Beyond the Buzzwords: Evolving Legal Skillsets

Hey. Thank you, Dan. I really appreciate it. It's great to be here.

That's a great question. Look. I think at the heart of it, the core thing that I learned, and it's something that really I've learned throughout my career, is that it takes a team. And really at the end of the day, the team is only as good as every link in that team.

I sort of think about it a bit like an orchestra. You know, if one instrument is missing, you can be the conductor. But, you know, if the bass is not there, you're not gonna have the same music you would if the whole orchestra was playing together. So it's definitely a team effort.

For those who may not fully understand the kind of the t shaped idea, the idea really is that to thrive in today's environment, you need to be a t shaped professional, meaning you have a deep vertical of expertise in one, let's say, one subject area.

And you also have the capability of drawing in information, contacts, ideas horizontally across both the rest of the organization you serve and also your network, your broader network outside of the organization.

And if you do that, I think what it does is it gives you the ability to be innovative, to imagine new ways of thinking, new ways of addressing challenges. So instead of just applying your silo lens, you kind of draw from the knowledge and the expertise that you pull in from around the organization. That's something that I think really is if anything, it's even more relevant today than it ever has been before because AI is moving and shifting at a very, very rapid pace.

And, you know, the ones who are gonna succeed are not necessarily the ones who are, you know, who have, let's say, deep domain expertise in coding or some specific capability, but have the ability to kind of understand that, but also understand a million other moving parts, Step back and think about what the implications of that are for the overall operating model that you sit within. Depending on where you sit, you might have different perspectives on that. And then evolve new ideas around how that might be improved based on what you've seen from outside. And, you know, one way of maybe helping to illustrate this, I think in the book I mentioned this, but years and years ago, I met this brilliant person, Sarah Parczak, who called herself a space archaeologist.

And I asked her what that that meant, and she said, well, you know, I'm an archaeologist, but I teamed up with I've happened to meet someone who was a satellite technician. And I was curious enough to sort of get into the conversation with him about what his profession entailed, and he was interested in my profession. And what we ended up doing was actually creating a new field called space archaeology where we leverage satellite technology to discover new archaeological sites that you can't see from the ground. And that's kind of, in my mind, is a perfect example of a t shaped individual, somebody who has a deep ability to understand their professional vertical, but then also sucks in information from across the spectrum and invents a new skill, a new technology.

And I asked her at the time, how did you become an archaeologist? And she said, well, when I was in college, Harrison Ford came to visit and to talk about Indiana Jones, the movie about an archaeologist. So there you have, you know, someone who is inspired by an actor to become an archaeologist who teams up with a space technician to a satellite technician to develop a new field.

That's, I think, what legal needs in the age of AI. It needs the ability to understand models, understand how AI and machine learning is impacting not just legal departments, but corporations. How is the corporate model shifting and changing? And to do that, you really need to kinda get embedded into the organization. You you need to understand the power of data. You need to understand why data is such a critical component to where we're all heading, which are kind of AI factories, where we're mining that data off of the back of component libraries and enterprise wide architecture to develop new use cases. And those use cases are moving at rapid speed with multidisciplinary teams that are moving quickly and breaking things, how is legal gonna service that kind of a model, and what do we need to do to shift it to get into that space effectively?

Absolutely, Dan. I mean, I think this is not an AI specific capability. This is something that always has been valuable. But what I will say is, you know, the t shaped notion has actually accelerated in importance, not only because of AI, but also because the role of in house counsel and particularly the role of general counsel is evolving.

Right? So there are new verticals that GCs are increasingly expected to take accountability for. That may be security. It may be compliance.

It may be risk. It may be aviation. It may be elements of HR, etcetera. Right?

And as that role expands, the role goes from being kind of t shaped to sort of what Eric was referring to pie shaped, the mathematical symbol pie, not the apple pie, cone shaped, you know, where you may have five or six different verticals. And that's where I think the horizontal becomes even more important. You've just got to be able to think out of your silo. And maybe one example that's not technological, but that I think has really proliferated in the last, say, ten years is kind of the notion of risk.

