Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Julia Montgomery

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 422 of the Kennedy Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Garrett, Indiana.

Tom Mighell:

And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy:

In our last episode, we continued our Fresh Voices series with Christian Posner, the CEO of CaseFriend, to explore optimizing document-heavy workflows, transitioning to automated cloud environments and making intentional tech decisions in an AI-driven legal landscape. In this episode, we have another very special guest in our Fresh Voices on Legal Tech series. In Fresh Voices, we want to showcase different and compelling perspectives on legal tech and much more. 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 Julia Montgomery, Director of Practice Enablement at King & Spalding. We want our Fresh Voices series to not only introduce you to terrific leaders in the legal tech space, but also provide you with their perspective on the things 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, before we get started, I want to welcome Julia Montgomery to Kennedy Mill Report. Welcome, Julia.

Julia Montgomery:

Hi, thanks so much for having me guys. I’m very excited to be with you and really glad that we’re making it happen.

Tom Mighell:

We are excited too. We want to know before we get started, tell our audience a little bit more about yourself. What’s the elevator pitch? What’s the 30-second high level view of what you do at King and Spalding and what our audience should know going into the set of questions we’re about to ask?

Julia Montgomery:

Sure. As you mentioned, I’m the director of practice enablement at King & Spalding based in Atlanta, Georgia. And my elevator pitch is a tricky one and that’s because it’s all about behavior change. My role was created at the firm to work with business services teams and practicing attorneys to build technology into their ways of working every day and help the firm recognize return on investment in their technology portfolio. I am a certified change management practitioner. I hold a Proci certification, which is one of the most common change management certs you can find. But if there’s one thing that I would want people to know about what I do, it’s number one, change management isn’t just about technology. It’s truly about changing behavior. And sometimes that’s job role changes or process changes, but sometimes it’s also technology changes. And the other thing that I would want folks to know about what I do is I’ve been doing this work for more than 20 years in legal.

And one thing that I know for sure is when I came out of my cert and was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and excited to get to work, everything that I tried failed with lawyers. And it took me a long time to figure out why that was and found a treasure trove of behavioral research data that helped me understand how lawyers are wired differently. And that’s research driven, that’s not just an opinion. And it allowed me to build my own approaches and methodologies leveraging best practices for change management, but also specifically tailored for the unique traits and behaviors of lawyers.

Dennis Kennedy:

It’s great. Julia, it’s awesome to have you as a guest on a podcast. You come highly recommended and I like what I’ve seen of your writing and the way that you communicate. It’s not always easy, as you just said, to talk with lawyers about tech. So first question kind of leads right into what you’re talking about because I want you to expand on it. So would you talk about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession these days about technology and what you’ve found actually is working well for you?

Julia Montgomery:

Happy to, and thank you for that. I think that the real difference here is lawyers. And as I just mentioned, there is a good solid body of research that tells us that lawyers are wired differently, have different behavioral traits, and a couple of those are key when you’re thinking about how to communicate with them. So for starters, lawyers are wired to be skeptical right out of the gate. They’re arguers and persuaders by nature and by trade. And so when you step into a conversation with them, you have to understand that that’s the most likely posture coming into things. The other aspect that’s very important to be grounded in is their strong desire for autonomy. And so knowing those two things, if I were to walk into a conversation with lawyers and say, there’s a fantastic new AI tool, it’s going to change the way that you work and everybody’s going to start using it next month.

I’ve already hit two hot button triggers. I’ve already told skeptics something like it’s going to change the way you work. Well, they’re already formulating a bunch of questions that they’re going to use to poke holes in that idea. But the other thing is I just told you that we’re all going to do this. So now I’ve also stepped right on top of your autonomy trait. And so just being precise with our language, how we position things and being mindful of that when you’re communicating can go a long way toward ensuring a smoother ride when you’re communicating with lawyers, especially about change. There’s a knock I think that a lot of you hear the talk track often that lawyers are hyper resistant to change. And I think about that a little differently. I mean, it might look like that, but there’s real wiring and rationale and behavioral research underneath why it looks that way.

