Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Jack Shepherd

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Web 2.0 innovation collaboration, metadata got the world turning as fast as it can hear how technology can help legally speaking with two of the top legal technology experts, authors and lawyers, Dennis, Kennedy, and Tom Mighell. Welcome to the Kennedy Mighell report here on the Legal Talk Network

Dennis Kennedy:

And welcome to episode 368 of the Kennedy Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor.

Tom Mighell:

And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy:

In our last episode, we shared our thoughts on the current state of legal blogging and renewed our commitments to get better about blogging or at least posting online more frequently. Or did we Y’all have to listen.

Tom Mighell:

You have to listen

Dennis Kennedy:

In this episode, we have another very special guest in our Fresh Voices series in Fresh Voices. We want to showcase different and compelling perspectives on legal tech from around the world and on even more topics than legal tech. We have another fabulous guest, Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell:

Well, Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy Mighell report, we are thrilled to continue our fresh voices on Legal Tech interview series with Jack Shepherd, who among other things is principal business consultant at iManage and a visible and insightful contributor to the legal tech world. We want our Fresh Voices series to not only introduce you to terrific leaders in the legal tech space, but also provide you with their perspective on the things that we think you ought to be paying attention to. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip website or observation that you can get started using the second that this podcast is over. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome Jack Shepherd to our Fresh Voices series. Jack, welcome to the Kennedy Mighell Report.

Jack Shepherd:

Thank you so much. 368, that is I think a Mighellstone episode, right?

Tom Mighell:

It will be now, yes. Before we get started, can you tell our audience a little bit more about yourself, what a principal business consultant does at iManage and what our audience needs to know about you before we get started?

Jack Shepherd:

Sure. So thanks everyone for listening. Really appreciate that. My role at iManage is primarily to lead what we call business consulting functions in Europe. And what that means is I’m responsible for all of the non-technical aspects of running and knowledge management, document management, et cetera, projects. So I’m all over stuff like process flows. I’m all over as an ex-lawyer myself, the value of projects like these things to lawyers, and I think that will probably become clear in a lot of this, the content we’ll discuss today. I am one of those people that like to have my fingers in lots of different pies. So I also influence our strategy around how we’re deploying AI tooling and I work very closely with products and marketing teams that I manage to influence our general strategy around how we can deliver innovation for our customers.

Dennis Kennedy:

Great. Jack, first of all, it’s so awesome for us to get perspectives from outside the US on the podcast, and that’s one of the things we wanted to do in this series. So we’re looking forward to that. We start out by saying sometimes I get frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technology, both older and newer technologies and the benefits of these technologies to those in the legal profession. Would you talk about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology?

Jack Shepherd:

So when I first started out doing this stuff, as I said a minute ago, I haven’t done this for the entirety of my career. When I first started working in legal technology, it was because I was excited about technology and what I found at the time was that not every lawyer is as excited as I was about technology. In fact, lots of people are scared by it. And what I’ve learned over the years is that you have to adopt a twofold focus. When you’re trying to convince lawyers of the value of technology, you first have to answer the question, what can technology do for your business? That’s important because it generates top-down incentives. So it links technology to business outcomes like profitability, retaining talent, all that good stuff. The second thing you have to think about is what technology can do for you personally in your work.

Otherwise you can’t persuade people that it’s worth giving up their very valuable time to learn how to do new process differently or to pick up a new piece of technology. So often I see technology deployed without either of these things being thought through or defined. And that I think is a real mistake because the only people that will be interested in that are people like me who are ex-law coders enjoy technology for the sake of technology. And in my experience that is a small albeit growing number of lawyers. So that’s my approach is to focus on business outcomes and what things can do at a personal level for people.

Tom Mighell:

So let’s stretch that out a little bit and at the beginning you said that not all lawyers are excited about technology, many are afraid. I would say that there’s probably another subset of lawyers who are just not interested for whatever reason, maybe ambivalent, I guess maybe that’s the better word for it. Dennis and I talk a lot on the podcast about the current state of technological competence among lawyers here in the United States, which we seem to have a low opinion of generally. And I guess I wanted to get your opinion about it, I guess in general and how is it different where you are versus where we might be seeing it from a US-centric perspective?

