From Hollywood to Legal: Unlocking Purpose in Law

Hi, Daniel. Hi, Eric. It's so lovely to be here with you, and thank you very much. That's very kind. You know, I've been in sort of job interviews where people haven't been as kind when they've looked at my resume. So it's nice that, you know, after so many years, it now all seems to make perfect sense how I got to where I got there.

Yeah. Happy to talk through that to nontraditional career path. But, effectively, I was a lawyer, so for four years in Sydney and then three years in Tokyo. But I was a lawyer harboring a very deep personality floor. And there's that I'd always wanted to be a Hollywood studio executive from when I was a little kid, weirdly.

And so I'd been doing comedy at night, and I was commissioned to write a pilot for a Japanese TV show while I was in Japan, and it was going to be on me. And it was around the Seinfeld time, and so the Japanese producers were convinced I was going to be the Seinfeld of Japan. And who was I to say no to such a lofty proposition? So I was on board, and we shot the pilot.

They aired it twice. It didn't take off, unfortunately, but I was able to use that as a way to get into University of Southern California film school. And so that's pretty good film school. George Lucas went there.

They only take twenty people a year. So I got into that program, and then I came out of that program, and I was working at Warner Brothers. I got a job at Warner Brothers as what's called a creative executive. So I was out of the law.

I was working with writers and directors, and our big show was back then ER. And so George Clooney was still on the show, so I was working with writers and directors on ER. And then also The West Wing came in, so we had the rights to Aaron Sorkin's script, and so that came in. So I started working on the development of that show as well.

And so that was all going pretty well, but I had a side hustle, which is I owned a script, which I thought was pretty good, and I needed a Hollywood star to be attached to that to get it funded. That's sort of the way it works. You need to have someone say that they'll appear in it in order to get the money to make it happen. So I sent out a hundred letters to Hollywood agents and managers.

For the younger generation listening, these letters is something we used to do back in the mid nineties. Anyway, I digress. So I sent those out, and then I waited for a response. And I didn't get anything for weeks until one day the phone went.

And I picked it up, and it was Woody Allen's agent. And she said, mister Allen, we'll do your film.

And so Woody Allen did indeed appear in the film, and it was called searching Krallis in Porchnek. And we released the film, and six months later, Oscar Alexander Abraham, actually, our firstborn son. And so that's the pivotal moment that really changed everything for me because up until then, I'd been living, you know, a life that was very focused on I always wanted to help people through storytelling. I thought that was going to be sort of how I was able to help people.

And then when Oscar came along, literally, I changed to have an honest. I didn't feel like that was a great place to raise a family for me and so and my wife. And so we decided to come back to Australia, and I just basically formed the view that I would return to Australia. I've I'd always enjoyed being a lawyer, and I just go back to law and try to figure out how to help people that way.

So, yeah, so I came back to Australia, and, yeah, that was twenty three years ago.

Yeah. So the most critical thing that I learned during those years so when you're starting in a in a creative endeavor, whether it's comedy or in the film world, what's critical is being able to work with others and convince them of your vision and to have them help you achieve your vision and, you know, collaborate with them on how the ultimate vision comes about. And one thing that they taught us at USC Film, and it sticks with me every day, it was that if you can help someone else, then you help someone. So that was a very busy I mean, that was film school was far busier than I've ever been as a lawyer.

And, I mean, it was, you know, almost twenty four seven because when you weren't shooting your own stuff or writing your own stuff, you were helping other people all the time, like, you know, all weekend and so forth. And, you know, what's interesting about that is, I mean, that created amongst the twenty of us who went through that program. There's still a very tight bond in that group. And in fact, so tight, one of the people who I went through with is a fellow by now, Rawson Thurber.

And Rawson has gone on doing incredible things. So his thesis project out of film school was dodgeball. So he wrote and directed dodgeball, which, you know, is a is a great film, went on to make an awesome amount of money. And then he's done a lot of the rocks movies as the writer director, the and central intelligence and so forth.

And so his, you know, his last movie is a, you know, two hundred million dollar films over so he's incredibly successful by any measure. Anyway, when I was starting these courses that I run for Bond University, I called him up. I said, you know, I just would like to interview you about how to pitch because lawyers aren't great at necessarily pitching, whether it's selling their services or selling innovation ideas to their own teams. And so I said, can I interview you about how to pitch?

And he immediately said yes, like, without, you know, even thinking twice. And that's you know, it's a measure of that person who's, you know, who is a terrific human being. And I gotta say the twenty minute interview is hilarious, and he's fantastic, and some of the learnings are amazing. But that's, I think, the most important thing to me is throughout my career where there's been an opportunity to help someone, whether that's you know, someone's lost their job.

