10:22] Charlie Uniman: That’s right. That’s right. And, it’s, as I like to tell people, it’s not just startup founders and their colleagues, but investors, lawyers who purchase tech, law professors who are interested in getting technology introduced to their students, a whole gamut of people.

[00:10:40] Greg Lambert: What is it that I would need to be in order to get into this network?

[00:10:45] Charlie Uniman: Well, the network, as was stated at the outset, is free. There’s no credit card required. I typically scour LinkedIn and myΓǪ Well, I’ve long exhausted my virtual Rolodex. But, I look for people who express, through Twitter and LinkedIn principally, an interest in LegalTech, and connect with them, and then invite them to join. But, then encourage them to ask anyone and everyone who might share their interest in LegalTech to join as well. There’s no vetting process. Anyone can join. Although, if you have an interest in knitting, for example, I doubt if it’s going to be a very fruitful experience.

[00:11:32] Marlene Gebauer: Not that we have anything against people who knit.

[00:11:34] Charlie Uniman: That’s right. Don’t write me about it. In fact, my girlfriend is a great knitter. So, that’s how anyone and everyone can join. All they have to do is go to, shameless plug, www.legaltechstartupfocus.com, and they can register and participate.

[00:11:53] Marlene Gebauer: And, we’ll put a link on the show notes for that.

[00:11:55] Charlie Uniman: Wonderful.

[00:11:56] Marlene Gebauer: In addition to this social network, you’re very active on Twitter, and you also have a podcast. So, is this part of the greater marketing strategy?

[00:12:06] Charlie Uniman: Well, yeah. The aim is to get the word out about LegalTech Startup Focus and get more members to join, hopefully triggering a feedback loop where more people join and they discover there’s more value to be had in becoming a member and others join. So, network effects. So, that’s the non-commercial goal behind that. But I just have an interest in this intellectually. I’m one foot in the startup world when I was practicing and worked on the late lamented deal stage. And one foot, I should say, in the legal world. So, I just get a kick out of it. The podcast, I’m about to post my 11th episode. I’ve been doing it for a few months, starting late last year. And in addition to being active on Twitter and LinkedIn, it’s mostly a matter of just taking the posts that I put and that others put up on the community and sending them over to LinkedIn and to Twitter. I also send out a newsletter every Monday up to my 73rd consecutive weekly newsletter that summarizes… Yep, I get that. Yeah, wonderful. That summarizes the previous week’s posts. And every now and then, we’ll add a little fill up there in the form of some additional information about a conference I might be attending. So, selfishly, self-interestedly, I want to get word out about the network, but I also want those vehicles, LinkedIn, Twitter, and the podcast to convey information. As the name, perhaps, makes clear, the focus is on startups and the people who not only work at them but feed into them with investments, comments, purchasing. If anyone has a hankering for learning about that particular corner of the legal world and the legal

[00:14:09] Greg Lambert: Yeah, what’s the name of the podcast?

[00:14:12] Charlie Uniman: Very originally, it’s called the Legal Tech Startup Focus podcast. There we go. As people have pointed out.

[00:14:18] Marlene Gebauer: Keeping it simple. Keeping it simple.

[00:14:20] Charlie Uniman: Although, I’ve tried to encourage people to say LTSF after having been chided by members who said, that’s a mouthful, Charlie, Legal Tech Startup Focus. And I simply come back and say, I may have been a lawyer and a failed startup founder and now a community host, but I was never a marketer. I just didn’t come up with a better name to catch your name.

[00:14:41] Marlene Gebauer: As a fellow podcaster, I know Greg and I always talk about how after we have guests on, we’re always inspired. We always learn something new from everybody. So for the LTSF podcast.

[00:14:56] Charlie Uniman: Thank you.

[00:14:57] Marlene Gebauer: You’re welcome. What have you learned? What are some of the takeaways that you’ve learned from your guests?