And if you look at the role that general counsels have played in managing and navigating risk for the company, it's kind of gone from, well, I'm responsible for, you know, the legal vertical of risk. And once a quarter, the risk people come around, and they ask me to move my heat map around a little bit. And, you know, it's gone from that to, hey. You know what?

Risk is actually multisided, multifaceted, high velocity.

And we live in a world where legal risk morphs into reputational risk, morphs into economic and environmental risk, and that happens at the speed of x. And so if you're not able to think in a broad based creative t shaped capacity, you're gonna be finding yourself in a very narrow space that is not particularly helpful either to you or the company.

That's a great observation. I think the key to it all really is culture. Right? And if you think about culture, what do we mean by culture?

We mean the values and beliefs that drive behavior in an organization. You know, it's not what you necessarily say the culture is. It's what people might tell an intern on day one in the lunchroom. You know, hey.

Let me tell you how it really works around here. Let me tell you about, you know, what Eric or or Dan expect. That's the culture. And I think that to change the DNA of an organization, you have to get at the culture.

You have to start, as a leader, uncovering what are those values and beliefs that are driving behavior, and where do I need to change it? And it's not as easy as it sounds.

Number one, the legal department doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists within the context of a broader organizational culture called the company. You're kind of restricted at some level to what the core tenets of the company's culture are. You can't create a culture that's entirely inconsistent with that.

But you can uncover the things the company holds dear, and you can reinforce those elements that are really, really important. Then there's some practical things you can do. I mean, I think embedding teams as far as you can into the commercial teams is a really good idea. So, you know, one of the things that I did very often on day one in one of the companies I've worked for around the world, it was a retail organization and, you know, it was very, very close to customers in the market.

I made sure that our lawyers were actually on the trucks delivering products in stores, and then we bring them back in, not only on day one, but sort of regularly. And we bring them back in, and we'd ask them, and we'd have the whole sales force there, the local sales team. And we'd ask the lawyers to give their review of the market that they saw that day. So tell us about the price points, tell us about the points of interruption in the stores, the quality of the products.

What did you hear customers saying? Where do you, lawyer, think the sales team could do a better job? And it was super scary for a lot of lawyers. But you know what?

After you've done that two or three times, you start to feel like you understand the language of it. And you start to realize who pays our salaries. It's the sales team. Right?

It's the people who are out there every day selling.

So and maybe to tie it all back, I think if you do this correctly, what you also do is you help to broaden the understanding of risk inside the legal department. You begin to realize that risk can be actions that you take, but it can also be inaction to your point. Failing to do something is a massive risk. Right?

So AI is a case in point. You know? AI is highly risky, but not engaging in AI at all, not investing in that technology, that might be existentially risky. Right?

So I think it's tweaking the culture. It's getting your teams embedded into the commercial operation and working with the commercial teams. Those are some ideas you can do, but it's a super hard thing to do to change a culture or shift an enterprise.

There's a lot in that question. A lot of good stuff in there.

Maybe taking the second one first and coming back to curiosity. I think it's really important to if you're coming into an organization as a new general counsel or if you're just been promoted into the role or if you've you've been promoted into a larger role in a company and you now have a team, I think to really sort of ask yourself, well, what are the values and beliefs in my culture that I really wanna reinforce? And which ones are things that I need to remove? And you can't as I said earlier, unless you're a startup, you can't really build the culture from scratch. It's gonna be there. Right? There is a culture.

There's an unwritten code of how stuff is done in every culture. And that culture will vary. You even have micro cultures. Right? So if you think about your family, you may have a culture with your partner. And then when the kids are around the table, that culture broadens and changes.

And then if the in laws are there, you know, it certainly changes again. And if it's a block party with, you know, all the neighbors, you're not gonna have the same culture. Right? So but there may be some core tenets that apply throughout it. So you gotta find those core tenets.

