Ep 4: Innovation Is Not Optional

[Music] Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of Future Contracts. Today I'm joined by someone that I've known for a few years now, Janna. We've been in the same space for a while. Janna, please tell us a little bit about yourself. Sure. Uh so Janna Blunt um in this space for a while as you say um about 10 years I would say probably in legal innovation. Yeah I know I'm one of the OGs. Um and I do uh legal innovation consulting for both in-house teams as well as law firms. So thinking about innovation strategy and then of course how you actually make that change happen. What is innovation in law? Oh, just started right out the gates. Um, you know, I think, uh, so I think there's there's been other kind of interviews where when I was at DA for a while, we actually switched away from using the word innovation, right? Because I think for a while it kind of just got lost and then it either meant everything or nothing to people. Um, so you kind of just would throw this word around and it was quite intangible and maybe even meaningless in some contexts. So what do I mean when I say innovation? Um, I think you can look at it in two ways, right? There's the innovation that people think about where it's disruptive kind of the new services, the new client experiences, um, creating something that doesn't exist yet, right? And then there's the innovation where I think is more common and should be more common which is where you're looking at what you're currently doing and how you can make that better, create more efficiencies, solve some problems that everyone's dealing with currently in the way that they're um actually doing their work dayto-day. Yes. Okay. Great. How did you get into this space? What was your path into legal legal innovation change? Yeah. How far back should we go? Go back to childhood, Janna. It's up to you. Go back to childhood. So, I was born um I was I was actually born in Miami. Um which is relevant in that I lived in eight different cities before I was 18, but ended up back in Miami for law school. Um and I think I was quite stereotypical in at least the US where I went to law school because I was told I was intelligent, I could read and write well, but I didn't really know what to do. Um, and uh, I enjoyed it. It was great. I met, you know, great people like Preston, for instance. Um, and I think actually being in Miami and going to that law school laid certain foundations, right? Like even when I was there, uh, they were pushing things like a joint JD MBA. So learning about the business aspect um, in conjunction with learning the legal aspects or the law. Um, so that was a really great foundation. I think a bit different than a lot of other law firm or law schools um, back when I was in law school. And um, so then I practiced as a litigator in Miami for about fourish, fiveish years. And even then, I distinctly remember one night coming home to my then husband and saying, "I'm just going to do this for a little bit longer so I can learn all the ways that we shouldn't be doing things as lawyers, and then I'm going to come back and tell all the law firms how to do things better and differently." Um, because even then, you know, doing the grind and experiencing that, it just seems like a lot of waste of really great brains. um doing a lot of tasks that we really shouldn't have been spending that much time doing. Um and and really wasn't creating that value I think our clients were seeking. Um so then we moved to London and uh I took a couple years off and it was really I was really fortunate to be able to have that kind of pause, right? Because I think when you're on that treadmill and you're pushing and you're going and it's a grind and you're busy, you don't have that space to actually sit with yourself and think, is this what I want to do? Is this really what I'm passionate about? Um, so I took that pause and um, again a very distinct memory for me is getting a phone call while I was walking around Hamstead and it was a recruiter saying, "I have the most vague and ambiguous job description ever and I think it might be your dream job." And he sent it my way and I looked and I was like, "Oh my god, it is literally my dream job." And it was DA and they were just starting out with what was then called service delivery and quality and it was basically you know we have some AI we want to do innovation go. Um so I did that and I was there for about nine years. No sorry 7 years. Seven and a half years. Seven and a half year. Amazing. And what were the changes? What are the changes that you've seen between what innovation meant when you first started in this space versus what it means now? Yeah. Well, I think the big change was people didn't know what it meant, right? It was this is it quality? Is it efficiency? What is it right? Um what does that even mean? How do you apply these these concepts? What what other industries are doing into legal? And even should we, right? is there value and just keeping the way keeping things the way they are. So like I said it was it was awesome you know and you know this as well going into a space where it really wasn't defined yet where people had to come up with actually this is what innovation can look like and means and how to translate um real benefits and and change into legal industry and law firms. So we started off quite ambiguous. Um, as I said, it was a very small team when I started at TLA, but we were still one of, you know, few firms that had a team of innovators and it was like a tech guy, some legal project managers and a pair some parallegals in a a legal delivery center and then myself and my role quickly changed within six months and then in another year and a half I was reporting up to the global co-CEO Simon Lavine and we were creating radical change and then really defining what that meant for us as well. Um, awesome. That sounds like a really fun job. Um, were you working for the firm to make that more innovative in its service delivery or were you working directly to deliver change into clients? Yeah. So my focus initially was we were the first law firm to get Kira and so essentially it was what