[00:15:04] Charlie Uniman: Well, I have been encouraged to find that although it hasn’t happened with as much latitude and depth as I would like, that there are law schools who are finally really taking seriously a couple things. First, not just training their lawyers to be in doctrine, which was mostly what I did when I was in law school four decades and more ago, but also making them much more practice aware. which was mostly what I did when I was in law school four decades and more ago, but also making them much more practice aware. And more particularly, practice aware in terms of the technology aspects that are near and dear to my heart and the hearts of the community members. So I’ve been encouraged by that. I’ve learned that those programs are spreading. I’ve learned that legal tech startups are often welcome at these programs to demonstrate their wares and get feedback. That’s one thing that has encouraged me and taught me something that I didn’t expect to be able to learn. I’ve also learned that through the community itself, but also in talking to various podcast guests, that the legal tech world extends way beyond the borders of the United States and North America, and there are active communities in Latin America, of course, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Australia, certainly. So that is something that also was a lesson to me when I started the network and have started talking in earnest to podcast guests. And finally, I guess I’ve learned that it really ΓÇô and this is a confirmation ΓÇô it really is a tough uphill battle to deal with the sales cycles in law firms.

[00:16:59] Greg Lambert: The very long sales cycles.

[00:17:01] Charlie Uniman: Yeah, and that’s really a symptom of any enterprise-level sales and marketing effort, but it’s particularly difficult in law. Although, I think things are changing. We may have hiccupped a little with the downturn at the beginning of the year, but I was of the view, when I started this project, engaging with the legal tech community, that venture capitalists’ institutional money was really not too sanguine about investing in legal tech. I now believe that there is an impetus to invest, despite some of the stumbles like Atrium’s cratering recently. stumbles, like Atrium’s cratering recently and there being a bit of a fall-off recently. But, I want to do what I can to encourage that. I mean, the numbers have to speak for themselves, and institutional investors have to know that they’re going to have a market size with their target investments and returns big enough to justify things, but I want to make them aware of legal tech, and there are candidates out there that are good targets for investment and hopefully brighten the discussions I’ve had a bit with some of the podcast guests about getting funding for their ventures.

[00:18:16] Greg Lambert: Now, when it comes to the legal startup community or just the startup community as a whole, that’s a different mindset than we normally see within the legal industry. Are you finding that your startup community is having a communication issue between themselves and their ideas in the legal organizations that they’re trying to woo into their products?

[00:18:46] Charlie Uniman: Well, I see an improvement over what I faced seven years ago, along with my co-founders at DealStage, where when we sat down, one of my co-founders, along with yours truly, was a lawyer in so-called BigLaw. And the third co-founder was a software engineer. We two former lawyers, sitting down with BigLaw law firms as a raw startup, often discovered that one of the biggest obstacles was just the fact that we were a startup. And they looked at us as if we had two heads coming to take their time.

[00:19:18] Greg Lambert: Yeah, BigLaw doesn’t want to be first in anything, but they don’t want to be last either.

[00:19:25] Charlie Uniman: Right, right. Solidly in the middle. Solidly in the middle, yeah. In the middle is the safest way. But I think things are improving. My reservation in saying that is, is it just a matter of people in law firms, big and small, learning the talk, but not walk the walk? Or is it really people being able to walk the walk? see, I think more than lip service being paid to the idea of innovating in law school. And law firms, there are hires now that direct themselves to innovation. Innovation is sort of a mushy word. It covers a multitude of sins or really means some very good things. We’re not where I want to see it yet. I think that really what needs to happen, and I can’t snap my fingers and make this happen, but there are efforts undertaken by some in-house legal departments. I think the pressure to have private law firms innovate has to come from the clients.

[00:20:34] Greg Lambert: And I was just wondering, speaking of that, is it with these innovative projects? A few weeks ago, we had someone from Brian Cave talk about their spin-off. They basically have created a startup within the law firm. Are processes like that where you can point other law firms saying, look, if you’re having a problem with startups, your competitors are themselves becoming startups and get over that. You’re not going to be the first one to enter this area. Are you finding that’s making the conversation easier or more difficult?

