#103 - The Lawyer Personality Unpacked: What the Data Says After 32 Years of Research

Nine out of 10 lawyers are low in resilience and low resilience hurts organizations. You have to take risks to be a good leader and you have to avoid risk to be a good lawyer. The better you are as a lawyer, the more you're basically developing qualities that make it hard for others to be in a relationship with you. (upbeat music) - Hello everybody and welcome back to CurlsOn. Gloves off, I am your host, Mario Carroll, CEO at LECG. Well friends, it has been another pretty wild couple of weeks here in legal. Let's start with Harvey, which just raised another $550 million at a 15 and a half billion dollar valuation. Now that is an absolutely staggering number, especially if you consider the company just raised 200 million at 11 billion valuation just six months ago. Harvey's doing great. They say that 80% of the AMLOB 100 are now using their platform. So we just want to send a big, big congratulations to Winston and all my dear friends at Harvey. I still cannot believe that legal tech has become so sort of household name and mainstream in this way. It's awesome. And I think that they're probably raising that money for a good reason, which aligns with the next theme. We're seeing which is M&A. We've been talking quite a while about consolidation, being one of the major growth engines of legal tech right now, and we're seeing more and more evidence of that every week. Just this week, another steady stream of little guys being swallowed up continued too many to list nowadays. But I'll also say this word of caution. I've spoke it to a few founders over the last year who seem to be building companies that are great ideas, but just don't feel like there's a big enough tam or target market to survive kind of on their own as a standalone company. And when pressed on that, they've said that their strategy is just to get their name out there quickly and get acquired for a fast exit. Now, look, my advice that does not a good mentality, is not a good strategy. Nobody wants to invest in buy from or even work with a founder that isn't in it to win it. So if you're getting started, maybe you eventually exit that way, but if you're getting started, you shouldn't be really as a founder thinking, like, go big, go big and win it on your own. And that's what we all want to see. Okay, we also saw the launch of a new venture fund called GC VC. That's a new fund that is backed by, I think, over more than 50 general councils as well as Wilson Sonsini also playing a part. There are focused on legal tech investment. So now it feels like there are a few players that are dedicated to legal tech out there, including obviously the legal tech fund. I believe there's anti-portfolio ventures as well. And so these guys are really smart. They're dedicated to this space and then they're going to be using their GC LPs as a network and a differentiator for them. We are going to have Eric Rabin, the GP on this podcast soon. I need to tee that up so that'll be a good look into what they're doing. Another big news announcement with Stanford Law School announcing their new legal engineering academy. Now that is some real validation about the explosion of this role, which we've been talking a lot about on this podcast. Adam and Irene will be here on the next episode to talk more about this program. So make sure that you follow our podcast and you don't miss that next drop in two weeks. And along with that legal engineering role, we are also seeing and hearing about, I think the emergence of, sure, a lot of new roles, but this one kind of role inside legal departments and law firms is primarily focused on AI and data governance and all the related permissions and system architecture, security and policies. So that's starting to emerge. We're moving beyond the who owns the tech stack conversation to much bigger questions about who owns the intelligence layer, the data, the strategy, how that work gets written and how it gets redesigned. So those are fun, fun times. Lots of things happening in our space as always, which brings me to today's episode because all this change raises, I think, a really interesting question. So I thought it was a good time to ask ourselves, our lawyers actually psychologically wired for the world that we are creating, right? Such a good one. And that's what we're going to be talking about today with this guest that I'm excited to have back, Dr. Larry Richard. Those of you who've been listening for a while, Larry was actually my guest way back on episode four. So one of my first guests ever, and that continues to be one of the highest performing episodes of all times here at Pogo. And I think I know why, right? 'Cause have you ever wondered, what's the deal with lawyers? I can't tell you how many times people have asked me that in my career, and Larry has actually spent decades studying lawyers, and more specifically, what makes them different from everybody else from a personality perspective. And he's got some really fascinating findings. He has found that lawyers tend to be extraordinarily skeptical, highly autonomous, very urgent, highly analytical, and much lower in sociability and resilience in the general population. So all these things like make you great lawyers, but make you a little bit different than the rest of the population. And his research, more than 90% of the lawyers he's studied score in the bottom half on resilience. So once you're here, Larry, explain this research, you're gonna start seeing signs of this everywhere you go, right? Like the lawyer who can't let go of a decision because there might be one more piece of information that they need to check out. Or maybe you know a litigator who is extremely confident in a courtroom, but then takes one piece of feedback really personally. You definitely are gonna see it in your job if your job is managing change in an environment where there's a lot of people that you're trying to change, but by their very nature are wired to resist it. Understanding why lawyers respond to things the way they do gives you a much better framework for working with it. And this time, Larry's coming back with a new book, which is why the timing works really well. This new book is called Thin Skand. Why lawyers are so low in resilience and the new science that can help. Now the timing is perfect too because we are operating in a world where AI is asking lawyers to operate in this world of uncertainty, to experiment with things that are certainly not perfect, to take big risks, to go and let go of control and really like fundamentally change all the work that they've done and how they do it. So let's talk about why that is so hard for lawyers, the science that explains it and then what can we do about it, right? Such, such a good topic. And I love this one. So before we get into it though, first quick, thank you. As always, to our wonderful sponsor Workday. For years, the world's leading enterprises have relied on Workday to move their people and their money forward. Now that same momentum is coming to legal. With the acquisition of eviscerate Workday is helping legal move forever forward by turning manual workflows into actionable intelligence. Less complexity and more clarity for the modern enterprise. Visit Workday.com to learn more. And now I really hope you enjoy this wonderful conversation with Dr. Larry Richard. - Larry, so good to see you. - Good to see you too, Mary. Thanks for writing me back. - Oh, I am thrilled. I don't even know where to start with this conversation. Most people know I don't prepare, but mentally I have like a million directions. I feel like we could go. I will level set and just remind you that everyone needs to listen to our first episode together. I will put in the intro what number it is. But it's still to date, one of the highest performing, most listened to episodes and people still stop me and tell me how much it opened their eyes. So we can rewind a bit 'cause I know we have a lot of new listeners since then. We've just surpassed our 100th episode. So we've been around for a while. But as you also know, the little industry has exploded, right? And so there's actually a lot of newcomers who have entered the world of legal for various reasons. It's a lot of opportunity here, a lot of change here. And so they're working with lawyers for maybe the first time. And I know that whenever I meet people from the outside who are coming to legal and working with lawyers for the first time, they often start scratching their heads