Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Sarah McCormick

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 393 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, Uwe Iqbal, founder of Simco, joined us as part of our fresh voices on legal tech series. Great insights from Uwe on the episode, especially on ai. Be sure to give it a listen. In this episode, we have yet another very special guest in our Fresh Voices series and Fresh Voices. We want to showcase different and compelling perspectives on legal tech and much more. Tom, what’s all on our agenda for

Tom Mighell:

This episode? Well, Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy Mighell report, we are thrilled to continue our fresh voices on Legal Tech interview series with Sarah McCormick, director of legal service delivery at Honigman LLP, a knowledgeable and insightful contributor in legal, operations, legal, tech, and artificial intelligence. We want our Fresh Voices series to not only introduce you to terrific leaders in legal tech space, but also provide you with their perspective on the things you ought 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 Sarah McCormick to our Fresh Voices series. Sarah, welcome to the Kennedy MA Report.

Sarah McCormick:

Thanks so much for having me.

Tom Mighell:

Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, tell the audience more about what’s what you do at Hing Man, what’s your role, what our audience should know, kind of just to get started.

Sarah McCormick:

Yeah, sure. So I’m the director of legal service delivery at Hockman. I started in legal project management actually right out of law school, so I never practiced. I went straight from Michigan State University College of Law and right into legal project management in 2017. When I graduated, legal project management was the hot topic, kind of like artificial intelligences. Today there were not very many younger individuals who were coming right out of school and into legal project management, so I took it as an opportunity. So I started off in legal project management, worked my way from Hyneman to another firm called Thompson Heine in Cleveland, Ohio, where I actually currently still live in Cleveland, Ohio, but all of my work is in Michigan. I ended up being the first billable project manager at Thompson Heine and kind of watched and learned how they grew that billable side of project management.

And after the pandemic hit, Hanman called me and said, Hey, do you want to come back to the firm? And I said, yes, but let me pitch you on what I want to do. Because historically from a project management perspective, we had been doing a lot of the budgeting pricing aspects and I really wanted to get more into the process side of things with still budgeting and pricing, but also the billable aspects. So I pitched creating a revenue producing function at Homan for their legal project management team and they said, sure, come on back, because what law firm doesn’t want to create more revenue for themselves? And when I first came back, I actually was assigned to help build out our diligence center. So it’s a dedicated group of six lawyers who do due diligence day in and day out. Hanman has a very large presence in private equity and corporate law, and so our diligence team is super busy, but creation of that team meant looking at how we can leverage people, process and technology to come up with a really robust diligence center.

That’s how I started. And then about six months into my role, my boss actually left and went to another firm. Then it was my time to shine and build out the billable project management function, which I have been doing. I did that for about a year and a half and I still continue to do that, but we are a small but mighty team over at Hahneman and come the end of the year of 2023, they asked if I’d be interested in taking over responsibility for practice technology, which also included artificial intelligence. And so now I look at service delivery as a holistic offering with how we can leverage people, process, technology, data, pricing, all of the aspects that we deliver on a day-to-day basis for our clients. And so that’s what I do every day is kind of take a look at how we can more innovatively provide client service.

Dennis Kennedy:

Sarah, first of all, it’s so awesome for us to have you as a guest on the podcast and your description there reminded me of why the MSU Center for Law Technology and Innovation is so cool and you’re kind of one of the poster children for us out of there. So I’m always impressed with what you and others are doing. So let me start out with, we’ll kind of dig in a little bit on the practice technology side of things. So I find this not always easy to talk to lawyers about tech and sometimes actually this might surprise people get frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technology, both the old and the new technologies and the benefits to those in the legal profession. You do a great job at it. Would you talk about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology, especially AI and what you found works well for you?

Sarah McCormick:

Yeah, so what’s very interesting about my journey is that I started at heneman pre Pandemic, which a lot of individuals don’t actually get the opportunity these days to be in person with everyone five days a week. But as we all remember, there was a point in time where we were all together five days a week. So I have a lot of solid relationships. So my first advice is to build those relationships absent technology, absent talking lawyers doing new things. And then once you have those relationships, then it gives you a step up. The lawyers already trust you because most of the time lawyers actually don’t trust technology. So if they trust the person that’s talking to them about technology, that’s the first step. The second step is meeting the lawyers where they are. You’re going to see there’s a lot of lawyers that are really into technology, but then there’s a lot of lawyers that are not.

