Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Amy Brookbanks and Michael Kennedy of Addleshaw Goddard

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Web 2.0 innovation trend collaboration software, 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 387 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, Tom and I had a great conversation with Jason Tashea part of our Fresh Voices on legal tax series. Check the episode out, especially if you’re interested in access to justice issues. In this episode, we have another very special guest in our Fresh Voices series, or maybe we have a surprise and more than one guest in Fresh Voices. We want to showcase different and compelling perspectives on legal tech and much more. And as I mentioned in the first for the series, we have two fabulous guests in one fabulous show. 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 Amy Brook Banks legal operations consultant at Shaw Goddard in London, and her colleague Michael Kennedy, head of r and d Innovation and legal technology. Also at Shaw Goddard. Both are terrific contributors to the legal, tech and legal AI world. As you know from our previous podcast, 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 what they think you need to be paying attention to right now. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip website or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome Amy Brook Banks to our Fresh Voices series. Amy, welcome to the Kennedy Mall report.

Amy Brookbanks:

Thank you so much, Tom and Dennis, it’s an absolute pleasure to be here.

Tom Mighell:

Before we get started, can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself? Tell us what you’re doing at Shaw Goddard, what our audience should know about what you do, just to get us kicked off.

Amy Brookbanks:

Sure. So I’m a legal operations consultant in the innovation group at Shaw. Godard Shores is a UK law firm based in London, but we’re an international firm now. So we have offices in many different jurisdictions and many different partners across the globe. So our sole focus, my sole focus in my role as a legal operations consultant is working with in-house legal teams. So I help them to optimize their legal operating models, the way in which they operate. And to do this, I examine and analyze the way in which they currently work and help them come up with a design for how they want to work in the future. So this involves exploring how aligned they are with their business, how to achieve efficiency in their processes, how to allocate and manage their internal and external resources. And of course that includes where to deploy technology. So in order to do this, I then help them come up with strategies that will support their vision and support where they want to get to in the future.

Dennis Kennedy:

And I have the honor of welcoming the excellently named Mike Kennedy to the show. We’ll have to find out whether we are genetically related, but we can pretend to be for now. Mike, can you tell the audience a little more about yourself, what’s all happening at Shaw and your role in it and what our audience should know about what you do?

Michael Kennedy:

Yeah, thanks very much. Thanks, Dennis. Yeah, great name. There’s definitely some of us across the pond, so I’m sure we are decently related. So yeah, great to be on. So thanks both. And I run a research and development team within the same group that Amy’s in. So Amy’s talked about the ERV and what we do as a wider innovation group. My role is within that team looking at I guess future planning, future technology. I do a lot of market scanning. I spend a lot of time with technology vendors and technology solutions. We do a lot of work obviously to figure out which tools to buy. So we buy a lot of things off the market, do a lot of work on roadmap, supporting startups and I guess early entrance to the space and in what problems are we trying to solve and where do we see potential in that as well.

A big focus for me is basically being really purposeful about finding that time to step back and do some of the future horizon scanning. Looking at where do we want to be in two years, three years, four years, not getting too stuck in the delivery of today’s problems. And I’ve done a lot of that throughout my career and done a lot of the doing and I really enjoy the sort of the future looking what’s next stuff. So that’s a lot of what I do now, working with our vendors. I work closely with our software development team and our internal development team to build things, to push ideas into production and do all that type of stuff. And I guess broadly just really try to be across all the problems that we face in legal as a firm and how do we use a mixture of tech. I do use a mixture of process and different solutions to solve those problems. So I do a lot of proof of concepts, prototyping, opportunity spotting and stuff with our lawyers and with our clients as well. So I do a lot of internal focus a lot with third party solutions providers and I spend a lot of time with clients on, I guess what do they need to know around the tech education, things like that.

Dennis Kennedy:

Cool. Sounds like fun, Amy. First of all, it’s so awesome for us to have you as a guest on the podcast. I like to talk about communications first, so it’s not always easy to talk with lawyers about tech, and sometimes I get frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technology old and new and its benefits to people in the legal profession. Will you talk about your own approach to communicating lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology, about process and operation and what have you found that works well for you just in communication?

Amy Brookbanks:

Yeah, I’m completely aligned with that and empathy I think is my starting point. I do think that there’s a genuine fear of how to get to grips with this tech thing when it’s not something that naturally you don’t find easy to understand. And after all, lawyers are very highly trained in their areas and most of us, our lawyers or who have been lawyers, it didn’t form really part of our training, certainly in the early years. So empathy I think is a great thing. And I can also, from my firsthand experience, the first legal ops job I got, I was asked to source and deploy some legal tech and I had never worked with tech before, so I really can get it. I understand the fear that lawyers can feel. That said, I’m also very quick to explain to them that whilst legal tech won’t replace lawyers, lawyers who use legal tech will replace lawyers who do not use legal tech.