and go, I've worked with a lot of high performing individuals in the past, but there's something different about these lawyers, don't you think? And oh yes, we do think, we do think. It's not in my mind a bad thing. And I think people sort of get it when I go, hey, have you ever worked with engineers? And they go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Engineers are different people when I go, exactly. You two, you lawyers are also different than other humans. So all that to say, you have studied lawyers for maybe 30, 30 plus years and how they're kind of different from the rest of us. And I can say that because you're one of them. And I'm not, but we are, you know, we're operating in a really interesting world. I'm just going to pause because I have now sort of framed your background and why I think this is such an exciting, interesting topic that people love to hear about and talk about. But yeah, tell us about kind of, I know you have a new book, but you've done this kind of study on lawyers for ages. - So you're absolutely right. I have studied the lawyer personality and other aspects of the psychology of law. lawyers and law firms and to some extent corporate legal departments for 32 years now. And it's to the point where I'm doing it now for passion more than anything else. It's something that I can't get enough of. And what's fascinating is there's a very consistent story in this data that I'd gather all these years. And that story is very simple. The people who go into law are dramatically different from other people, from the general public. The ways that they're different help them to practice high quality law. And those very same qualities pose some challenges that are not very pleasant and are getting worse in the world we currently live in with lots of unexpected and accelerating uncertainty. Certainly AI is part of that narrative. And it's increasing that same pattern of increasing uncertainty. The other thing, as you mentioned, engineers. And that's a very interesting little tributary here because engineers are very high on skepticism just like lawyers are in. That's part of what people are reacting to when they go, oh yeah, engineers, they're different. And so lawyers and engineers share that. But for engineers, the skepticism is about data. For lawyers, it's a much broader skepticism. It's about data, about people's authenticity, about whether they're telling the truth. It's about relationships. It's about hidden agendas. What are you really asking me that for? It's not just about data, although that's certainly on the table as well. So lawyer skepticism is a much, much broader field, say, than the skepticism of engineers. But it can feel very similar when you're talking to these two types of creatures. You've studied this for a long time. I know in our first episode, it may be worth reminding everyone. There are personality traits that are more pronounced or that stand out in the body of the population of lawyers versus everyone else. Like you said, these are not bad things. They actually make them wonderful lawyers. That's what makes them so good at their jobs. And I think with every strength, you can always split it like all my strengths are also migrating weaknesses. And so that is what we're seeing here is in different circumstances. These personality traits show up in different ways. Do you want to walk us through kind of quickly what those are and what you found in your earlier studies? And then I'd love to know what's changed recently. You're all be glad to do that. But I should mention first, for new listeners, 30 seconds on my background. I started out as a lawyer. I come from a family of lawyers. And I just assumed it would be the job for me. And day one of law school, I kind of realized, wait a minute. This is not a good fit for me. But I stuck it out. And I practiced for a number of years. And after starting to get physical stress symptoms, I kind of reexamine my path. And I said, no, this is not my career. This is not meant for me. I'm going to do something different. And I decided to go back to what has always been my first love in that psychology. And I earned a PhD in psychology, but I studied lawyers, because I had invested so much in this profession, in the legal profession, from the earliest point in my life. And that's what I've done. I've studied lawyers my whole career. So what are the traits that I've discovered? The tool that I use is called the Caliper Profile. It's not widely known to the general public, but it's a hugely, hugely successful tool used in over 30 different countries, been around for over 60 years. It's with the challenges of every sort. And it's turned out in hindsight to be a very statistically valid and reliable assessment tool. And it measures 21 different traits. Each of these are common ways that we behave on various dimensions in measures, how we are with people, how we are with taking the initiative, how we are with being forceful, how we are in terms of organizing things, and so forth. And it's helpful to understand each of these 21 traits. They're all measured on a percentile scale. It goes from a low of 1% to a high of 99%. And like any other percentile scale, if you look at the aggregate of people who've taken, lots of people who've taken this, you'll get some low scoring people and some high scoring people, but the majority of people on any trade fall on the middle. And the average is going to be smack dab in the middle, 50% if you get a large enough sample. When you look at lawyers, seven of the 21 traits fall way, way below or way, way above the expected range. And that's seven more than you see in any other occupation. I mean, that's just not what we normally see when we look at personality data for an occupation. Individuals, sure, we see variation. But the average is, they're just always in the center of the bell curve, not for lawyers. So what are these seven traits? Number one, lawyers are off the chart high on skepticism. And as I mentioned, it's a broader skepticism than engineers. It's basically taking any assertion that somebody makes and challenging it. Where's your proof of that? What does that really mean? Can we challenge it, slice it and dice it, really lift up the hood and look at it? It's about looking at exceptions, not just the main point of something. What's the 5% that's not true about that? It's looking at what could go wrong in the future. It's a beautiful day out. Well, yeah, but it could rain. It's challenging people's motives in having some sort of interest or conversation or request from you. What are you asking for? What do you really want, that type of thing? So lawyers are off the chart on skepticism. Why? Because it's essential to practicing high quality law. We're trained in law school to think skeptically. That's the training. They don't call it that. They call it thinking like a lawyer. But it is training in skepticism. And it works really, really well for practicing law. The problem is, if you go through all school training and then you practice law for a number of years, you get so good at looking for problems and thinking about glasses half empty instead of glasses half full, that it starts making your neural pathways in your brain very, very efficient. Brains adapt to the things that human beings use them for the most. So we're constantly looking for problems and looking for fault. Our brain is going to get very adaptive and make it very efficient to look for skeptical negative answers to questions. That tends to start to spill out beyond the practice of law into our personal life and our relationships. That's why the book that I just wrote is called "Thin Skinned," why lawyers are so low in resilience and the new science that can help. Resilience is one of the outlier traits. Lawyers are not only low. They're 20% lower than the public. But the bell curve, it's all squeak into the bottom. Nine out of 10 lawyers are in the bottom half of the scale. Not 50% lay it quite weight expect. 