I’ve actually seen great enthusiasm from many lawyers around these AI tools that we’re introducing, more so than I can recall with any other technology change in my career. So it’s not necessarily that they’re absolutely averse to change. I think it’s just there’s some wiring and behavioral stuff happening that makes it really look like they are. But if you know how to navigate that, I think you’ll find that there’s some enthusiasm here. One pro tip I guess I would share because I do like to share practical stuff is storytelling is a great tool when you’re communicating with lawyers. Everyone’s brain is hardwired for storytelling to be effective communication, but lawyers are hardwired for a specific type of storytelling to work particularly well with them. I can nerd out about brain science all day, but I won’t go too deep here. Peer storytelling, so not me telling a story, but a lawyer who this lawyer thinks that lawyer is like them, knows their practice, knows their work.

If that lawyer tells the story, then something happens in the brain that’s called narrative transportation. And it’s especially important when you’re working with lawyers because what narrative transportation does is it short circuits the wiring in the brain that’s wired for skepticism. And so when your audience scores 90 out of 100 on a skepticism trait, having storytelling that will calm that natural response and allow them to hear the message is solid gold. It’s really magic. And so if I was going to tell your audience one tool that they should leverage in their communication and change efforts working with lawyers, it would be peer storytelling.

Tom Mighell:

So we’re going to talk offline about the fact that change management’s a big part of my job. It’s not talking to lawyers, it’s talking to corporations, but that’s something I really want to try immediately or think about immediately. But I want to come back to lawyers and shift the question slightly. When you’re talking to lawyers, how much does their, and if you’re adopting that fancy new AI tool that’s going to change the way you work, how does their technology competence factor into what you’re thinking? Dennis and I tend to be the grumpy old men who think that most lawyers are not technologically competent or at least not as competent as they should be. But you’re in the trenches. I mean you’re able to actually, you’re working with lawyers all the time and I’m wondering what you’re seeing. I’m assuming there’s different levels among generational lines and other lines, but it by no means is a standard rule.

But what are you seeing right now as far as technology competence with lawyers and what would you say a technologically competent lawyer needs to know to be successful in today’s legal environment?

Julia Montgomery:

I love this question. I think it’s an important one. I think for years in our industry, technology competence has translated to, can you use this? And I think AI poses a different question and perhaps demands a different definition. It’s not so much can you use the tool? That’s certainly part of it, but it’s do you have the knowledge to know when you should use the tool, when using this tool would be effective? And then the judgment to be able to review and assess the outputs to understand if the tool added value in a way that’s meaningful for you and for the client. And so I think about AI around fluency rather than competence because I think there are levels. So one of the things that I think we see in some data coming out of firms is what I call the partner gap. It’s very common to see a higher usage rate among associates than partners.

And there are lots of different possible explanations for that. It’s important to dig into it and understand what really is leading to your particular gap. But for partners, perhaps competence with AI, depending on the partner and the work they do, maybe it’s not being able to create a banger workflow. Maybe it’s really understanding how to supervise work that’s done using these new technologies. And so that might be what fluency or competence looks like for that partner in that firm in that practice. So I think the idea of one size fits all is behind us now. And I also think the idea that competence has to mean usage is probably no longer true as well. There’s one aspect of that that I want to touch on. We’ll probably hit it a couple of times during our conversation because it’s top of mind for me. One of the things that I think is emerging from this idea of the new way of thinking about competence or fluency is what’s the cognitive impact of that?

So there is cognitive impact to asking people to learn how to create a workflow. That’s change and change has a cognitive erosion effect on our brain. But there’s a study, I think Boston Consulting did it. It was published in HBR in March of this year I think. And that study shows that while that cognitive load is real, learning how to use AI has a cognitive impact. The higher cognitive impact is reviewing and supervising and looking at that output to ensure the quality of it. It has a higher cognitive erosion impact than learning how to use the tool in the first place. So when you think about that, if you’re a partner in a firm and fluency for you means you learn how to review and supervise this work. There’s actually a higher cognitive load to bear on that way of working than in actually creating a great workflow.

And if there’s one thing we know, it’s the most valuable asset a law firm has is the cognitive abilities of its great lawyers. And so I think there’s a really interesting question there. And I think it also forces firms, or I hope it will force firms to think about how we’re caring for cognitive capacity and how we can protect that in this steady state change.