So it’s incredibly important that they do front it and face it and get up to speed with what tech can do for them. And we speak to lots of GCs directors of legal heads of legal, and one of the things that they are all genuinely keen to do is develop a team of lawyers for the future and lawyers for the future are the lawyers that are looking at tech now to see how they can use tech to help them enhance their own performance. So I think by giving them some anecdotes, some insights like that really just helps them to focus their minds on embracing technology.

Tom Mighell:

So Mike, I want to ask the same question, but from a technologist perspective. So I know you spend a lot of time talking to vendors and externally, but I’m assuming you also do some talking to the lawyers as well, maybe requirements gathering or other types of stuff like that. How do you approach talking to lawyers about technology from that technology perspective, especially around ai, which is kind of new and interesting and frightening all at the same time to everybody?

Michael Kennedy:

Yeah, I definitely spend a lot of time speaking to our lawyers at the firm and similar to Amy, a lot of our in-house teams and our clients. I think the biggest takeaway for me when I speak to lawyers is that it isn’t all about the tech. And I know in our role we get excited about technology. I’m super involved and super deep into the tech side. My background isn’t super technical and sometimes it’s been really clear that you are talking about what it can do for them. And I really try and not speak at people when we’re talking about technology. I think it’s really easy if you’re the techie person to go in front a room of lawyers and actually just speak at them about all the things they should know and they should be aware of and they should care about. And at the end of it, they just leave going, well, I feel like I’ve been lectured to rather than been supported and educated and helped through.

So a lot of it’s speaking with them and talking it through. Some of that is through workshops and being a bit more involved and a bit more hands-on, but it’s focusing on what are the problems that they face and how do we solve those problems and help them with those problems. And yes, some of that is technology, but making it relevant to their day-to-day is really important. And because I work across the whole firm, a lawyer in our disputes team will have a different need for AI or for technology than a lawyer in our real estate team. And if you just speak in generalizations, they will switch off because of like, oh, that’s not important to me because my role is different. So being specific, actually spending time talking and spending time with them is really important. But I do communicate slightly differently to our own lawyers and in-house lawyers.

And I think some of the in-house teams are really much more almost receptive in a way and really engaged about taking things forwards and you can educate them and speak to ’em around, well, this is where you might be able to get this benefit, but they don’t have the resources sometimes to do that the next day. Whereas at the firm, I spend a lot more time talking about we can literally do this for you now, so this is how you get on board and this is what we can do tomorrow and we can make this work and this is how we can make this work. Sometimes it’s bringing clients into that internal conversation as well. So a client really cares and is engaged around technology. Our lawyers will also care and we’ll also be engaged because that’s our job is professional services. Our job is supporting clients and giving them, I guess, what they want and what they want to drive.

So yeah, I think it’s not getting too technical, but I often do want to cover some of the technical bits because I actually think the true understanding, especially AI and generative ai recently, the true understanding comes when you understand at least the undersurface level pieces of information. So then you can realize what is this stuff, how does it work? And it will save you quite a lot of pain in the long run if you do understand the underlying mechanics. So I try and do a lot of that. Why is it relevant to me? How do you learn about this stuff with lawyers?

Dennis Kennedy:

Great. Amy, you and I share some spending part of our career, and so I’ve always felt that having that understanding both being outside counsel, in-house counsel is really a great combination and there’s a big disconnect because I think a lot of times law firms, legal tech companies don’t really understand the actual work that’s done. And so I’d like to get your perspective on the in-house perspective, legal operations and what you’re doing there and what are the areas in the legal profession that you see need the most attention and how can we get people to pay that attention now?

Amy Brookbanks:

Yeah, as you say, it’s having that firsthand experience, isn’t it? Which I think really helps. And I have been that busy in-house lawyer that is in constant firefighting mode and also now having the privilege of working with lots of teams. I would say it is incredibly rare. In fact, it’s probably never that we are working with teams that aren’t overstretched. They’re all incredibly busy. So I think addressing that, it’s the noise, it’s the day-to-day churn, how can we address that to free up the lawyers to spend their time on what is really important and where they’re adding the most value. And it’s not always appropriate to just throw more bodies at the problem, I don’t think. It’s not always a sustainable solution to the problem. So I think looking at in-house teams, it is how do we get rid of that day-to-day churn? And I think that’s really where innovation and technology comes into its own.

And what we do is help in-house teams press the pause button and just reset, well, what is our purpose as in-house lawyers, what are we here to do? What should we be prioritizing? But even more importantly, what should we be deprioritizing? And that’s where a number of solutions come in. And depending on the strategic direction of the company, of the department and the resources available to them, there’s different options you would choose. But certainly technology and automation is a key solution. And so looking for how you can use automation to support processes and also to handle certain tasks, repetitive tasks such as contract management, contract negotiation. So we are really seeing that this is where there’s a need. It’s in freeing the lawyers up from those repetitive or low risk tasks and being completely tech agnostic. We’ve got a bunch of legal tech consultants who specialize in this stuff and they can help to drill down with legal teams on where are the pain points, where are the bottlenecks and what solutions could they be looking at in order to address that rather than just recruiting more and more people. It’s the smart way of resourcing the problem. So that’s really where I see the biggest opportunity in house right now is looking for those solutions and also helping them with the implementation, which our tech consultants also do.