[00:21:16] Charlie Uniman: No, it’s interesting you bring that up because I get to participate in a monthly breakfast in the city about a half an hour from where I live. The discussion, the last one I attended, involved a few lawyers, I think one of them, in fact, from Brian Cave, who talked about just what you were discussing. And another law firm employee said, well, wait a minute. We’re thinking of doing that, too. And they got a real discussion going together after the breakfast ended and they could break off into a little group. So, yeah, I think that’s going to help. And frankly, the AMLaw 25, the top 25 law firms in the country, they’re going to go and do whatever they want to do because they have the leverage in the market to do that. But I think well shy of that. that, or not so well shy of that, I should say, others are going to, other law firms are beginning to feel some client pressure and there are clients who are interested in innovation. Whether they talk to other firms that have their own sister company startups or just realize that it’s the future. The future is now. I hope I’m not being a Pollyanna when I say that. And lastly, on the subject of law firms dealing with startups, I have been working on a presentation that deals just with that, that I was going to give for a London conference that because of present conditions has been canceled. But it was devoted to just that topic, buying legal tech from startups the right way. And there are ways that law firms can, there are steps they can take to grow more comfortable with startups.

[00:23:03] Marlene Gebauer: You had talked about how there seems to be more comfort, I guess, discussing possible partnerships with legal startup vendors. And I think part of that is also because there just seems to be so many more than they used to be. And they’re covering areas where some of the more traditional solutions are not filling that void. But at the same time, we in legal organizations, we’re still, we know how things worked with those traditional providers, but we’re often not really informed regarding what it takes to get a startup off the ground and that different mentality. The investment process and marketing, pricing, the revenue and process among other things, it seems to be a totally different world, I think, than what some of us in big law experience. So what do we need to know kind of coming into these conversations to be more knowledgeable and empathetic?

[00:24:11] Charlie Uniman: Well, akin to what I was saying a few minutes ago, I think that there are ample resources that law firms can consult to find out more about startups. I’ll go back to that. But I think, too, law firms and the lawyers they’re in regard failure as a really ugly F word, if you will. And I can understand that, having practiced for as long as I did. We lawyers have a body of professional expertise. We’re supposed to know it cold within our areas of expertise and not knowing it, omitting something that shouldn’t have been omitted. That sort of failure, I can understand, is something that no law firm or lawyer is happy with. But the approach that startups take is, well, they don’t welcome failure, certainly. But it’s really a matter of trying things out, iterating, as it’s called, the lingo. And sort of experiencing many failures, consulting with customers and internally consulting, and then making changes. So they’re in a process of cycling through small changes, tweaking things, knowing at the outset that they’re not going to get something entirely right software- wise or user experience-wise. But that they will devote themselves maniacally often to getting it right in several very quick cycles. So that is something that if I could sit down with lawyers and elaborate on, I’d want to do that. I’d want them to know that in dealing with startups and brand new products to the market, there is inevitably a testing and an iteration. Not that a startup should go to market with something that’s just a piece of garbage. And I’m not sure where I come on the view that you can go out with a so-called minimum viable product and go from there. It should have some polish. You’re dealing with lawyers. They’re busy. They don’t want to have you keep changing the ground from under their feet. But it’s that appreciation for iteration and a constant and continual improvement that I hope lawyers can come to understand when they deal with startups and their products.

[00:26:32] Marlene Gebauer: So my new phrase, Charlie, is every decision is a risk decision. My new phrase, Charlie, is every decision is a risk decision.

[00:26:38] Charlie Uniman: Good. I still like that phrase.

[00:26:38] Marlene Gebauer: So given that, And you touched on this a little earlier, what are the risks and rewards of legal organizations working with startup vendors? And does it make sense to mix and match startups and more traditional vendors? And I’m looking at this from a content or workflow perspective, but also a cost perspective.