do we do and I you know we did a lot of meetings with all the practice groups, group heads, sector heads and um that quickly then led to client conversations because clients wanted to hear about what we were doing and even what innovation meant for legal, right? Um and that then became the catalyst for my jump up to the change maker at DA. Um essentially I was brought into pretty significant or very significant client pitches and we won pretty large mandates um based off of offering them alternative or new ways of delivering legal services um that we would co-create with them. And once people caught wind that clients really actually really did want this and would pay for this um I I found myself having coffee with Simon and then my role became change maker and it became if we go back to what does innovation mean? We bifurcated in innovation. So I was purely focused on the what how do we create the new the disruptive the client experience. Um, and as you know, I'm very passionate about design thinking. Um, it was always the premise that we use design thinking because we needed to make sure that all the new products and services were grounded in real client needs and desires rather than what we thought was cool and sexy and fun. Yeah, I've got loads to say on on design thinking, but before I go there, um just on the on the kind of change that you're delivering into clients, I think that has been the biggest barrier to the legal transformation that we've been hearing about and been promised over the last I'm going to say decade. I mean, I I started up in this space in 2017 and legal ops wasn't even a term that was widely known. And I think that a lot of the stuff that you're talking about is just better legal operations, right? How do you work better to deliver your service either internally or externally? And um and and so it's just legal ops is a space. It's a it's a well kind of structured everyone understands kind of what it means kind of but they've heard it before probably. So you've got that bit. Then you've got change. How do you implement change? Because it's not just about legal ops and better processes. And then there's methodologies like design thinking that you would uh leverage to deliver change and better legal obstruction structures. So that's not a question. That's a lot of different kind of areas that I want to touch upon, but I'll hand that over to you. What do you think? Yeah. And I think that's kind of the biggest maybe as you were saying that I was thinking, my god, how many people actually understand that, right? Like that all of those components are necessary and play a very important part into this ecosystem of actually making change happen, right? Um, and I think to your point, that's probably where we're seeing not as much change happen because people understand, I think on a high level, you know, we work in in law firms. Many people are very highly intelligent humans and they can see what's going on. I I would struggle, I think, today to find a lawyer that would say everything's fine the way it is. Nothing's going to change. Right? Where I think we as an industry struggle though is that's not been our day job, right? There's there's some of us have been doing it for for a decade or so. But really what's needed is it's not a point solution. You can't just have some people on the side that are doing the change. It's it's really thinking about holistically how are we going to operate? And that means so many different layers and levels with different processes, different methodologies, different mindsets, different technologies. But you need all of that in order to effectuate real change, right? You can't just have people that are eager without the tools in order to make the change. You can't just have the tools without people that have the mindsets to be willing to learn how to use them, right? So really what's needed is to bring all of that together. And that's Not that's quite significant. That's a lot. Um, and it takes a lot of thinking and planning and strategy. And my last point on this before I guess you you can ask me another question is um I think what really needs to happen is a lot of legal law firms will see innovation and have an innovation strategy and it's like a pillar, right? And then you have finance and then you have marketing and BD strategy and then you have your growth or you know whatever your different strategies. Um and actually innovation needs to be kind of put on its side and be the enabler of the strategy for how the law firm the legal team operates. How do you actually enable these strategies that you're trying to um drive across the law firm? And ultimately, you would hope the law firm had an overarching strategy, but innovation in itself isn't just a thing that you do over here, right? It it's needs to be a driver, an enabler, a builder, an expander, an amplifier of of an overarching strategy, of a vision of where you want to take your your firm, your business. Yeah. I wonder whether other industries have innovation as like a pillar. Is there such a thing as marketing innovation that everyone's banging on about the way we are in legal? I don't I don't know the answer to that. But I think that I mean there's two questions that I have here. The first question is why do we need to change? What's the thing that's driving the change? And is there enough impetus there for us to to to change? What so let's start with that. Why do we need to change in legal? Why do we need to change in legal? I mean, yeah. Well, we'll get straight to it. I mean, everything is changing right now, right? And and of course, I'm going to say Gen AI, right? Because everyone's talking about Gen AI, but it's not just Gen AI. I mean, look at the world right now. Every day you open your news and my god, everything is is changing very rapidly. not only geopolitically, but then even the different generational approaches to work and the way they see work and the way they want to work and how they relate to others in the workforce. Like how do you train them? How do you grow and build your business with these um very differing views as to what it means to be employed and what a career path