And a lot of times lawyers find themselves having to talk about technology because their clients are demanding it. And so I like to meet them where they’re at, give them three to five examples that are specific to their day-to-day practice. Instead of talking about technology just generally, if you’re not showing them what they’re going to use, it’s not going to work. Talking about technology generally and you’re taking what you think and trying to impart it on them without showing them is not very useful. So we take three to five applicable use cases to their practice. The first use case is going to be very simple and then we’re going to keep building it. And then you watch as the light bulbs go off in their heads as to how they can start to use it in their practice, the wheels start to turn and then they’ll start to ask actually more questions. Now there is always going to be those lawyers that no matter how many times you explain it, how many times you show it, how cool the technology is, they’re just going to refuse to use it. But for the most part, just kind of approaching it very collaboratively with the lawyers and also showing them that they’re still needed in the process, technology is an assistant not a replacement and explaining it to them really helps us to get more buy-in from the technology perspective.

Tom Mighell:

So Sarah, here at the podcast, Dennis and I talked frequently about the duty of technology competence. We tend to take a pessimistic view of lawyer technology competence where we see that AI is all the hype, but still lawyers struggle to format a document in Word. And so we like to talk to our guests on fresh voices to understand what are you seeing out there, what are you seeing from lawyers? So what is your view of the current state of technology competence? And maybe second question would be, what do you think a technology competent lawyer really needs to know today to be competent? I assume that answer includes to a certain extent ai, but interested in your take on that.

Sarah McCormick:

So I think the answer to this greatly varies depending on practice area because there are still a lot of practice areas that do operate in the far, far past where they’re still doing paper filings and that type of thing. But I get the opportunity to work with our most technology forward lawyers. And I would say, and this is going to come to note as no surprise to anyone, our patent lawyers are the most technology forward because their clients are creating AI solutions and tools. So they by default have to be at the forefront. Whereas other groups of lawyers like our private client wills and estates lawyers, they don’t have to have that the same competence level. What I also find interesting though is those that are making the around AI seem to lack a level of knowing what it’s like to be in the practice.

So for example, and you can fact check me on this, but I believe there was some guidance given that if you’re on a call with a client and they start recording the call with an AI tool, you’re supposed to as a lawyer just hop off the call. And that is just not really a workable solution. As you can imagine, our lawyers want to give the best service to our clients. And so I think it’s a combination of the lawyers that are practicing day in and day out, having a base level of competency as it relates to technology, but also the rule makers that are going to be providing guidance because historically lawyers have accepted that guidance, those rules from the same organizations. And so they have to have that level of competence to be providing really sound instruction to the lawyers on how they’re supposed to be practicing in this new world of ai.

Later on, I think we’ll probably end up talking a little bit more about ethics, but that’s an entirely other area where I find it very fascinating because all law firms are just trying to avoid being the first law firm on the front page that used AI improperly. And so the various policies around AI are super interesting in my opinion. But the two things that I think are really important for a lawyer to be competent about is one, the difference between public and private AI tools and how the data’s being stored. Because that’s a constant question At Heneman, we are really at the forefront of ai. We have multiple legally trained AI tools, but that’s always the number one question and people are hesitant to use the tools because they don’t understand the differences between going to a chat GPT or using something like Harvey or co-counsel.

And then the second is the other thing is just general prompting guidance. I don’t feel like people have that. We spend a lot of time training our lawyers on how to prompt. So the other thing that I found also interesting that I was thinking about as it relates to this question is young lawyers are continuously going to become better and better at using ai. But what I was really interested in is when I was teaching the students have access to AI tools, but there’s not a huge push because to use the AI tools. And I think that’s maybe because, I mean because thinking to myself, if I was in law school and I had co-counsel, I would never have to read a page of case law again in my life. And I think that there is definitely a need to figure out how do we train our young lawyers to still know how to get to the answer without using AI to replace their knowledge of trying to figure things out. And I think we haven’t answered that yet. So I think that there is approach that’s needed from a couple different angles. One, the law student angle to the governing bodies of who provides that instruction to our lawyers and then our lawyers have to buy in because it’s interesting, I’ll talk to lawyers and they’re not really interested in learning, especially more senior lawyers because what they’ve been doing for so long has worked for them.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I want to dig into that a little bit. I do have some thoughts on students using AI and there is what the students can do with AI in my class is way different than what they do in other classes. So there’s a lot of interesting issues out there. But I think that notion of prompting, how do we learn the assumptions that we’re making kind of goes across from law schools to the court systems to firms. And we do have this odd dynamic where I will talk to people not even at the schools that I’m at, who say, I’m so happy I have tenure so I can sit this AI thing out. Or I have a text from a lawyer friend of mine who says, I have eight more years till I retire. I’m sitting this AI thing out. And I think it’s just really difficult to get people to pay attention to the things that they need to do and what the rest of the world is doing with ai.