[00:27:05] Charlie Uniman: Well, let’s take the benefits and the drawbacks. First, you’re dealing with companies that are more likely than more traditional tech companies, the larger kinds. I have a great deal of respect for the Thomson Reuters and the LexisNexis and Westlaw types. They do great work. But in dealing with a startup, law firms are going to often find it has a shot at really working with cutting-edge technology and learning cutting-edge workflows. Now, they have to be open to seeing the possibilities of competitive advantage in seeing the new cutting-edge technology and adopting or at least trying out cutting-edge workflows that may not align with what they’re doing now but could make the practice in whatever area the startup’s application works a whole lot better. You’re also dealing with organizations that are eager. They’re going to be more flexible in negotiating terms. They’re going to be more quickly moving. They’re going to be willing to try new things, at your suggestion, more readily, perhaps, in a much bigger company where the ship is harder to turn. They’re going to be nimble and fast to adapt. I think those are very worthwhile advantages to dealing with startups. The drawbacks, the risks, well, the biggest one, of course, is will the startup be there in six months, 12 months? The other sort of correlated risk with the first one I mentioned is do they have the financial and personnel firepower to do what it takes to provide you with the software updates, the feature requests, have the financial and personnel firepower to do what it takes to provide you with the software updates, meet the feature requests, support, training, encryption, and privacy aspects that you need? So yes, there are those drawbacks. What I am trying to figure out is how to maximize the benefits and minimize the drawbacks so that, net-net, it’s worth dealing with the startup. I happen to think not all are going to meet the criteria, but many can meet the criteria where it’s worth a try.

[00:29:18] Greg Lambert: And I think this probably goes on, especially with the health situation that’s going on in the world right now. I’m seeing a lot of the, and you’ve heard the phrase, never let an emergency go to waste.

[00:29:32] Charlie Uniman: Exactly.

[00:29:35] Greg Lambert: And so when it comes to dealing with startups or actually dealing with anyone and having that risk that Marlene talked about, and especially with failure, if I’m the person that’s going to bring in the startup to the firm or to the organization I’m working with. To solve the problem. To solve a problem. Let’s say it does fail. How do I spin that and make a success out of it? How do you tell people or how have people talked about this on the network about dealing with the failures? Is there any stories that you have?

[00:30:13] Charlie Uniman: Well, I think laying the groundwork at the outset. If you happen to be appointed as a champion for a particular startup or as a person who is just going to be the point person with the startup, I would try my best to make it clear to firm management and to the potential users that, at the outset, there are risks. But I think the best thing you can do is let that be known from the outset. What I would counsel is, and it’s certainly not original to me and kind of obvious when you think about it, when you’re using a startup’s piece of software that is new to the market, start with low-stakes use. Don’t adopt it and intend to have the most depth of company matter handled by that software. Don’t let the most senior people in your firm whose time is more valuable work on it. Do it in stages and work from the bottom up with more junior lawyers, allied professionals, and low-stakes matters. You can kick the tires on something where a failure were to occur through no fault of the firms. Then the risks, the consequences of a risk turning out to have been a bad one are much less. Then work your way up so that when you finally get to use it on more serious, consequential matters, you’re more confident that the people behind the software can live up to your expectations and the software actually works. Be prepared at the outset. I can understand a firm saying, I want a discount because I’m an early adopter and I want a period of time to use it for free to get to know it. Sure. When it comes time, if you like what you see, and somewhat counterintuitively for the firm’s benefit, obviously for the startup’s, pay a market price for the software. You thereby provide sources of funds to the startup. You incentivize your users to actually use it, learn from it, and give feedback because if they know you’re paying for it, I should say, they’re actually, I would think, human nature being what it is more likely to use.

[00:32:32] Greg Lambert: Hey, Charlie. I think that advice was worth the price of admission right there.

[00:32:36] Marlene Gebauer: Me too. That was great. I think so often we have discussions with vendors where it’s like, this is the next greatest thing that’s going to revolutionize the way you handle a regular process. But oftentimes, it doesn’t do that for various reasons or it’s good at one small part. So I think what you’ve mentioned is actually very useful to keep in mind.