90% of lawyers are thin skinned. And the reason for that is resilience is highly sensitive to a number of things. Number one is our degree of positivity or negativity. And when you're trained in negativity, you're being set up to be low in resilience. When you use negative thinking every day, you're almost destined to be low in resilience. And number two, relationships are very important. And five of the seven outlier traits have a lot to do with our relationships or with kind of inhibiting or making it hard for people to get into and to sustain relationships. So the better you are as a lawyer, the more you're basically developing qualities that make it hard for others to be in a relationship with you. Lose the relationship advantage, your resilience drops. People who have high relationships with strong social networks, strong connections with people, very trustworthy, intimate, authentic relationships with other people. Number one, they're insulated when they hit live bumps. Number two, they have a support system that can help support them back into kind of a stable, you know, return to normality. But people who are low in resilience can be isolated. They can be, you know, not have those relationships. And it's a two way street. The low resilience increases the isolation. The isolation lowers the resilience. The third trait is abstract freezing. This is the thing that attracts people to long the first place. Lawyers like analyzing, they like using their large brains to solve problems, to do things that are mentally stimulating, to be creative, to use the intellect. Now, the use of the intellect is kind of a detached exercise. So that's one of the things that distances us in our relationships. But in practicing law, abstract reasoning is the source of enormous pleasure because you're solving problems intellectually and logically and you're using capacity to reason in a lovely way. But it can also be a challenge in terms of lowering resilience. Next is urgency. You notice I'm talking fast. It's like I'm spilling over my words because my thoughts are going faster than I can save them out loud. That's the mark of somebody with high urgency. My urgency score, by the way, on the caliber is 99%. - Yeah, I think mine was, too. (laughing) - And that's why we keep finishing each other's seats. - And again, it's a good thing for practice. sing along because our clients get the sense we're pushing their case, their matter forward. We're not letting grass grow under our feet. But how's that work in a leadership role where leaders need buy-in from people and people buy-in when they feel listened to or how's it work in an interpersonal relationship when you keep cutting off your significant other, right, not so good. So it's not surprising that lawyers have one and a half times the divorce rate of the general public. Wow. Autonomy, lawyers have an unbelievably high level of autonomy, 89% they don't want anyone telling them what to do. And again, the practice of law is a perfect environment for people who like autonomy. There's not a lot of hierarchy in practicing law. So people who go into this profession can feel like, oh, I finally arrived at a work environment where I can call the shots myself and I don't have someone breathing down my neck. However, again, in relationships, not so good. Could you please take out the garbage? What do you ask you need to do for why are you doing, right? That's not going to fly if you do that too often. So autonomy is a two-edged sword as well. Next lawyers are low in empathy. They don't take the perspective of other people. So someone assigns something to a young associate and the associate says, I'm sorry, I have a social event this evening, I can't do that. And the assigning partner is like, flabbergasted. When you mean, if I did that when I was coming up as a lawyer, I'd be fired. But since the entire younger generation that's coming through as associates today basically shares lower empathy, there's been studies showing that empathy is declined, not just among lawyers, but across the book, across the board, around the globe, in everybody basically who grew up with technology as the main way it indicated. Sure. Empathy has declined, and so it's not good because empathy, especially what we call cognitive empathy, using your intellect to understand what is somebody who's giving me that assignment really doing, you know, really needing, why are they giving it to me now? If my focus is on that, I might respond in a more appropriate way, but if my focus is on me, oh, I have climbing class, I can't do that. I'm going to create a disconnect between me and the partner who's kind of evaluating my potential to follow in that partner's footsteps. So it's not a good look low empathy. And then the last one is, I always save this for last, because it's unbelievably low. The average on this trade called sociability is 12.5% compared to 50% for the public. So what is sociability? Someone who has high sociability is naturally open emotionally, willing to be vulnerable, especially, you know, those slow little disclosures we make when we're first meeting somebody, people who are high on sociability are comfortable with authenticity, where they're revealing things that are a little bit risky, emotional. But the reward is when you reveal something, someone else feels reciprocity, and they reveal something to you and that deepens connection, and before you know what, you have a really deep authentic, you know, relationship. All of the words in that sentence, I just uttered are room clearing words for a group of lawyers. I mean, if you want to be the room, just say authenticity, vulnerability, emotion, connection, empathy, you know, goodbye, where did everybody go? It's a profession that has maintained this kind of unwritten norm about how anything touching on relationships is touchy-feely and worthy of being trivialized or, you know, joked about, and as a result, and by the way, you know, 20 years ago, and before, it was perfectly appropriate to joke about that sort of thing because we didn't have any data. Most of the data about the importance of social connection in, in a personally and in the workplace has emerged in science over the last 20 years or less. And what that's, as is at this point, so strong and so coherent that we can't ignore it. And what it says is that relationships are not only not trivial and not relatively unimportant. They're just the opposite. They're the single best predictor of life satisfaction for human beings, period, head of message. It's not even close to number two. Wow. This is science at every level. So I've seen studies in the fields of neuroscience, in the fields of anthropology, in the fields of cultural anthropology, which looks at different comparative nations, in sociology, in psychology, and that all these studies are showing even at the level of our brain. We have special features in our brain designed just to maintain relationships. We have special designs that help us work in teams and collaborate as opposed to being individuals. We have social structures which support our success at working together. We're not the strongest organism on the planet. We're not the fastest, but we have the best skills at forming groups. I've read something about longevity in convinced with nuns, and that their longevity is much higher than average and likely because of the communal living, and that you're surrounded by young people. But just that you are relying on each other day to day, and it's a communal style way of being. So you're right about that study. This is one of my favorite studies, Mary, this is, I think it was 1998, researchers discovered diaries of two different convinced in Baltimore, and these diaries went back almost a hundred years, and they were daily diaries that the nuns in these convinced kept, and they now had data most of the nuns who wrote these had died, but they had records about how long they lived. And graduate students go through the diaries and independently code them, and each comment that the nuns put in the diary, they would code as socially positive, like something that had to do with relationships, or negative, or I can interpret it one way or the other. And they threw out the I can interpret it, kept the positive and socially negative. And then they did a simple analysis and said, is there any correlation between the nuns who routinely were socially positive in their diaries compared to the nuns who were socially negative? And the answer is, you betcha. The top quartile lived not just a little longer, ten years longer than the bottom quartile. Ten years. Yeah, it's fascinating. It's mind blowing. It's an amazing study. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff. If anybody wants the citation to the studies, I'll be glad to send it along to them. I love this stuff. I often say I wish I could have a podcast that talked about this stuff, but we will pivot back to the lawyers, which I guess is what's most important here. I think since the last time we spoke, it's probably been several years. The world has changed. I think the demands on what lawyers need to do and be and how to think and how to operate have changed. The environment in which the roles and responsibilities of people within legal departments or law firms have evolved. So it's not just lawyers. I mean, you're going to have many more, you know, the non-lawyers who are operating amongst them. And so we're just into a different place. And I think all the things that you're studying almost are more important for us to be talking about and thinking about. The world has gotten, you know, I love the term "vooka," you know, much more "vooka," and probably going to stay this way. And "vooka" stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Unlike you, I am not a lawyer. I'm an operator, a process-oriented person. And so, and I have taken the caliper test, my personality is a bit different than the average lawyer. So I love change. I love uncertainty. I love "vooka" environment, I think, that keeps it interesting. But I guess, like, if you were to design the perfect profession to struggle in an AI change world or a "vooka" heavy world, would it be law? Would it be the one that we're talking about? It won't. It would be law. So let's start with this. When you're trained in law school as a lawyer, you're introduced to the idea of caseloads. Caseloads basically judges decide cases that go to courts. And the principle that runs through the decisional history of caseload is what's called starry decisis, which is Latin for precedent. Previous judges said, and were inculcated in law school with this idea that the way that it has been done up until now is the way we need to do it in the future. Well, that's great stability and predictability, and the rule of law. That's what the rule of law is based on. It's got a deep foundation of stability. But in a world of constant and escalating change, precedent, as a mindset, is a little bit of a loser. You've got this whole profession that's been trained in this presidential mindset, trying to cope with a world that's anything but. That's the one. Thing two, when you're a low in resilience, it is much harder to cope with change because resilience is essentially adaptability. I thought I was going in this direction, there's a bump in the road, now I have to pivot and go in this direction. the high mountain. resilient person says, okay, let me, you know, call an audible and I'm going to change the way I'm doing things. The low resilience person goes, well, it should work. Let me try it again. And by the fourth or fifth time, you're kind of banging your head against the wall. So resilience means I'm not low resilience means I'm not adaptable. And, you know, in today's world, the idea of change in general and AI in particular, AI has put on the table both opportunity and threat. The opportunities are huge and you can see just from the escalating numbers that are going up like a hockey stick in terms of the number of people daily that are continuing to adopt AI in their use and the amount of time people report spending on AI, you can't do two studies in a row and get numbers that are same, you know, the second set is going to show, oh, there's an increase in usage. There's an increase in the rate of adoption and so forth. So it's taking off like crazy, but it's bringing with it a lot of uncertainty. On the negative sign, people are worried about, is AI going to put me out of a job? On the positive side, there are all these new entrepreneurial opportunities and people are plunging in to try to show those potential gaps with new things. But all of those changes produce uncertainty and for someone steep in the idea of precedent, it's freak out time. Yeah, let me ask you. So I spoke to someone yesterday who told me, I see a few things when there's a lot of change. You know, one is there's the reaction of, no, there's nothing to see here. Everything's still fine. That might be happening somewhere else, but doesn't affect us. You know, I talked to someone yesterday who the new legal department leadership has all come from a law firm that was supporting that company. So all the lawyers from the law firm are now in-house. We all know in-house very different environment in every possible way. We don't need to go into that. But what they basically did is they just, you know, moved their lap top to the new office and said, okay, we're going to operate in exactly the same way. I'm going to need the same systems and tools. I'm going to need all the same people that I used to work with. I'm going to work in exactly the same way. So I thought that was very interesting. And then with the AI stuff, I've been on, you know, many parts of the ecosystem now and certainly there are those who say it's not going to affect us. We're, you know, we're a law firm. We're am law 25s. It's not going to affect us. Or, but because there is the sense of urgency, they say it absolutely is coming. We have to do something. But do something around the edges that doesn't actually touch, you know, my world or what I'm doing. Or I think it's great. You should do that. Start with that other team over there. We're fine. Like what do you make of sort of those reactions? Well, it sounds like you're getting reactions from people at the top. And my first thought is, wow, they sound really removed from the people that are working for them. If the point, if they have associates and what law firm doesn't, I guarantee you their associates are using AI. The leader, oh, we don't use AI. But turn around, look at your people. Your associates grew up on it. Your associates are using it. They are definitely constructing memos to you. They're drifting documents for the client. They're looking at, you know, I mean, everything they do. They're searching on AI. Even somebody who says we don't use AI, ask them if they subscribe to Harvey or ask if they subscribe to, you know, one of Thompson Reuters new platforms. Chances are they're actually paying some good money for high platforms. So it's a term of art when they say we're not using it. Maybe they've fooled themselves. I don't know, but I'd be, excuse the term, very skeptical of somebody who said that to me. Yeah, no, I think they want people to use it. Maybe they just don't want to use it themselves. I guess you touched on something just now about young associates. And I'm curious, have you done any studies of lawyers over the decades, maybe more recently? And is there any personality traits that are changing amongst the young associates of today? Are they kind of wired and trained and reflecting all the same that you've seen 20 years ago, 30 years ago? This is a very interesting question, Mary, because with all the changes in the profession, when I started gathering personality data, we didn't even have an internet, right? Now we have a completely different working environment. The demands on lawyers are very different. You were more global as a society before we were more, you know, US focus. Lots of things have changed. The regulatory environment has changed. The politics have changed. The stressors out in the environment have changed despite that, the same basic personality characteristics are coming through in young lawyers, in middle age lawyers. No change with one very important exception. And that is what I alluded to earlier. Empathy is declining in my date and in the data that it's published in studies that are done with people in other fields beside law. Empathy is dropping. The younger somebody is, the more they learned or spent time in school using texting and other instant technologies rather than face-to-face communication, the lower their empathy is. And so it's a very significant factor. Number one, because it's been documented as incredibly pervasive. Drop in empathy just from the last 12 years. There's a 50%, 55% in empathy. And it's a very consequential trait. When empathy drops, it undermines all kinds of social norms, relationships, the tools that we use in our work that are psychological. Everything starts deteriorating because empathy is the backbone of trust. It's the backbone of relationship building and a whole bunch of other things. Yeah. Wow, that's really, I guess, not that surprising, but a little disappointing and disturbing as well. The other point that you kind of touched on was about leadership and people in leadership roles. I have had many podcast guests and the last one I just talked to, leadership is so important right now. In fact, it is maybe more important than ever because we have to create, in legal, like this culture of experimentation, of risk-taking, of collaboration. Like all these words