And so the gap I’m seeing is not in lawyers using ai, but lawyers not being able to represent the people who are using ai. And the tendency for lawyers to say what you need is a policy. And it’s almost like any policy works without even considering what that might mean. So anyway, as we like to say, that’s more of a statement than a question, but I think that as you think about what you’ve seen and what you’re seeing, especially in ai, where do we need to put the most attention into ai especially, and I would say prompting of even more so, and how can we actually get people to pay that attention where there certainly is a comfort level out there with people being willing to say, I’m okay with sitting this whole technology out.

Sarah McCormick:

Yeah, Dennis. So one thing that you mentioned that I found interesting and something that I’ve been watching is that we just had at Homan, our summer associate class just started and we are doing a whole program on AI with various, and you’ll see press about it in a little while once it keeps going. And to your point also, you mentioned that students can use AI differently in your class. So I was very interested, you guys will hear about this later, but this is my first semester teaching. And I told the students, I said, look, I’m not here to tell you you can’t use ai, I just need you to disclose it to me when you are using it and it can’t replace your thoughts. And when I got the final papers for the class, I thought it was very interesting that I had only one paper that disclosed that they used ai.

And I think that they’re doing themselves a disservice by not leveraging AI more and idea generation and kind of using these tools as a sparring partner and kind of making whatever it is that they’re doing better. And then going into the summer associate program, we obviously have students that are coming from all different schools, so was super interested in knowing where’s everyone at? We wanted to evaluate from a student perspective, where are you all at from your knowledge of ai? And really it wasn’t as high as I thought that it would be just in day-to-day life. And I think it’s interesting because it’s just like to me for a student right now, I feel like you need such a low amount of exposure to really have it catch fire. Whereas for more senior lawyers, you need a lot more exposure or IT to catch fire and for them to use it in day to day.

So I just found it very interesting. So our goal with the summer program is to kind of evaluate where everyone is. We’re giving them mock scenario, so we gave them a mock scenario that they’re evaluating and then they’re going to evaluate that same mock scenario at the end of the summer and we’re going to see how much they’ve grown in their understanding of ai. But the student question and the learning about AI in law schools is such an interesting topic to me. I could go on and on about it. But yes, the prompting piece, needing more attention. And then again to my point on ethics, clear policies at firms on how to use these tools, clear policies from clients on how they can use these or how they are expecting their law firms to use the tools. We have very, very, very few clients that have taken a look at artificial intelligence in their outside counsel guidelines, like very few mentions, some of our large very large clients, and we’ll get into this I think in a little bit more depth here soon. What’s really interesting is the clients demand it, and then you get this additional issue that you have to deal with is, okay, well you’re going to use AI now how are you going to charge me differently? And so you’re solving one problem of what the clients are asking for and that you have to use ai, but then the question still remains, what are the policies, what can standard policies be? And how is the billable hour I think is really going to change here soon, not for all work, but some really commoditized work.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, I’m going to take a total different turn on this and ask another question we like to ask, which is about collaboration. Dennis and I wrote a book on collaboration tools. We love talking about collaboration, so we want to always understand how our guests are collaborating with internally, externally, whoever you happen to collaborate with, what are your favorite ways to collaborate? That may be technology, but it may be people or process, it may be all of those combined.