And so immediately, if I see it on LinkedIn, I'll send them a note saying, look. If there's anything that I can do to help, I just think that when times are good, you can help other people, and then that creates this wonderful safety net under you because I had some very difficult times in my career as well. And because I feel like I've helped a lot of people, there's a bit of a safety net around me that others have chimed in to help me.

So I think it's really important for lawyers to recast how they think about themselves.

I think, in terms of helping others and being creative. And so I'm an adjunct professor at Bond University. I teach three courses there. And so I've now interviewed over two hundred lawyers, like, you know, lots of global general counsels, lots of also a number of global business leaders.

And, you know, what becomes very clear in that is that your purpose is critical. And, you know, why is it that you wake up in morning? With successful lawyers, it's very interesting. It's very clear that they understand why they wake up in the morning.

They know what they're doing, and they, you know, they're driven by a lot of different things, but a lot of it comes back to this idea of helping people. I mean, look at what you're doing with the podcast.

You know, it's creative, and it's clearly aimed at helping people. Probably not something, you know, fifteen, twenty years ago, you know, our firms would have looked favorably on. So I think there has been a significant change.

And so to look at it from the point of view of and this is just me. So everyone needs to find their own purpose. I think, you know, I've I've done, you know, a few different things. You know, I gave up pretty promising career in the US to come back to Australia, but that's because I thought long and hard about what made me content, what was driving me.

And so I don't say that everyone needs to find their drivers helping build, but that's what I found was my key driver. And so was thinking, how could I come back and figure out a way to help people? And then that, for me, I understand now very clearly what my purpose is because I wanted to raise the family and, you know, wanted to help people through the law. And so that then gave me my purpose, and then everything just built on that.

And so I think people need to understand why they do it. And and doing it to make money is not a bad thing, you know, provided you understand that that's your purpose. I mean, it may get a little hollow once you get to, you know, making a reasonable amount of money. But to think about, you know, how it is that you can help people.

I look at Lawpath. When I started that business, I literally my initial pitch was I was going to help a million Australian small businesses get legal advice, and no no one thought that was a good idea. Everyone thought that was ludicrous. We've only got two and a half million small businesses, but I saw that there was a significant gap in the market where small businesses couldn't afford lawyers, but they had legal problems.

And so that came from answering phone call after phone call from friends and startups and so forth who couldn't afford to pay me but needed advice. And so, you know, that was the that's the driving force behind that business. You know, we just recently hit five hundred thousand customers. You know, we've provided some sort of service to, you know, more than twenty percent of Australia's small businesses.

And, you know, we'll get to a million in the next sort of two years, I think. So so it gets back to purpose, I think, with helping people. So I wouldn't say everyone has to find that as their purpose, but knowing your purpose is really critical.

Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. I think, you know, in the research that I've done with the sort of two hundred interviews, I've come up with the legal profession.

We've got a two tiered profession because I would speak to lawyers who are so excited about their jobs. Like, they love what they're doing. That wasn't a lot of them. And so what I think about it is we've got the thrivers, and then we've got the grinders. And so and what I'm doing with my courses is trying to teach lawyers the skills that they need to move from being a grinder to a thriver.

And so if we think about it as you know, being a lawyer is hard. You know, it's a difficult job intellectually and time consuming and so forth. But if you can think about why it is that you are doing it, and then so the way that I think about it, for example so let's say, you know, the phone goes on a Friday afternoon, and it's a client, and you know that it's going to involve weekend work.

So very much, I could look at that and go, that is annoying and upsetting because I don't wanna do that.

But there is a flip to this, which is if you can think about that as this is a pretty privileged position I've got here because, you know, I'm a lawyer, so I know quite a lot about this problem that the client has called me about. And I can add real value to that and then, you know, help the client out. That is a very motivating way to think about things. Now you need to be, obviously, you know, balance that with, you know, home life and etcetera, etcetera.

But there's two ways to think about it. And so I think if you consider what you do as in my case, anyway, the way I consider I consider that I know I consider that, you know, when I'm working with my team, whether it's at work or, you know, the work that with Lawpath and the folks there and so forth, the bond stuff, it's all driven by this idea that, you know, maybe this will help you. And I just have these ideas. You know, I don't wake up in the morning thinking, how can I be more like Mother Teresa?

It's not that's not the way I think. I literally I mean, drives my wife crazy, but I have these ideas, and then I just I try to put teams around them. So I couldn't do everything that I've done without deep relationships and having built teams around. I mean, Lawpath, I don't do anything at a practical or executive level in that business now.