that you just told us are going to make people leave the room. It's a different way of thinking and working like we mentioned. And the way that our lawyers are trained today, they're in school or as law firm partners, they are individuals. They're not leaders. There's no team that you learn to manage. There's no right. There's no people management. There's no culture building, at least not in the way that you know, we're talking about here and creating an environment that is creative and innovative. So they're getting now, you know, thrown into this new environment, whether it's within a leadership role at their firm or there, like I said, coming on the in-house side where we operate also very differently. Are we selecting the wrong people to be legal leaders? Like how, or how do we train them? Change them is like how do we find who should be the right people? Or how do we take the people who are there and think about how do we make them better? So a couple of points. First of all, we know from 30 years of research, mainly by John Cotter at Harvard and his associates, that leadership, the reason it's on the radar so much today is because leadership as a practice is itself a response to the subjective feeling people feel in a world of uncertainty. Take anybody in a business, not just law, any business, you have certain skills, certain resources, and they're limited. You have to make decisions about how do I deploy my skills? How do I deploy my resources? As the world outside begins to become less predictable, you as an individual contributor start wondering, where should I deploy my resources? Should I do them here or here? And the answer to that question is what we ask our leaders? How should I deploy my scarce resources? And so the more uncertainty in an outside world, the more people in an organization have a felt need to seek out leadership for guidance about uncertainty. For the leaders part, the leader is no magician, they don't know what's going to happen. All they know is I've got to mobilize people and use my best judgment to go in one of these directions. But I can never reassure people. This is the certain path to follow because the whole reason I'm here in this role is because it's uncertain. That's right. What do I have left if I can't guarantee them my way is the right way. The only thing a leader has is trust. Follow me because you trust me. Leadership is an interpersonal enterprise. And the one way we know this intuitively, if you ask people what can you manage you get a long list. And you can manage paper, you can manage inventory, you can manage things, you can manage people, you can manage projects, you can, it's a long list. Yeah. What can you lead? It answers itself. People. That's it. It is a is a relationship based enterprise. And so given that we have to prioritize the people skills of our leaders. What do we know about lawyers? Just finish saying how all of the special traits that make them good at practicing law, five of the seven traits inhibit their ability to be good at people's skills. So that's part one. Part is Conner's research shows that, sorry, let's Let's skip to another model, which is we're going out to the University of California to Jim Kuzis and Barry Posner, who are the leading authorities on what's become the de facto model of the scientific base study of leadership effectiveness and what I mean by that is, what is it that leaders can do to get other people to follow them? And the answer is not, can we pick better leaders? It's not about picking them. It's about what they do once they're in that role. Kuzis and Posner's research shows pretty decisively the decision to follow a leader is a function of whether the leader is seen as regularly, consistently, executing five very important behaviors. And in their books, in their many books, leadership challenge and other books, they've laid out what these five behaviors are, and they didn't just make them up. They observed people who were good leaders and people who weren't getting followed. And they said, the ones who were getting followed seem to keep doing these behaviors than the ones that are not getting followed. Don't do them as frequently or don't do them at all. And then they've done in empirical studies to test that hypothesis over and over and over in all different kinds of organizations. They keep finding the same exact result. Do these behaviors on a regular basis. And when you turn around, they'll be people, they'll be following you. Don't do these behaviors and they won't follow you. And people who do these behaviors, they have data showing that, you know, they're stock prices higher for publicly traded companies, they're private. They are more profitable when they are run by leaders who follow these principles and so forth. So there's a lot of empirical evidence that leadership is about these behaviors. Now, personality factors into this in the following way. If I know that I'm going to be effective as a leader, if I do these behaviors, the question then comes up, how hard or easy is it going to be for me to sustain these behaviors over time? Let's take an example. One of their five behaviors is, remember, leadership is a response to uncertainty. So one of the things leaders cannot do is keep doing things the way we've been doing them because that's not. Right. And to change, you know, we already tried that. We don't somebody who's going to lead us, not manage us. Management is about stability. That's right. Leadership's about change. And by the way, those two often get mixed up or conflated and really important to know the difference. So one of the things leaders have to do is try new things to experiment, to take risks. While we have data that lawyers don't like taking risks, in fact, the better lawyer you are, the more careful you are about taking risks. So what if you're a lawyer in a leadership role? What are you going to do now? You've got one hand in fire and the other in ice, right? You better know which hat you're wearing at any given time. And you better learn how to tolerate the discomfort of taking risks. Because for you, the comfort is not taking the risk, but in your leadership role, you've got to take them. So it's not a barrier to being a good leader. It just means you have to be willing to tolerate a little bit of discomfort to try new things earlier than is natural for you if you want to be a good leader. You holding back and being risk averse, you're going to lose followership. Right. Right. It kind of reminds me of, you know, if you take any Myers-Briggs test and that's maybe something what people are more familiar with and the introvert, extrovert spectrum. And I think there are studies that have shown most CEOs are introverts and people go, well, that's impossible. They're always on a grand stage and they're always shaking hands and they've got to get out there. And I think the point is always, what doesn't mean they don't, they're not capable. They're not able to be out there and be social and vulnerable and all those things. It's just they get their energy in a different way. And so you can be one type of personality but, you know, are you able to flex when appropriate into somewhere that is maybe a little bit more uncomfortable for you or that's not natural for you and you can still be amazing at it, but that maybe is not your default setting. Right. And so is that what you're kind of saying? Absolutely right. And in fact, I've talked to many of those introverted leaders who are out there every day looking like extroverts. Yes. And they tell me is I want room service at the end of the day. Exactly. They had a table for 10 with everybody yacking, I need to go down time. Yeah. You can be great at both. You just know how to use which lever. Are you going to go through the other leadership traits or is that just the one that you wanted to highlight? Yeah, that's the one I wanted to highlight. I think it'll take us far afield if we go through it the whole model. Okay. And I think what we tend to see in legal leadership roles as we elevate new leaders or elect them, we often index on intellect, right? They're often kind of trying to promote the person who's the best, you know, privacy lawyer or anti-trust lawyer. And not necessarily the person who's the best people manager, people leader, you know, person who wants to enact change. In fact, a lot of times we think who can keep this going in the way that it's always been kept going. Should we stop expecting our lawyers to be great people leaders? I don't think that's the right way to think about