Sarah McCormick:

So I love technology for this purpose. So my job first is to evaluate a process to identify what the issues are. And so technology really helps to bring all the facets of my job together as the grand finale. And so we’ll take lawyers through a process evaluation, bigger, small, depending on what they need help with. And once we’re there, we identify current state, then we look at future state, and then we can identify in that future state where all the areas are that we’re going to incorporate technology. And it’s not always artificial intelligence. We have collaboration tools that we use hiq where we can build dashboards and collaborate directly with our clients. Or we have something like KEIRA Systems where, I mean that’s a form of AI technology, but it’s not generative AI in the way that we’ve been talking about. And so the people process technology aspect, I mean lawyers are being exposed to a new way of collaborating, not just via email, not just via phone calls or not just via yelling out across the hall to their associates that are working alongside them.

And so really the technology from my perspective is the wow factor that we place on top of identifying the process, whether or not we’re going to use project management, km, how we’re capturing data, all of that. And the data question with all of this new technology is a whole other topic that we could talk horse hours about. That’s super interesting. But really my favorite ways to collaborate with coworkers and lawyers is just to show them, okay, here’s where we’re starting and here’s where we’re going to go and this is going to be the final product. And then just getting that feedback of, hey, lawyers that may have been really not technologically interested become very technologically interested overnight once we give them a new perspective. So

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we’ve got a lot more questions for Sarah McCormick, but we’ve got to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors and then we’ll be right back.

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Sarah McCormick, director of legal Service delivery at heneman LLP. We found in the Fresh Voices series that we’d love to hear about our guest career paths and our audience does as well. So you started in an area and I would say you’re still in an area that a lot of people don’t know that much about, which is the legal project management area. From my time at MasterCard, I used to say things like A great project manager is worth their weight in gold and you should do whatever it takes to keep them once you find one. But maybe could you talk about your own career path and how you’ve moved into that project management area and how other people might think to get into the area and what things you enjoy about that taking that approach.

Sarah McCormick:

So I started law school and I’m one of the first lawyers in my immediate family. So I feel like all of the members of my family thought I was going to be on the news in these huge litigations representing whatever the top story was. And I really wanted to be a litigator. Actually when I started in law school, I soon realized that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be and that it was a very, very slim chance that I was actually going to be doing what I thought I was going to be doing. And so my first year, I think it’s a shock to the system for a lot of students or first year because most law students are used to being very good at school until they get to law school and then you’re against every single person who was very good at school.

So it was kind of a shock to my system to be competing against others who are also just as smart or not if not smarter than I am. And so my first year summer, I actually interned at the Ann Arbor Public Defender’s office and I’ll never forget my first day I walked in, I was so excited. They have a really great program over there because basically the students are the student lawyers. The judges have so much patience with the student lawyers and your bosses are the public defenders, but they don’t do really any of the representation. They’re just there to supervise you. And they said, okay, Sarah, you’re going to be assigned to the juvenile unit. And I was like, oh, okay. Not what I was expecting. And it ended up being the most soul sucking job. I mean, to be honest, I loved these kids and I would go from court every day to the juvenile detention center and I would sit with them and talk to them and feel like I was making a difference or at least I was trying to make a difference. And I would be like, Hey, this is what we’re going to do. I don’t want to see you back in court. And then every Monday morning when all the kids that got picked up from the weekend came in, it was the same kids and it would just break me. It would just break me every single Monday’s

Tom Mighell:

To beat down

Sarah McCormick:

And it was the saddest thing ever. And it took over all of my thoughts all of the time. And so I realized very quickly that it just wasn’t for me because I couldn’t live the rest of my life thinking about how I wanted to help these people that I just felt like I couldn’t help. So fast forward after one L year, you obviously get the opportunity to take more variety of classes. So I started to take a lot of what was then legal RD classes and data and legal service delivery and that type of thing. And I remember the big turning point for me was there was an opportunity to do a hackathon in California and the students were able to go and we were going to do the hackathon plus we were going to get to meet Elevate Services. We were going to meet the CEO of Elevate services and many of the vice presidents of Elevate Services.

This is going to age me a little bit if you’re familiar with Elevate and how many people work there now, but I believe when we were meeting them, it was like a couple hundred people worked there. They were very small. We ended up meeting all of them. Then they turned around and said, Hey, we want interns. So I applied to be an intern for Elevate. It was an amazing experience because I was an intern, but I was reporting up to the vice president because they didn’t have a huge infrastructure at the time because they were just starting out. And so I got to work with a couple of vice presidents across the board, and then there was another job opportunity that came along for an Australian law firm who said, we want an American student to come teach us something. You pitch to us what you want to teach us, but teach us something about innovation in the United States.