I mean, I took a month off, and I got it sort of I figured it out and figured out what we're going to do. And then I brought in over the next year two cofounders who run that business day to day. We now got a hundred and ten people in the business, but I couldn't have done that by myself. That wasn't something I was going to do.

I love the practice of law. I don't wanna be a CEO of a startup, but I brought in teams. Then I've worked with those teams. I've worked with the investors and so forth.

So similarly with Bond, I couldn't do that by myself. I've worked with the team at Bond. So so I think, you know, this what I appear to have achieved is quite a lot, but that is really just based on you know, I had some ideas, and then I've really worked at relationships and making sure that I helped people and got people around the idea and got them excited about it, then, you know, worked with them. You know, I don't own as much of Lawpath as I could have if I have done it myself or whatever, but that was never the driver.

The driver was, this is an idea.

I found some people who thought it was a good idea too, and out of that, we seem to have created something.

No. I mean, that's very kind. Look. I will say and because, look, Lawpath is the success of that business is due to my cofounders.

They are incredible. Dom and Tom are amazing individuals. I'm so lucky to have found them. And so the time when I do feel quite nice about is I'll be sitting down, and it happens quite a lot now because, you know, Australia's a pretty small country, and if you had, you know, five hundred thousand customers.

So I'll be sitting down, you know, whether it's a work lunch or, you know, business lunch or something, and, you know, it'll be mentioned that I'm the cofounder of Lawpath. And people will come over and say, I've used it. It's really good, and it really helped me. And so that's fantastic because I can assure you that was not always the case.

So, you know, for the in the early years, it was, you know, it was a mess. We didn't you know, the tech was terrible, and it didn't do what it was supposed to do and so forth. So now it's all very slick. And so that's nice.

I didn't do it because I thought it would have these tremendous repercussions. I just did it because I had an idea, and I thought it was interesting. And then I managed to find some other people who thought it was interesting, and it sort of blossomed from me.

Yeah. Well and it's, you know, it's sort of like that. I mean, it's obviously not jumping off the lawyer ledge, but so the course of basically so there's introduction to generative AI, that sort of basic gen AI. Then there's a course on innovation and how lawyers can do innovation.

And then there's the next course is the ten key skills lawyers will need to survive in an AI driven world. And that's where a lot of the research is around what are these ten key human skills that are going to stand out. You know, we talked about AI taking lawyers' jobs. I'm a firm believer that there's great opportunities for lawyers, and we can talk about that as a separate concept.

But just to get back to your point, so there's a wonderful story with with a lady, and there's there's all these case studies in all of those. But and she's done a case study for me where I interview her about the change that happened. But, effectively, she came in very senior lawyer in one of the big government agencies here. And when she started doing the course, I noticed that she was not really coping at all well.

And so I actually called her up, and she said, look. I'm just not gonna be able to deal with this. I thought I could, but everything's too bad at work. And and so I just asked a few questions about that.

And so, basically, she had a reasonably large team, thirty people. They all didn't like their jobs, and my sense is they didn't really like, you know, her particularly or her management style or just, you know, being in being lawyers in that role. And so and she certainly didn't enjoy what was going on. So bad morale through the thing.

And so what she was working to do was to change the way that things work there. And what was happening is this is the story for a lot of in house legal teams, low decision latitude, so not a lot of autonomy. So the research would tell us that for job satisfaction, having an amount of autonomy is very important. And so lots of in house lawyers have this sort of low autonomy because stuff just gets thrown over the fence.

People have a high expectation. Lawyers were very task oriented. We sort of wanna help people so we do the work, but often, it's not appreciated, and it's, in some cases, not necessary. And so what was happening is the team is incredibly overloaded with work.

Team's not very happy, and then just more work keeps coming over the fence. And so what she decided to do, she analyzed what were the key priorities of the agency that they were working for. And then she said as work was coming in, that work would be prioritized according to the agency's priorities, so not the priority of the person who was sending the work in. So what that mean is never saying no.

So it wasn't like we're never going to do it, but it's like, well, it's not, you know, the top five priorities. So it will go to the bottom of the list. It may get done, but it might be a couple of weeks.

And so she did that, and then she also changed the meeting structure. So no meeting went more than thirty minutes. So this is pretty simple stuff in one sense, but it's quite hard to operationalize those sorts of innovations. And that so we use minimum viable product.

It's the process that I use, which is what we use to build Lawpath, what most startups use. I think it's very important for any lawyers trying to make a change, to use minimum viable product because it's just a way to derisk any innovation. And so she used the framework, and, obviously, the reason that I did the case study was it was incredible success. So, I mean, to see the difference in her, she goes, it's incredible.