it. The basic idea is that anybody can adapt if they want to. Adaptability is a human skill, it's something that we can channel if we want to. And so the challenge is, I know this is not my comfort zone and I want to be effective. And so what's the point at which somebody says, I'm consciously making a decision to step into my discomfort zone. So that I can be more effective in this role. It's only for a brief period of time, it's not like you have to change your personality. You're just adapting for the moment. I should mention that resilience, we talk about this in the book, resilience is a learnable personality trait. Most traits are more genetic and they're very stable and hard to change. I think I'm like a rubber band that kind of wants to bounce back when you try to change it. But resilience doesn't have that rubber band effect. So you can take somebody who's low in resilience, who's thin skinned, who's defensive and train them how to be more resilient and it sticks. Interesting. Should that be part of what we're doing in training young lawyers then, and is that something that you're seeing happening at all? I think it would be a very good idea to do that for training young lawyers because, again, our data show that nine out of 10 lawyers are low in resilience and low resilience hurts organizations, so, and especially hurts leaders, so, you know, leaders are going to be drawn from the pool of associates who are on their way to partnership, who are on their way to leadership roles, why not aim at role and start building that resilience skill before you get there. I've talked to a couple of managing partners who have single-digit resilience scores. They're so low and it doesn't change their skill at being good leaders. What it changes is, at the end of the day, to quote one of my clients, he said, "People home at night, and I say every partner hates me." And it was, it was like one of the saddest things to hear him say that because he was a really good leader, but people were constantly carping about his decisions because, you know, nobody likes change, and he took it personally instead of realizing that's the natural consequence of asking people to do the right thing. I have seen this play out over and over as well, and I think law firms are very difficult structures to be a leader because you've got, you know, 300, 500 partners who are also your bosses in some way, they're owners of the firm, and you are elected into this role to sort of, you know, run the firm, but then every time you make a decision that nobody likes, you're going to hear about it from 300 people. So to your point, that resilience is even more important to say, I'm going to do the right thing here, not the popular thing, or to be comfortable with a little bit of, you know, friction in that setting. Very, very good way to put it, exactly. The amount of change that is happening and the amount of risk-taking and experimentation that we're trying to get people to do these days, you know that my background is in legal operations. I have sort of always worked alongside the legal leader in trying to be the change driver. What are your thoughts on, because I think that this skill set needed to do legal operations and be successful in that is completely, you know, different and apart from being an amazing lawyer. And I think my hypothesis, you may have even done some studies on this with clock. You know, what is the legal ops, caliper sort of personality traits, how do they differ? And then if you are a legal leader or a lawyer who is a leader, should you like all of us other people managers, think about where you have strengths, where you need to be rounded out and surround yourself by others who have different skills and different personalities and different backgrounds so that you have, then that's what a team is, that's how we build teams. You know, how much more important is that than now because of the environment that we're operating in? Sure. So let's start with the last piece. First, and then we'll work back to the legal ops folks. In terms of getting feedback, there's a study that is still, what I call, good law. That's really good science by Center for Creative Leadership going back about 20 years. And what they found is that the most successful leaders have the highest levels of self-awareness. And there's a good reason for that. If the issue in leadership is interpersonal, if my ability to succeed as a leader depends on my getting trust in other people so that they voluntarily follow me, my ability to act in a trustworthy way is going to be central to my success. And it's not for awareness. It's one of the easiest and most important pathways to being able to adjust my behavior so that I am authentic. And I am seen in a way that is credible and respected, respecting other people. So self-awareness, yeah, it's helpful for people to get feedback about their personality traits. It's helpful for them to get feedback about their leadership behaviors. So I usually give leaders two tools. I give them the calipers so that they can understand their personality traits. And I give them the LPI, which is a leadership practice, is inventory, coosers and posner who developed this research about the leader behaviors. Long ago, created this 360 tool. And unlike most 360s, which kind of are judgy, they're about, you know, Mary does this really well. Mary sucks at this, right? It doesn't have any of that stuff. This 360 only is asking operational questions, such as, how often do you see Mary doing this behavior? Not how well does she do it? How often does she do it? 'Cause it's the frequency of the behavior that's the best predictor for whether people will follow. So it's a really useful tool, come buzz you. It's a really useful tool to have both of those pieces of data, your own personality data, and then data about how the people you're trying to lead see you as doing the leader behaviors. That's the thing one. The second piece is legal ops folks. And you're kind of hinting at the idea that legal ops folks might be opposite from lawyers. And in some ways, you're absolutely right, they are. But first of all, let's remember that legal ops is not one undifferentiated thing. It's lots of function, and depending on what type of function you serve in legal ops, the assertion that you're making might hold water or might be a little bit leaky. So things that are more on the financial side and the analytical side where there's one right answer, yeah, I kind of agree with you. But when you're dealing with things that are more impressionistic or more higher level, I think that analogy breaks down. The second piece is that if you are in legal ops and you work in an environment run by lawyers, you're going to be influenced by the culture that those lawyers create. And that culture in turn is going to be a product of the personality traits that I've been describing. So you're going to be in a resilience unfriendly environment in mostly goal offices because there's going to be a lot of skepticism. It's going to be a lot of urgency. People aren't listening to each other as well as they might. There's going to be a lot of autonomy. There's going to be a lot of it. And a lot of political detachment. There's going to be low resilience. There's going to be poor use of empathy. And in that kind of an environment, it's really hard to build the kind of connectivity, trust, all the things that you need. And anyone who is not, you know, didn't go to law school, it doesn't matter if you work, let me put this way, the longer you work in that kind of an environment, the more you start metabolizing, taking on the personality traits that the creators of the culture have given you. Oh, interesting. I say that because my mom has always said, you changed ever since you started working with lawyers. I would like long, that's ridiculous. One more that's nothing here. So the other thing that I've just reminded of is, you know, I think it's a wonderful thing given all the new opportunities. There's legal tech vendors. There's, you know, a variety of operational type roles. There are legal tech companies that are hiring folks who are lawyers to do sales roles, to do customer success roles, to do what we're calling, you know, process improvement, identifying areas where they can use AI. As lawyers, many of them who I know, again, great people who call and go, I think I'm done with being a lawyer, I want to try something different. And then they go into these environments where they're now doing, let's take sales, which is very different, I