Dennis Kennedy:

It’s interesting because there is this concentration these days on workflow and mapping it, which is a really unique skill that I don’t know that we actually have that much of in legal profession. And when I think about mapping my own workflow, it’s a little scary because I have my own ways of doing things that work for me pretty well, but can be improved and AI supplements that in a lot of good ways. But I want to look at, I love the area that you’re in of practice enablement. And so I think it gives you a unique vantage point and I want you to reflect on what are the areas of the legal profession that need the most attention now and how can we actually get people to pay that attention? And I don’t think anymore that the answer is just to try to scare them.

Julia Montgomery:

Yeah. Fear is a burning platform. And so it only holds for so long. And the reality is that if you’ve been in this industry for any length of time, we’ve had plenty of burning platforms before. The death of the billable hour, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard about the death of the billable hour, I would be retired somewhere in the tropics. So I think it’s really important in this moment. There’s so much focus on the technology and it’s amazing and really it is. I’m using it in so many areas of my life that I just didn’t anticipate it would add value to. But I think tying back to that comment I just made about cognitive erosion, I think the area that needs attention is the care of the people that are in the midst of this change. It’s not just the lawyers, it’s also KM teams, innovation leaders, technologists.

This is an extraordinary moment. The pace of change has accelerated exponentially. And if you’re lucky enough to have a change manager in your ranks, none of the tried and true models were built for this. They were built for episodic change that happened inside a container, like a merger or a project. And so one of the things that I think needs attention, and most of my answers to this question would fall into the people category is I see firms, there’s so many roles being filled right now and I see firms filling roles. What I’m not seeing, what’s not visible to me is them building capabilities. How do you build an organizational change function that can support this amount of change for all areas of the organization and preserve the cognitive abilities of your workers? Not burn them out, not overwhelm them. I think John Cabot-Zen has this great definition of overwhelm, and I wrote it down so I wouldn’t get it wrong.

I don’t like to misquote. It’s the feeling that our lives are unfolding faster than our nervous systems can manage. That resonates with me. And when I talk to lawyers or I talk to people who are product owners and trying to keep up with the pace of change in these products, I sense overwhelm. And I think for a long time, wellness initiatives were kind of a nice to have and this is big law and buckle up. But I think that it’s becoming a resilience and wellness are becoming business problems to solve right now. And I think that’s an area that needs attention.

Tom Mighell:

So I want to talk a little bit about what you’re doing at King and Spalding. I think you have written or said in the past that change management in legal is everywhere and nowhere. That it shows up in half a dozen job descriptions on the same team and when everybody owns adoption, either nobody does or it just doesn’t get done. That’s

Julia Montgomery:

Right. At

Tom Mighell:

King and Spalding, you built it differently. You built it with business analysts, communications, learning and development all inside the PMO. For those in our audience who aren’t familiar, project management organization. What does that actually look like at King and Spalding and how did you put it together?

Julia Montgomery:

This is the part where I come back later and say maybe we should edit this part out because I’m going to get myself in trouble by being a contrarian in the industry. And part of this sounds incredibly self-serving and I recognize that. I still will not shy away from it. I’ve been doing change management work in legal for more than 20 years. And for many years I was like a unicorn in the desert looking for someone else who was doing change management in legal. And every year I would speak at Ulticon and we had packed house, everybody’s in the room and I would think, “This is it, man. This the year. It’s going to happen. Legal’s embracing change management.” And then nobody did.

And I’d be out on message boards like anyone, anyone. And then something interesting happened. And this is where people might say I’m being a bit self-serving or maybe sour grapes. I feel like I got lapped. All of a sudden I woke up one day and everyone’s like, “Well, I’m doing a lot of change management. We’re doing a lot of change management over here.” And I was like, “Whoa, the herd of unicorns have arrived.” But then I started asking questions, not in a challenging way, in really a beginner’s mind, curiosity-driven way. And what I found was what I refer to as a lot of change management theater where a discipline, a recognized longstanding discipline change management with multiple frameworks and defined terms kind of got flattened down into we send emails and we do a lot of training. And communications and training are just two levers in an effective change management program, but they are not a change management program.

