Reimagining Legal Tech: Continuous Improvement and AI

Thanks for having me, Daniel. Nice to meet you, Jared.

I'm the director of legal operations and litigation support for Toyota Motor North America. I've been there about five years and kind of wear two hats, right? On the one hand, the legal operations, legal technology, and then on the other, the eDiscovery and litigation support side. Like I said, I've been there for five years. Prior to that, I was the director of eDiscovery and information governance for seven years. So I was there dating back to about two thousand twelve.

Prior to that, I spent a lot of time on the law firm side. It was mostly eDiscovery, lead support, or even going all the way back to my help desk days at a law firm in Boston.

I tell people I walked the dark side for a little bit. I spent a year on the eDiscovery service provider space, with your friends in Overland park, Kansas.

If I'm being honest, I think it goes back to even predating my eDiscovery and my law firm days. Right? When I my degree is actually in psychology from Georgetown University and I spent the first years after college. I ran a group home for troubled teens for three years. So I always tell people that that was my training for dealing with attorneys was working with angry adolescents.

But I learned a lot about concepts of therapy and counseling like tabula rasa being a blank slate. So I learned about emotional intelligence and about being able to hear what the problem is rather than what they're telling me the issue is. Right? Not solving for specific issues, but solving for the actual root problem.

Certainly not that specific right where I'm like, yes, this is exactly what I dealt with when in the group home, the kid was running away. Right? You know, not so specific, but certainly those those concepts, those ideas about how to be how to be open and listen and engaged with the people that you're working with. Right?

I mean, I can't tell you the number of times early, especially early on in the career. And I feel like the industry has changed a lot where you don't run into as many attorneys who are screaming at front level workers. But that was the space that I grew up in, large law firms with partners and even associates who were just screaming at you because they had deadlines and you were not delivering data as quickly as they wanted. Right?

So walking into those scenarios with the mindset that I had from my counseling days really helped me through that, understanding that it wasn't me. Right? I'm not the issue here. There's a bigger problem, and I'm on your side.

We're actually gonna work through this together and get what you need.

Those are concepts that I certainly brought from my background and my experience in the social work industry.

It all comes back to these interpersonal skills, right? Active listening is certainly one of them. Emotional intelligence, collaboration and ingenuity and adaptability, resilience, All of these concepts that are underlying social skills, interpersonal skills, what I've referred to recently in LinkedIn and the conference that I'm about to present in New York City next week is legal power skills. Those are the heart or foundation of the skill set that we bring to the table that allows us to excel.

And it's not just in the eDiscovery space, it's not just in the legal ops space, it's not just as attorneys. Right? It transcends all of those concepts and it's true for everybody in every career. Right?

These are the things that help us move the needle in our careers. If you're able to communicate, if you're able to listen and speak to the issues that are near and dear to that person's heart, those are the ways that you're going to engage and influence.

Leadership isn't about telling people what to do and when to do it. It's about being authentic and being trustworthy.

It's about encouraging and allowing people to be the best versions of themselves and everybody rises together. Right.

Right. No, you're absolutely right. And it is it's difficult to find in the industry. There are ways to find it. You can go on Google, you can go on LinkedIn, LinkedIn Learning.

Some larger organizations do a really good job of creating learning sites for their employees to engage, not just on the specifics, right? Like if you're a retail organization or an automotive organization, right? It's not just about the specifics of your job, but you might be able to engage in other learning activities that are outside about leadership, about communication.

I tell people all the time, get on YouTube and just look up TED. Right? TED and TEDx.

There are so many fantastic eighteen minute videos that will teach you about the art of storytelling.

Simon Sinek and his start with why. Right? I bring that up all the time because when you're trying to communicate and influence, whether you're trying to influence your leadership and steer them in a direction that you want leadership to go, or you're trying to get your team and your employees to move in a certain direction, starting with why is the right place. Right? You've got to understand what their motivation is, what's their why, and then.

Tell the story in a way that engages them on their level and encourages them to move forward.

Fantastic question. You know, I started the pandemic looking for reading material. I kind of blew through everything in a very short time. And so I went back and started reading a few things, and I read Stephen Covey, Who Moved My Cheese. I actually really thought about, could I rewrite this or rewrite a shorter version of it, Who Moved My Cheese?

Because everything we were trying to accomplish was still the things that we were trying to accomplish. The cheese didn't move, cheese didn't change. It's just that our entire paradigm for how we operated changed. And it was something that we in the industry, especially in legal technology, well, in all technology, I think it moves so fast.

We're used to change. We're used to disruption. We're used to innovation. Sometimes we have to tear down entire paradigms and build them back up.

That was something completely different.

So from a tech perspective, I felt like my reaction to it and many others in the space was just as you expect. Right? We built a new paradigm for doing work remotely and it worked. It worked well for as long as we needed it to.