Jack Shepherd:

Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I mean, first of all, I would say that I think it’s great that in the US you have this duty of technology competence because that doesn’t exist here. I’m not sure if it exists in many other jurisdictions. What I kind of hear from people is that it’s maybe not something that’s actively applied. It’s not like the regulators are going around law firms and saying, Hey, you dunno how to program a macro, you’re going to lose your license.

Tom Mighell:

It is a rule without T, it is not being enforced anywhere.

Jack Shepherd:

Correct? Yeah. So I wonder whether the real meaning of that rule then is that if you are a lawyer and you don’t know how to use Westlaw and you dunno how to send an email and you dunno how to use Microsoft Word, that means you literally cannot do your job. And I think if that is the extent of the technology competence rule, we probably have that covered in our jurisdiction through other rules that don’t specifically refer to technology competence. What I would say is that when I first started practicing, and I should frame everything I say, by the way, you won’t be able to tell this maybe even by looking at me, but I haven’t actually been around the legal industry for very long. I qualified as a lawyer. Well I started my training as a lawyer in 2013, so that gives you some idea of my experience bracket in terms of time.

But even then when I started practicing, it was almost a sense of pride among some lawyers that they were a dinosaur or a Luddite when it comes to technology. And they would use those exact words with sort of our rise sMighell on their face. When I came in, and I’ve got a bit of a background in technology anyway and I made some pretty outrageous decisions in my practice. The first one was that I presented a legal research memo and PowerPoint rather than in Word, and the partner initially looked at it, which was like, what is this? What is thing? And we ended up presenting it to a client and the client loved it. Like I can digest this. I work in diagrams and pictures and this works well for me. The second thing I did was I turned up to a client meeting without a notebook.

Once I turned up to the client meeting with an iPad and an Apple pencil, and I dunno whether it’s like a badge of honor, but a lot of the other partners in the team immediately went out to the Apple store and bought an iPad, an Apple pencil. I dunno whether it’s just made them look good. But what I would say is that over the years noticed, I hear more and more stories like that of people maybe in their personal lives seeing the benefit of technology and using it more. I think that there has been an increase in that respect of things and fewer people see it as a badge of honor to be a Luddite and a dinosaur. I think particularly with the advent of things like ai, people know these things are going to have an impact on the business and I think most people understand that they need to be more competent in these tools.

So I personally notice an increase in terms of how that differs from geography to geography. I dunno if I have a view on that. I would say that in more hierarchical cultures, I won’t call out specific countries, I don’t think that would be fair, but in some countries they are more hierarchical in how they approach the practice of law and I hear about, for example, some attorneys that refuse to use document management system, they will send a document sometimes in hard copy to their assistant and they see it as their job to interact with the technology. So I do still see these instances and there are a few geographical splits, but I’m not quite sure where to draw them.

Dennis Kennedy:

It’s interesting, I sort of think even with AI that I hear a lot of lawyers kind of proud to be dinosaurs and are basically all but saying they they’re hoping that career is over and they exit successfully before the big asteroid hits. So that is out there. I want to push you a little bit on the difference between the Europe and I guess the rest of the world in some ways and the us I have a habit of saying to people sometimes just to start conversation with lawyers in the US to say, I feel like the London law firms, lawyers in Europe, lawyers in Australia, lawyers in other parts of the world are actually doing a lot more creative things with technology and kind of pushing the boundaries of the practice of law more and maybe using the tools out there better. So let me put you on the spot and ask it this way. Am I off base when I make those claims or is there something there that you also see?

Jack Shepherd:

I definitely see a split between Europe and US that much I can definitely say is true. I think what you said, I probably would’ve agreed what you said five, six years ago, but I see a lot of us firms doing what looks like pretty forward thinking stuff when it comes to AI and stuff like that. There’s a lot of people that are very, very, to be honest, I have limited insight in what actually happens on the ground, but at least I hear a lot of us firms talking about this stuff a lot more. There’s a lot of hires going on right now around data science teams, things like that in the us which is really, really interesting to see. I think historically it’s right that Europe maybe had that reputation for being a little bit forward, more forward thinking. Maybe that’s because of how profits are divided in these firms.