And so that’s my Joan of art crusade and didn’t end well for her, but I’m still committed to let’s have real conversations about what change management really is. And I see lots of job roles where change management is one of 10 bullet points and I think we still aren’t quite hitting it. I think we’re still filling roles and not building capabilities. So what did we build at King and Spalding and why did we build it that way? And how is it I think different than what you might find elsewhere? So we built a change management machine, I think. And what we know about the way we work at the firm is the majority of the change that we introduce at the firm from a technology perspective comes through projects. And so the PMO becomes the heart of the change management machine. It’s kind of not necessarily what everyone would think.

So projects come in, requests come in for projects. And when they come in, so the PMO sits with me and my work. When requests for projects come into the machine, I have a team of business change analysts. So they have business analyst skills, so they’re really good at requirements gathering, very consultative. They also have change management skills. So they review these requests. They might do a consultative interview with the sponsor of the project to learn a little bit more. And then we do two things in that moment. The business change analyst assigns a complexity value to the project, the proposed project. How long is it going to take? How many different departments are involved? And then we also assign something that we call a PIE score, a people impact estimate. So we learn about which roles in the firm will be impacted, how significantly will this change their way of working?

When we can find it out, we like to also include in that score, are there a lot of other changes that will hit those people at the same time as this one? And so then after we score those, we have a quarterly review meeting and we take a look at the portfolio and the proposed projects, the proposed changes, and we say, okay, let’s sequence this out so we’re not inflicting too much change on the organization at once. And so the people who are delivering it won’t be overwhelmed as well. And so then we schedule and sequence the work and then a business change analyst works on above a certain score. A business change analyst will ride along and develop a change management plan, which includes training, communications, but also measurement. And so rinse and repeat. So now instead of just kind of a fire hose of change washing over the organization all at once, we are bringing more measure and more intention to how we introduce change into the organization.

So my org is the PMO, the business change analyst, learning and development, and then a communications role as well.

Tom Mighell:

I love it. I have about a million different questions about my own, how that works with my own job, but we don’t have time for that. And in fact, we need to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors, but then we’ll be right back with Julie Montgomery at King and Spalding.

Dennis Kennedy:

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

Tom Mighell:

And I’m Tom Mile, and we’re joined by our special guest, Julia Montgomery from King and Spalding.

Dennis Kennedy:

Julia, I’m like Tom, I have a bunch of follow-ups that I’d like to do, but we want to keep on track here. You can always

Julia Montgomery:

Bring me back, you guys.

Dennis Kennedy:

We start the second segment always with what our listeners and us have found as our favorite question. And we found in this series that what we love most is hearing about our guests’ career paths and our audience does as well. Especially when I was teaching, my students loved to hear about how people got into the careers they did. So you have a great career story. Could you talk more about your actual career paths and what kinds of things you’ve done to get you into your current role and focus?

Julia Montgomery:

I appreciate you saying I have a great career path. It was very unintentional, my path. It started when from a very young age, I wanted to be a lawyer. And I’ve talked a little bit about behavioral research and how lawyers profile differently. And I actually profile just like a lawyer. So I was kind of wired for it from a young age. And then I was in my last year of college and a dear friend who was two years ahead of me had gone on to law school and he called and said, “I need to talk to you. ” I said, “Okay.” And he said, “Don’t do it. ” I was like, “Whoa, wait a minute, this has been my entire plan all along.” And he said, “Go work in a law firm this summer. Work closely with the new associates, talk to them, se what you find out, then make the decision about what you want to do.

” And so I took his advice and I did. And I found a bunch of folks who honestly weren’t very happy and it broke my heart. And they told me, many of them, if I could do it all over again, I would choose a different path. And I’m not so sure that if I could go back now that I would do the same thing, but I let that really give me pause so I didn’t go to law school. But I love legal. And so I started working in law firms and I worked as a paralegal and managed large litigation matters. I have a really interesting case history of different matters that I managed as a paralegal. And then I started to get my feet wet in different types of practice and firms so I could learn all the different ways that lawyers worked. And I loved that.