I think about it like inheriting an English garden. You can't just create a cactus garden, you know, tear down all the trees and sort of completely reorganize your garden. You gotta use what you have to work with. But you can prune the hedges.

You can take the weeds out. You can plant some roses over here. So you're really trying to move the culture in a direction that you think is important. How do you do that once you've identified those tenants of your culture?

There are a number of ways. I mean, number one is how do you introduce people to your culture on day one? What do you tell them the first day that they arrive at the department? And I'll give you an example from a company context that I thought was extremely powerful.

There's a particular agricultural company in the US that is iconic. And what they do with their culture on day one, they realize that the first day and the last day of your life in that organization are days you will always remember. You may not remember what happens in the middle. So seize day one.

And the way they do it is even a few days before you arrive, you get introduced to a buddy.

That buddy kind of shares with you insights around, you know, where to go to lunch and stuff like that. Then on day one, you come into the lobby. Your name is there on a screen, and there's your buddy standing there waiting for you in the reception. Takes you upstairs.

There's a little flag at your cubicle so everyone knows this is your first day. They all stop. They try and reinforce the things that are important about that culture. You have a little toy, iconic toy, on your desk from the CEO with a little letter saying, this is a miniature replica of what we sell, and here's why we sell it and why it's important to the world, and here's why you're important in that context.

Right? So the culture just shines through on day one. You reinforce those things. You find ways to induct people into the culture.

And then secondly, you've gotta promote people in accordance with the culture. So what are those traits you're looking for that are gonna underpin and accelerate that culture? If curiosity is one of them, you're gonna promote people who are curious. And by the way, you're also gonna fire people who refuse to live the values of the culture, the core tenets that are important to the culture.

If you don't live them, you don't belong in this culture. You you can go somewhere else where maybe you fit. So that kind of induction reinforcing hiring and firing in accordance with the culture, that's really, really important.

And maybe just on the curiosity piece, I think it's so critical for lawyers to be curious. I think one of the best observations around this I had the good fortune to meet Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great and a number of other business books. And he told me that out of his list of ten all time great CEOs, three of them came from the legal function.

And the interesting thing about all three of those companies and those three CEOs is that they were deeply successful at a time of massive transformation and change inside their industries.

And he said the reason they were so good had to do with their legal training. Because law school teaches you to ask the right questions as opposed to providing the right answers, which is kind of what he thinks business school teaches you to do. I tend to disagree. So the best of lawyering is about asking the right questions, about being curious, about going, let me check that.

Let me ask you, you know, a hypothetical that's adjacency to that, and then playing with it from there. And the reason they were so successful at strategic change was because they asked those questions over and over and over again. And instead of firing a cannon into the dark and hoping they'd hit something with their transformation, They fired bullets until they hit something, and then they fired the cannon. And that was very powerful.

The flip side of that is I think lawyers can be the worst CEOs if they exhibit the worst behaviors of lawyering. Right? Siloed mentality, deep deep risk aversion, a disconnectedness to the business. So you've gotta weed out those things from your garden that are gonna be thorns, and you've got to plant the roses and water them to make sure that your your garden grows in the right way.

The way I would answer that is probably I back out of the focus purely on the one side of that fence, and I really wanna look at the problem as a whole. So that is not a problem with legal operations people needing to understand how to deal with the way lawyers behave. It's a problem that cuts across that whole team. And in the world that we're heading into where, you know, one of the things that I think AI is going to do is going to radically change the composition of a legal department.

There are gonna be fewer lawyers and many more multidisciplinary professionals. You need to kinda get ahead of that, and you need to make sure that the traditional barriers that exist culturally inside a department between, quote, lawyers and nonlawyers gets eliminated. I always found that to be the most ridiculous distinction. No other profession talks about nondoctors and doctors or nonarchitects and architects or non CFOs.