It's like people really like coming to work now. And this is in a very short space of time. We're talking two months. And the person who was the biggest detractor from the new process became the biggest supporter.

And she said the morale is fantastic in the team now, and that's continued on. And she's continued to innovate in her processes over the last year since doing the course. So but, I mean, there's lots of very kind testimonies, but that's one very clear example where it has helped change lawyers like this.

Eric, it's such a such a great topic. There's a wonderful case study that I do in the innovation course where I've interviewed a lady who was the EMEA general counsel for a large professional services firm. And, so she's looking after Europe, Middle East, and Africa. It's a very busy job, and she also looks after their legal innovation. And this is a professional services firm with over three thousand in house lawyers, so it's massive.

And what they were finding is that they had a reputation in the market as being difficult to deal with. From customers thought it was difficult to deal with this particular firm's legal team. And so the CEO said this is an issue that has to be met, you know, dealt with. So what the organization did, the legal team, they analyzed what was the reality of the risks that they were contracting so hard to protect and did a lot of work on that and ultimately formed a view because previously, what was happening is the deal lawyers were, like, told you can't agree to anything, you know, that's not part of the playbook.

And so low decision latitude and low autonomy, and that made them feel not great as lawyers because you didn't feel like you were actually delivering. You feel like you were just, you know, beholding someone else. So what they ended up doing is they formed a view that they could accept, and then they devolved a lot of the decision making into the actual deal lawyers. So rather than this, I have to go back to, you know, regional general counsel or, you know, we have to escalate, the deal lawyers were able to make those decisions.

And, literally, they backed this up with some technology and so forth. But over the course of a year, they managed to turn their reputation around, and now they're getting very good feedback around how they ought to deal with. They basically form the view that, well, they employ incredibly smart people who are very close to these transactions. They should trust those people.

And sometimes it might not go right. And, actually, there's a very clear point, which is if a decision gets made by a deal lawyer that's not right, and say, for example, it does resolve on something, there are no repercussions. So I think that's something that we can all think about because we need to recognize that lawyers, you know, we employ them because they're smart. And if they're very close to things, then I think it's good to trust them a lot.

Yeah. So Pug was really just driven by curiosity. I mean, it was I mean, it was a long time ago. Now it was five years ago, and AI wasn't what it is today.

And I knew that chatbot capability was developing, and I also knew that you could use chatbot as a service provider. So we didn't have to build the whole chatbot infrastructure and so forth.

And I worked together with one of my colleagues at Norton Rose Fulbright, and it's, you know, largely thanks to my colleague. I mean, neither he nor I technical, but together, what we did was to create Parker. It took about thirty hours, and it wasn't programming because we were using a chatbot as a service provider.

And so we were basically filling out lengthy templates around particular topics.

And then what you could be comfortable with because it was a walled garden, we knew that the chatbot wasn't going to say things that it shouldn't. It would either say the right answer or it would hang itself up and say, you know, I'll get a manager to contact you was kind of the idea. And so it was fantastic because on day one of Parker going live, it delivered responses to over a thousand people. It it delivered over forty hours of legal information.

It was smarter at the end of the day than it was at the beginning of the day. Learned during the course of the day. And all up to the chatbot as a service provider, we paid nine dollars fifty because the way the payment model worked, it was based on calls on the solution and so forth. And because it was, you know, just a text based chatbot, it didn't cost very much.

The big takeout from that was, a, we didn't have to involve our IT team. I mean, our IT team are great, but they they're busy doing quite important things, very important things. And so, you know, building a chatbot for an annoying partner is not something, you know, they had high on their list. So we're able to do it ourselves, and that's a really important thing for all lawyers, which is the tech tech then was intuitive.

It's super intuitive now. So lawyers can lawyers can actually do the creation of the app. You don't have to code at all. And I also have to say, you know, many thanks to the firm and our compliance people who trusted me that this would work and that we wouldn't end up, you know, having problems.

And what we did was to use it as a lead generator. Effectively, there was a change in the law at that time. With any change in law, most of people wanna know how that will impact them. And so the problem that I had seen was that how do we get the maximum amount of information to people in a low cost way?

And, also, how can we see who might be a good potential client? And so, you know, if we think of that first day, and in order to use the chatbot, you had to give your email address. So that meant we got to see who was using it, and that gave us then a list. And we generated a significant amount of feeds by then following up those people.

So effectively, I used it or we used it as a lead generation tool. What I then did was to think, well, globally, this would be helpful, I think. And so I literally just did a webinar for our firm globally and how you could build such a chatbot. And we ended up having five chatbots around the world, five of the Parker generation of chatbots, all built by lawyers.