Tom Mighell:

Michael, I want to dig in a little bit on what Shaw Goddard is doing right now. What are some of the cool and new things that you are working on? And I guess my initial question is do you spend more of your time working on tools that the lawyers can use to serve their clients? Or are there tools that are directly for client use that they have or is it both? Or I guess what can you share?

Michael Kennedy:

Yeah, so it is both a little bit. We probably as a team, we do spend a bit more time on tools that our lawyers can use, but there’s definitely an ever broadening group of projects that are going on that are much more focused on direct access to clients and there’s much more interest around how do I access some of the technology that you have as my law firm to give me what I need as a client without maybe completely relying on the human element and completely relying on people and are there elements of self-service that we can build into our offerings as a law firm that clients will be happy with actually using and taking forward as well. So it is a mix. There’s almost a hybrid piece in there as well, because a huge amount of work that we do is alongside our lawyers.

So rather than just saying, look, we have purchased something, you should use this. This is how you use it. Here’s some training, go and use it. We are much more involved in the discussion at the beginning, which is what is this piece of work? What’s the scope, what’s the proposal maybe we support in pitching for that work as well? So we might go along to a pitch that we are an 80 strong team now as an innovation group, and a big part of that team is client delivery, is focusing on matters and live work that’s ongoing. So we get a lot of our lawyers coming to us saying, we’ve got an ask from a client and we think to deliver this, we need technology. Please can you help us and work with us to do that? So that’s almost a mix of delivering legal services in a tech enabled way, but we’re very much a full service innovation offering.

I guess you could tagline it and some of the stuff that is going on, the newer firm, the New Horizons, a huge amount of generative AI initiative. So you probably is not surprised that that’s going on. That is very much in my world from an RD perspective, but a lot of that has now been pushed into our practice innovation group of actually delivering things to the lawyers and giving them tools to use. So we’ve got our own internal solution that’s A GPT, which very creatively named, which is a wrapper around an LLM that we’ve built a few features around prompt library, around things like that. So that’s still ongoing. The feature development there is constantly ongoing. How do we make that better? How do we serve our lawyers better with some of that? You’ll have seen probably in the press that we have bought some tools around generator ai.

We’ve actually had for about 18 months solutions in our lawyer’s hands delivering on some of this work using gen AI for mainly contract reviews and some bespoke playbooks and drafting and things. And then we are doing a lot of research as well. So I guess we are in r and d doing a lot of heads down technical research around how do these tools work, how do these LMS work, how do you compare the outputs? There’s been a huge uptick in benchmark analysis over the past six months. So you’ve seen the vowels report that we now recently John kras from CMS doing a lot of the work in the lytic group that we are a part of and supporting on different initiatives that are going on. We have been doing quite a lot of that benchmarking ourselves as well, because a big thing for us is how do you make sure things work before we roll things out?

Other areas of work going on. At the moment, we’re doing a huge amount of workshops and training for clients. So Amy mentioned our legal tech consultancy team there. I work really closely with that team to help build out some of the technical education offerings. And I do a lot of sessions with clients around this is how we use these tools, this is support on building out a business case or use cases in an in-house team, and how would you almost take the advice and the next steps that someone in Amy’s role can give and how would you put that into practice and take that forward. So a lot of workshops that we’ve got, workshop series that we do there as well. And yeah, quite a few other, I guess SPO ad hoc projects across the firm. There’s definitely a big line of people in the firm that are interested in doing stuff around AI especially, but sometimes it almost leads you to say, this isn’t ai, but we can support you anyway.

Tom Mighell:

So it sounds like not a whole lot going on in words what you’re saying.

Michael Kennedy:

There’s plenty of time.

Tom Mighell:

I have more questions about ai, but we need to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors and then we’ll be back with Amy Brook Banks and Mike Kennedy both from Shaw Goddard

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Amy Brook Banks and Mike Kennedy at Shaw Goddard. We found it in the Fresh Voices series that we love to hear about our guest career paths and probably more importantly, our audience does as well. I want to get each of you to talk about your own career paths and what kinds of things you’ve done to get you into your current role and focus. Amy, would you start us off and then we’ll turn it over to Mike?

Amy Brookbanks:

Sure. So I started off very traditionally, so I was a corporate lawyer working in a city law firm in London for the first four years of my career. I then went in-house and I spent 18 years in-house. 14 of those years were at the Ocado group where for most of that time I was head of legal for the commercial legal team. But then in 2018, and I think this was quite pivotal for me actually now looking back in 2018, the Ocado group went through a really big business transformation. It went from being so Ocado retail was an online grocery retailer that just operated in the uk. Then in 2018, it transformed itself into being a global provider of technology, logistics and robotics supplying its platform to global retailers, so not just in the UK but around the globe. So an enormous business pivot, so completely reinvented itself really in order to supply its platform.