And it's a ridiculous and meaningless distinction, and it's one that that builds walls and create barriers. So I think that the solution to the problem is really, once again, coming back to the notion of a team. Hey. We're on the same team here.

In Europe, we play a lot of soccer, you know, football, what we call football. But, you know, if you think about the positions that different players have on the field, everyone's got a critical position to play. Doesn't matter whether you're, you know, right in front of the opponent's goal as a forward or whether you're playing defense. Everyone's gotta play together, and you don't have non forwards and forwards or it's really about bringing the team together around a shared objective.

Everyone's got a skill that's critical. I think the good news is, as I said, as we move towards that multidisciplinary world, that's gonna become more and more evident. I think also the more we become pie shaped and cone shaped and whatever other shapes might emerge, the more we begin to realize that these distinctions are not only meaningless, but also actually a barrier to, you know, achieving your objective. One of the most interesting people I met this year was a professor at Harvard Law School.

She's very fascinated at this notion of what she calls the dragonfly thinking. The idea with it is, you know, if you think about a dragonfly, it's the world's most efficient predator, catches ninety seven percent of its prey. And the reason it does that is it has one thousand lenses on its eye. It can see three hundred and sixty degrees.

And if you think about risk, I think that's what you need a dragonfly lens in order to understand how to calibrate, manage, react to, mitigate, anticipate risk. You're only gonna do that if you get your team to sort of lift the siloed goggles that they're wearing and sort of look at the whole picture because you're only gonna understand it if you see the whole picture.

It's a super challenging time, I think, to be coming out now.

Partly because what the future of work will look like is still taking form. And as a result of that, the education you've just received was configured for, you know, an era that made sense five years ago. It doesn't necessarily make sense five years from now. And so you're kind of in this liminal period between the pre AI era and the fully fledged AI era. So it's a super challenging time to be coming out.

I don't have a perfect answer to that question. I do think, though, there are two attributes that we'll be enduring in the in the coming age. Number one, I think being a human being, having the right interpersonal skills, having a sense of humor, having emotional intelligence, displaying a sense of cultural intelligence, having curiosity, having a sense of grit, diving into things, rolling up your sleeves, showing that you care deeply about whatever it is that somebody's paying you to do, those are skills that I think are going to endure. However bad it gets in any industry, the people that work alongside you, you want those people to be people that you can trust, but also that you get along with and that you like.

You know, the more likable and the more you can demonstrate the kinds of enduring human skills, the better off and more likely you will be to get an entry level role of some kind. So that's one thing. The second thing is, I think, given where we're heading, having a working knowledge of an understanding AI is going to be critical. So, really, not just machine learning, but agentic AI, generative AI, understanding what the implications of it might be, but also understanding how to use those tools and having a certain fluency in terms of the latest technologies and being comfortable with that is important.

And one of the things that I've seen with a number of the Gen Zers coming out that I meet, especially law school students, is some of some of them are very, very good at this, and they're leaning into the new era of law. They're leaning into business models, thinking about new service delivery models, etcetera. And others are very, very scared of this technology and almost have a phobia of it, perhaps because they sense it's a threat.

Lean into that first group. Be part of the solution. It's the same thing with any digital transformation in a company. You have two choices.

None of those two choices are a choice not to digitally transform, but you have two choices. You can either reject what's happening around you, in which case you'll probably get eliminated at some point, or you can lean in, raise your hand, and say, how can I be part of this? Let me help you brainstorm. Let me figure this piece out.

Let me take it away and come back with a solution.

That's kind of an analogy that I think people coming out now need to adopt.

At the same time, there's a broader subtext to your question, which is education, business education, legal education.

Pretty much every form of education is going to undergo profound shifts over the next few years. And it's going to be critical, I think, as much as it is for law firms to evolve into this new era, it's going to be critical for legal education institutions, law schools to do the same thing. You know? And everything we've talked about would suggest the more multidisciplinary that education can be, teaching people the basics of finance, teaching them to understand the difference between a p and l and, you know, balance sheet and what cash flow is, kind of just basic things like that. I've been shocked at how many law students are ignorant of those things.