I still to this day, don’t think that the CEO of that firm understands the opportunity that he gave me, no matter how many times I tell him. But I pitched legal project management. I was only there for six weeks, but I went over to Australia and taught them about legal project management and what was going on in the United States as it related to legal project management. So then I was locked in. I ended up coming back. I worked on the a future of the legal profession report. I was the very unlucky individual that did all 400 citations at the end of the report for $8 an hour. It was very painful. I wish that I had AI back then. And then I continued to work for Elevate, but at the time I was at Elevate, I was working remotely. It was very uncommon to have a remote job at that point in time.

I was reporting up to someone that was so senior that I wasn’t, we both kind of decided, and she’s still such a great mentor to me today, but we both kind of decided that I needed to go out and find a job where it wasn’t such, she was doing things that I would’ve never understood. I would understand them now, but at the time I just wasn’t going to understand them. And one of our professors had a lawyer come in and talk to us, a lawyer that happened to be from Hanman, and the lawyer that happened to run the value team at Hanman, Hanman actually had an attorney run innovation team. At first, I remember saying to my professor, Hey, let me take him out to get coffee. It’s so funny to think back too, because I literally thought this guy was going to let me buy him coffee.

I was a lawsuit student. He was a very senior partner at Heneman, but he bought me coffee and I talked like this at him for 30 minutes. And I remember walking away going, this guy thinks I’m absolutely insane. And so fast forward to the spring, I got a phone call from my professor, Hey, they’re looking to hire a legal project management specialist, which is our entry level legal project management position. You should apply. I applied, got the job, and that’s where I started as a legal project manager for a couple of years. Like I said earlier. Then I went to a Cleveland firm and I will say the best thing that I did, I love Horneman, I love working for the firm. They’re an amazing firm, especially from a culture perspective. But the best thing I did was leave to see how another firm was doing it. I had a really great boss at Thompson Hein who was really on the cutting edge of innovation as well. Got my feet wet there and then went back and was armed with so much more than I would’ve been armed with had I just stayed at Heneman. And so yeah. Then last year, yeah, last year I guess Dennis posted a job posting for a professor. I had always wanted to teach and we’ll talk more about that, but I also taught my first class on legal ops this semester.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, well let’s dive back into ai, but I want to ask the question from a slightly different perspective, and we’ll talk a little bit later about the course that you’re teaching on legal operations. But when I think about AI and when I hear its application and its use in law firms or corporate legal departments, I don’t very often hear about its use in terms of legal operations. So I was interested in your take on that is what you’re seeing and how you’re seeing AI develop on the legal operations side?

Sarah McCormick:

So AI has a lot of impacts on the legal ops side. I mentioned it briefly earlier, but the biggest impact I think is going to be the need for alternative pricing arrangements. I don’t think the billable hour is going away permanently, but I do think for certain types of work, if you’re thinking contract review, lease review, very repetitive projects like that, large law firms are simply just not going to be able to compete if they’re still going to operate from a price perspective on the billable hour model, you can still use billable hours, the model for more senior lawyers that are providing not repetitive type of advice. So that’s one. And it’s interesting too, I did a lot of budgeting and fee reporting when I first started in legal project management and we were coming up with scopes of work by just talking to the lawyers.

Well, now we can come up with the full scope of work leveraging AI or at least a really great starting point to help us to have a great conversation. The one thing that everyone in legal ops has to know is that the lawyers, not all of them, but a lot of the lawyers at Lisa Hodgman are using AI before they come to talk to the staff side resources. And so if we’re not also using ai, we are not putting our best foot forward. And so coming up with process, coming up with, I don’t know, for example, we run technology pilots all the time. All of the emails that you have to come up with for communications for technology pilots can take a long time if you’re not using AI to at least come up with the first draft. So our legal operations team really uses AI a ton. Now what’s interesting is right now our AI efforts are focused on the legal practice side, but there’s obviously a whole host of ways to use AI on the law firm staff side from a business development perspective, attorney development. So our other staff groups are expected to also look at ways to use artificial intelligence. So not only is it impacting the legal ops side of the house, but it’s impacting every single staff department that you see at a law firm.