So, I think it's a good template for what we can do now. Obviously, all of this needs to be done within your organization's compliance framework and so forth. That's taken as read. But because it's intuitive, we can use this technology to create interesting ways to help our clients.

Yeah. So what I say to get back to this thing and there's a very popular theme in media that, you know, lawyers are all gonna lose their jobs to the robots. That's sort of super popular. And, you know, because it is, you know, widely held view out there that, oh, no.

People don't like lawyers or something. And I think it's just really wrong. And there's a number of folks out there who are telling a story around, you know, lawyers are gonna be replaced by robots, and it's just not true. And the problem for me and I went on the attack is probably oh my but I wrote quite a significant article debunking this idea because one of these particular pundits had written an article saying that in ten years, there'll be no work for traditional lawyers.

And that, a, it's completely wrong, and, b, what it does is it causes anxiety for those in the profession and particularly those junior lawyers who or who are in law school who've dropped a bundle getting a legal degree, and then it's like, well, hang on. We're not going to have careers. And it's ill placed anxiety. So it's a very important point for me, and I took this particular person on on LinkedIn as a result of this article I wrote for the UK Law Society Gazette.

And, funny as I did in the article, I, you put very cogently why it doesn't mean the end of lawyers and why there's good opportunities. And then I asked this particular person if they would be open to having a good natured debate about this, And that individual contacted me on LinkedIn and said, not open to a debate, but that if I read his most recent book, then all of the answers to my questions would be solved. I was like, oh, wow. Okay.

So I think the way to think about AI for any lawyers is no. We've seen this before. When when Excel came, people said, well, we don't need as many accountants because Excel does what a lot of traditional accounts used to do, know, that sort of bookkeeping type stuff. Accountants have leveled up.

There's a great story with Jeffrey Hinton, who is he is the godfather of AI. He's a genius engineer. He just got the Nobel Prize couple of months ago and well deserving. But five years ago, he literally said about radiologists.

So that was the end of radiologists. Forget it all over. And he he literally used the term, if you're a radiologist, you are like the coyote in the old cartoon who's run off the edge of the cliff, and you haven't realized it yet, but you're about to plummet to your demise. And so he was very, very strident in these words.

And yet in the last five years, the number of radiologists' jobs in the US has increased at one point four percent a year. There's now a global shortage of radiologists. And the reason for that is because when tech comes along, people don't just surrender to the technology. It wasn't like the radiologist said, oh gosh.

Look at that. The machine is better at reading the scans than me. That's not the way humans work. The radiologist grabbed the technology, and they leveled up the solutions and the insights that they provide to their patients.

And that will be the way that we will be able to work with law. Yeah. There's some things that, you know, we won't need a lot of human involvement in, whether it's, you know, discovery and so forth, but there will be ways that you know, you think about every lawyer doesn't have enough hours in the day to do what they've gotta do. That is a clear indication of the opportunity there to use the technology.

I mean, Lawpath has had five hundred thousand customers. I would wager that probably four hundred and fifty thousand of them would have never gone to a lawyer for their problem. But they came to us because we use technology to help them find the solution much, much more cheaply than they would by going to a lawyer. So there's massive opportunities.

And I do think, you know, at its core, AI makes the world a complex place, a more complex place, and lawyers thrive on complexity.

You know, if I look at the jade, I've I mean, I've never really thought about that before. You know, every day is just another day. You know? And I do have these cockamamie ideas, and they come in thick and fast.

I mean, my my notes file is crazy in terms of, you know, the number of ideas. So I never really think about that. I'm just you know, I am infinitely curious about the world and about range of different things in there. But first, look at one moment that that was just really exciting and I think a development point for the younger me.

It was when I decided to set up the comedy club in Tokyo because I was a lawyer during the day and so forth. But it was actually it was actually going, okay. Well, I think there's a good opportunity for this, and I'm very interested. I'm and I like doing stand up comedy, but I had to get a team around me.

We can't run a comedy club with one person. Although I did end the program myself quite a lot. But it was actually going, okay. Well, how do I get this team together?

And and putting it together, and then, you know, that it worked. And then, ultimately, I sold it to a mate of mine back then, and it's still running today. So that's, I'm sort of proud of that moment, I guess, because it was it was such a unusual thing for me to do and such a sort of leap into the unknown, But it's been so incredible. I mean, it opened so many doors. Not that I thought of it at the time. I was just, you know, got together with some friends and put on a show effectively, but it was it was a really, you know, pivotal moment, I guess.

Thanks, Daniel. Thanks, Eric, and thanks, everyone, for listening, and best wishes for everyone's career. I do think we can all be thrivers in the legal world. So thank you.