It’s called the Ocado Smart Platform to international retailers. So at that point, the general council realized that the legal team basically needed to reinvent itself in order to stay match fit to support this new exciting business. And he created a new role head of legal operations. We hadn’t really needed that before, and I put myself forward for the role because I just felt it was a really exciting time to get my teeth into something new. I was nervous because all I knew how to be was a lawyer until that point. So it was nerve wracking, but equally because I’d felt the pain points of being a lawyer, I was really keen to take the opportunity to try and do something about it at the same time as helping the legal department to transform. So that’s how I got into legal operations, and my first task was to digitize the legal department.

So no longer did we have the luxury of knowing every single person by their first name, we were a huge company, we’d already expanded and we’re expanding rapidly across the globe. And so we had at the time a very progressive general counsel because back in 2018 in-house legal teams weren’t doing a lot with technology, and yet he tasked me with sourcing and implementing matter management, contract management and spend management. And I loved it. I mean, it was a fantastic role. And after five years in that role, I decided that I would really like to help other legal teams tackle a similar journey. And so hence this is why I’m now a legal operations consultant. I was incredibly fortunate that ags Innovation Group was looking to recruit a legal operations consultant just as I had decided that I was going to look elsewhere. And after 14 years in one business, it was quite a big leap. But 18 months ago I joined ag and now I’m lucky enough to be able to work with such a broad variety of legal teams across different jurisdictions and different sectors.

Tom Mighell:

Same question to you, Mike.

Michael Kennedy:

Yeah, thanks. I feel like slightly less impressive than Amy, but I also started in a relatively traditional path as well. So I went to university, I did a law degree, had very much the vision of I’m going to become a solicitor. The usual stuff I guess that you would do if you were picking a law university even through college, that was my plan. I did not enjoy my law degree at all, and I didn’t really know if that was something I wanted to do anymore at the end of university, I felt like it wasn’t a world I belonged in, to be honest, my background didn’t really seem to line up with a lot of other people I went to university with. I didn’t seem to know as much about the world about that as a role, and I decided not to do that and went and did something else for a bit of 18 months after university, but eventually then moved back to my hometown, moved back to Manchester in England and had the usual, well, I’ve done a law degree on that as well.

Applied for a role in a law firm, applied to Godard and joined as a paralegal, which is like a junior role within the firm, and then managed to also get a training contract. So managed to get a training contract to become solicitor out of shores as well. And a lot of the time I was working as paralegal. I spent looking at technology and looking at actually them. I feel like a lot of what I used to say to myself was, there must be a better way. I’m here very late nights, I’m doing a lot of what some people tell cognitive drudgery of type of work, and I would constantly think there must be a better way of doing this. So I’d spend a lot of time googling things. I’d spend a lot of time playing around with Excel macros or different ways of doing stuff and within the tight confines of a law firm in that I can’t go and download software off the web and go, well, this might do it.

Let’s play around. So very much within just the tools that we had. And actually I was again really lucky in that at the time there was a new team setting up. So the partner who now heads up the innovation group was thinking about this as well and was thinking about is anyone interested in doing something like this as a role as something that’s a bit more, not really something that was a real job and existed yet, but almost a pre precursor to does anyone want to do some of this? And we’ll see where it goes. And I jumped to the chance. I was really keen to do that. I was doing my training contract, so I basically finished that as quickly as I could whilst doing a lot of the innovation work, a lot of the technology work. And I knew straight away, I’m not going to become a real lawyer.

I’m not going to go and do that role and a genuine solicitor. But I finished and I got the usual pricing, significant things immediately moved into what was then a very small handful of people as a team. And then I always spent time looking at what’s next. So we’ve gone from a handful of us about a decade ago to over 80 now in the innovation group and performing. We’ve now, obviously we’ve got the wider Amy’s team, the consultancy team, we’ve got our managed civil service team and a knowledge team. So we’re actually quite a big beast now compared to where we were. And I’ve always spent a lot of time looking at the what’s next. So I was always that person who would solve a problem and I’d like, oh, that problem’s solved now. And if someone was like, well, I need you to do that a hundred times, so I need to go and copy and paste that result now a hundred times.

And my brain was a bit like, well, no, but I’ve solved that problem. I just wanted to solve the problem and now I want a new problem, I onto the next thing, and my brain definitely does move on to the next problem. So naturally, as we grew out and we grew as a team, I was able to carve out more of a space for the, I guess true research development, horizon scanning, almost keep those problems coming through. And then when we deliver them and solve them, they can live in one of the group teams that we have. But actually that’s the focus for me is solving problems and communication and engagement with people around what we’re doing. So I’ve been really lucky in that we’ve been supported as a group, as a team over the past 10 years in a very non-traditional environment. We’ve been able, in a very traditional environment, sorry, we’ve been able to build a very traditional, almost like esque team out of it and see where things go and grow into the space that we’ve built for ourselves and bring people in to the point where we are now a really formidable group that can deliver on essentially anything within that innovation and tech space, which has been really, really good.