might look like? Layered on top of that, you have Gen AI and then of course we're going to be rapidly moving into spaces with quant quantum computing. um and everything else. And actually holistically, the way people want to receive services is changing, right? If you just think about even if you think more personally and more um anecdotally, right? Like the way that I would envision um getting a cell phone plan, right? I used to think I used to have to go into a Verizon, you know, pick out my phone, talk about the plan, um, see how many free minutes I could get on the weekend, do that negotiation, sign up, and it was for a set term. Whereas now, I would never want to go back, you know, go into anywhere. You would want to do it all online. And this huge move to digital everything and digital first is also a massive shift. So everything is shifting around us and the way our clients want to be interacting with their lawyers and the way that they want legal services to be shifted is the is the main driver. Right. And I think you can look at change in a couple ways like defensively let's change to protect yes our business. Right. Right. Or you could think about change as, wow, this is we're on the cusp of a huge moment and there's so much opportunity. What are we gonna do with it? I I tend to love to be in the latter space. I think a lot of a lot of the change motivator though tends to be more of the former of more of a defensive how do we protect our margins? How do we protect our business? How do we protect our spot right now? I'm not saying one's right or wrong. I think you need a little bit of both. But I think the latter actually really opens you up to a lot more. Yeah. I I I that is such a good dichotomy and I'd never thought of it like that. So, thank you because that's that's given me a good framework. I think that a lot of people, a lot of firms, a lot of in-house teams, but more firms I'm going to say, yeah, only driving change and this is why a lot of people are quite suspicious with all due respect to DA and of innovation teams in law firms because they think, well, why? It's like Turkeyy's voting for Christmas because you're going to make me more efficient. I'm going to need you less. So, why am I going to trust you? And then the law firms are probably thinking the same. You know, there are they are commercial entities. driving innovation in other legal teams out of the goodness of their heart. They're doing it because the client demands that those uh firms look like they're being innovative. And I just an anecdote from my 1NDA time when I was doing when I was driving the 1NDA initiative, the way we got the law firms to come on board was through pressure that was applied by the in-house teams. So the in-house the big in-house teams that really were advocating for 1N NDA and the benefits that it would bring went out to their panels and said we want you to be involved in this innovation project because this is what we want from you guys and we're spending millions with you a year so you know do it. And then as soon as we had a couple of big firms on board the others then followed. They didn't need pressure from the client. But I think that to your point, any true innovation in the law firm space will be driven by the client. And at the moment, maybe law firms have the luxury to uh drive any innovation on the defensive, but ultimately it will get to a point where it's no longer that's no longer something that they can afford to do. You can't just defensively drive for it because other players are going to come and then you're going to lose. You're you're not going to be able to compete. Yeah. And I think we will say see these AI first law firms that appear. They're going to happen. They're going to happen. Yeah. I mean, and the other aspect to that is, you know, when when I started out um and I was actually recently on a panel at a global law firm talking about my perspective um and even more so now that I'm I'm doing more of the um in-house work and consulting. Um but when I started you know as I said we we we were the first law firm to have Kira machine learning AI um and clients were like tell us about this right like we had the privilege of being in the position of knowing something that was new and novel and that they did not have experience yet in but actually what we're seeing now is um a lot more of in-house teams being the ones that are really uptaking Gen AI and thinking about how they leverage it and what that means for the way that they work internally in their businesses. So this um this the positions are switching a you know as so you're not going to be able to kind of sit back and or even go into a pitch and I used to love this when people would go out to pitch and I'm not just talking about one law firm I happens you would hear clients talk about a lot of law firms doing this coming in and essentially be like look at this lovely menu of things we have right like isn't it cool isn't it great isn't it awesome like we have these amazing inov ation things. Whether or not they actually used it with the client is another matter. But even that in and of itself is not going to be as impactful, right? Because now the in-house teams are going to be like, "Yeah, well, we've been using AI and Gen AI for two years now, right? Like our company has it. We were mandated to use it, right?" So, um, this dynamic is really shifting and and law firms are going to have to really think about, okay, and even if you stay defensive, what's next, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, we talked about legal innovation as I agree. I I don't think that it does the space any real service because it's too fluffy and it's too opaque and it's difficult to productize. I suppose if you're selling legal innovation, it's very hard for people to perceive what that means and you've got to explain it and it just takes too long and people lose interest and it's like you can't really point to any tangible results. So I think that's why legal innovation is not a great term. I get it. I'm sure lots of people get it, but just to sell it, it's not the right I don't think it's the right way to sell change. So then we