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, Sarah, one of the things that you’ve told me about that heneman is doing that I’ve shared with a lot of people who are looking for ways to use AI and they’re able to take their mind away from legal research and hallucinations, and that’s just using the AI to evaluate things like strength of argument, strong arguments, weak arguments, how might I reply, how might I test this out, how might I brainstorm ideas or responses? And I know you’ve been doing some of that and you’ve been doing it for a while as I recall. So maybe you could kind of cover some of the things that you’re doing along those lines that I think are really compelling to lawyers, but they’re sort of outside of what the legal research oriented AI conversation seems to be taking these days.

Sarah McCormick:

For sure. So we actually have a whole group called our AI on demand group, which is exactly what it sounds like, AI on demand. A lawyer doesn’t know exactly what they’re going to use AI for, but they know they need to use ai. They reach out to a group of staff who can help them. So you are right that probably our biggest request is, Hey, we’ve got this deposition, the set of deposition transcripts. Not only do they want to summarize the deposition transcripts, but they want to figure out what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses, what’s a draft opening argument as it relates to a set of documents, not just a deposition transcripts. So we’re using it a lot for first draft things like opening and closing arguments. We’re using it a ton for what are the strengths of this deposition or uploading multiple depositions and saying, tell me the holes between what these people are saying.

Again, the advice that we give or the guidance says absolutely followed is trust but verify. But we tell our lawyers that this is a conversation between you and a colleague. So act like the colleague has already read through the documents. One thing that the AI tools that are legally trained are really great at, there are a lot of things that they’re not so great at yet, but some of the things that they’re really great at is looking at a set of documents and being able to provide opinions, thoughts, using them as a sparring partner between yourself and those documents. So the tools have something to ground themselves in to provide the responses back to you. So we’re not only doing stuff like that from the litigation perspective. Our top users are actually, like I said, our patent lawyers coming up with patent arguments for patent prosecution matters or our corporate lawyers.

Our corporate lawyers use the documents a ton to draft short form letters like side letters and stuff like that. We’re not to the point where obviously we’re going to be drafting full-blown purchase agreements, but we’ll take various, we’ll upload a contract and say, Hey, what are the change of control provisions in this contract? It’ll tell you, and then you can edit that change of control provision to be more buyer or seller friendly depending on where you’re at in the transaction. Same with leases. So our real estate lawyers are looking to say, Hey, what is favorable for my client? What is not favorable for my client? And so one of the things that we really drive home is there’s different tools for different use cases and figuring out what the right tool is for that use case is super important. We also have a lot of rules from our policy perspective on what we can use for client data and what we can’t use for client data.

Because as you both I’m sure are very well aware, some of the public tools are awesome, but you simply just can’t. We just don’t have the infrastructure yet. They don’t have the infrastructure for us to be able to upload client data. So we do say like, Hey, if you’re doing something for a business development pitch or something like that where it’s not confidential, you can totally use a Chachi BT a Claw and something like that. But here’s the tools that you use for these other use cases. For example, a co-counsel is better what we’ve seen for litigation use cases on Harvey. Harvey typically works better for the corporate group. So it’s just figuring out the tools, what they’re best at, and then training our lawyers on which ones to use when has been definitely a journey.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we still got a few more questions, but we need to take a quick break for another message from our sponsors. And now let’s get back to the Kennedy Mighell report. I’m Dennis Kennedy. And I’m Tom Mighell. And we are joined by our special guest, Sarah McCormick, director of Legal Service delivery at Heneman LLP. We’ve got time for just a few more questions. Sarah, you’ve gone back to law school to teach a class on legal operations. What was it that drove you to create that course and how are students responding to it?

Sarah McCormick:

Yeah, so it was interesting. I did feel like I was going back to school. It was my last first day of being a professor a couple weeks ago. I’ve always wanted to teach, and in particular I’ve always wanted to teach at Michigan State because that’s where I went. However, I was always grappling with the fact that I live in Ohio and Michigan State in East Lansing. So when there was a job posted to teach a class on legal ops remotely, I jumped at the opportunity. I was super excited. The students, I think, I don’t know, I haven’t gotten my reviews yet, but I think they really enjoyed it the way that I set the class up because one thing that I feel like I didn’t necessarily get in my education, everything was always taught about, I don’t know, let’s take legal project management for an example.