think, then being a lawyer, there's for many reasons, it's, you've got to get out there and develop a lot of relationships and be very sociable and have a lot of empathy and collaborate and all those things. You know, what would you think would be some of the things we should watch out for if you are a lawyer transitioning into such a role? - First of all, these personality traits except for resilience, empathy and skepticism, those are more learned. Those can be changed and adjusted. You can teach somebody empathy skills. You can teach somebody resilience skills. You can help somebody die of back skepticism. - Okay. - The other personality traits, the high abstract reasoning, the urgency, the autonomy and particularly the low sociability. Those are baked in and those are very hard to change. You can stretch when you're being vigilant. So urgency is one of my highest traits. It's, like I said, 99. It's not gonna change, it's biological. I'm wired to be urgent. Does that mean I always have to finish people's sentences? - No, I can stop and be very mindful and intentional. And I can slow down my, you know, speaking rate. I haven't done it in this interview, but when I really set myself to do it, I can regulate it, but only while I'm being vigilant. As soon as I stop being vigilant, the rubber band springs back to my normal setting. So anybody can step out of their current role into any other role they want. And if lawyers wanna go into sale, more power to them, all I'd suggest is that you need to do it in a way that is much, much more intentional, mindful, present so that you don't shoot yourself in the foot. Because if you're gonna do things that are highly skeptical, you know, you say to a client, can I interest you in such and such and they go, well, let me think about it and you go, oh, sure, you're gonna think about it. I know what you're saying. Not exactly going to win a contract, right? You kinda have to, one, have self-awareness and then two, be able to apply that self-awareness to dial back or in the some cases dial up certain traits so that you can be in rapport with the person that you're talking to. You know, I do it for 24/7, just in that moment. And I'm not talking about being inauthentic. I'm talking about a genuine part of yourself that may be covered over or lost in the, you know, in the dust because of your dominant traits. Learn how to adjust which of your authentic traits is out front in a particular interaction. And that advice is gonna help anybody transition into a different role. That said, if the role you pick is one that is just gonna constantly require you to be not yourself, you have to stop and think, is this really the right role for me? Most people do the opposite. They pivot from, you know, they go into a job of some sort. They try a number of different roles. And at some point they go, I like this, but I don't like that. And the next position that they take is a little better tuned to fit them. And they progressively kind of like a sailboat tacking in the wind. They go zig and zag and zig and zag. And eventually, you know, 20 years into their career. They've landed in a job that's a much better fit for their skills than the first job they had. That's what is for most people that are trying to be conscious about their job trajectory. But some people make decisions based on some dangling shiny object or the compact packets that's offered and they don't think about the fit between me and the job. And that's going to lead to the obvious disaster that we've been talking about. - That's a good point. And I'll tell you the reason why there are so many legal tech CEOs hiring former lawyers to do sales jobs or customer success jobs right now is actually very in line with what you're finding, which is because lawyers are the buyers of this technology and they are highly skeptical. They're only gonna trust buying from another lawyer. So it seems to be working really well for these tech companies. - Draw there's one dimension where that makes total sense. But it comes along with all the other aspects that may not make it, you have to know what you're buying. - That's right. Okay, and one question that I remember, people loved, and this is where they learned the most in our last episode, you know, as you are in legal ops or in now there's like innovation officers, chief AI rules, where your job is to enact change to get people to take risks, to try different ways of working and challenge kind of everything they've ever been taught. What are some of the tips or like what would you tell people they should know going into this field where they're working with a bunch of lawyers who are low resilience, high skeptical, et cetera. - So the first thing in terms of any type of behavior change is there are a lot of really good models that are empirical models, they've been researched very solidly using the scientific method. And so we have some good science about what enables people in an organization to change. Because the general human condition is stability, homeostasis, we don't like change. Change is perceived by the threat circuitry in our brain as a threat. In fact, everyone has a circuit in our brain designed to keep us alive, that scans the environment for threat. The mechanism that triggers a threat. change. So when you're asking people to change, you're basically setting off the threat circuit. Right. So the whole process of trying to implement change is it process where you have to understand the psychology of threat and what can you do to minimize the perception of an individual that they're being threatened and what can you do to increase their incentive to be opened to the change. So on the first part, getting by in, being a good listener, making people feel like you hear me. When somebody says we're thinking of changing over here and you say, "Well, I don't want to and here's why." If your response is, "Oh, you're wrong. Let me tell you why you're wrong and this is good for you." Yeah. You've lost the person. You're never going to get them to change because now you've denied their experience. The best thing you can do is listen to what you don't really want to hear, which is why they don't want to change. This is kind of the paradox of human behavior. When people feel like you really understand why I don't want to change, once I feel so understood about that, now I'm more willing to change. Right. So understanding people is paramount in the change process. That's thing one. Thing two, John Cotter, who I mentioned earlier, has 30 plus years of empirical research about the steps and the stages that people go through in organizations when there's plan change. Plan change, keep in mind, in today's world, is always risky because the outside world is bringing in gobs and gobs of change that we don't control and we didn't ask for. And in a world of unprecedented change coming in from outside, if we have a voluntarily started on an internal path of plan change, we are clearly adding to it. It's an additive process. We're adding the amount of psychological distress because of change by our internal process, whether it's let me take a simple example. There's change happening on the outside world that everybody's feeling. And now we say, let's upgrade to the next level of windows. And everybody who has a computer is going to have to learn the new system. It's done all the time. But every time you do it, there's a learning curve and every time you have a learning curve, they're stressed. And you're adding that level of stress to the already existing level of stress outside. And I'm using a very insignificant common garden variety type of change. What if the change is something that requires you to behave in a new way and makes you feel less competent than you always felt? Yeah. Really threatening people. Yeah. You have to think about the psychology of introducing change in a world that's already creating stress because of the uncertainty. That's thing two. Thing three is, Carter's model tells us eight steps that people need to increasingly feel comfortable stepping into the the new arrangement, the new way of behaving. And if you don't honor each of these steps, like one of them is creed a sense of urgency. If people don't feel like the cost of doing nothing is large, then they're going to do nothing. Right. This is a matter of how interesting the change is or how much bells and whistles are out there in the future. If I don't see that it's going to materially harm me right now, I'm going to put it off. So we have to do something that mobilized people and