have um legal operations as the other term that people may or may not understand. What's your definition of legal operations and how does that sit with legal innovation? What's my definition of legal operations and how does that sit with my definition of legal innovation? I think my answer today is probably different than if you had asked me a year and a half or two years ago. Nice. Where I would have said legal operations would have been the type of innovation that I just wasn't doing, right? When I was doing radical change, right? I would say legal operations is a must-have. It's a necessity. People should definitely be doing it. Um, but it's more focused on let's look at what we're doing now and some of the pain points and do some process mapping and then identify areas to create efficiencies or we bring in some technology very useful but that's not what I do right because I'm doing this new stuff I'm thinking more like disruptive and bigger um I think if you really think about the opportunities now right with Gen AI Um the point solutions are kind of like the easiest piece, right? Like the tech is there, right? And you can really quite quickly think about it could do this, it can do that, it can automate this. These are the tasks that can be automated. I think if we were really, you know, based on our conversation right now, where the real benefit be comes from and where the real value will be is when people are able to look more holistically on operations on the operations of a legal team of a law firm. Um, think about those interactions and the entire workflow processes or workflows, right? Not just from when it hits you as a lawyer, but the actual like when the genesis, right? So, it doesn't start with the lawyer. Contracts don't usually start with a lawyer. They start in a business team. And for a law firm, the contract doesn't start necessarily with us. It's there's a driver, right? The client's coming to us because they need something. They're trying to accomplish something. I think the real huge potential here is really thinking about that holistic flow and then thinking about how do we design a better one by leveraging technology but also in a way and if we think about this in the more opportunistic air space rather than the defensive right it's not about protecting our peace in that process. It's flipping it to think about my god, we have all this technology that can enable massively and way different ways of working and different um touch points and interactions for the humans involved. And if you really think about redesigning that, that's huge, right? that is actually really quite disruptive and can give you entirely different operating models and business models and value propositions and and and and and yeah absolutely I agree. I think my definition of legal ops previously was much more tactical. Obviously, there was a strategic element, which is if you want your legal team to be able to, and I'm talking more in an in-house scenario here, but if you want your legal team to be delivering at the pace and scale that the business needs, then you're going to have to treat your legal team as a business in and of itself. So, you're going to have to look at your processes, the way that you're spending money, how your uh productivity is, um who's doing what, remits, organagrams. you're going to have to be much more structured so that you can scale and you don't need to be hoarding everything either. You can enable the rest of the business as well to some extent to do things within guard rails. Yeah. And a lot of the work that we did to help people when I say we I mean any consultant in this space. Yeah. Including you was very much um deep into the process mapping and where you can optimize and this bit's inefficient and let's redesign that. But I think now the legal ops remit is going to become much more strategic because to your point, it can't just sit within legal anymore. Yeah. It it has the ca the capacity to become something much broader. So, you're going to have to really understand the business strategy, what the interests of the finance team are, and you're going to have to tie all these things together and fit into this broader business um strategic operations. Uh, and you're not just a cog anymore. And I think legal ops is going to have a much more important seat at the table. So, and I think that's right. Um, I hope that's the way it goes because, you know, I was recently speaking to a potential client and um, they were talking about a CLM system and how it wasn't really giving them the benefits that they had wanted. And we could go into all the reasons why that didn't, but actually one of the big issues was they had done a lot of the process mapping and looking at what they as a legal function did and how they worked with contracts and what how they needed things to be set up. But if that is the legal system and the legal processes and the legal um platforms and they're completely segregated and unattached from the processes of the entire business, you're still not going to be driving the efficiencies. You're still going to need to go into the finance system, the marketing system, the salesforce. And you have all this disperate kind of point solutions across a business. Um, and you're not going to see the rewards, the benefits, the efficiencies, the gains that you're hoping to to achieve because to your point, and I think what I'm trying to say is it's it needs to be holistic. You're you're not a a little island on your own, right? You can't just be thinking about the way that you work and how you can make what you do faster. It's really thinking about how do we really think about, and I love the word guard rails. I say that a lot. And the real power of Genai and Agentic AI is thinking about how you enable your legal teams and functions to create those guard rails throughout the process, right? From the legal team into the other work streams into the other business's workflows and processes to really scale and amplify your job, your work, your expertise of protecting the business. Um, that's huge. That's really exciting. That is huge. And this I think that we're at a point where and I I