And then I became a consultant and that was because of geography. I was moving and I needed a job. And I realized nobody as a young child grows up or when they’re a kid says, “Oh, I want to grow up to be a consultant one day.” But I loved it. I absolutely loved being a consultant. And so as I was doing problem solving with my clients, I started doing these things over and over again. So I came to understand later, a few years into that work, what I was doing was change management. I didn’t really even recognize that that’s what it was. I didn’t know that was a thing. And I did a lot of reading and research and change management outside the United States is a much more mature discipline recognized. There are law firms outside the US where they have a change management office, just like we have a PMO, they have a CMO.

And that led me to get my certification. And then I mentioned earlier in our discussion, I was all excited. Here I go. Now I’m legit and I’m going to go and do this. And everything didn’t work on lawyers. And so that set me down a side quest. Why isn’t this working? Am I really bad at this? Am I doing it wrong? And that’s when I came across the work of my good friend and great mentor, Dr. Larry Richard, who has spent 30 plus years profiling and studying lawyers. Larry’s a lawyer himself and also a psychologist and his work was transformational for me. When I took his research and I overlaid it with change management best practices, I could then quickly see why this wasn’t working. And that allowed me to create my own approaches. I took that information and I went to work at InTap serving the legal industry and I led a team of what we call solution advisors.

And solution advisors were really doing change management work. They were working with clients who own the products but were struggling to get effective adoption. Then I really missed working inside a law firm, believe it or not. And so now here I am come full circle and I’m back inside a law firm this time at King and Spalding and I love it. And what an exciting time to land back in a law firm because this, my friends, this moment in our industry, this is the Super Bowl for change management and I could not be more excited.

Tom Mighell:

So that’s a great segue. This is an amazing time to talk about AI. So let’s talk about AI.

Julia Montgomery:

Oh, okay.

Tom Mighell:

You have written before about a two-week stretch where the two main AI tools that you use renamed five features, add six more, ship two with no ability to gate them and announced all of it on LinkedIn before your team had even seen the changes. I think you said somewhere that that’s when you thought about becoming a barista, which you didn’t mention on your career path, but I appreciate the feeling. That’s not really an adoption problem. That’s the vendors outrunning us is

Julia Montgomery:

Really what

Tom Mighell:

That is. So my question is, is anybody actually solving that? Is there a solution to that or are we just supposed to keep up? What’s the solve for that?

Julia Montgomery:

I don’t even drink coffee. So that’s how serious it was that I was like, “I’m going to become a barista.” I think the vendors are not serving us well. And the vendors with whom I have the closest relationships and speak most frequently would tell you, they would just nod and say, “Yes, she tells us all the time we’re not serving them well. But listen, the teams that are… Hear me, Harvey, Lagora, insert whatever vendor here. These teams of people, the innovation teams, the technologists, whoever it is, these are the folks who are championing your products. In the words of, I think Cameron Crowe was who wrote the great film Jerry McGuire. Help me help you. I can’t keep up with my own learning at the pace that you’re introducing changes. So how can I then synthesize what you’ve introduced, understand the likely use cases, and then effectively message that to skeptical lawyers and then give them training that will help them build the skills they need to adopt your ever-changing product?

You have to give us some help. I’ve advocated for these vendors to have client advisory boards. I’ve advocated for them to do previews specifically for people who are leading the change or product owners and firms.

I feel like something’s going to break and it’s going to be people. And that’s not great. It’s not hyperbolic. Our brains are not built for this. David Rock’s amazing work, Your Brain at Work, is I think critical reading for anyone working in our field right now. And you will come away from that book clearly understanding we are absolutely not built for this pace. And I think the vendors really need to come alongside and be more partners. There’s a way to still innovate. You can still go fast. You can still impress investors and get your incredible valuations without breaking your client base, I think.

Tom Mighell:

Your customers. Yep. Amen.

Dennis Kennedy:

I struggle because so much of this seems so venture capital private equity driven and people have to overstate. AI firms, especially legal AI, I think back when I was at MasterCard, we had to review everything for forward-looking statements. And I

Julia Montgomery:

Was

Dennis Kennedy:

Like, that doesn’t even exist out here. So it’s like

Julia Montgomery:

People – That’s adorable. That’s adorable.