And then maybe the last thing to say on this is I do think we can look at this with a lot of pessimism, but I think that ten to fifteen years from now and I know that's not much comfort for people coming out right now, but I think things will adjust. And, you know, that has happened in every era of technological change and the industrial revolution being a good example. And if you think about, say, bank tellers during the era of ATMs, when ATMs first rolled out, and I'm old enough to actually remember this, there was a lot of prediction around, you know, bank tellers disappearing.

And the interesting thing is today, there are more bank tellers in the United States than there were pre ATMs. But the difference is they're doing different things. They're now inside the bank. They're doing more upskilled strategic collaborative work around loan issuances and so forth.

So I think it's a good analogy. But there's also a warning and a dark side to that, which is that with every transformation of technology that I've looked at, you also have social dislocation. And you have a period of profound shift that can lead to some very disturbing things. So, you know, the industrial revolution took a while to, you know, to take off.

The steam engine, the electricity didn't wire factories immediately.

But when it did, you know, everything changed. People moved from the countryside into cities, and you had mass urbanization. You had the rise of capitalism. And in the end, that also spawned a whole bunch of bad things, ideologies, fascism, Nazism, you know, extreme forms of communism that plagued the twentieth century.

And we did write ourselves in the end, more or less. The printing press did the same thing. Right? It was a good technology, and it liberated the world in terms of everyone being able to read stuff at a relatively reduced cost.

But think about the thirty years war. Think about all the things that came in the wake of it. So that's one thing that does worry me is we are in a rapidly accelerating transformation that I think surpasses, in many ways, electricity and the steam engine in the sense that it's going to impact every industry and every aspect of our lives. What is that gonna do to society?

How's that gonna play out when people are impacted by this at scale? That's the sort of dark underbelly of all of this.

Right. It's a great question. It's it's also I find it fascinating that law is one of the few professions where, you know, people still talk about where you went to school thirty years after you graduated. It still defines you.

The fact that something you learned in a very closed environment, a very select group of non let's say, non intellectually diverse group of people in the sense that they all took the same test, scored highly on it, and were admitted on that basis and sat in a closed environment, isolated from other sources of knowledge, that education you had twenty or thirty years ago is still the thing people look to determine whether or not you have the skills for the twenty first century is just characteristic of everything that you've said. I think it's gonna be a challenge, and I'll tell you why. I

think there's a dynamic between law schools and their primary customer, which is law firms. And the whole system kind of evolved in tandem if you go back to the nineteen forties, nineteen thirties, nineteen forties, nineteen fifties when the Kravath model first emerged, and there was a symbiosis between elite law firms and elite law schools, and the professionalization of law that sort of looked at it as a science, you know, that could be taught and mastered. All of that needs to change for the twenty first century. We need a more expansive definition of the kinds of skills that are needed, and we need a different set of capabilities on admission.

I think why not admit a broader range of tests, for example? You still need highly intelligent people, but why not have highly intelligent people coming from, you know, mathematics and science and other skills, creative skills even in design thinking? You know? So why not have a range of tests for admission?

Why not think about merging pure legal education with business? You have three years. Do you really need three years to learn the basics of law? So that's one thing.

The other thing that I find fascinating is that as technology advances, you kind of end up in a situation where AI is actually able to provide better answers than any human being. And you probably remember this as well as I do and probably with the same level of pain, you know, the Socratic method that law schools have where the goal is for the teacher to ask these brilliant questions and for students to uncover the answers. In the world of AI where the AI is actually able to provide far better answers than even any teacher, that's just increasing.

The skill might actually lie in reversing that Socratic method and having a form of training in which students learn to ask, coming back to Jim Collins, ask the right questions. And then as the AI provides answers, peel back another layer of the onion, ask another question, and get to a point where the AI is providing a really configured ideal answer to your series of questions and thereby solving your problems. So I think there's a whole range of stuff we could say about how you could just blow up that model and really reimagine it. Whether it will happen, I it will. But will it happen before law schools get disrupted? That, I don't know.