I don't say this to exaggerate. I think that this is the time where we will see the biggest transformation in the legal profession that we have perhaps ever seen. And I say that because we're going to just we're going to become much more integrated within organizations. both if you're um representing clients in a law firm or if you're inhouse, you're going to be expected to operate at a much more kind of high at a much higher level so that you can influence how the business gets stuff done more quickly and that means surfacing risk more quickly and much more deliberately. So being very pointy about where you're raising a risk and why and also helping to resolve that. And I think that's where we will retain a really important human element down to how can I get the business to do deals really quickly. It's not by it's not by I I I wrote a newsletter recently u where I talked about babysitting contracts and that's what a lot of legal teams still do. We've we feel the need to control everything really really tightly because we don't trust anyone to go into a contract and use legal language. I mean, of course not. It sounds insane that you would do that. But if you do have tools that allow you to do that and are potentially even more reliable than a junior lawyer in your team, right, to be blunt, then why would you not allow the business to run with stuff um as long as you've got the right guardrails in place to to enable escalations at the right points in time? Yeah. And then I know that we're going to come on to this, but then you know as well when you are enabling and setting up systems so that your business can get on with executing these contracts without a junior lawyer or someone babysitting them and being that checkpoint, that human checkpoint, right? You enable that, if you have it set up in a system, you're going to be able to start to collect really interesting data. And if you combine that data with other data sources, the other huge aspect of of AI is its predictive abilities, right, to spot these patterns that you as a very busy individual would not be able to see. Um, and then that also can translate to new types of advice, new ways of advising. um to as you said, you're moving up. You're being more strategic. You're seeing what's happening across thousands of contracts rather than what is the term you agreed to in this specific one. You can see more holistically and start to advise on this level of this is where I'm seeing things going or actually because this has been happening in this region over the last year and it's a big switch. What does that mean? Like let me help you, let's advise, let's think about it. and you just shift yourself into not less advisory but really different proactive business strategy type of advice which I mean surely that's what we all went to law school to do right absolutely absolutely no one went to law school to review NDAs relentlessly forever I think some people did I don't know I think there are some people that actually are really comfortable doing really safe routine work day in and day out and then being able to like check out because they've done their job. Um, but I think the majority, yes, we're like are in the space of this is not this is not it, right? Like I could do more. Those people, you know, they're not loving the old NDA. They're not just doing that thinking I'm loving my life. They might feel an element of safety. Correct. I totally get what you're saying there as well. You know there is a safety net that gets created particularly if you're at quite a progressed stage of your career or even quite early but you found your niche and you feel like you're good at it and all of a sudden someone's like AI change. No one wants to be disrupted. We talk about disruption and change. No one wants their train journey to be disrupted because that's super annoying. Same way you don't want your job to be disrupted. You don't you don't welcome change. That's part of human nature. And I think that's why it's been just such a difficult thing to do in the legal industry. Um, we you touched upon CLM earlier. Uh, and I just wanted to double down on that for a minute because I feel like CLM has been the biggest disappointment in legal since the beginning of legal tech thoughts probably. I think I know you've written um an article or a piece about this. I don't know that I'm as passionate about that space as you are, but I think it goes into what we've been saying thus far, which is people seeing it as this point solution that's going to solve all these problems, right? Like, we're going to buy this expensive technology. Look at all of its capabilities. Look at all the functionalities. It's going to save us. It's going to go get us so many efficiencies. We keep hearing we need to be efficient. This is it, right? Um, but as you and I know, it's not that's not it, right? You can't just just, and I hate when people use the word just. You can't just bring in a piece of technology and it's going to massively transform the way you work. You have to actually know the way you work. You actually have to understand how you interface with all the different business functions. You have to really understand what it is that actually your business values. And I think that's and maybe we'll get on to this. That's something that we really need to be honest and really take a hard look at ourselves across the legal industry is the and not even legal industry. I think Genaii is making humans really think about what is the value of what I do versus what a machine does. So we can talk about that in a second but um without having those more strategic conversations without talking to your business partners without really thinking about how does this really work? How will we get the change management right? Even as as we said at the very beginning, it's not just about bringing in a technology and having a piece of innovation. It's really thinking about okay, we've looked at the processes. We've identified actually where people should be using this, how people should be using this. You still have that massive step of getting people to actually do the damn thing, right? participate in these p