Dennis Kennedy:

People want to overstate At everything and claim things and name things in ways the legal OS, the AI native firm that’s supposed to mean something when we have this really cool tool that might be in version 1.2 ultimately with a lot of flaws, but it’s incredible. Tom and I would say what’s got us enthusiastic is that we were part of the beginning of the internet or I would say the worldwide web in law and it was revolutionary like the invention of the printing press and generative AI has that potential

Julia Montgomery:

But

Dennis Kennedy:

It’s early days. Still early. And the more you over promise that people are going to be disappointed and it does seem to be driven by funding frankly and acquisition and less by what you’re saying like, well, is this going to be useful for the client? And if one person promises this, then everybody else feels they have to promise it. When you and I are sitting here saying like, how do we train somebody on something where we could go, we could do one thing and they made some changes and now we can’t even come close to getting the same results and we have to kind of rewire it. That just

Julia Montgomery:

Feeds

Dennis Kennedy:

That lawyer skepticism. So I like to ask this question in this way. So I like to find out what people think is actually working in AI these days and where is their action and their outcomes and not just talk. And one of the things I used to do when I interviewed job candidates was I asked them just what they worked on the day before so they would be specific and say, “Here’s something I accomplished.” And maybe that’s what we should start looking at more with lawyers. What did you actually do? What was successful? Why did you think it was successful? But what are the things where you say this is something I can point to that will help other people understand what the enthusiasm should be about this?

Julia Montgomery:

I love the entry point because I think it cuts right through all the hype immediately. What did you do differently yesterday? Before I jump in, because I do have a thought here. I want to touch on something you said that I think is really important and gets overlooked. In our conversation today, we’ve talked a bit about skepticism and autonomy as being outlier traits, very strong in lawyers. There’s another outlier trait in the other direction and it’s resilience. And I mentioned Larry Richard in his research and he’s just publishing a book on lawyers and resilience. And the research and data shows lawyers have a significantly lower resilience score than other people do. And the reason that’s so important is you just talked about the hype and the promise and the check out our greatest, latest new feature. It’s going to change this. It’s going to absolutely transform that.

Lawyers who have low resilience and high skepticism hear that, try it. And it’s like, it’s all right. And then what happens is they never come back and use it again because their low resilience is they’re underwhelmed. Their high skepticism is, I knew it. And then you’ve lost your opportunity to get meaningful engagement. So I think the vendors are doing themselves a disservice because you’re turning off your audience with all of the overpromising and the hype. So just wanted to get that one in because I think it’s absolutely critical to understand that part. So what’s real? I think asking people, what are you doing differently with this tool than how’s it changing the way you did that a month ago? This is practical. I want to make one little asterisk here. There are a lot of thinkers in the field who kind of pashaw about people calling these things tools.

And I disagree respectfully. I think these are tools. And I think when you’re talking to lawyers who have a high autonomy level, that talking about them as magical transformational things versus talking about them as a tool is not doing you any favors. When I talk to a lawyer about this is a new tool, I’m going to show you how you can use it, but you are in charge. You get to choose how to use this tool. You will know better than I when it’s the right tool for the right job and you have the knowledge, the judgment, the big brain to know when to pick it up and how to use it. That’s empowering for lawyers. And when they have autonomy, high autonomy trait, empowering them is important. So I do like to talk about these as tools and you’ll have a toolkit and there’ll be different tools in the kit.

You see where I’m going there. I think one thing that gets overlooked and part of this is because there’s a bit of change management theater happening out there as we talked about. Change management, good change management starts with a foundational question. What problem are you trying to solve? Now listen, I get the early days in exploration and it’s good to let people kind of freestyle a bit so they get comfortable. But at some point you have to come back to what’s the problem we’re trying to solve? Focus on that and then say, can this technology actually solve that problem? This isn’t one size fits all. And then the question I ask is if we did everything right, if we got the messaging right, the training was amazing, we had good champions, would the lawyers actually use it? And if the answer to these questions, if that’s no or we can’t articulate the problem we’re trying to solve, I think move on and find another place to explore.

When you get on LinkedIn, it sounds like a lot of people have figured all this stuff out. And I would just say that’s amazing, but I’m not sure that that’s the case. I’m going to get in so much trouble.