So started off traditional and now ended up in a job that’s definitely made up, did not exist previously. So getting away with it for now. Yeah,

Tom Mighell:

It’s so interesting that 25 years ago I was in the same position, although I was a lawyer, not a paralegal, but I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I came in, the law firm came to the same types of interest as you did, but what a difference 25 years makes in that you had a firm that was supportive and was willing to move forward. And I was just one guy who the firm sort of resented for wanting to do technology. And I feel like I was born out of time. But Mike, I want to dig in a little bit more on the ai, and I’m actually going to ask something. I’m going to follow up on something you said a minute ago. You mentioned that Shar Goddard has created an AI tool, a generative AI tool called A GPT. What interests me about that is that my business is information governance. I work in the information governance, data governance area. And so this is an area of interest to me. So this is my personal question here. What are you training that model on? Is it all client information? Is it all lawyer information? What’s the corpus? What’s the LLM based on?

Michael Kennedy:

So this isn’t US training an LLM, sorry. This is us building a solution based on, so we use the Azure AI service. So Duty 4.0 for example is the LM scenes. We are doing a lot of the, I guess I won’t say fine tuning because that’s got technical connotations, but the tweaking of outputs using a lot of our knowledge, using a lot of our lawyers, doing the building different knowledge bases that will answer questions and point at information to bring answers back. But we’re not going down the route of trying to train a legal ag specific LLM. So A GBT is very much, it was initially a sandbox project to figure out can we host a secure GPT-3 0.5, for example, can I put that in the firm and be safe and use that and test it properly with client information, with live information? And then from there, the amount of people that were like, well, I would like access to that and I would like this, and so on and so forth. So in I think late 2023, we basically said, yeah, here you go. We’ll launch this as a solution to the whole firm. And we’ve had hundreds of thousands of inputs into their, pretty much almost everyone in the firm, minus a couple of percent have used it and played around with it. So it’s been really good, pretty successful.

Tom Mighell:

But it does allow users to access firm information to use the tool.

Michael Kennedy:

So we’ve got a separate, we’re doing some of the co-pilot studio builds, which are ed, a lot of people call this agentic ai, but essentially just knowledge bases that you can query using natural language.

Tom Mighell:

Got it.

Michael Kennedy:

At the moment in development is how would you merge those two so someone can access that knowledge through A GBT, but they are separate at the moment because mainly just from a development point of view where law firms aren’t software houses and actually things take time to build in robust versions of solutions.

Dennis Kennedy:

Got

Tom Mighell:

It.

Dennis Kennedy:

Okay. I want to follow up with Amy on ai, which I think is both a challenge and an opportunity these days, both in the legal profession and where I’m at in legal education. And I just feel like it’s advancing incredibly quickly. And even in the last couple of months, I have the sense, so my sense is, or two senses, is that legal operations professionals are leading the AI charge in many law firms and that do legal operations in law departments. And I always have the sense that the UK law firms are well out ahead of US firms in ai. So Amy, I just kind of want to get your perspectives and your insights on what you’re seeing from your vantage point in AI in law departments, in legal operations, and also maybe from your perspective in the uk what’s happening in ai?

Amy Brookbanks:

So in law departments within corporates, I think you’re right in that what we’re seeing is that where they have dedicated legal operations resource, they usually have, I mean this is generalizing, but they usually have a more sophisticated approach to the way they’re operating, which means they are exploring tech and ai and they also tend to have that, the dedicated resource, they have the resource to do that as opposed to departments that don’t have legal ops people. That said, just to put it in context, it’s so vital, and we see this all the time. It is so vital that the company has leaders that are on board with this tech journey as well, because equally I see legal ops professionals who are in an in-house team, they’re raring to go, but the green light isn’t being pushed because the company has a nervousness around adopting ai, particularly generative ai.

So I think it’s incredibly important that that leadership within corporates is there to make sure that there’s a strategy that supports ai. But in some ways it gives us a challenge because one of the things that we do to help with this as far as we can is help teams become tech ready and AI ready and change readiness is something that we take really seriously. In fact, when we are assessing legal departments on their legal operating model, we always look at their approach to change because unless you have firstly a change mindset, secondly, knowing what to change and thirdly knowing how to change it, it’s very difficult to get anywhere. So I think that’s where we come in, is in helping with the people piece, getting that change mindset and ensuring that people aren’t afraid to change and see the benefits of changing. So I think the legal ops professionals in-house alone can sometimes struggle with that, and sometimes it actually helps to get someone from the outside to help change, bring a new perspective. But yeah, I think being tech ready, having the right mindset is half the battle one, even with teams that don’t have legal ops professionals, if you’ve got that curiosity and then you can free up the resource to actually pursue it, that’s really the most important thing. But yeah, that’s how we are helping. It’s the change readiness piece I think. Dennis,

Dennis Kennedy:

And then just out of my own personal curiosity, how do you assess what’s happening in the UK versus us or other parts of the world?