in these places where you've seen that there could be benefit and that in and of itself as you said people hate change right like I hate change and I'm I used to be called the change maker right if you come to me and you're like Jana the way that you look at your emails is all sorts of wrong I have a way a way better way of doing it you're just going to have to do these training sessions and you know and it'll be launched next week what the hell Electra I don't have time for this. Why are you doing this to me? Um, and actually that's that's that's a huge issue because I think we can sit there and say and I think some some of the change has been due to lack of the overarching strategy and understanding how this piece of technology or system fits into the wider system and processes of a business. But then a huge downfall in my experience has been the lack of change management, right? And actually, and you said this already is a lot of lawyers are in this defensive space and you you automatically see this as either a threat and if not a threat, a huge burden, right? Like this is just more work for me to figure out how to do this. And people need to be a lot better at articulating why it matters, how it benefits you, and all the opportunities that this can create. Um, and I think that that's been lacking, right? Yeah. Yeah. So for anyone who wants to drive change, what are your top tips for starting off on that journey? Have a really thick skin. Just change your personality and be more resilient. Be uber resilient. Um, what are my top tips? I think a lot of people it's getting better. Um, and you're seeing a change in the demographic of who's been driving change. And I mean that in not just physically, but like demographic of the individuals of like where they've come from and their past experiences and and how they approach change. Full stop. Um I think a lot of change initially was and and some people still believe this is it's an individual that's quite strong. They know what's right and they're going to they're going to drive it right. And of course you do need to have some expertise and know what you're doing to do this well. But actually um and this maybe brings up or brings in design thinking again and why I was so passionate about it. It needs to be meaningful, right? And to actually be an effective change maker, to lead change, to drive change, you need to be articulating that change in words and ways that resonate with the people that are needing to experience it, that need to actually participate in it. And it can't just be driven from the top in a way that says because this is what are, you know, too high level. really you really do need to get to understand the people that are experiencing it. And that can look like a lot of different ways. But if you don't spend the time really getting to know the processes, the people um the client wants, the client needs, the benefits, then you're going to fail. You just are, right? Um you might bring in some really cool things, but no one's going to use it, and that's not real change. Um the other thing I would say is change is always changing, right? So while you do need some expertise, the expertise is created by continuously learning and exploring and being curious and having conversations and talking to different people and going to events and constantly staying on top of what's going on because um it's not static, right? um even you know even in our spaces it's we can roll out um if we think about productizing innovation and the services we do you're going to have to switch what that is in a year right it's not going to be the same so you need to be curious you need to continuously learn and when I say learn I mean that about in both aspects of learn about your humans that you're impacting and dealing with and doing change with and for and I mean that as well with the technologies and the larger impacts that are going around that are influencing and requiring the change to happen. Yeah. And then you do have to have a tough skin. I stand by that. You can't you can't you can't just give in and be accommodating. It doesn't get you very far. Be non-aggreeable. For sure. Exactly. I I agree. I think that having driven change in the past, you've got to really understand your audience and be really clear about who this change is impacting. Not just what the change will deliver, but who this change is impacting, what their roles are, what they're interested in, what drives them, but also what they're afraid of. And speak to both those things because it's just you're dealing with humans. And I think that lots of with a lot of change agendas, people almost forget that they're thinking about this is the process that's going to change. This is the tool that we're going to use. This is how we're going to get the cool. What about Linda? You know what what how is she going to be able to? And it's not just about training. It's about hearts and minds and getting people on board early and allowing them to influence how you're going to drive this change, which yes, to your point, brings us back to design thinking. So, what is design thinking? Yeah. Um, I love how it's just like kind of blown up, right, since well, in the last couple years. Um, so that's that's great. Um on its simplest level it is a process to come up with the more innovative new products services um products and services technologies. Um there's a lot of different frameworks. I think the one I've been using is kind of three step three steps. Empathy um ideiation and then prototyping. So um empathy really understanding the users the humans that where the needs are even if they're not able to clearly articulate what those are you you're going to discover them through the different techniques of the empathy phase ideation you know that's more the stereotypical postit on a wall like let's go crazy um you know Lego and everything else like cool and fun um which is important and it should be fun and exciting and then um prototyping experimentation I This is where a lot of um people can get hung up and forget to do this stuff, which is not not fully rolling out an idea, right? Actually testing some assumptions, playing