Dennis Kennedy:

Well,

Tom Mighell:

It seems

Dennis Kennedy:

Like Tom and I will get in worse trouble. Well,

Tom Mighell:

It seems like it’s a great time now to take a quick break for a message from our sponsors. So we will be right back with Julie Montgomery.

Dennis Kennedy:

And let’s get back to the Kennedy Bio Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy.

Tom Mighell:

And I’m Tom Mighell. And we are joined by our special guest, Julia Montgomery at King and Spalding. We’ve got time for just a few more questions.

Dennis Kennedy:

So I’m the biggest fan possible of today’s law students and new lawyers. And I think they’re going into a really difficult world where there’s a lot of backward movement and high expectations for them without giving the tools to work with. So how would you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find career paths in non-traditional legal careers like yours, especially in legal innovation and related fields?

Julia Montgomery:

My niece just graduated from law school and we’ve had lots of conversations about this. She went to law school almost begrudgingly, I think, but doesn’t feel a passion for the practice. And so I’ve said to her, “Hey, there are lots of new avenues opening up for someone who’s holding a JD.” And I think that’s exciting. I think that the path right now is much narrower than it will be in a few years time. There’ll be more roles, more understanding of how we want to incorporate these technologies and tools into the way we work in law firms. So whether it’s being part of an innovation team or new roles that we haven’t even imagined yet, I think there will be lots of paths open. I want to say one thing about that though, and this again sounds self-serving and contrarian, feels like the theme of this episode.

I mentioned earlier that I see firms filling roles rather than building capabilities. As long as I’ve been in legal, there has been this kind of mindset that only lawyers can talk to lawyers or only lawyers can understand legal work. I recognize there is something about holding a JD. You’ve had training and education that I haven’t had, I don’t hold a JD. But it does sort of rub me the wrong way, this idea that people who don’t hold a JD can’t understand legal work. Of course we can. And I can map that process for you. And I think the capabilities idea is you’re going to need people who hold a JD. They understand how lawyers think, they understand the nuances of the work, but just the virtue of having a JD doesn’t mean that you have the skills and knowledge to process map or to do change management work.

You certainly could do those things with the right training, but just because I hold a change management certification doesn’t mean I’m qualified to write a brief. Learning and training is specific. And the idea that simply holding a JD makes one qualified to do all of the things that are required of this moment in our industry, change management, continuous improvement, process mapping, true business transformation. JDs are a critical part of that. I would say to someone who’s getting their JD right now or coming out and saying, “I’m not sure I want to practice what paths are open.” Don’t stand on your JD alone. Go get business skills training, learn process mapping, get continuous improvement certifications, get change management certifications, build a full skillset that JD brings an add lens and perspective to. But this moment, in my opinion, this moment in our industry is a business transformation moment and it requires those skills.

So if that’s the path you want to pursue after you have your JD, recognize there are other skills and certifications you should invest time in getting that will supplement that great expertise you have by virtue of having a JD.

Dennis Kennedy:

And that you might be able to get the firm that you go to that you’re already starting to feel unhappy with to pay for that training and certification for you.

Julia Montgomery:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Dennis Kennedy:

Double benefit.

Julia Montgomery:

I love that, right?

Tom Mighell:

Okay. Time for our self-serving part of the podcast. We always like to ask at the end, who are the fresh voices that you are seeing out there? Who are the voices in legal tech and otherwise that you’d like to single out and that maybe we could also single out as guests of our Fresh Voices series?

Julia Montgomery:

There’s so many voices that are like names. And sure, but I love that you’re bringing forward smaller voices like mine. So I’ll say that I mentioned in our conversation that change management is a more mature discipline, a recognized respected discipline, more so outside the US. And so my recommendation is the really smart, innovative folks at the Basil Research Initiative in the UK. Justin North, Mark Dean, and others, they are really the first think tank of their kind that I’ve seen that is bringing behavioral science research and organizational psychology approaches to law firms specifically. And it’s, I hope, the beginning of something really cool.

Tom Mighell:

Excellent. Yay. Another name we didn’t have on our list, so that’s fantastic.

Dennis Kennedy:

Time is totally up your alley too.

Tom Mighell:

Yes, mostly. We’ll talk offline. We want to thank Julia Montgomery, Director of Practice Enablement at King and Spalding for being our guest on the show. Julia, if people want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that?