[00:33:09] Charlie Uniman: And I would add to address a point that you had mentioned earlier, Marlene, and that is, you know, what about the smaller startups that have more point-like solutions than broader solutions? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, and I don’t mean this at all as a disparagement of any of the startups who are part of the community, but I think you’re going to find some sort of consolidation, not only because there are a lot of companies attempting to do the same thing that happens in any market, but I think here with law firms being as slow in the uptake as far as actually licensing software. And wanting to have a solution that doesn’t solve just one thing, you know, I wouldn’t offer a solution to a law firm that says, if you want to sign a document in Blue Ink and Blue Ink only, mine is the application you want to use. I think you want to have more heft. I think that I’m talking to the startups now. I think you want to try to do business development deals with allied startups. I think that you want to quickly figure out as quickly as you can whether making it on your own rather than combining in some fashion, if it’s an opportunity available, it’s worthwhile. Because, you know, unlike Salesforce, for example, which is gobbling up more and more of its customer relationship management market and bolting out other things, law firms don’t have a real big platform, even by department, that they can latch onto and know that they can reliably get much of what they want in doing a deal or handling a litigation or doing an investigation. If I were an investor and I’m not, you know, I would be looking for the larger plays among the startups. But again, I think startups can still be nimble, flexible, and cutting edge, even as they combine in some fashion to gain heft, staying power, and a broader array of features to offer.

[00:35:06] Marlene Gebauer: cutting edge even as they combine in some fashion to gain heft, staying power, and a broader array of features to offer. You had a short post on Medium where you asked the question, and this was in relation to where law school should focus. So I’m going to make the assumption that there are kind of two camps of attorneys out there. And the question was, which do you believe, the debunker, where law is part of a society’s plumbing and lawyers should be trained as ethical business people, or the traditionalist that law is an intellectual study? Lawyers should be taught jurisprudence, sociology, and economic analysis. So in terms of an entrepreneur coming in, and you have these two camps, and you’re going to have to be communicating, what should they be thinking and how should they be addressing this when they’re trying to break into this legal startup field?

[00:36:11] Charlie Uniman: Well, they, the nascent startup founders, I think are best advised in approaching law firms as businesses. They’re there to make a profit. They have to know doctrine. They have to be really good at the substantive knowledge aspects of their profession. And law schools have to continue to teach that. I don’t know whether it should be taught for as long as it’s taught in the three years worth of study, but startup founders should appeal to the business side of the law firm. And their application is not going to, unless it’s some sort of magical AI that can carry out a negotiation or analyze a whole set of documents to come up with a brand new way of structuring a deal. They should sell their wares as something that will enable the business part of the law to succeed, to make money. it’s more efficiency, whether it’s fewer mistakes, whether it is making life better for the practicing lawyers and thus making the lawyers more loyal to the firm and not fleeing the law or jumping ship to another firm and all the costs entailed with that. As far as law schools go, I’m a quasi-debunker. And by quasi-debunker, I mean, look, I think we should, and this is my own personal thing, I think we should all grow up a little. I don’t know that judges have to wear robes to be judges. And I don’t know that lawyers have to use heretofore and whereof all the time in order to feel like lawyers. But I do think, most emphatically, that law is special in one very important way. And that is, the law is a powerful weapon when used badly. People’s lives, financially and otherwise, can be at stake. So I am a great believer in re-regulation, in regulating law firms a whole lot differently from the way they are regulated now to encourage more access to justice and, frankly, competition. But I don’t think lawyers should be excused from the duty to be officers of the court, to offer pro bono work, to be held to a standard that recognizes that the law is part of society. We are not fixing sinks. And no one wants their sink fixed badly. But most often, the results of a poorly fixed sink is not someone going to jail improperly or being poorly represented in a real estate transaction, whether buying a house. So the awful force of the law should only be brought to bear when people have adequate representation. And lawyers should be held to account in providing that reputation and regulating, even better than they are now, frankly, in adhering to ethical standards. That should not go away.

[00:39:32] Greg Lambert: Yeah. Always remember, it’s a profession and a business.

[00:39:35] Charlie Uniman: That’s right.

[00:39:35] Greg Lambert: And you can’t just focus on one or the other. It’s a combination. So, Charlie, I want to wrap this up in a way that has you kind of both looking forward and backward, because you’ve done a lot, I mean, over the years, practicing and then into the legal technology and now with LTSF. What have you seen over the past few years that you think has been one of the most impactful changes in the industry? And then let’s flip that. And what do you see are some changes that are still yet to come to fruition yet? And if you have any tips as far as investments with the stock market like it is right now, you know, hey, feel free to throw those in.