with things, doing short experiments to make sure does this actually have lives? Do people actually do do they actually people want to use this and and how? Um so that's the process, right? And all innovators should know that process as one of their methodologies of creating change in new products and services. But for me, what I get really passionate about and I see the real power of this is it's in the mindsets, right? The mindsets that you have to have and the space that you have to be in while you're going through these steps. And um that's where I saw the huge benefits at at um at DLA even, right? And that's why we launched it to the the entire law firm. It wasn't that I wanted thousands of lawyers to be product designers. It was that I wanted not just lawyers, like everyone in DA could take part. It was that I wanted a law firm where everyone was like, "Oo, why are we doing it this way? What do our clients really want from us here? What could we do differently? Why don't we test this out? like let's actually think a bit differently about this and and that to me was going to be actual huge transformation was and kind of goes back to our first point is it's not just a team of innovators here doing all that thinking and spotting all these opportunities. We might be the ones that create the products, but actually the opportunity spotting and identification should be a firmwide thing, should be a business thing, should be um we have thousands of lawyers speaking with our clients every day. All of those opportunities, right? Like that's where you're going to really get the real insights and real needs that haven't yet been addressed. Um so that's design thinking. And then of course there's legal design which is the application of like human- centered um design in understanding complex legal documents and contracts as well which is hugely important. Um yeah yeah I mean I I I've I've talked a lot about legal design and thought a lot about legal design because it's it's great like the meth it's it's a methodology isn't it? It's just the way in which you do a certain thing. Um, so legal design I think again suffers from a branding problem. The same way legal innovation, legal ops and legal design all have branding problems because they don't communicate what they do on the tin and it's hard to build a business on that. It's hard to productize it. It's hard to communicate the the output, the results, the impact when things are poorly branded. And I think that one of the reasons that legal has been one of the last industries to really transform and change even though around us other industries or other teams internally within an organization are working in a much more efficient or kind of forwardthinking way is because we just haven't had the language to communicate what we need to do in order to get there. And also the get there hasn't been clear. So there's been a lack of structure and agenda as to where we need to get. Um, and I don't think that's anyone's fault. I think that what legal does is complex and is different and is nuanced. And so it's difficult to package it. You know, you can apply design thinking principles or legal design to an IP part of a, you know, a part of a legal team that deals with intellectual property or data protection or uh contracts. But it's hard to articulate what it is that you can do for them until you're in it and see where the problems are and the friction lies and what you know the reason that person is not engaging is because this process is broken. You can't tell them what you can do for them until you're in. And I think that's a very long- winded way of saying that there's a there's a a branding issue which I think actually is being you know this kind of leap towards different ways of working for legal is being bridged by AI and the reason is that you can get a point solution that is uh lowcost is very intuitive um is based on large language mo models that people have already adopted in other parts of their lives. and you can deploy those and instantly see the result and the impact and you're like this is cool. Okay, what's next? Yeah. But I think this also this this lack of sort of quick wins. The lack of quick wins in a legal transformation journey sounds so stressful even just saying legal transformation journey. I'm stressed out by just hearing that. This is just this is a point solution. And I think the other thing that the legal design community is guilty of with all due respect to them and I I feel like I am part of it so I can say this is that we haven't really um kind of eaten our own dog food. Is that the same? You know, we're talking constantly about human centricity and yet we're not thinking about how we're going to make an impact because the the best way to make an impact is not by going through and mapping every single process and finding optimization opportunities. That's going to take you 12 months. It's about quick win, deliver a change, show the impact as quickly as you can, the smallest kind of increment possible, and then build on that. build your ambassadors, show people that you can do it and and make their lives better and then get them to advocate for what it is that you can do. And I think yeah, there have just been lots of barriers to change and transformation that AI is bridging. I think if I push back a little bit, I think you do need a vision of what that overarching scary hairy legal transformation journey is and then you have the quick wins that feed into it. I think the other risk that and what I've seen happen as well is sometimes and this is this might be more firms than legal in-house teams is you got a lot of quick wins on the board but you're not getting a cumulative effect necessarily because they're not geared or pointing in the same direction. So, I do think, you know, you need to spend and you can use design thinking in that as well, right? What what are the opportunities? Where do we want to go? What does that future look like and then you're right and then it's it's the quick wins that build up to this vision that you have. And so, you need both, right? You you you can't just do these point solutions and be like, why aren't