There was a lot taught about legal project management, but there was nothing taught about soft skills that you need as a legal project manager. So communication influence leadership. So it was a dual track course on legal operations topics and the actual knowledge of understanding what is pricing, what is legal project management and process improvement. But then there was a second pathway. So we would look at, okay, we maybe would do legal project management and communication. There’d be two topics for each class and look at how you best communicate. I supervise people and it’s interesting to see what students are coming out of school with. They just lack those soft skills or it’s one of those things where you either have it or you don’t, but if you don’t practice it, you’re not going to have it. As we all know with all the new technology, people just don’t communicate in the same ways.

But then you enter something like a law firm and you have to be able to adapt your communication style to be able to fit in. So I thought that almost really those skills are as important if not more important than the actual legal operations topics. The other thing, the other two things that I thought were also super important, one, building your network. So I had a lot of guest speakers come in and their first assignment was actually building their LinkedIn profile to the extent that they did not have a LinkedIn profile, I had them watch something on the LinkedIn algorithm and I did a test and Dennis, I don’t know if you saw this test on my page, but I basically said, Hey, legal operations people out there ask my students something I wanted to show them as more of a conversation happened in the LinkedIn thread, more people were going to see it.

And so I actually had a lot of people participate in the conversation. You guys can look at it, it’s really interesting of people in the legal ops space asking the students questions. And then I expected the students to answer them. What ended up happening, I started to panic. We got way more questions and the students wanted to answer. So there are some unanswered questions, but we ended up having over 4,000 people look at that post. And that was just so every week it was fun. I’d be like, guess how many people looked at your post guys? Feel free to keep the conversation going. And so my goal was to tell them, Hey guys, I’m also here to help you find a job to the extent that you want a job in this space who goes to law school and doesn’t want a job when they graduate.

So I served as hopefully helpful in that sense and kind of just reiterated time and time again how important networking is because really that is what has propelled me really a lot further than I think I would have been had I not been in the right place at the right time. Meeting the people and having the conversations and just getting the students used to, I kept telling them the worst that people can say is no, you can ask. Never had a senior person in legal ops say, no, I don’t want to talk to you. It might be like, Hey, I’m super busy. I can talk to you in a couple of months type of thing. But people probably aren’t going to say no. And if they do, okay, move on to the next. And then lastly, the one thing I wanted to make sure is that they had a tangible piece of work that they could talk about in an interview.

So when I was in law school, we had access to think Smartt, which I don’t even know where that stands as a technology anymore, but we built workflows in thinks smartt, and that was something I was able to talk about. And so I came up with mock scenarios using AI for them to design process maps on. And so that was another one of their assignments. I wanted their assignments not to feel like just assignments for the sake of assignments, but the LinkedIn profile and then the process map, they can talk about that. And then they did presentations and papers at the end, but it was a proud mom moment when they were doing their presentations where I actually felt like I taught them something because some of the students are just quiet the whole semester. So it was super rewarding for me. I hope it was for them too. And hopefully we keep building the program out to have more coursework.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, that’s great Sarah. And yeah, I want to build some things out. So definitely watch for some things that will be happening there at MSU. So I do want to just touch a little bit on something you said because I think that the students, especially my AI students, there are some of them who have written papers that I would put them up against anybody in terms of the sort of legal AI space in certain areas. And I encourage ’em to go into AI law if that’s something they’re interested or some other aspect of ai and they’re really, really nervous about this or reluctant. And part of it you touched on, which is this thing that I went to law school and my friends and my family are going to be really disappointed if I’m not this lawyer they see on tv. So there is that aspect of it, but how would you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers and I guess also lawyers who are now have gotten the AI bug and to change careers, how would they find those new career paths? And then the second question we always end with is, who are the fresh voices in legal tech you would like to single out and see as part of our Fresh Voices series?

Sarah McCormick:

So I was unclear when I was a first year law student and as to what I wanted to do. And so even as a second year law student and I was a little bit unclear. And so the advice that I gave my class was, if you’re unclear, keep doing both. It sounds terrible, but I was still a member of ABA Journal when I was in law school. I was still on trial team. Those things are all going to still give you the trial team experience was great. I’d never used it a day in my life from a trial team perspective or representing someone in the court, but it helped me with my communication skills so much. And so I always say, take every opportunity that is given to you. Also don’t say no because you never know what saying yes is going to do for you.