[00:40:26] Charlie Uniman: Sure. I wish I knew answers to the last mentioned question. As far as what I see happening now, my podcast listeners have heard it ad nauseam. But I’ll say it again here. By my lights, legal tech is a 25-year overnight success. And we are hearing now in the legal tech world and in the legal world, talk about legal tech and innovation, innovation being important because you’re changing, you’re innovating the way in which you carry out your work processes, you use to practice law. Those are innovations. You’re innovating by bringing people in. We’re allied professionals. We’re finally hearing a lot of the talk being spoken by people whose decisions really matter now, whether it’s just talk or not, is still to be determined. But as recently, I’d say, as 10 years ago and maybe even more recently, the talk was not at all as widespread. So it’s in the air. And the fact that it’s in the air and it’s being talked about legal technology, the role it can play, the importance it can have on a firm’s bottom line and the happiness with which lawyers and satisfaction with which lawyers practice law is much more the subject of discussion than ever before. And that is a positive for legal tech startups and I think for lawyers. So, you know, I’m encouraged by that. And that is a sea change. The next step is to make it an actual behavioral matter rather than just talking. That may take looking far ahead. That may take a generational change. The law students and the young lawyers who are practicing now are still going to want to make money. They’re still going to want to take pride in being lawyers and practicing their profession. But I will say that in 10 years, and I’m pretty confident of that, the younger lawyers, we’re not only more comfortable, and yes, they are with technology, they’re going to be much more comfortable, I think, in adopting that technology and the practice. The other thing that’s going to change if certain states do what I think they’re going to do and hope they’re going to do is the way in which, adverting to what I mentioned earlier, the way in which lawyers practice and how they’re regulated, that will change. Once that changes, hopefully without lessening the ethical standards that lawyers have to adhere to, you’ll have new ownership structures. You’ll have people being able to do legal related work without having a law degree. And that will encourage technology use and also make law more accessible to more people. So I’m counting on that.

[00:43:15] Marlene Gebauer: OK, folks, you’ve heard it here. Charlie, we may have to invite you back in a few years to see where we’re at.

[00:43:22] Charlie Uniman: I would love that. Yes.

[00:43:25] Marlene Gebauer: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.

[00:43:28] Greg Lambert: My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Marlene, I liked how Charlie just laid the whole process of how law firms should work with startups. I know to him it came, you know, he was saying, well, you’ve probably heard this before. This is a common sense approach. But quite frankly, I think what he was laying out there is something that most of us hadn’t even thought about because we’re not engaged day in and day out with legal tech startups. Doing that whole process of making sure you’re working on small projects rather than at the firm projects. You’re not obligating your most heavily used attorneys to work on these projects, but rather using others paying retail rates for startups so that they can continue. So, I mean, it’s just a number of things in there that he said that were very insightful to me and how you deal with legal startups.

[00:44:35] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, I agree with you completely. And I also appreciated the reminder about fear of failure and how that has to be addressed at the law firm side of things. And I’ll tie it back to what you said in the inspirations about PricewaterhouseCooper and also with what’s happening now with COVID-19. That we’re in this landscape that we don’t really know what the right thing to do is. And so we are all trying out different things and, in a sense, taking these risks to see if these things will work and be fruitful. And I’m hoping that this experience, as bad as it is, is something that we can apply in the future when we’re looking at some of these tools and resources that can really help us change the way we practice. Yeah.

[00:45:36] Greg Lambert: And like you say, all decisions are risk decisions. All decisions are risk decisions. Well, thanks again to you, Charlie, for joining us today. It was nice to have a normal chat on legal technology innovations and startups and kind of veer away from the most prevalent topic of the day.

[00:45:59] Marlene Gebauer: Before we go, we want to remind listeners to take the time to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Rate and review us as well. If you have comments about today’s show or suggestions for a future show, you can reach us on Twitter at GabeBauerM or at Glambert, or you can call the Geek & Review hotline at 713-487-7270 or email us at geekandreviewpodcast at gmail.com. And I will add one thing. Please reach out to us or anybody else if you’re there by yourself in your house and you just not want someone to talk to you about what’s going on. It’s like we’re all here to listen. And believe me, we all want to talk about it. Yes, we do. So please do. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeSicca. Thank you very much, Jerry.

[00:46:50] Greg Lambert: Yeah, thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene. Stay safe. I’ll talk to you later.

[00:46:55] Marlene Gebauer: All right. Stay healthy. Bye.

At the recent, excellent Law 2030, Vijay Govindarajan observed, “There is only so much Six Sigma you can do.” Despite my affinities, I concur. Low baselines can have an outsized impact on the efficacy of interventions—but then baselines stop being low.

Consider buying a car with an eye towards better gas mileage.

Which technological leap saves more gas? Improving a car’s miles per gallon (i) from 10 mpg to 20 mpg or (ii) from 20 mpg to 100 mpg?

Put another way, from the perspective of gallons saved, what is the ‘bigger improvement’ (i) +10 mpg/2x or (ii) +80 mpg/5x?

Since I’m asking the question, you already surmised the answer is counter intuitive:

One simple takeaway is that once you cut something in half, there is nothing you can do, save eliminating it entirely, that will ever again deliver the same raw level of improvement.

In the legal context, for example, we have good reason to accelerate contract review. Start with a standard review that averages 20 minutes and reduce it by 60% through basic interventions (harmonized templates, checklists, playbooks, deviation matrices, etc.). You save 12 minutes per contract. Next, throw on some razzle dazzle AI that reduces average review time by another 60%. You save less than 5 additional minutes. That’s not nothing, especially with large volumes. But it comes at a cost, including the opportunity cost of addressing other chokepoints, constraints, and rate-limiting factors. Continue Reading The Limits of Incremental Improvements

 

Using Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Natural Language Processing to hold a conversation might seem like a far off idea when it comes to the legal industry, but it is not. We sit down with Baker Hostetler’s Katherine Lowry, and Puerto Rico defense attorney Diego Alcala to get a better understanding of how chatbots work, and what value they can bring from legal practices ranging from BigLaw Bankruptcy practice to a solo attorney’s criminal law practice.

Katherine Lowry won the American Association of Law Libraries’ Innovation Tournament in 2018 with her attorney-facing chatbot. In the nearly two years since that recognition, she has created a chatbot for her Bankruptcy practice that answers thousands of potential questions and helps her attorneys find information quickly and frees up her researchers’ time for more complex questions.

Diego Alcala is working on chatbots which will assist him in his practice by answering basic questions that family members need to know about the clients he is representing. While Diego is not a programmer, he has learned the concept of chatbots through numerous platforms that allow for those with no coding skills to still create powerful chatbots to answer practical questions.

Listen in and see if the ideas shared by Lowry and Alcala spur any ideas of how automating a conversation might help you in your practice.

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Information Inspirations

There’s another bill in Congress that creates a FREE PACER! Congressman Hank Johnson, D-GA, is not stopping there. He is also requiring more transparency in the Federal Courts by requiring audio and video recordings are made available of court proceedings. While the bill creates a FREE PACER for most, there is a surcharge for power users who have $25,000 or more in quarterly usage. That means some BigLaw firms will have to pay that surcharge. Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 70 – A Chat About Chatbots and The Law With Katherine Lowry and Diego Alcala

Photo by Dimitri Karastelev on Unsplash
With all of the news about COVID-19 (Coronavirus) making its way into the United States, it is time for law firms to think about what they are going to do to prepare for a possible outbreak that will affect their business operations. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans need to be dusted off and updated to manage the different scenarios that may come our with over the next few months. We asked the Association of Legal Administrators interim Executive Director, April Campbell, to discuss what law firms need to be doing to prepare.

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There are definite immediate and local actions that should be implemented such as:
  • Restrict travel to hotspots
  • 14-day work from home policies for personnel who have traveled to those areas, or were exposed to others who may have traveled to hotspots
  • Stress that sick employees stay home
  • Explain proper handwashing techniques
  • And LOTS OF HAND SANITIZER
The CDC released communications resources on these actions.

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 69 – What Should Law Firms Do To Prepare for a Possible COVID-19 Epidemic? With the ALA’s April Campbell