Amy Brookbanks:

And actually, I’ve just recently been working with an in-house team based in Texas in the us and what I found there is again, an incredibly inquisitive mindset. They are really wanting to see what tech can do for them that’s at the top of their agenda. And in fact, one of the things that I’ve seen is that I think because legal tech has kind of been a thing in the US for longer than it has been in the uk. So what you see that the difference I’m seeing is in the uk, they’re starting out on their journeys and they are in the planning phase. Some of the times what I’ve seen in the US is that they’re already on their journeys, but it’s kind of got a little bit chaotic at times. So they’ve got lots of different pieces of tech that aren’t talking to each other properly and the processes haven’t been streamlined or perhaps they were at one point, but they’ve been bolted onto and there’s a little bit of chaos. And by the way, I’m not saying this is the case in all companies by any means.

Tom Mighell:

Oh, it is.

Amy Brookbanks:

I think it’s where we are in our maturity though, isn’t it? So in the uk, we are starting out as in-house teams. I think it’s different in law firms, and I think Mike’s already spoken, it’s different in law firms. I think we’re pretty advanced actually as law firms, but as in-house teams, we’re starting that journey and overcoming the fear and trying to get buy-in for it. Whereas in the US that journey has been started and sometimes it’s become confused and they need to take a little bit of a step back and reassess their processes and reassess the tech stack.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we still got more to talk about, but we need to take another quick break for a short word from our sponsors.

Dennis Kennedy:

And now

Tom Mighell:

Let’s get back to the Kennedy Mighell report. I’m Dennis Kennedy, and I’m Tom Mighell and are joined by our special guests, Amy Brook Banks and Mike Kennedy from Shaw Goddard. We’ve got time for just a few more questions. We always like to ask a question about collaboration. Dennis, I have written about collaboration quite a bit. We like to talk about it, so we like to ask our guests, what are your favorite ways to collaborate? I usually like to talk about technology, but we all know collaboration is not necessarily just about technology. So I guess we’ll start with Amy first. What are your favorite ways to collaborate? And then Mike?

Amy Brookbanks:

Yeah, that’s really interesting because Mike and I were having a chat about this yesterday because in my role, I mean at ag we have lots of different tech tools that we can use to collaborate. And I conduct a lot of workshops, a lot of which are online. So we are using tools like Figma ter, which promotes interaction. And the advantage of that as well is then you’ve got data that’s gathered up and you can share it afterwards. But actually we both agreed with each other that nothing beats good old fashioned getting in a room face-to-face, having a flip chart using sticky notes. And I don’t think that you are ever really going to replace the value of doing that. I dunno, Mike, if you’ve got anything to add to that, but I think that’s certainly the conclusion we came to yesterday.

Michael Kennedy:

Yeah, I think some of, when we do interactive workshops, we often bring people away from technology and print out big piece of paper and we do a lot of work or whiteboards and things like that. It gets people talking and that’s where people have ideas and people share thoughts and it is really useful. I think one of the, as a tech specific aspect of this, I love having meetings. I love talking to my team. I love sitting down and just brainstorming and really going through lots of different things. I’m terrible at taking notes. I’m terrible at taking actions at the end of things. And what has been really useful is, and you can do this virtually, we can do this, just having your laptop with you is putting on, so we have copilot at the firm, turning copilot on. You could talk for two hours and then suddenly you’re like, oh, what are the main points?

And the key themes, analysis from the transcript, the actions that comes out of it is actually really, really useful. Because yes, you might take notes, yes, you might jot some things down, but actually having a play by play of the conversation you’ve had, which could be you’re talking about projects over the next six months, it could be trying to solve a really specific problem. It could be planning a workshop for a client, having the notes afterwards. It seems really simple, but I’m terrible at, I’m just bad at doing that. I’d much rather be speaking and be free and think, trust my brains, go remember all that and I never do. So even just having copilot in person in a room on the side has been useful.

Tom Mighell:

Well, I think to me using that in copilot, there are two main benefits. The one thing that I think is really cool is being able to talk to copilot during the meeting and ask questions. What are the things that, what are the main points? Are there points of disagreement? Are there issues we still need to resolve? I love that. But then I also love, not only do I hate taking notes, but I also hate remembering who’s doing what. And it always comes up with a list of takeaways and action items. And I think it’s just an awesome assistant to do that.

Dennis Kennedy:

The AI note taking tool I want is that you can be in a meeting and it will tell you what the subtext is and what’s really going on when people are with what, it’s only a matter of time,

Tom Mighell:

Only a matter of time. Yeah.

Michael Kennedy:

Mine is my wish thing. My wishlist is that it would do the actions that I promised to do, the amount of calls I leave and I go, I’ll send you that document, don’t worry, I’ll send it yet. And I just don’t do it and I forget. So we just did it.