And really if a student, because a couple of students said, Hey, I really don’t know what I want to do. I really think I want to practice. But then again, I don’t know, I always suggest that if they do have an interest in practicing practice first, because it’s so much harder to go from being on a staff side role to then trying to enter into practice. So if you’re not sure, practice first and then it’s a super easy transition into a staff side role because you can specialize in whatever it was that you were practicing in and that gives you a huge edge across others that are just entering straight from law school. You actually have the day-to-day practice. And somebody that I think would be great is she’s actually an MSU alum as well. Her name’s Edra Johnson. She worked with me at honigman and Legal Project management, but now she works in access to Justice for Legal Technology Services Corporation, but she would be awesome because she’s going to bring that access to justice side of things. She had a lot of experience in that before she came and then she came to hanman. And so I really like that difference in opinion. The second person I would say is Eric. He currently works at hanman, but what’s interesting about Eric is that he worked at the client. He worked at an A LSP and he worked at a law firm. He used to work for Mayor Brown before coming to Hagman. And so he’s got that trifecta look into Go operations ai and he runs majority of our AI programming too.

Tom Mighell:

Yeah, Lares great. Very good. Alright, we want to thank Sarah McCormick, director of Legal Service delivery at Haman LLP for being our guest on the podcast. Sarah, tell us where people can learn more about you or get in touch with you if they want to talk more.

Sarah McCormick:

Sure. Yeah, so my bios up on hagman’s website and then also my LinkedIn. Always welcome conversation, happy to talk to anyone at any time, so feel free to reach out.

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, thank you so much, Sarah. You’re a fantastic guest, great information, great advice for our listeners and as usual, so many topics to discuss. And so little time, we’ll have to get you back one of these days, but now it’s time for a parting shots, that one tip website or observation that you can use the second this podcast ends. Sarah, take it away.

Sarah McCormick:

So enough talk about work. I love to travel and I use AI actually to now plan all of my traveling adventures. So I recently went to Bar Harbor, Maine and I used AI to totally plan out my itinerary every day because terrible at it. And what’s great is you can say, Hey, I don’t really like, I dunno, I don’t like skiing or I dunno how to ski, so take the skiing out of this and give me something else. So I ended up eating a lot of great lobster based on the suggestions from chat GVT.

Tom Mighell:

We are spending a week in Santa Barbara in a couple of months and I did the same thing and it planned out with times and everything that I should be doing. And it also found events that I might want to go to because we’re going over July 4th and they would say, you might want to go to this parade or you might want to go do this. It was an amazing way to do it. I’m totally into now planning all my vacations with ai. Mine is travel related, which is that I am hearing from friends who ordinarily wouldn’t be stopped when they’re returning back from international travel and being asked to give their phones up. These are people that I wouldn’t expect would be being asked to give their phones up. So I think right now there’s a lot of uncertainty about what happens when you’re coming back from foreign country, so you might want to be protected. So I’ve included a link in the show notes on how to protect yourself from phone searches at the US border just in case it happens. Be aware of the things that you might want to do. Some of the things are pretty extreme, so you might not want to do it, but it’s always good to be informed. Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, so I’m going sort of simple, but I’ve read this interesting article about smart folders on my mac and tags and I think you can do the same thing in Windows. So the idea here is that smart folders are essentially these saved searches that help you organize things. And so I just created a set of tags to say like, oh, these are slides. This is from a presentation, this is for class, this is for these different things. And then I tag the documents from time to time. And then the smart folders are just simple rules that allow me to have this little folder. It’s kind of like a meta folder. It doesn’t really move things around. And I could say, oh, I just want to look at all of my presentation slides in one place and boom, they’re there. And it’s simple to maintain. I don’t have to look through a whole bunch of different sub folders and all these other things. These are like these little shortcuts to the types of files that I want.

Tom Mighell:

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 our episode on the Legal Talk Networks page. You can find all of our previous podcasts along with transcripts also on the Legal to network site. If you want to subscribe to our show, again, you can do it on the Legal Talk Network site or in your favorite podcast app. If you’d like to get in touch with us or suggest a topic for an upcoming episode, remember you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn. But remember, we still love getting your questions for our B segment. That number to leave a voicemail is 7 2 0 4 4 1 6 8 2 0. So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy:

And 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 helps us out, especially on these Fresh Voices episodes. 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 Meyer report on the Legal Talk Network.

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