Maybe the eat what you kill model in the US means there’s this less of a need to build collective business process around these things. Whereas in Europe, obviously there’s more kind of profit pooling that goes on. I think that maybe the other distinction I draw, and I see this a lot with my knowledge management projects, is that I can go into one call with a US firm and talk all about knowledge management and the kind of things we’ll talk about will be building databases of deal terms or enterprise search one search over a single pane of glass over all their content sources. But then I’ll go into another meeting with a London based firm and we’ll be talking about knowledge management, but we’ll be talking about something completely different, which is creating content, creating precedents, getting lawyers sharing knowledge. If I go to the US firms and talk to ’em about that, they’ll say, we’re never going to do that.

Our attorneys will never give up their time to share knowledge with people. If I go to the firms and tell them about enterprise search, they’re like, what? That sounds like an awful idea. Having us search across content of variable quality and unknown provenance, no, we don’t want that. I’m actually seeing a convergence in the approaches on both of these things, if I’m honest, which is great to see. I dunno why that is, maybe because of the international expansion of firms both from Europe into the US and vice versa. But it’s definitely an interesting trend to watch.

Tom Mighell:

That is so interesting to me that divide and I’m glad to see that there’s a convergence happening. I think it kind of needs to happen to a certain extent. Jack, we love to talk about collaboration on this podcast. We wrote a book about it, so we talk about it whenever we can. So one of the questions we always ask our Fresh Voices guests are what are your favorite ways to collaborate? Whether that is with coworkers, with colleagues, with customers, whoever it is, happy to have this be a self-serving answer and talk about iManage if you want to, but happy to also, if you want to talk about something outside of all of that, just tell me what excites you about collaboration.

Jack Shepherd:

Yeah, I’ve got a couple of things. First one I really like doing in-person collaboration. I joined iManage during the pandemic. There’s a lot of people that maybe I haven’t spent as much time with as I did in my previous firm, so I don’t know them as well. But I do think that particularly where you are collaborating with somebody who maybe comes from a different perspective on a particular subject matter, I think collaborating in person, everyone’s getting in front of the screen is definitely the best way of doing that. So I’m a fan of bringing that back for particular purposes. I’m a very visual thinker as well. So to the extent we’re in a remote or an in-person setting, I use tools like Miro. I think Miro is quite poor for finished work products. I always say Miro is where work products goes to die. It’s great for ideation, drawing up diagrams, this is how it could look, this is how it might work, this is how it connects to different bits. It’s great for getting thoughts out of people’s brains and into a way that others can digest them. I think you need to put it into a more formalized format after you’ve been doing that brainstorming exercise though. And the final thing I wanted to talk about, which has saved me a lot of time, and actually my clients love it, is there’s a tool that I use called Loom. It’s not very complicated. It’s basically just a video. You don’t want to zoom recording.

Tom Mighell:

It’s a great tool for instructions and stuff like that. Yeah,

Jack Shepherd:

And what I often do is if a client sent an email that requires a complex explanation and maybe I’m just struggling to find the words in an email, I just record a quick five minute video explaining it and people really like that and often saves having a meeting, which can be the arranging of the meeting is the painful bit. I really hate that. I wish someone would solve that problem.

Tom Mighell:

Quick follow up, so agree with you totally that tools like Miro can be where stuff goes to die. So where do you get it out to? Where does it go when you do that? I’m just curious, where does it usually go for you?

Jack Shepherd:

Yeah, well, it depends. Classically what I’ll do on a consulting engagement is we will do some user interviews and understand the lie of the land in a given subject area and we’ll do a load of process mapping, which we will do on Miro. We will then run through with the client on the call what the different process steps are and we’ll say, look, we think this bit’s a problem. We’ll think that bit’s a problem. And then I’m a bit for things like process mapping. I think people spend a lot of time doing them, but they don’t fully understand why they are doing them. And so for me, this needs materializing into a list of things that we are going to solve in this project because when you want to present this stuff to senior people like GCs, law firm partners, et cetera, they don’t want to see a miro. They want to see a one pager proposal. So generally that kind of thing is what I have in mind.