you know, starts making them feel like there's no choice. Staying the way we are is bad. Doing something new is good even though I don't like change. And then the next thing is we have to give them a reason to go toward not just a reason to move away from the status quo. It has to be something. And again, the research suggests that fear based or negative reasons for change work, but they work in number one very unpredictable ways. And when you take your foot off the pedal, people rebound. They go back to the old and they often go back with resentments that you force me to change in a way I didn't want come up the system. They're going to sabotage. The best type of motivation for change is positive, empowering, uplifting reasons for change. If we do this, look what's on the other side of the mountain. If you can get people excited emotionally about here's the promise as opposed to do this or else, you're more likely to get sustained change because people incorporate the internalized positive changes. They don't internalize the negative ones. They resist them and resent them. So positive change motivations are harder to use to mobilize people, but once they stick, they become internalized and become very long lasting. That's just a couple of ideas. I mean, we could do a month's worth of tutorials just on the psychology of organizational change. A couple of other things. Some recent research out of Harvard shows that the structures that produce change are far more important than the squishy stuff. I mean, trust is important, but trust usually follows when you build structures that create psychological safety. So what do I mean? What do I mean? My structure is a structure would be things like articulating clear goals that everybody buys into. A clear goal is mobilizing to people. If I said everybody in our firm is going to build 5% more hours this month. That's a nice goal, but you might build 10. Somebody else might build 3. Somebody else might build nothing. It could be individualized. Compare that with this goal. Mary, in our conference room, we have this 2,000 pound conference table. I need 10 strong people to help me lift it on the count of 3. That's a goal that can only be done collectively. That very collective nature of the goal tends to psychologically mobilize people. It makes them want to work together. That's a natural human need. We like collective action. If you can find a goal that mobilizes the need for collective action, you're much more likely to see collective action. Whereas goals that can be done individually, you're going to see a bunch of frogs in a wheelbarrow. So it's a different kind of thing. Those are just a couple of the principles of change. There's a whole lot more to talk about, but that'll get us started. Yeah. Let me go back to the one you just mentioned before about the positive, you know, to change you get something positive out of it. I have found in my experience that it has to be a what's in it for me. The positive outcome for the greater good is somehow less interesting or like less effective. If I say we're going to save the company 10%, we're going to do this and it's going to be, you know, data will be shared and you'll have visibility for the whole department. It'll be great for the GC. Nothing happens when you say this wonderful outcome will come for your day-to-day life when you're doing that thing. You hate all of a sudden they start paying attention. When I'm going to push back a little bit, you're right in one way, but not in another. Okay. You're right that if all you use as a positive goal is something that benefits the company and doesn't benefit you, it's going to be hard to mobilize people. Okay. It mean that the thing that you use to include the individual is a selfish goal. It can be look at how you can be proud at the end of this thing. Let me give you an example of that. General Electric maybe a dozen years ago used to run on TV, the series of brilliant advertisements and the advertisements, the camera took us the viewer into some sort of a business where GE products were being used and then we looked at the people on the GE factory floor and they would tell us in their own words how proud they were that they built this this MRI scanning machine that saved this woman in Arkansas from cancer. I built that. I saved the life. It's not benefiting me, it's altruistic, but it is personal. It is you've connected the actions that I took as an individual on the assembly line with seeing where my assembling this piece of machinery went after it left the factory and Adam Grant at the Wharton School has done a similar study where he looked at people who were in a call center and all they did all day long as you know they had the headsets on and they're calling people and asking for money. In this case it's asking for money for scholarships for kids and what the company did is for one group they brought in kids who had received scholarships in past years and the kids simply sat in the lunchroom and talked to the telephone operators and said I'm so grateful to you guys because what you did is you enabled me to go to school and now I've gone to school and here's what I'm doing in the world. And after that their performance levels like went through the roof because they could see the consequences that followed from their actions. They could connect what I do with the outcome. Again it's nothing that I you know I didn't get richer for it I didn't get more important for it I just felt like I made a difference and that can have a huge impact and there are lots of studies showing that when you connect something that activates the heart, that can mobilize individuals, as long as they see the linkage between what I do and the consequences out there in the world. - Of course, that makes a good sense. Larry, it's been a great conversation. We have a few minutes left. I would love to just leave you some time to tell us, you know, what inspired you to write a new book and where can people find it? - So I wish I could say it was written from a place of inspiration. Here's what happened. A couple of years ago, Mark and Bar Association came to me and, you know, they know I've been publishing this personality data for 30 years and they said, we see that you constantly are showing data that lawyers are thin skinned. Lawyers are low in resilience and not just lawyers in general. Nine out of 10 lawyers. Just constant every year. It's the same thing. It's just this pervasive won't go away, very consistent pattern. Why or why is that true? And I said, well, there's some good research in the social sciences about why lawyers are low in resilience. It flows from the other traits that make them good lawyers. Great they said, can you write a book about that? And in addition, explaining why they're so low, is there any science out there that can do anything about that? Can you help them become more resilient? And I said, I can do better than that. I can not only help them become more resilient, but the very thing that they do to become more resilient, those same practices are linked to a whole bunches of other research about increasing well-being, managing stress, increasing workplace engagement, being better leaders, and a whole bunch of other things. It's all the same stuff. The same behavioral practices that raise resilience also have positive impacts on all of those things I just listed. So it's like a win-win-win-win type of proposition. So I wrote a very early version of the book, maybe two years ago, and it was a piece of trash. - It stopped, I'm sure it was not. - And I was not very happy with it, and I looked at it, and to their credit, the ABA had an editor who gave me some really valuable feedback that was so helpful, and I went back to the drawing board, and my wife is also a psychologist, and a much better psychologist than I am, my role model. And she and I set together to especially revise the second half of the book, the what can you do about it part of the book. But her hand is on the first part as well, and on the writing of it, and on, you know, she, together, I think we really made it more coherent, more evidence-based. And so this has turned into a 300-page evidence-based, really solid book, and it's readable, a friend of ours who's in the psychology field, emailed us the other day, and said, I'm halfway through your book, and it's a page-turner. - Okay, that's amazing. - You've never heard a non-fiction book called a page-turner before, but thank you for the compliment. So we asked her to write an endorsement, which was on its way. