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[Music]
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Welcome to CharneyChange in Legal!
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What up?
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I'm Ari Kaplan.
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I am an analyst that covers the legal industry and honored to be here with Macohhost.
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How do I follow that?
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I'm Carolyn Hill, Editor-in-Chief of Legalite Insider.
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It's good to be here with you.
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Nice to see you.
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It's so nice to see you.
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It's been 50-something episodes.
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I'm definitely, I feel very confident someone is watching this one.
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I think you are.
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I have a deep, deeply strong feeling about this.
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We are going to double, triple our listeners.
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Anyway, it's been a very exciting end to the first quarter.
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I think it's an interesting start to the second quarter.
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I'm looking forward to lots of more events that are coming up.
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We should see each other certainly.
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It's a Lexpo for sure.
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I'll also be in London.
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I'm going to be going to relativity fest London.
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It's a lot happening.
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A lot of excitement.
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That is so exciting.
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I didn't know you were coming to Ralfa.
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That is super cool.
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I think it's already heating up, isn't it?
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My diary is already jam-packed.
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Lexpo is exciting though in Amsterdam.
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I haven't done that one before.
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It's super, super cool to be supporting Robert Mayer and I think it's the tenth anniversary you said.
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Tenth anniversary of Lexpo.
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You've been in for over years.
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I was a speaker at Lexpo 1 in 2016.
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It was great then and I have been lucky to serve as the MC for the past five years.
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It honestly is such an exceptional event, not just because I'm associated with it, but because Rob and his team have figured out
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a way to draw the most dynamic and high-level decision-makers and give you a forum to get to meet them all.
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That's really the special secret sauce there is that all the people you want to meet come and you get many opportunities to interact with them.
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I just love that about the event and I try to do everything I can as the MC.
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Forget about the content and the venue and everything, but I just think the mix is special.
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I think you're going to get a lot of value out of it.
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I'm looking forward to seeing you there.
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I cannot wait.
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You're absolutely right.
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I think it's already a year to be selective with your time.
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People took that away from last year so the sort of chasing our tails, going to every single thing under the sun.
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I think people are a little bit done with that.
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I think that this year is going to be a year for being, well, we're already in April.
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But anyway, over a year for being a bit more selective with your time and choosing events exactly where you get the right mix of people and are able to have those really great conversations.
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Otherwise, why are you there?
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It's fun to me to think about this idea of it being the year of something or something else because I feel like in AI years, we're moving at such a rapid pace that I don't actually know what this year is going to be because people ask me.
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I'm not really sure.
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I mean, ChatGPT came out at the end of 2022.
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I think people thought that year was going to go in one direction and then it completely shifted in a pretty extraordinary way.
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I will say that I missed out on something in Amsterdam.
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I did the Amsterdam triathlon last year and registered early and not realizing that that race closes super fast.
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So I will not get to swim in the Amstel this year.
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I think Robles will be having a lot of fun.
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Yeah.
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I can race to the ball already.
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It wasn't just a long race.
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There's no showing off there.
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I will say that I wanted to think I'm very excited about is that I just released a report studying how law firms in 14 countries are thinking about and measuring the ROI of their use of legal AI.
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I did that with LaGora.
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So specifically LaGora customers, but it was a broader conversation than that and really remarkable to have conversations with people who are thinking very deeply.
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Not only about adoption and deployment and building community and work quality and workflows, but just how do we effectively measure performance?
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How do we gauge the impact on the overall business of law?
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It was a very lucky project and just interesting to see the reaction.
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That's so cool. And so you interviewed just slightly north of 13.
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Yeah, 31 law firm leaders.
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Yeah.
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Most of them were partners or well, there was a group of partners and sort of decision makers and innovation and AI.
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And just asking a series of questions about how are you reallocating the time that you're saving?
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Are you getting value? Are you getting projects that you otherwise wouldn't have taken? How is it affecting business development?
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What does revenue look like? How does profitability? How is that affected? And it was just fascinating.
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And people are very generous to talk about this, especially in a form where you're holding what they say in confidence, but aggregating it so that it builds something of value for the entire community.
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And I kept telling them, you know, my goal is to help LaGoura help you. That was really what the objective was is to try to better understand where they're gaining value, where they're having challenges so that the team there, which is just exceptional.
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Honestly, like, I'm a neutral as you know, industry analyst.
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I'm Switzerland, but when I ask people, how would you recommend, you know, what would you rate this on a scale of one to 10 and people give it a nine or a 10 and so many people do that?
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You know, you recognize that they're trying to do something that's important for the space.
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And I know that there's a lot of great vendors out there just saying in this instance, I study them.
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And there was a lot of very positive value. And I only hope that this kind of research elevates our entire community.
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Because other other teams can learn from this. And I think that was their goal is certainly is it's always my goal is how do we take this research that's focused on a particular area and use it to give an advanced everyone.
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You know, when I do, I just also released my general council report. And when I do that, I also hope that law firms gain equal or even more value than just leaders of law departments because there's a collaboration, right?
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We all work together. And if one learns something about the other, that just heightens the experience for everyone.
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Did you use these firms? Were they US space, were they global, were they mixed?
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They were firms in 14 countries. So it was a mix, definitely US firms, but certainly firms throughout Europe and Asia. And it was meant to try to draw a line through what firms are doing, but recognize that different firms are doing.
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Different firms have different individuals who are handling this who are responsible for the rollout and just usage of their legal AI platform and it's different in different organizations. Some people have a more significant legal operations component.