Tom Mighell:

I bet that’s also a matter of time,

Michael Kennedy:

I think. Yeah, I have asked Microsoft for that one, so we’ll see.

Dennis Kennedy:

So let’s wrap up with two quick questions. So one is because I’m involved in teaching law students and new lawyers and they are interested in these different career paths and legal, tech, legal operations, non-traditional careers. And that’s why I think they find your stories interesting and they’re really both intrigued by AI and what it might do. And they’re being asked in the firms that they work at to get involved in ai. So what are the ways that you might encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find these career paths? And I’ll go with Amy first on that, and then just we get suggestions, great suggestions, like the two of you from our guests in this series. So I also wanted to ask you to mention a few names that you think might be good people for us to single out and be part of our Fresh Voices series. So Amy?

Amy Brookbanks:

Yeah, so starting with the question about law students, and I know Mike will probably talk about our work with universities in a moment, but we actually operate a legal innovation graduate scheme at Shore Godard, which is open to students with a whole array of degrees. Some have law degrees, but they could be any degree. And it gives them experience in a whole range of roles. So they spend four months in eight different departments including Mike’s team, my team, and in a variety of teams that work on finding innovative solutions for both the law firm for clients. It’s a great hands-on opportunity and I so wish it was open to me, I would love to go on it. So that’s something really, really great that we can offer. And it’s certainly I think massively in our interests as well as a firm to be investing in bright graduates and encouraging them to be exploring the non-traditional careers in legal. It’s something we are absolutely supportive of. And I think Mike, if you come in now to talk about unis and what we do with unis.

Michael Kennedy:

Yeah, like I mentioned at the top of this around when I was at university, I didn’t really enjoy my law degree and I felt like it wasn’t a place for me. I just felt like I didn’t, and if someone had sat down and been like, there’s this whole world that you could go into, I’d have at that chance and I would’ve gone straight into it. So I actually, I’m really passionate about spending time with students and doing things with universities. And ever since I’ve been doing this job, I’ve spent time with universities doing lectures, doing sessions, doing workshops, and talking to students about this as a path. So before we started the animation graduate scheme, even trying to get people to look at this as a root, as a potential career or even going into, yes, becoming a lawyer, but knowing this exists because that’s so useful for us as a team.

If you have a trainee that starts, it goes, oh, I don’t actually want to do this, but I know what you guys do and I’m going to come and speak to you when I need that help. So we support on a variety of different modules across law firms and actually my whole team at Manchester University right now doing a workshop that I’ve chosen to be here instead. So as a treat, no, but we do lots of stuff we universities and we do. It’s really interested to see the questions and the engagement and the interest, like Dennis, you’re saying they do really want to know about this stuff and a lot of them are in a similar place that I was felt a bit stuck and it was a bit like I’m not sure if I do want to be a solicitor. And even the ones that do, knowing that there is really important. And so yeah, we do try and support university as much as we can and we do some of the alternative, like law school work. There’s an online law school 2.0 is called who would do a lot of content for people looking to break into their legal ops and innovation space and we help that as well.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, that’s cool. Mike, one of the things I’d liked about your story is it’s something that I hear a lot from my students is they feel they want that they have this passion to go into AI and tech and sometimes process improvement and other things like that, and they get convinced that they just have to be a lawyer for a period of time. And that’s the conversation I have a lot. So it’s interesting. So I like the fact you’re reaching out. It does take some convincing for people, even though I sometimes say this career question is the part of these podcasts that I almost want to call the Tom wishes he was a student again, so he could go in a different direction segment of this. But for both of you, who are the people you might suggest that we try to get onto this podcast?

Amy Brookbanks:

So Ben White. So Ben is the founder of Crafty Council, which is the UK’s largest community for in-house lawyers. He’s created this incredible community and he’s a really interesting guy. Lots of insights. So I think he’d be a really interesting guest.

Michael Kennedy:

Yeah, I’d definitely second that. I think Ben would be amazing. I would suggest, I know for a few years, Mark May and he is the creator editor of the Legal Technologist, which is like a publication that looks at innovation change legal operations, but he’s really passionate about getting people into this space, getting people into legal operations. He spends a huge amount of his time on content, on supporting people, on helping people do a lateral moves and helping people come in from student perspective or a junior perspective. And he’s actually got really interesting career path as well. So I think he’d be a good person to have on

Tom Mighell:

Those both sound like great suggestions. Alright, we want to thank Amy Brook Banks and Mike Kennedy at Shaw Godder for being guests on the show. Amy and Mike, if people want to get in touch with you or learn more about you or the firm, where should they go? Amy and then Mike,

Amy Brookbanks:

I think if could check us out on LinkedIn and look at Shore Godard’s website, they’re probably the good starting points.