It's very hard.

So as I said in the beginning, the fundamental premise of it is going to be around the client as a catalyst for profound change to the legal industry. The reason I think the client being the corporate client is such a profound catalyst is that companies themselves are completely reorganizing around AI, and that's not just digital companies. Right? So if you think about the impact of AI on companies, what does it enable?

Once you digitize your data, once you sort that data into an enterprise wide library that can be mined for use cases, what that allows you to do, it allows you to scale at near zero marginal cost with an almost near infinite level of scalability. It allows you to expand your scope at an almost infinite capability and at almost zero marginal cost. And it allows you to generate learnings from what you're doing and apply them immediately, right, everywhere. Think about autonomous vehicles.

Right? One autonomous vehicle somewhere on the road has an accident. That learning is embedded in every other autonomous vehicle everywhere on the road at once. Right?

And that kind of learning, that kind of scalability on the digital side is countered on the traditional company side with the impossibility of scale. Right? Like, think about your favorite restaurant. Once you have a hundred people in that restaurant versus a thousand people, you end up in a at a point where it becomes so complex, so overwhelming to try and do with manual labor, with manual tasks that it's just not gonna work.

The whole thing is gonna break down. So everyone is moving towards becoming a digital company, even traditional companies. And there are a lot of examples of great businesses that came from traditional retail that are now combining digital and retail in unique ways and becoming digital companies. So as all of that changes, legal departments inside those companies are gonna change.

You cannot stay still when your company is changing. You will change. And as you change, the world around you changes. Your supplier base, the expectations you have of your suppliers, that's all gonna change.

So what does that mean for law firms? Well, imagine we're five years from now, and you're in a company that has digitally transformed, and your legal department is now powered by an AI engine, has multidisciplinary teams, is leveraging some advanced form of generative and robotic AI to conduct sixty or seventy percent of your tasks, and you're very data driven. And then on the other hand, you have law firms that are charging you two thousand dollars an hour for human based input costs in a pyramid model that's deeply siloed and providing, you know, puristic legal advice that takes maybe a week or two to generate and probably cost more than you expect, and then it needs to get refined.

Are you gonna put up with that? Is that what you need in a world where risk is morphing, where you need to have a dragonfly view of the world, where technology is king. I and in the book, what I look at is a lot of the work of Clayton Christensen around the innovator's dilemma, disruption, and change. The inflection points that we are looking at right now are classic.

And so I think there's going to be a disruptive impact to the current model. And then the book kind of explores, well, what might come in the wake of that? So what alternative models might emerge? How will power differentials across the industry shift.

So the bargaining power of suppliers will shift all across the landscape, including with law firms. And then finally, there's a whole practical piece at the end around, if you're a law firm partner, what can you actually do about all this? If you're a managing committee partner, what can you do? If you're a regular lawyer, what can you do?

And then I do talk a little bit at the very end around legal education, what are the implications here for that. And one last thing I'll say on it is that, you know, as you look at the history, the history bears this out. Every time you've had a change in the geopolitical and macroeconomic landscape, corporations have shifted. And every time that shift has happened, legal departments have have changed.

And every time legal departments have changed, guess what? There's a knock on effect in terms of the role, the scope, the power, and the scale of law firms. So there's nothing new here, but it's gonna be a very interesting conversation, I think, coming in the next few years.

I think it would be to be massively curious about the future, learn as much as you can about as many things as possible, and broaden your lens. That would be the only advice I can give because we live in an age where knowledge gets stale super fast.

Leaning back on whatever you think you know isn't gonna get you very far. You need to stay curious, stay hungry, and keep learning.

That's great. Yeah. Thanks. It's it's coming out early 26, so I'm halfway through writing it.

Hey. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.