we transforming? Well, you've got great point solutions, but it needs to be a collective a cohesive approach to building something. And you can't just have this grand scheme of vision appear and then hope to like do it all within it's it would be freaking impossible to do that all within 12 months. Like that's just not happening. So agreed. Yeah, you need you need both. Um you do need the vision. You need to know where you're going towards. But I think that often we've started off by going right let's map all your processes. Job one. Well, I don't think the processes is where you're going. Yeah. I think the processes are where you're at. Yeah. Yeah. the processes are where you're at. So where you want to go and then you start to think about how you do stuff with these processes that get you to where you want to go. So I absolutely agree. Like I think a lot of people just are starting with what is it we're doing now. Let's map all that out. Really figure out what we're doing now and then create some efficiencies here. But that is this. Sorry, we'll try not to curse. That's the same stuff just faster, right? It's the same stuff faster. And that's not transformation. That's efficiency. That's speed, which is good in a lot of senses, but real transformation. You need that vision. You need to understand actually where are we really trying to get to? What really and I and I'm looking at the time, I really want to talk about the value, right? What is it that would be really valuable and how do we create that value for our business, for our clients? Now, let's revisit our processes. Maybe we don't even need some of them. Let's just cut out half of them, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, let's talk about value because up until now, lawyers have traded on their knowledge and their expertise. How do you think that is transforming? Yeah. And I think it's transforming um it's kind of this like existential moment for humanity, I think. Right. What is the value of humans and what we do that's different from chat GPT Gemini claude right so I how is that changing I think um we really need to I just completely lost my train of thought why did I I don't know what value is why did I even bring this up I think you could on LinkedIn around um you know up until now your value as a lawyer has been your knowledge and your expertise. Okay. Thank you. Yes. What if that isn't your moat anymore? Yeah. So I think what I think and this is this is where I was trying to get to and even when I think about my kids and like what they need to learn and what what skills they need for the future is we need to be and this is really uncomfortable really really uncomfortable is we're getting into a space where we need to be selling because we are businesses and trying to make money as individuals but selling more our capability of understanding and problem solving rather other than our expertise in specific problems. Right? So, in the past, we could say, you know, and clients have come to us, well, you've seen this issue before based on your experience. What do we do? Right? And like, yeah, I've seen this hundreds of times, thousands of times. Our firm's done it millions of times. This is what you need to do. We're in a space right now where you there no one's done it yet, right? No one no one I mean, you could say Garfield AI, right? uh there's an AI first law firm, but they just launched, right? So, you you don't have that to fall back on. You can't sell the fact that you've done this a thousand or 100 or even 20 times before. And what this big shift is is really getting into this space of I might not know this problem, but I am a great problem solver. I do know I have really strong analytical skills, negotiation skills. I'm bringing in my ethics and my ability to analyze that and being able to see what future implications might come out of the actions that we take now so that we can solve this together and map out what this looks like together. That's a different mindset. Full stop. And it's highly uncomfortable for a lot of people, most people probably, right? And and not just legal. It's most professionals sell their expertise and their experience of having done something before and now we're moving to uh it's green fields or blue ocean or whatever analogy and book you've read. It's one of those, right? And and now we need to rely on people's abilities and capabilities rather than past experiences and expertise. Yeah. It's not just learning how to do something on repeat. It's about engaging your critical skills, your critical assessment skills to overcome things that you can't just codify. It's that creativity element. And I think there's a lot of kind of talk about AI killing creativity or killing critical thought. I think it'll be the opposite. I think that we're going to have to force ourselves totally outside of our comfort zone to really Yeah. differentiate. Yeah. I saw a post, I think it was Nicole Bradock just now on LinkedIn talking about how so many people are saying Genaii is going to kill the designer, right? And actually, she was saying it shouldn't kill the designer. The designers are just going to be able to have AI do a lot of that grittier stuff of creating the images, making sure it's aligned and the color schemes consistent, etc. I don't know. I'm not a designer, so I'm probably butchering other things that go into it, but the main point was you still need the human to say this is actually what our client wants. This is good taste or keep going or no, you're good. We're stopping here. This is what we need. Um, and you're right, that's it's a different skill set and that's still creativity and that's still being able to make sense and and really tap into what is it the humans would like from from all of this, right? And that's a more holistic shift happening across all industries right now. Very very interesting. Janna, thank you for an excellent conversation. I could talk to you for hours. Uh really appreciate your time there. Pleasure. I could I love talking for hours. Um awesome. Thanks so much everyone for listening. Uh thanks Janna for being here and tune in for the next episode. See you soon. [Music]