Tom Mighell:

We have a lot more questions for Jack Shepherd, but we first need to take a break for a quick word from our sponsors and then we’ll be back.

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Jack Shepherd at iManage. We found in our Fresh Voices series that we love to hear about our guest career paths and our audience does as well. Would you talk about your career path and what kinds of things you’ve done to get you into your current role and focus and to extent you’re allowed to share some of these things, some of the cool things that you might be working on that get you jazzed up about what you’re doing?

Jack Shepherd:

Yeah, you’re going to have to cut me off on this one. If I go off on one, there’s so many exciting things going on. To answer the first bit of your question, I’ll try and whiz through this, but I have always been someone interested in technology. I built a web design agency when I was aged 15 and learned to code and PHP and all that good stuff, dor content management systems, all that good stuff. I then tried to thought my career would go down that sort of engineering path. And then for reasons that probably we don’t have time to go into, I decided to actually study law instead. And I know those might seem like polar opposite kind of things to study, but that’s the decision I made really. I decided to study law by process of elimination. I didn’t really want to be a lawyer, but I ended up getting taken out for a dinner by Freshfields, which was the firm I subsequently joined and trained at while I was an insolvency lawyer.

So saved lots of companies from bankruptcy but also put a lot of companies into bankruptcy. I found though that I had this technology itch that it just wasn’t scratching and I thought I could do really well at this job, but I really miss being creative. And an opportunity came up at Freshfields to build a transaction management solution, which I took a six month secondment to do, and then it became a permanent role that taught me a huge amount about how to do this stuff. I can talk if you want about all the mistakes I made on that project, of which there were many, but eventually was mentored by some really smart people and we delivered a really, really successful product, which I’m very, very proud of, but ultimately wanted to go and work for a technology company partly to work more directly with technology and to work with a wider range of law firms.

And that is when I ended up joining iManage. And at iManage. It’s been a really exciting year because we have recently launched our cloud-based knowledge management system called Insight Plus. Insight Plus is awesome. It’s being adopted by a number of law firms right now, specifically to help people build things like knowledge bases, but then eventually towards the end of the year do things like matter intelligence and deal intelligence and that kind of stuff. And it’s been great working with some really, really talented people, both the products end of the spectrum and the data science and technology end of the spectrum on that. And I’ve really enjoyed consulting customers getting their content in order, talking about taxonomies, stuff like that so they can make the most of it. The stuff that’s really cool though is that and working really closely on all the bits in our DMS product and our other products where we can use AI to help people in their workflows.

I’m a big believer that I don’t think there’s going to be an AI product. I think that it’s going to pop up in lots of different places where you most need it, and if we’ve done it well, you won’t even know that it’s AI doing stuff. So really looking forward to delivering some great outcomes from people there. Being able to actually find your documents a little bit more easily, being able to get to the right part in a contract that’s going to take you ages to review all those kinds of stuff. I think it’s a really, really exciting time to be at a company like iManage.

Tom Mighell:

So you started to get into what is our kind of obligatory area around artificial intelligence. We have to ask the questions chat. GPT is still very high in the hype cycle right now, so we want to ask questions about it, about what it means for lawyers and legal technology. But I’m really interested more in you getting into a little bit more detail about what iManage is doing around its DMS offering or if it’s also being extended to knowledge management too. Can you be more specific and go a little bit deeper into what iManage is doing around ai?

Jack Shepherd:

Sure, yeah. And I can also give you my personal stance on these things, which may or may not reflect where I manage gets out. My personal stance on these things is that when I’m looking at use cases for ai, first of all, I don’t really like the question, what use cases are there for ai? I strongly believe that in all of product development and legal technology initiatives, you first and foremost need to be guided by what you actually want to do at a business level. And things like AI come in and they influence that and they provide you with more solutions, but they do not lead it. I think if you’re in the area where AI starts to lead these conversations, you end up building things that are pointless and unfocused because you don’t have anything to anchor them in. So that’s the first thing.

And my personal approach on these kind of things is you distinguish between autopilot use cases and assistant use cases. Seems to me the world is very much trying to focus on autopilot use cases. Right now we’re seeing a lot of people say things like AI can draft your contracts or AI can draft your research memos, et cetera. I think those use cases frankly missed the point a little bit. I don’t think that the purpose of a research memo is the memo itself. I think that the purpose of a research memo is to evidence the fact that you have somebody that knows about that area of law and can advise on you and can spot the nuances. The whole exercise does not end with pieces of words on a paper. So I’m very much invested in looking at the assistant use cases because I think that the way that the large language models work is that despite a lot of people saying they have reasoning capabilities, I really don’t think they do.

I think that we need humans to primarily drive these things because they’re the ones that have judgment. We might have some sort of AI development in the next few years that does have more reasoning, but we don’t have it right now. So with that in mind, the use cases that I’m most excited about are the assistant ones rather than the autopilot ones. And I think this will appeal to a lot of people. So for example, at iManage, we have had iManage document classification service running in beta for a couple of years now, and what it does is it gets around this pain point people have of categorizing things. Some firms implement this workflow way in order to save something in iManage, you have to fill out a long form that tells everybody about the document. And what do people do when they’re forced with that?

They just put miscellaneous for every single question if you enforce it. So it’s not very helpful. So what the document classification does is it will classify for example, what type of contract a given contract is. So if it’s a share purchase agreement, it will have that in metadata. So when somebody is searching for an example share purchase agreement or they’re searching for a particular share purchase agreement, they want to dig out, they don’t have to do that thing where they type in SPA or stock purchase agreement or share purchase agreement or asset, et cetera. So having a structured where finding things, and that’s not, by the way, that’s not even generative ai, that’s just traditional machine learning, which we’ve been working on for many years. The stuff that I think is really cool, I’ll give you an example of what we’re currently building and testing with customers is in our Insight Plus product, and it’s this feature called Ask Knowledge.

And given my primary job at iManage is to consult people on how they build these knowledge bases, the next step is to then say, how can you extract more value from those knowledge bases? So we use a combination of things to help people find documents they couldn’t have otherwise found. So that would be through a vector search. So you don’t know the right keywords to type in. Well, that’s not a problem. We can find semantically linked keywords to help you find things. But then also for certain search queries, we can act in that assistant capacity of saying, look, you’ve got 10 documents to read. We can start to prioritize which ones we think you might want to read first based on the semantic relationship to your question. And we can try and synthesize some of them as well into a response. Now all of these things rely on you actually reading the underlying documents themselves, but what they do is they help you focus your reading, you come to do it.

So thus stuff’s pretty powerful. We’ve also got another thing at iManage called Ask iManage, which allows you to select one or more documents and ask questions about them. So this could be really useful, for example, for where you’re looking to spot market trends in documents like have loan assignment clauses become more friendly as the lender or the borrower over a period of five years. Well get your bank of loan agreements, which the classification will help you do. And then you can ask it these questions and it will at least have a stab of answering the question. And if it doesn’t get it right, we’ll at least point you in the right direction to help you analyze it. So that’s kind of the stuff we’re doing at iManage. Lots of other stuff as well, but those are the things that are public right now. Very cool. Yeah, it is.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I was going to say, I was thinking about the hype curve because in the last 48 hours in legal ai, it sort of felt like we took a big no dive down the hype curve, which is not unexpected, but it is kind of interesting that the directions people go off in. So let’s talk a little bit about this assistant versus autopilot thing. I like the idea of this assistant, and one of the last things that you talked about is where I think that lawyers really have difficulty seeing the potential value of ai. So if you said, if I took the last five years of the agreements I did, people could say, oh, I would like to find forms to use and stuff like that. And I think the AI could be really interesting to see, as you said, trends, do people negotiate differently? What are those things?