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And so they look at it through a lens of metrics and other analytics. Some are partners at their firms and they're responsible so they're looking at very much from a use case.
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From the juniors to the seniors and which juniors, you know, I asked not only our associates or partners or knowledge management leaders getting most of the most value, but if they are associates who within the associate class is it juniors is it mid levels is it seniors.
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And you know, are the people who are performing well getting value and what does that look like are the people who are not performing as well as that helping them is their work being enhanced by this.
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And you know, a lot of interesting metrics and takeaways that I hope people will get value from.
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Did you, was your overall takeaway? So this is fascinating. My conversations around ROI. I'm sometimes surprised at how I don't know how to express this without sounding negative.
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But like you've just thought that ROI would be the first and foremost consideration, but it's not for a lot of law firms. They think and maybe this is the right thing. There's lots of reasons behind this. You know,
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AI, Jenny, either different beast people experimenting with how it's used. Sometimes the ROI isn't going to be clear takeaway all of that. But I've always been a bit surprised by how they think, oh, you know, we'll get to we'll get to ROI.
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I've spoken to a couple of firms with huge wrong outs, including a flakora where ROI, they've said, oh, yeah, we're getting we're convinced that it was going to provide value, but they're not there.
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Putting metrics at the front and center of their decision making, which I thought was kind of interesting. Is that did that come across strongly.
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There were definitely conversations about how you define ROI, how you prioritize ROI. And I had a great follow up conversation on my podcast with Nick, what Nick West that Michigan, Durea, who's a leader, obviously in this space.
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And Nick and I had a long conversation about what does value look like? What does ROI look like? What are the most important metrics that you should capture? And in this conversation, I was honest about what we were trying to achieve.
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And I don't think that there is a mandate to force ROI conversations, nor is there a free free pass on gauging ROI. I mean, every organization is making an investment not only of time, but certainly of of, you know, money and their budgeting for this and they're thinking about it long term.
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So this has to be part of the conversation people are in different places in their journey and some have just deployed some have been doing this for years. And as a result, one size doesn't fit all, but I tried in every section of this report to give suggestions.
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So for example, if you're trying to measure the performance of your junior and middle-level lawyers, for example, try to connect realization rates year over year or try to find some way to gauge progress, because those are numbers that you have.
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And they're excellent at keeping track of how much of that time they've gotten paid for. So those are easy numbers. And the other point that I tried to make was that this cross collaboration between disciplines within a firm is only growing that it can't just be the superstars and innovation and knowledge management and AI.
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It has to also be the talented folks in time and billing. It has to be individuals in IT. It really just has to be this cross functional journey. And I think that's really important. I just want to tell people that you can download it.
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It's logora.com/ROI-law-firms.
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And go download it. It's interesting that you talk about reallocating time as well. I know we must move on briefly, because obviously we have such an agenda always.
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And we have a lot of work to do with the process of reallocating time. So by that, presumably, the worst thing that they were seeing, they were gaining time back.
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Everyone, 100% are saving time. But time isn't really an ROI component. It's much more about what will you do with that time?
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And then the return will be in having more time to take on work, you otherwise would have declined, or the technology allowing you to scale in a way that was otherwise not possible.
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Could you now do a project that would have taken a team of lawyers a week to a couple of lawyers in it? And I really talented paralegal just a day.
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And are there projects that were too document intensive? And is there a way to view it across the spectrum? I mean, there was a lot of discussion about thinking through projects and being able to serve clients in a way that you otherwise weren't able.
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Obviously, law firms are already providing super high quality work. So the question wasn't, you know, what is that?
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You know, trust in the work, response time, there were just so many areas where there were improvements in the experience. And law firms will this year, I think, really be able to measure ROI in a way that is meaningful.
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And I'm saying, if I'm honored and lucky enough to do it again next year, I think that we will get much richer data. And there will be a way to do a year of your comparison. That's really important for our industry.
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It's a, it's a, it's a tangent, but it's so relevant. I'd love to see them really dive into also who is doing what and what impact that has on our, our, our work because I feel like one of the things that's being overlooked is how, how new technology will change who is doing what?
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So, for example, I've referred to partners, perhaps doing research that they would have handed off to an associate, you know, and, and they were because it's because it's there within their workflow because they can instantly ask a question and they'll have the citation and they can immediately, you know, I mean, a lot of this is they would know anyway, you know, but, but, you know, the, but the point is that things that they would have naturally just handed off is it because it would take a little bit more time.
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It can be done pretty instantly. What impact is that going to have on who is doing what and what impact is that going to then have on on our, what does it all mean? You know, I feel like it's a tangent, but it's equally super relevant and, and, and then in terms of preparing for things to change and training people to do things differently.
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You know, I think that that's, it's, it's relevant completely.
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You know, I was lucky to help to co facilitate a luncheon this week in Washington, DC with Lucy Allen, who's the chief growth officer at Barbary, who you know, who's now an special congratulations to her, who is now the co CEO of Barbary, which was just announced.
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And we were lucky to host an incredible cross section of knowledge management, innovation, professional development, training and development, just all of these really exceptional leaders that aren't often brought together.
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There are events for knowledge management. There are events for professional development. There are events for innovation.
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We don't typically bring those groups together and yet exactly your point. We are seeing a shift in who's getting the work, where the work is being distributed. This technology is enabling senior professionals to rely less on some of their junior support team because the answer is right there for them.
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And they're becoming very adept because it's easy to use. And the answers are increasingly trustworthy. So the vetting isn't, isn't as crucial for a basic question that relies on a proven document set.
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And so we had this great conversation and it was just helpful as you know, because we both are lucky to facilitate some of these discussions, to bring people together to try to work out the issues.
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And Lucy was great in teasing out some of those really important points. And I think that you're going to see that being a real focus this year, just in terms of how do we rebalance the training and development.
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And the thing that came out of this research and that has come out of a lot of my discussions over the course of the past few months, six months because I was just at League of Week is that the exceptional service and technology that company like LaGora is providing, but also let's just be even here, Lexus, protégé, Harvey, there are a lot of teams, Thompson Reuters, there are a lot of teams that are competing in this game.
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But the emphasis on exceptional client service and great technology and following a roadmap that's realistic and honest, I think it's really leveling up everyone's game and it's great for the buyer.
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That I think is just a general observation and perspective that only helps all of us in legal.
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Yeah, no, I agree with you completely. I mean, there's also sort of challenges, speaking to people a lot about strategy and it's interesting because we're doing a lot of inside view. So we're speaking with market leaders on on a podcast with the inside view and I'm preparing for one.
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And he wants to talk about some of the funding that's coming into the sector, which obviously LaGora is one and then there's many others.
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And it's really interesting to this sort of like the people sort of perception of that and people's, you know, the challenges, if it does present any challenges, I think there's, I think there's so much being driven.
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There's a real energy in the sector and I think that's great for everybody. I think that there's also just like a tiny bit of like just nervousness, you know, like is this sustainable? This has to be sustainable.
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I think that's something for all vendors to be really focused on with their clients, you know, making sure that they felt they feel everything they're doing right now is sustainable.
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Listen, money in the space is great for everyone. I just, I'm positive about the investments. They know certainly the people who are putting their money here know generally more than we do and have done a lot of due diligence on this.
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And we saw this. We've seen this in cycles. I've been studying this space for almost 20 years. This is actually my 20th year and of being on my own as R.E. Kaplan advisors.
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And we've seen, I know, I know, it'll be awesome, it'll be in June and at Lexpo. So there you go. No, but I just, I just think it's really important for us to not be distracted in some ways by areas we really, we can't control who puts money where I think that the money talks about the importance of the space.
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But we saw this. We saw this with CLM. We've seen this with the discovery. We've seen questions about numbers and valuations. I think that that is almost like a side story, at least for what I do, you know, I'm trying to make sure that we focus on our what tools are people using where are they getting value?
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Are we training people properly? Are clients being served? Are people avoiding mistakes? And that was, you know, that was one of the things that I asked in my research was like is the level of trust is becoming trust?
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Are you, are you, are you built? Is the judgment? You know, all of these, all of these components that we've been talking about. And you know, just to try to start a conversation, the cool thing about releasing the research was there were a lot of comments in the various LinkedIn posts about people digging through and asking questions.
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And I was very happy to have a conversation because each conversation kind of leaves us closer to an answer. And that's I think what a lot of people are trying to get to.
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Yeah, I was saying that we're in this privilege position as well. Like within this same prep call up with with the inside, the inside view.
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I was saying that we're in this privilege position of of reflecting dialogue that helps to advance the conversation, right? I never particularly sometimes I'll post opinion pieces where a lot of the time I'll post reflections on my conversations with people.
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I don't really feel like there's a definitive answer to a lot of things right now, but actually what there is is amazing conversations that we're lucky enough to present to to to present to you know to give a public beauty, which I think is a very privileged position to be in.
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But yeah, it's kind of fun. Do you know what my biggest takeaway I think from our conversation today is that AI years are like dog years, I think, are that's that so?
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Yeah, and I was trying to explain to somebody how I think something's are changing and I was laughing that when I, after I graduated college in 1983, I was lucky to spend a year living in Japan.
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So I was an English teacher through something called the jet program and I was in a public high school in in Kobe outside Kobe. And I would always make a mistake about taking the local train versus the express train because you know everything is absolutely certainly 1993 94.
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It was everything was absolutely Japanese and I was a little embarrassed and my Japanese wasn't very good and they don't want to keep asking people questions and so I would end up taking the wrong train. And I said we are now in a moment where certainly in legal services.
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You know, if you ever saw like a map on the on the New York City subway, for example, there are express lines are local lines and so the express lines just have fewer dots.
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There are just fewer stops that you need to make in the in the same way that a partner may not need to make one of those stops with an associate but may need to do that with a senior associate.
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And so I just kept thinking like we're getting faster and we're stopping less but we're getting to the destination earlier and by getting there earlier, there are other things that you can do to enhance the experience.
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And it just I was trying to, you know, because I'm always trying to think of a visual, I do a lot of infographics.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I love it. It's like eight years and not like normal years. So I was in each a item where there is but so I wrote you and I spoke about orchestration though given the speed of things that are happening and I wrote a piece last week actually about the importance of orchestration and that came that that came up again and I thought about actually I wrote it.
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Yeah, I wrote it this week and I thought about conversation about how orchestration because of the speed of which things are moving this need and I don't I think that I just I described it as in a we need an innovation spine.
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So you need to have something that holds everything together that enables you to maintain it like make sure that you're in charge.
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So even if it's even if it's a heavy degree of automation and eventually identity, you need to have the spine through which everything kind of slots into and that's that's orchestration and this is something that's super fascinating.