Julia Montgomery:

Find me on LinkedIn. As you mentioned a couple of times today, I tend to get out there and sort of let it rip. So you’ll find me out there. I also am speaking at Eltacon this year and the KMNI conference coming up in October. I try and do as much speaking as possible and get out and talk to folks about this stuff. I think it’s an amazing time to be having really interesting conversations with peers.

Dennis Kennedy:

So thank you so much, Julia. You were fantastic guests. Great information and advice, many insights and so many topics, so little time, which is a trait of the series. But now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Julia, take it away.

Julia Montgomery:

Mine is maybe in alignment with some of the softer things I’ve been talking about today, and that is my parting shot, my pro tip is show yourself some grace and give yourself permission to not have all the answers right now. I think when you go on LinkedIn and you hear a lot of folks who are declaring that they’ve solved these challenges or they’re making these huge strides, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or easy to feel that you’re falling behind. And I would say let that go. Take a deep breath and start small. Pick one practice group, pick one workflow, pick one thing, do that, and then rinse and repeat. My mantra is that small and real beats big installed every single time. You don’t have to know everything, you just have to start and you just have to ask some questions and it all comes in time.

Dennis Kennedy:

So my parting chart for this week actually is yet another variation on my theme for this year of addition by subtraction. And so we recently moved, I mean very recently moved from Ann Arbor to Garrett, Indiana, which forced a major audit of my physical and digital infrastructure because we would have to move everything. So when you move locations or even update your workspace, treating it as just the logistics challenge is a missed opportunity. So treat it more like a structural migration. So execute a strict sunset protocol on your physical data. Get rid of the paper, get rid of this legacy storage devices, shred or securely recycle it rather than paying to transport it because you pay a lot to transport things. And then you can use the disruption not as just this grudging disruption, but as a way to intentionally rebuild your network architecture, your technology architecture and your approaches from the ground up, optimize your security and your hardware and just where you place things instead of just blindly recreating your old cluttered legacy environment you just left behind.

Tom Mighell:

Dennis went first because Dennis talking about moving and I was talking about moving the last time. In the last podcast I gave an update on how connecting smart bulbs to my network was driving me absolutely crazy. And I will give you a quick update on that. The answer is make sure that if you want to connect smartbulbs to your network, that your Wi-Fi password does not contain an exclamation point. That was the entire thing that was preventing me from connecting the smart bulb. And frankly, any symbol. I keep saying that I’m not looking for a smart house, I’m just looking for a clever house. I just want clever home technology. This seems very dumb, but it led me down a path. But what I really want to focus on is another use case for AI in your personal life, which is on troubleshooting technology issues.

We have had issues with our internet since we moved in. I started troubleshooting with my favorite tool of choice and it led me in places that I just don’t have experience in. It said, “Let’s set up a PowerShell script and let’s ping your network every 10 seconds and just let it run for eight hours so that we can see what’s happening on your network while you’re working.” We’ve been having periodic drops of the internet, pages slow to load. We’ve watched Hulu or Apple TV and those things would not load directly. Trying to figure out, I couldn’t just go to the internet company and say sometimes it doesn’t work. It’s not really a diagnosis. I ran it for eight hours. I then turned it back over to my AI and it identified that between seven minutes past the hour and 25 minutes past the hour, there was a 30% degradation in our signal and the latency went up tremendously just at that period of time, which the AI says suggests a scheduled activity on the internet provider.

It’s something that happens every single hour during that time. Of course, the internet company doesn’t care that I told them all that. I gave them the evidence. I said all of that stuff, but at least I have it. We’re going to see what happens with it. My saga with internet connection still continues, but I like that I feel more empowered on this. I feel more intelligent and it’s something that AI has helped me with. And so that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy Mighell Report.

Dennis Kennedy:

A big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing the show. You can find the show notes and transcripts on the Legal Talk Network website.

Tom Mighell:

If you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave us a review.

Dennis Kennedy:

You can also connect with us on LinkedIn with your questions or share your thoughts about the episode.

Tom Mighell:

And 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 for more than 20 years.

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 ABA Books or Amazon. And join us every other week for another edition of the Kennedy Mighell Report only on the Legal Talk Network.

Continue Reading