And now that paradigm is shifting back and we're starting to see certainly, you know, law firms were early adopters of the going back into the office. Right. A lot of law firms were almost too fast. Maybe that you'd hear some, certainly a lot of the younger attorneys would say. But much of the rest of the industry world has started to shift back to and we're seeing more hybrid roles, more, you know, three days in and two days remote and similar similar models trying away from the fully remote model that some people have stuck with, but a lot of people have shifted back into these. At least some portion of it is in person.

The tech isn't the issue. Right? Dealing with the ways that we handle that, we've already figured all of that out. But now it's this interpersonal issue, how we become collaborators and good employees and good employers and good leaders in this space where there's this hybridization and how do you reengage when you got used to being remote for so long?

So once we went back into the office and I started bumping into people in the hallway and saying, oh, I meant to ask you, have you got a chance to look at this, or did you do this, or can we talk about this later?

Fifteen second, thirty second interactions were more powerful than me writing a thirty minute long email and then scheduling a thirty minute meeting that didn't need to be thirty minutes, but I had to block time on the calendar to get it done.

All of that to say, we're still in this mode, right? We're still trying to redevelop a paradigm that works where you get that personal interaction and you get that distance and the ability to work from home that has been so productive and helpful for a lot of people.

Yeah. The concept of Kaizen or continuous improvement has been an integral part of developing how I approach situations both personally and professionally.

I think that one of the things that you learn, it's the lean concept. Right? Six Sigma, take these courses and you'll you'll learn about Kaizen and about Muda and eliminating waste and all of these concepts that are part of that, right? One of the things that you learn is that in order to Kaizen, you need to map your process, right? You need to understand all the steps that are involved in getting from a to z.

Right? What is it that you're trying to accomplish? What are you trying to improve?

Improvement for or innovation for the sake of innovation is, I think, a mistake that a lot of organizations make. They think that they need to be innovative, especially as we're approaching this area where AI and generative AI and LLMs are becoming so omnipresent in the industry.

There's this danger of people saying I need that, bring that into our organization or do something that uses LLM just so that we can say we're using LLM. Right?

But the key is to map your process and understand all the steps in the process and understand where can you make improvement that has the greatest impact on the result.

Sometimes it is technology.

A lot of times it's just a change in the process or a change in the people that are involved in the process. There are two forms of innovation, well there are multiples, but I usually break it down into the two primary ones, which I feel are sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation.

Right? And disruptive is when you tear down something and you put something in its place that completely changes the way that you approach a situation and makes it hopefully a lot better.

But sustaining innovation, that's what we do every day, is we just look at a process that we're doing and figure out is there some small change that we can make? Is there a little tweak in that process or in that technology? Can I add some sort of automation to it or add AI into that process or add some new web based or SaaS technology into that process to make it just that much incrementally better? Maybe save some of my people from doing tedious administrative work and free them up to do more meaningful work.

Right. That's the key. That's what we're trying to do most of the time. And so I think that that's where I try to approach my career and my personal life.

That's the innovation that I'm looking for on a daily basis is what small change can I make that is just going to make everybody my life and the life of the people around me just a little bit better?

It's an excellent question.

I think that in some respects, attorneys see themselves as artists in a way. They're creatives.

Right?

And they've been somewhat hesitant over the years. Like, we knew that, you know, back in two thousand twelve when the RAND study told us that TAR was more effective than manual document review by trained attorneys, twelve years later, we're still doing manual document or linear document review by attorneys. It doesn't matter. They refuse to give up that ghost. Right?

But somehow generative AI comes on the scene and they're like, well, we've gotta have that. And suddenly you've got attorneys that are submitting pleadings written entirely by CHAD GPT and getting their hands slapped in court and blaming their paralegals for doing it right. There's a piece of that where they're, I don't know if I get many attorneys to say that they were artists, but, or creatives, but it is like writing content as an attorney is something that computers couldn't really do very well in the past.

And suddenly the understanding of language and the creation of language.

These are things that lawyers are particularly very good at. That's what their training is about, is understanding, breaking down complex content and then being able to summarize.

So I think it's encroaching on the space more than it ever has before, but I do still think that we're probably.

I want to say that we're close to a decade away.

It might be less than that. It might be, you know, maybe four or six years away from having truly being able to incorporate LLM generative AI into the process in a truly meaningful way. I think it's good supplementary.

I can definitely see use cases already for it, but truly bringing it into the process in a meaningful way, I think we're a few years away from that being accomplished.

Oh, for sure it is.

Like I said, I am not one to be looking for disruption.

I tend to be very skeptical of technology that is going to change the game.

I do think Gen AI is going to change the game. I think that we're in an inflection point from a technology standpoint. I just don't think they've figured out how to do it yet in a truly meaningful way. I think that's the tech that is going to change all the tech.

Outside of that, it's mostly sustaining innovation, right? It's taking existing technology and making it tweaking it, just making it a little bit better and more usable.

Thank you, Daniel. And Jared, it's been a pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation. I love seeing it go in different directions and, and following it wherever it went. It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it.