Michael Kennedy:

Yeah, I try and share a lot of what we’re doing on our LinkedIn in a balanced way that I try and chat about what we’re doing and also share useful stuff that’s quite interesting to others. And we do have a blog, so we’ve got a Legal Tech talks blog on the website actually, which is, we don’t update as much as we should, but there’s quite a lot of useful stuff on there. And you can find if you are interested in a career, we’ve just closed our innovation graduate scheme and we actually got over 500 applicants do it, but the brochure for that is online. If people are interested in almost what does that look like, the brochures there, the innovation graduate scheme brochure is quite an interesting good look into it.

Dennis Kennedy:

Very cool. Good. I’m going to share that with my students. So thank you so much Amy and Mike, you were fantastic guests, great information and advice for our listeners. As usual, so many topics to discuss Tom, and so little time, we’ll have to get you back both back on the show for a part two, but now it’s time for parting chats, that one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Amy, take it away.

Amy Brookbanks:

So something that’s just helps me generally in life is an app on my phone called Brain Toss. There are other apps available, but this is when you are out and about and you suddenly remember that you’re supposed to be booking your car in for a service or you need to order more pet food or whatever it is, and you just record a voice note into the app and it will then send you an email as a reminder. And I’ve just found that that’s a really helpful tool in life.

Michael Kennedy:

So my tip for this is I do an internal newsletter, so I’m not going to challenge the titles of the space that are out there with the newsletter, but I do an internal newsletter for the team every two weeks, which is a bit of a what’s going on within the legal tech space every two weeks. And we pull out some key highlights and I do a worth reading section, which is basically all the things that I’ve read and I think are worth looking at. Your podcast has made it on there before, so it’s good news. But I would say that what was really useful for me is I, throughout the two weeks, I basically just chuck links into a OneNote and I read them and I throw ’em in there and I think, yes, that’s worth putting there. By the end, the two weeks I’ve forgotten all the information.

I put that big link into that list of LinkedIn chat GBT with a prompt that I’ve got and it gives me a really nice two sentences about every single one. But not only is that useful to the base for news, I’d say, well, this is what this link is about and this is why it’s worth reading. But it reminds me and it gives me a really nice, oh, that is going on. Oh wow, that was only a week ago. It feels like that was six months ago. I actually think everyone should do that at the end of a week. If you think, what if you just link, if it’s from your bookmark, if it’s from saved links. I know people use reading apps that they click to like a reading pane in Chrome and things that retrospective of what you’ve read in the week or the format of the month has really helped me stay on top of a crazy moving space.

Tom Mighell:

That’s an awesome way to do it. I use Read Wise for that purpose, I will use that as my reading app and then it will regurgitate that stuff for me regular. I have two parting shots. First parting shot is due to the overwhelming demand for people to see me and Dennis on video. We are actually doing video. And so I believe that by the time this podcast is released, you should be able to see Tom and Dennis take technology for a spin. In this case, we’re working with green filing and showing how to do e-filing here in my state of Texas. So take a look, see if you like it. And then my other parting shot is another copilot tip. One of the things that I’m starting to do to see if it’s useful to me is just going into copilot at the beginning of the week and saying, as I plan my week, say, summarize my meetings for me this week. And it will look at my calendar, it will tell me what meetings I have. It will go into my emails and my documents and say, here are the documents that you might need to prepare for that meeting. It’s a great way to think about it. I’ve tried it in the past. It’s somewhat helpful. I need to learn probably how to ask it the right questions and ask it for the right things for it to be truly helpful. But another interesting way to use copilot if you have it at your firm or office, Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy:

So I’m going to have to do two as well because as you said, there’s such a demand for us on video. But I’m doing a new thing called Legal AI Live, which is a webcast happens on the second Friday of the month. You can find it on LinkedIn. It’s called Legal AI Live. And it’s just a group of people in the legal profession talking about how they actually use AI and the things that they use it for. The other part of chat is just a simple thing of creating an AI prompt library. And I think that as we move into the sort of recent world of benchmarking AI tools, I think one of the missing pieces is we’re not taking a close look at what the prompts are being used in those things. And I focus so much on prompts when I use AI and reusable prompts that I just keep building a prompt library.

It just says, Hey, this prompt worked before. I’m going to keep it and I’m going to keep reusing it. So that saves you time and effort in the future. It also helps you develop your prompt engineering skills. I keep mine in a tool called Tactic Expander, which could also be my tip. So if this is a prompt, I use a percent, I have a couple of letters I type and it puts together the whole, it just puts the whole prompt that I need to use into the AI tool and boom, I have a consistent approach and get the types of results that I want.

Tom Mighell:

And so that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy Mighell 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 website. If you want to subscribe to the podcast, again, you can do it on the Legal Talk Network website or in your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to get in touch with us or suggest a topic for an upcoming episode, you can always find us on LinkedIn or remember, we love getting your voice messages. I know it’s so analog, but we have Please leave us a voicemail at 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 two that really helps us out. And as always, a big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing and distributing this podcast. We’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening to the Kennedy Mighell report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, the Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, smart Ways to Work Together from a Books or Amazon. And join us every other week for another edition of the Kennedy Mighell Report, only on the Legal Talk Network.

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