And just kind of turn it loose and see what comes up. And so there is this assistant thing where you say, and it goes back to what you were saying about the, I want to know how the technology helps me personally. And so the summaries, all those things just help me personally applying checklists, all these sorts of things. There’s also, I’m going to spend a summer looking at the notion of AI in agents, which is a really amorphous concept and there’s a number of ways to think about agents, but I think the agent piece could be interesting in process automation, as you said, when you do those things or you’re doing due diligence or other things like that, what’s your thinking along those lines? Is this sort of AI agent space something that you also find interesting?

Jack Shepherd:

Hugely, and I’ll be honest, this is a trend. I’ve noticed more people talking about this. They call it, I dunno how to pronounce it, aic ai, maybe that’s the right expression. I’ve seen a lot of talk about this in the last two months. And on the one hand it worries me because you are putting stuff through a process and by its nature, if you’re using ai, it’s, it’s not going to be a rigidly defined process because if it were, why would you use AI for it? But maybe you can have a rigidly defined process that uses natural languages as interface instead of a form. But I don’t think that’s what people mean by agents. I think what people mean by agents is various steps in the process. The AI will work out where to put you, where to root you in the next step. And I have actually seen some startups do some interesting stuff with this that do actually put guardrails around it, which I find really, really interesting.

I think that one thing that’s common to all of this stuff is that when we’re thinking about use cases of AI and agents are included in this, the thing I always keep coming back to is look at the journey and how important the journey is versus just getting the end product. You take a sewing machine for example, I don’t think we really missed much through people, not hand stitching stuff, but if you take my other example of a legal research memo, even if AI could produce a research memo that was of the same standard as a lawyer, I think we missed quite a lot in the journey there. I think that in writing these things, you flex your brain muscles and you think about issues you wouldn’t have thought about if you wouldn’t have written something. And I think that if your job is just to review something, I think you are biased by what’s already on the paper.

And again, you might not be flexing brain muscles in the same way. And I think that the journey of a legal research task is about flexing brain muscles. So that I think is a theme that we’re going to keep coming back to with agents. I think that there’ll still be quite a lot of process definition work that sits behind it as well. And I think a lot of prompt engineering work to make sure that the right inputs are rooted to the correct places in the correct workflows. But I think you’re right, Dennis. I think this is a really trending topic right now. And it seemed like six months ago everyone was talking about retrieval augmented generation as the trending topic. There’s been some research recently that’s kind of caused a bit of a chilling effect on the excitement of that. And I think agents are going to be the thing people are going to be talking about for the rest of the year.

Dennis Kennedy:

The thing about agents and AI that’s intriguing to me is that even in process automation, so part of your work is going into these places where they have really bad processes that were somehow put together by humans, and those humans are afraid to turn AI loose in a rigorous kind of way. And then we’re also kind of analyzing, humans are analyzing things by the seat of the pants and going like, this will never work, or no one would ever agree to this or that kind of thing. And I just like that sort of second pair of eyes notion approach to ai.

Jack Shepherd:

Yeah, for sure. I think, by the way, one thing you maybe think about is that I think the other commonality all of these use cases have is they really do depend on content. I think that the same with they say I’m wrong about the drafting for a research memo. You definitely can’t get there if you’re just using chat GBT. You have to have it grounded in some data. iManage has recently announced a partnership with VL around the data they have, and it is for this reason that if you’re using it to generate stuff that needs to be grounded, and I think it’s the same with the agents as well, I think that you can’t just unleash them. I think you have to go in, speak to people, understand what the process is, design a better process, and then the agents become simply the way you’re operationalizing the process. At least that’s my theory. I’m not an expert on this stuff, but

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we’ve got a lot more to talk about with Jack Shepherd, but first we need to take another break for a quick word from our sponsors.

Dennis Kennedy:

And now let’s get back to the Kennedy Mighell report. I’m Dennis Kennedy,

Tom Mighell:

And I’m Tom Mighell. We’ve got time for just a few more questions with our special guest Jack Shepherd at I iManage. Jack, my last question is always what I call the best advice question, which is what’s the best advice that you either have been given before or that you would give to others or maybe both if you think there’s something that covers both.

Jack Shepherd:

So I’ve been given a lot of great advice over the years, but I guess you’re most interested in the stuff that’s related to legal technology. And this was not a direct piece of advice, but it was a comment a partner made in a meeting once, and the comment was along the lines of, I wish all you technology people stop talking about technology. And what he meant was that what he meant was that instead of dropping names of software products everywhere and buzzwords about technology, talk about what your audience actually wants to hear, which is the impact of these things. So that’s really like understanding the concerns people might have when you’re talking to them about something and being proactive with these concerns, not hiding them from people say, look, introducing this new tool, you are going to say this, this and this about it. I get it. It’s all good. And then being really clear on what the tool does. So that advice has really caused me to really not adopt this hyper attitude to legal tech. I wouldn’t roll out a piece of tech on the basis it’s got ai. I would probably not want to mention AI at all in it to be honest. I probably just want to say what the impact is, what the concerns likely to be and what the benefits are to them.

Tom Mighell:

Usually in the work that I’m in when I talk with IT departments, when they talk with their legal department, the first thing they want to talk about is what the tool is and not about the problem they’re trying to solve or what the needs are, the company, and we have to start all over again when that’s so that’s great advice. That’s absolutely true.

Dennis Kennedy:

It also is that ironic thing where it’s lawyers known for using jargon are complaining about another group using jargon.

Jack Shepherd:

No, it is so true. And the other bit of jargon that kind of turned me off when I was a lawyer was business jargon. I remember when I first started working in legal technology, people used to talk to me about Stop solutionizing and we need to be agile here. One of the things you actually used to really roll me up when I was first doing product management was people asking me what problem I was solving In my experience, that phrase to us, we know what that phrase means, but in my experience, when you put that to an enthusiastic lawyer who just needs their enthusiasm channeled in the right way, it can be a real turnoff because it makes them feel like you are telling them to do things. Basically. Don’t tell people that they’re doing things wrong, basically try and channel their enthusiasm rather than shut it down.

Dennis Kennedy:

So let me finish with two questions. So I teach law students and I talk to a lot of new lawyers who are interested in finding career paths in legal tech and other non-traditional careers in law. So first, how would you encourage them and maybe point them in directions to explore that. And then we’ll end up with who are the fresh voices in legal tech for you that you would like to single out and see as part of our Fresh Voices series?

Jack Shepherd:

Well, I think that law students are really, really lucky with the opportunities they’ve got Now. A lot of even startups do internships and they accept people straight from college or university to work in them and they see the benefit of having a legal background. So I think I’d encourage law students and other people wanting to consider those career paths to have a look at what the technology companies are offering, but also to consider what they might want out of a career. I hear some law students will say, oh, I think I want to do lots of coding and stuff. And I say to, if you want to do coding, you should go be a coder. And you don’t necessarily need to do that in the legal industry. Knowing how to code can help you in a lot of respects, but it’s not a particularly vital thing.

And I think depending on what you want to do, if you want to do pure technology stuff and build products, a startup or a tech companies be a really good place for you, you’re more interested in the business angle and change angle work in a law firm or a legal ops team is also really a good place to be. And I wish I had these kinds of opportunities. Innovation teams are growing really, really quickly and I think that enthusiastic law students would be wise to look at those career opportunities. You also asked about other people, other fresh voices, and I do have four names actually, they are all, so I have to apologize for that. But the first one is Daniel Yim, who works at a company called Sideline. He’s a really good voice on LinkedIn. I love what he says because it’s always so pragmatic and real.

You have all these people saying, oh, why are lawyers not using project management tools, et cetera. And he’ll provide some really good reasons why they’re not doing that. And you have to tackle those reasons to make change. The second person is Remi Bon afe, who is an ex-colleague of mine. He’s based in a beautiful town in Belgium. He’s similar, got a very pragmatic view on things, but he’s one of those people that also likes tinkering with technology. So he’s got a really good blend of legal experience in technology and he works for a company called Ask Q. Third. Jenny Hochin, who is a colleague of mine, also an ex-lawyer, if you’ve been to I managers recent connect live conference, Lucina on stage, her enthusiasm for driving change in the legal world is contagious. And she’s very, very smart and well worth listening to. And finally, Alistair w. He is the legal technology attorney at Latham Watkins. He also has worked in the sales capacity at the startup. So I think what all of those people have in common is they have a real mix of skill sets and they’ve got some quite interesting perspectives to share.

Tom Mighell:

That’s awesome. Four new guests, Dennis. Excellent. This is how we do our recruiting. This is how this

Dennis Kennedy:

Is a self-generating segment. Exactly.

Tom Mighell:

And we love it. So

Jack Shepherd:

You could use AI agents to arrange your interviews

Tom Mighell:

With them. That is also a good idea. We want to thank Jack Shepherd, principal business consultant at iManage for being a guest on the show. Jack, tell us where people can either learn more about you or get in touch with you if they want to

Jack Shepherd:

Follow me on LinkedIn. If you’re based in the uk, send me a message. And my rule is I never say no. If someone says, shall we get a coffee? And similarly, if you want to have a chat on Zoom, I never say no to those requests. So LinkedIn is the place to be really

Dennis Kennedy:

Great. Thank you so much, Jack. You’re a fantastic guests, great information and advice for our listeners. And Tom and I both will be looking for ways to follow up on this conversation in one or more places in Europe. I’m sure. Now it’s time for our parting shots. That one tip website or observation you can use. The second this podcast is Jack, take it away.

Jack Shepherd:

If someone says something that you don’t agree with, the first thing you should think about is not why they’re wrong, but why they’re saying what they said.

Tom Mighell:

That’s very good. Unless of course you’re on X and you just need to respond immediately to it.

Dennis Kennedy:

Right?

Jack Shepherd:

There’s so many conversations where, yeah, no, right, right. Exactly. You got to get it out. Yeah, I know. We’ve all been

Tom Mighell:

Alright. My parting shot is not technology related. As listeners know, I have been on a kick lately of health related stuff as I begin to age and start paying more attention. And I listen the Peter Atilla podcast all the time, he has such great guests on, and there was this one on Foot Health that was recently where they describe how stability really comes from the strength of your feet. I mean, it’s not just good hip or knee or other strength, it’s how strong your feet are. And it was incredibly interesting to listen to the different things you could be doing. So they have foot exercises you can do, and talking about the right kind of shoes and even the notion that something like plantar fasciitis, it doesn’t have to be a permanent thing. It can be something that can be cured even and managed with the right treatment. So very interested in that. But frankly, all his guests that he gets on the show are really good. I will put the link in the show notes.

Dennis Kennedy:

So I decided, I’ve been thinking about Zoom. I rearranged my home office and the same is true of my office at Michigan State and the one I was using at Michigan is that when I have them set up in the best way for me to work, they’re less than ideal to say the least for Zoom. And I’m always trying to figure out the lighting and all this other stuff. And I decided that it could be a case of addition by subtraction. And so I’ve kind of gone back to the future and found that Zoom itself has collected a bunch of virtual backgrounds called Zoom, virtual backgrounds on the site. They’re really professionally done. There’s a lot of choices and I’ve just decided to not care about what’s behind me anymore on Zoom calls and just go with a really nice virtual background.

Tom Mighell:

And so that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy Mall report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Networks page for our show. You can find all of our previous podcasts along with transcripts on the Legal Talk Network site. If you want to subscribe to us, you can find us in iTunes. You can find us on the Legal Talk Network page or in your favorite podcast app. If you’d like to get in touch with us. Remember, you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn. We still love to get your questions, so please leave us a voicemail if you get a chance. That number is 7 2 0 4 4 1 6 8 2 0. So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell. And

Dennis Kennedy:

I’m Dennis Kennedy and you’ve been listening to the Kennedy Mighell report, a podcast on legal technology with an internet focus. We wanted to remind you to share the podcast with a friend or too that really helps us out. As always, a big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing and distributing this podcast. And we’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

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