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It's on it's only good technology.com. I call it innovation needs a spine if anyone does want to have a look.
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But I really thought about our conversation about how orchestration given the speed of things is coming up more and more.
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And I'm actually have to say I'm super excited about this so next month on May 5th I am the MC of the Lexus nexus AI symposium at the Harvard Club in New York City and I am excited to hear Jeff Blight who is the general council event,
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and I think it'll be just you know, there are lots of leaders who are going to be there and in the various panel discussions, but that is an element of what's changing our industry that I think will be extra powerful part of the conversation, which is important for us to be having just where where is this, you know, how how much change can we consume.
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At once and everyone I talked to is like gosh doesn't it seem faster like it seems faster and I joked that we were talking on our discussion about the general council report that the general council is every year I do this general council report this is year seven and we try to characterize the general council and you know in 2020 they were the chief legal officer and chief medical officer and then they became sort of chief procurement officer and chief transformation and little global.
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Global global diplomat et cetera this year was sort of the unfazed general council because you know you imagine someone juggling and then you imagine putting one pin on fire and then all the pins on fire and then adding spikes to all the pins and that's kind of like what's happening and it's just and then bouncing on a ball and you know holding away like the cat and I just think that there's a really interesting element here of just being super versatile and that being the core component so orchestration and versatility let's call those two.
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At least two of the words of the year.
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I see I speak to less general council I speak to a lot of legal operations and I see them being it's you can't generalize there's so much so many people at different stages so many different size so many you know often it does correlate to the size of the company into the size of the team and the resource and all of that kind of stuff in terms of the level of advancement but
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they I hosted a I hosted a webinar with Harvey and and actually it was I have to tell you it was our largest we were we were over subscribed we had well over a thousand people sign up for that one which was kind of funny because we were like what happens now to just fall over but no.
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But so and Russell Dentsy is the head of legal operations at Harvey you know we were talking about a genticae I that was one of the purposes of the conversation we had Joe Cohen from Harvey and we had a millie lemon who's one of the engineers and we had
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a really practical conversation about a genticae I and actually one of the things the Russell's got a big team I but comparatively big team so he has like seven operations people in his team the legal team is about 300 people 250 lawyers and they are so they're advanced right and they've been using Harvey they want an early adopter but they taking you know they they're taking a cautious approach they very much
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wanting to be in control the the the Russell's whole messaging was around you know we need to be in charge of this we're not going to take any risks they're not heavily regulated industry so they they can do things that perhaps banks and you know they they they've got different concerns but
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but yeah it was just interesting I just really thought that that was that was his his whole vein was they're doing some exciting stuff they're doing a lot of automation and they're probably further ahead than a lot of people in terms of workflows and automating workflows and I'm not suggesting for a minute that they're not doing some really cool stuff but I was just interested you know that they're still that tone of we need to we need this to be governed we need to be in charge of this.
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Well I actually read so Richard Troman shared a piece that gave one of the co-founders of Harvey wrote for X and so I read Richard's analysis and then I read Gabe's piece about agents and the use of agents and it it fascinates me the whole there are two things that I read this week that I found really interesting I found Gabe's piece really interesting and also the two scat and leaders who are now advising one is heart advising Harvey and the others advising
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letharra and I forget the other company but it was it was in law.com and it was fascinating actually put that into notebook LM so that I could listen to the analysis of what they were saying and it was just fascinating and I've started doing that a lot more like I'll take you know the annual report for example Larry thinks annual report and put it into
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a notebook LM just to listen to how they are talking about it and pulling out key themes and it was fascinating I'll just say that the one the most interesting thing I pulled out of that for example
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life thinks of course the famous CEO BlackRock he said nobody's paying attention to this but the most important jobs for the future are essentially jobs of the past that we need expert electricians we need people who can build data centers
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and it was so interesting you know I'm a fix a guy and I love that and I'm just always thinking about that and I had it got me thinking because when I was doing my research one of the things that I recommended to people is to think about the data they already have and try to deploy it in a way that will help them measure
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and engage ROI and progress and if anybody is like me and has a garage and fix this things and I have sort of redundant tools and I have things my wife so I was like don't you already have that I know I don't know where that is I don't know what bin that tube of whatever is so I just buy it again and my point was that it
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has a lot of firms and certainly in corporations and that's why legal operations is such an incredible part of a law department but there's all this data there's all this information there are all these resources and we don't use all of them and I don't know that necessarily you need to rein you need to invest more you just need to sort of you
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think where what you have is and what you've done you know has where that's taken you and figure out how you can use that with what you're now investing in to push you forward
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I'm doing webinars and in-person sessions on data and data strategy this year and I think it's going to be I can't wait this is there we've had a lot of conversations about data already and it's going to be another year of really starting to learn from learn from people you know
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this is what I'm excited about I'm doing a webinar coming up with the leads where we're going to be looking at some success stories maybe get a client on the early stages of just prepping it but you know the more people at the end more end users that we can get on talking about their experiences the better I think you know
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like in terms of what can we've done this and this is how and what we've learned and these are the challenges and these are maybe the mistakes wow
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Wow Caroline I'm excited for our next time so there's a lot happening here but we'll try to we'll try to chart that change so
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boom in change in legal
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all right well wonderful to see you wonderful to all of our viewers and our listeners and I'm just overwhelmed with the attention great great
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episode thank you I'm sorry bye
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(wind blowing)
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♪ Yeah ♪
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[Music]
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Welcome to CharneyChange in Legal!
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What up?
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I'm Ari Kaplan.
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I am an analyst that covers the legal industry and honored to be here with Macohhost.
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How do I follow that?
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I'm Carolyn Hill, Editor-in-Chief of Legalite Insider.
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It's good to be here with you.
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Nice to see you.
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It's so nice to see you.
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It's been 50-something episodes.
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I'm definitely, I feel very confident someone is watching this one.
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I think you are.
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I have a deep, deeply strong feeling about this.
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We are going to double, triple our listeners.
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Anyway, it's been a very exciting end to the first quarter.
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I think it's an interesting start to the second quarter.
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I'm looking forward to lots of more events that are coming up.
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We should see each other certainly.
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It's a Lexpo for sure.
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I'll also be in London.
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I'm going to be going to relativity fest London.
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It's a lot happening.
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A lot of excitement.
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That is so exciting.
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I didn't know you were coming to Ralfa.
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That is super cool.
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I think it's already heating up, isn't it?
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My diary is already jam-packed.
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Lexpo is exciting though in Amsterdam.
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I haven't done that one before.
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It's super, super cool to be supporting Robert Mayer and I think it's the tenth anniversary you said.
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Tenth anniversary of Lexpo.
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You've been in for over years.
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I was a speaker at Lexpo 1 in 2016.
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It was great then and I have been lucky to serve as the MC for the past five years.
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It honestly is such an exceptional event, not just because I'm associated with it, but because Rob and his team have figured out
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a way to draw the most dynamic and high-level decision-makers and give you a forum to get to meet them all.
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That's really the special secret sauce there is that all the people you want to meet come and you get many opportunities to interact with them.
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I just love that about the event and I try to do everything I can as the MC.
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Forget about the content and the venue and everything, but I just think the mix is special.
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I think you're going to get a lot of value out of it.
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I'm looking forward to seeing you there.
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I cannot wait.
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You're absolutely right.
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I think it's already a year to be selective with your time.
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People took that away from last year so the sort of chasing our tails, going to every single thing under the sun.
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I think people are a little bit done with that.
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I think that this year is going to be a year for being, well, we're already in April.
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But anyway, over a year for being a bit more selective with your time and choosing events exactly where you get the right mix of people and are able to have those really great conversations.
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Otherwise, why are you there?
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It's fun to me to think about this idea of it being the year of something or something else because I feel like in AI years, we're moving at such a rapid pace that I don't actually know what this year is going to be because people ask me.
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I'm not really sure.
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I mean, ChatGPT came out at the end of 2022.
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I think people thought that year was going to go in one direction and then it completely shifted in a pretty extraordinary way.
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I will say that I missed out on something in Amsterdam.
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I did the Amsterdam triathlon last year and registered early and not realizing that that race closes super fast.
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So I will not get to swim in the Amstel this year.
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I think Robles will be having a lot of fun.
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Yeah.
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I can race to the ball already.
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It wasn't just a long race.
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There's no showing off there.
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I will say that I wanted to think I'm very excited about is that I just released a report studying how law firms in 14 countries are thinking about and measuring the ROI of their use of legal AI.
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I did that with LaGora.
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So specifically LaGora customers, but it was a broader conversation than that and really remarkable to have conversations with people who are thinking very deeply.
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Not only about adoption and deployment and building community and work quality and workflows, but just how do we effectively measure performance?
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How do we gauge the impact on the overall business of law?
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It was a very lucky project and just interesting to see the reaction.
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That's so cool. And so you interviewed just slightly north of 13.
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Yeah, 31 law firm leaders.
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Yeah.
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Most of them were partners or well, there was a group of partners and sort of decision makers and innovation and AI.
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And just asking a series of questions about how are you reallocating the time that you're saving?
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Are you getting value? Are you getting projects that you otherwise wouldn't have taken? How is it affecting business development?
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What does revenue look like? How does profitability? How is that affected? And it was just fascinating.
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And people are very generous to talk about this, especially in a form where you're holding what they say in confidence, but aggregating it so that it builds something of value for the entire community.
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And I kept telling them, you know, my goal is to help LaGoura help you. That was really what the objective was is to try to better understand where they're gaining value, where they're having challenges so that the team there, which is just exceptional.
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Honestly, like, I'm a neutral as you know, industry analyst.
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I'm Switzerland, but when I ask people, how would you recommend, you know, what would you rate this on a scale of one to 10 and people give it a nine or a 10 and so many people do that?
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You know, you recognize that they're trying to do something that's important for the space.
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And I know that there's a lot of great vendors out there just saying in this instance, I study them.
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And there was a lot of very positive value. And I only hope that this kind of research elevates our entire community.
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Because other other teams can learn from this. And I think that was their goal is certainly is it's always my goal is how do we take this research that's focused on a particular area and use it to give an advanced everyone.
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You know, when I do, I just also released my general council report. And when I do that, I also hope that law firms gain equal or even more value than just leaders of law departments because there's a collaboration, right?
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We all work together. And if one learns something about the other, that just heightens the experience for everyone.
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Did you use these firms? Were they US space, were they global, were they mixed?
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They were firms in 14 countries. So it was a mix, definitely US firms, but certainly firms throughout Europe and Asia. And it was meant to try to draw a line through what firms are doing, but recognize that different firms are doing.
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Different firms have different individuals who are handling this who are responsible for the rollout and just usage of their legal AI platform and it's different in different organizations. Some people have a more significant legal operations component.
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And so they look at it through a lens of metrics and other analytics. Some are partners at their firms and they're responsible so they're looking at very much from a use case.
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From the juniors to the seniors and which juniors, you know, I asked not only our associates or partners or knowledge management leaders getting most of the most value, but if they are associates who within the associate class is it juniors is it mid levels is it seniors.
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And you know, are the people who are performing well getting value and what does that look like are the people who are not performing as well as that helping them is their work being enhanced by this.
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And you know, a lot of interesting metrics and takeaways that I hope people will get value from.
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Did you, was your overall takeaway? So this is fascinating. My conversations around ROI. I'm sometimes surprised at how I don't know how to express this without sounding negative.
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But like you've just thought that ROI would be the first and foremost consideration, but it's not for a lot of law firms. They think and maybe this is the right thing. There's lots of reasons behind this. You know,
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AI, Jenny, either different beast people experimenting with how it's used. Sometimes the ROI isn't going to be clear takeaway all of that. But I've always been a bit surprised by how they think, oh, you know, we'll get to we'll get to ROI.
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I've spoken to a couple of firms with huge wrong outs, including a flakora where ROI, they've said, oh, yeah, we're getting we're convinced that it was going to provide value, but they're not there.
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Putting metrics at the front and center of their decision making, which I thought was kind of interesting. Is that did that come across strongly.
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There were definitely conversations about how you define ROI, how you prioritize ROI. And I had a great follow up conversation on my podcast with Nick, what Nick West that Michigan, Durea, who's a leader, obviously in this space.
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And Nick and I had a long conversation about what does value look like? What does ROI look like? What are the most important metrics that you should capture? And in this conversation, I was honest about what we were trying to achieve.
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And I don't think that there is a mandate to force ROI conversations, nor is there a free free pass on gauging ROI. I mean, every organization is making an investment not only of time, but certainly of of, you know, money and their budgeting for this and they're thinking about it long term.
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So this has to be part of the conversation people are in different places in their journey and some have just deployed some have been doing this for years. And as a result, one size doesn't fit all, but I tried in every section of this report to give suggestions.
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So for example, if you're trying to measure the performance of your junior and middle-level lawyers, for example, try to connect realization rates year over year or try to find some way to gauge progress, because those are numbers that you have.
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And they're excellent at keeping track of how much of that time they've gotten paid for. So those are easy numbers. And the other point that I tried to make was that this cross collaboration between disciplines within a firm is only growing that it can't just be the superstars and innovation and knowledge management and AI.
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It has to also be the talented folks in time and billing. It has to be individuals in IT. It really just has to be this cross functional journey. And I think that's really important. I just want to tell people that you can download it.
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It's logora.com/ROI-law-firms.
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And go download it. It's interesting that you talk about reallocating time as well. I know we must move on briefly, because obviously we have such an agenda always.
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And we have a lot of work to do with the process of reallocating time. So by that, presumably, the worst thing that they were seeing, they were gaining time back.
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Everyone, 100% are saving time. But time isn't really an ROI component. It's much more about what will you do with that time?
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And then the return will be in having more time to take on work, you otherwise would have declined, or the technology allowing you to scale in a way that was otherwise not possible.
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Could you now do a project that would have taken a team of lawyers a week to a couple of lawyers in it? And I really talented paralegal just a day.
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And are there projects that were too document intensive? And is there a way to view it across the spectrum? I mean, there was a lot of discussion about thinking through projects and being able to serve clients in a way that you otherwise weren't able.
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Obviously, law firms are already providing super high quality work. So the question wasn't, you know, what is that?
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You know, trust in the work, response time, there were just so many areas where there were improvements in the experience. And law firms will this year, I think, really be able to measure ROI in a way that is meaningful.
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And I'm saying, if I'm honored and lucky enough to do it again next year, I think that we will get much richer data. And there will be a way to do a year of your comparison. That's really important for our industry.
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It's a, it's a, it's a tangent, but it's so relevant. I'd love to see them really dive into also who is doing what and what impact that has on our, our, our work because I feel like one of the things that's being overlooked is how, how new technology will change who is doing what?
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So, for example, I've referred to partners, perhaps doing research that they would have handed off to an associate, you know, and, and they were because it's because it's there within their workflow because they can instantly ask a question and they'll have the citation and they can immediately, you know, I mean, a lot of this is they would know anyway, you know, but, but, you know, the, but the point is that things that they would have naturally just handed off is it because it would take a little bit more time.
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It can be done pretty instantly. What impact is that going to have on who is doing what and what impact is that going to then have on on our, what does it all mean? You know, I feel like it's a tangent, but it's equally super relevant and, and, and then in terms of preparing for things to change and training people to do things differently.
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You know, I think that that's, it's, it's relevant completely.
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You know, I was lucky to help to co facilitate a luncheon this week in Washington, DC with Lucy Allen, who's the chief growth officer at Barbary, who you know, who's now an special congratulations to her, who is now the co CEO of Barbary, which was just announced.
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And we were lucky to host an incredible cross section of knowledge management, innovation, professional development, training and development, just all of these really exceptional leaders that aren't often brought together.
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There are events for knowledge management. There are events for professional development. There are events for innovation.
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We don't typically bring those groups together and yet exactly your point. We are seeing a shift in who's getting the work, where the work is being distributed. This technology is enabling senior professionals to rely less on some of their junior support team because the answer is right there for them.
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And they're becoming very adept because it's easy to use. And the answers are increasingly trustworthy. So the vetting isn't, isn't as crucial for a basic question that relies on a proven document set.
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And so we had this great conversation and it was just helpful as you know, because we both are lucky to facilitate some of these discussions, to bring people together to try to work out the issues.
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And Lucy was great in teasing out some of those really important points. And I think that you're going to see that being a real focus this year, just in terms of how do we rebalance the training and development.
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And the thing that came out of this research and that has come out of a lot of my discussions over the course of the past few months, six months because I was just at League of Week is that the exceptional service and technology that company like LaGora is providing, but also let's just be even here, Lexus, protégé, Harvey, there are a lot of teams, Thompson Reuters, there are a lot of teams that are competing in this game.
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But the emphasis on exceptional client service and great technology and following a roadmap that's realistic and honest, I think it's really leveling up everyone's game and it's great for the buyer.
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That I think is just a general observation and perspective that only helps all of us in legal.
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Yeah, no, I agree with you completely. I mean, there's also sort of challenges, speaking to people a lot about strategy and it's interesting because we're doing a lot of inside view. So we're speaking with market leaders on on a podcast with the inside view and I'm preparing for one.
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And he wants to talk about some of the funding that's coming into the sector, which obviously LaGora is one and then there's many others.
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And it's really interesting to this sort of like the people sort of perception of that and people's, you know, the challenges, if it does present any challenges, I think there's, I think there's so much being driven.
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There's a real energy in the sector and I think that's great for everybody. I think that there's also just like a tiny bit of like just nervousness, you know, like is this sustainable? This has to be sustainable.
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I think that's something for all vendors to be really focused on with their clients, you know, making sure that they felt they feel everything they're doing right now is sustainable.
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Listen, money in the space is great for everyone. I just, I'm positive about the investments. They know certainly the people who are putting their money here know generally more than we do and have done a lot of due diligence on this.
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And we saw this. We've seen this in cycles. I've been studying this space for almost 20 years. This is actually my 20th year and of being on my own as R.E. Kaplan advisors.
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And we've seen, I know, I know, it'll be awesome, it'll be in June and at Lexpo. So there you go. No, but I just, I just think it's really important for us to not be distracted in some ways by areas we really, we can't control who puts money where I think that the money talks about the importance of the space.
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But we saw this. We saw this with CLM. We've seen this with the discovery. We've seen questions about numbers and valuations. I think that that is almost like a side story, at least for what I do, you know, I'm trying to make sure that we focus on our what tools are people using where are they getting value?
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Are we training people properly? Are clients being served? Are people avoiding mistakes? And that was, you know, that was one of the things that I asked in my research was like is the level of trust is becoming trust?
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Are you, are you, are you built? Is the judgment? You know, all of these, all of these components that we've been talking about. And you know, just to try to start a conversation, the cool thing about releasing the research was there were a lot of comments in the various LinkedIn posts about people digging through and asking questions.
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And I was very happy to have a conversation because each conversation kind of leaves us closer to an answer. And that's I think what a lot of people are trying to get to.
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Yeah, I was saying that we're in this privilege position as well. Like within this same prep call up with with the inside, the inside view.
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I was saying that we're in this privilege position of of reflecting dialogue that helps to advance the conversation, right? I never particularly sometimes I'll post opinion pieces where a lot of the time I'll post reflections on my conversations with people.
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I don't really feel like there's a definitive answer to a lot of things right now, but actually what there is is amazing conversations that we're lucky enough to present to to to present to you know to give a public beauty, which I think is a very privileged position to be in.
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But yeah, it's kind of fun. Do you know what my biggest takeaway I think from our conversation today is that AI years are like dog years, I think, are that's that so?
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Yeah, and I was trying to explain to somebody how I think something's are changing and I was laughing that when I, after I graduated college in 1983, I was lucky to spend a year living in Japan.
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So I was an English teacher through something called the jet program and I was in a public high school in in Kobe outside Kobe. And I would always make a mistake about taking the local train versus the express train because you know everything is absolutely certainly 1993 94.
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It was everything was absolutely Japanese and I was a little embarrassed and my Japanese wasn't very good and they don't want to keep asking people questions and so I would end up taking the wrong train. And I said we are now in a moment where certainly in legal services.
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You know, if you ever saw like a map on the on the New York City subway, for example, there are express lines are local lines and so the express lines just have fewer dots.
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There are just fewer stops that you need to make in the in the same way that a partner may not need to make one of those stops with an associate but may need to do that with a senior associate.
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And so I just kept thinking like we're getting faster and we're stopping less but we're getting to the destination earlier and by getting there earlier, there are other things that you can do to enhance the experience.
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And it just I was trying to, you know, because I'm always trying to think of a visual, I do a lot of infographics.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I love it. It's like eight years and not like normal years. So I was in each a item where there is but so I wrote you and I spoke about orchestration though given the speed of things that are happening and I wrote a piece last week actually about the importance of orchestration and that came that that came up again and I thought about actually I wrote it.
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Yeah, I wrote it this week and I thought about conversation about how orchestration because of the speed of which things are moving this need and I don't I think that I just I described it as in a we need an innovation spine.
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So you need to have something that holds everything together that enables you to maintain it like make sure that you're in charge.
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So even if it's even if it's a heavy degree of automation and eventually identity, you need to have the spine through which everything kind of slots into and that's that's orchestration and this is something that's super fascinating.
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It's on it's only good technology.com. I call it innovation needs a spine if anyone does want to have a look.
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But I really thought about our conversation about how orchestration given the speed of things is coming up more and more.
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And I'm actually have to say I'm super excited about this so next month on May 5th I am the MC of the Lexus nexus AI symposium at the Harvard Club in New York City and I am excited to hear Jeff Blight who is the general council event,
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and I think it'll be just you know, there are lots of leaders who are going to be there and in the various panel discussions, but that is an element of what's changing our industry that I think will be extra powerful part of the conversation, which is important for us to be having just where where is this, you know, how how much change can we consume.
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At once and everyone I talked to is like gosh doesn't it seem faster like it seems faster and I joked that we were talking on our discussion about the general council report that the general council is every year I do this general council report this is year seven and we try to characterize the general council and you know in 2020 they were the chief legal officer and chief medical officer and then they became sort of chief procurement officer and chief transformation and little global.
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Global global diplomat et cetera this year was sort of the unfazed general council because you know you imagine someone juggling and then you imagine putting one pin on fire and then all the pins on fire and then adding spikes to all the pins and that's kind of like what's happening and it's just and then bouncing on a ball and you know holding away like the cat and I just think that there's a really interesting element here of just being super versatile and that being the core component so orchestration and versatility let's call those two.
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At least two of the words of the year.
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I see I speak to less general council I speak to a lot of legal operations and I see them being it's you can't generalize there's so much so many people at different stages so many different size so many you know often it does correlate to the size of the company into the size of the team and the resource and all of that kind of stuff in terms of the level of advancement but
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they I hosted a I hosted a webinar with Harvey and and actually it was I have to tell you it was our largest we were we were over subscribed we had well over a thousand people sign up for that one which was kind of funny because we were like what happens now to just fall over but no.
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But so and Russell Dentsy is the head of legal operations at Harvey you know we were talking about a genticae I that was one of the purposes of the conversation we had Joe Cohen from Harvey and we had a millie lemon who's one of the engineers and we had
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a really practical conversation about a genticae I and actually one of the things the Russell's got a big team I but comparatively big team so he has like seven operations people in his team the legal team is about 300 people 250 lawyers and they are so they're advanced right and they've been using Harvey they want an early adopter but they taking you know they they're taking a cautious approach they very much
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wanting to be in control the the the Russell's whole messaging was around you know we need to be in charge of this we're not going to take any risks they're not heavily regulated industry so they they can do things that perhaps banks and you know they they they've got different concerns but
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but yeah it was just interesting I just really thought that that was that was his his whole vein was they're doing some exciting stuff they're doing a lot of automation and they're probably further ahead than a lot of people in terms of workflows and automating workflows and I'm not suggesting for a minute that they're not doing some really cool stuff but I was just interested you know that they're still that tone of we need to we need this to be governed we need to be in charge of this.
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Well I actually read so Richard Troman shared a piece that gave one of the co-founders of Harvey wrote for X and so I read Richard's analysis and then I read Gabe's piece about agents and the use of agents and it it fascinates me the whole there are two things that I read this week that I found really interesting I found Gabe's piece really interesting and also the two scat and leaders who are now advising one is heart advising Harvey and the others advising
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letharra and I forget the other company but it was it was in law.com and it was fascinating actually put that into notebook LM so that I could listen to the analysis of what they were saying and it was just fascinating and I've started doing that a lot more like I'll take you know the annual report for example Larry thinks annual report and put it into
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a notebook LM just to listen to how they are talking about it and pulling out key themes and it was fascinating I'll just say that the one the most interesting thing I pulled out of that for example
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life thinks of course the famous CEO BlackRock he said nobody's paying attention to this but the most important jobs for the future are essentially jobs of the past that we need expert electricians we need people who can build data centers
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and it was so interesting you know I'm a fix a guy and I love that and I'm just always thinking about that and I had it got me thinking because when I was doing my research one of the things that I recommended to people is to think about the data they already have and try to deploy it in a way that will help them measure
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and engage ROI and progress and if anybody is like me and has a garage and fix this things and I have sort of redundant tools and I have things my wife so I was like don't you already have that I know I don't know where that is I don't know what bin that tube of whatever is so I just buy it again and my point was that it
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has a lot of firms and certainly in corporations and that's why legal operations is such an incredible part of a law department but there's all this data there's all this information there are all these resources and we don't use all of them and I don't know that necessarily you need to rein you need to invest more you just need to sort of you
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think where what you have is and what you've done you know has where that's taken you and figure out how you can use that with what you're now investing in to push you forward
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I'm doing webinars and in-person sessions on data and data strategy this year and I think it's going to be I can't wait this is there we've had a lot of conversations about data already and it's going to be another year of really starting to learn from learn from people you know
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this is what I'm excited about I'm doing a webinar coming up with the leads where we're going to be looking at some success stories maybe get a client on the early stages of just prepping it but you know the more people at the end more end users that we can get on talking about their experiences the better I think you know
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like in terms of what can we've done this and this is how and what we've learned and these are the challenges and these are maybe the mistakes wow
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Wow Caroline I'm excited for our next time so there's a lot happening here but we'll try to we'll try to chart that change so
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boom in change in legal
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all right well wonderful to see you wonderful to all of our viewers and our listeners and I'm just overwhelmed with the attention great great
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episode thank you I'm sorry bye
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(wind blowing)
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♪ Yeah ♪
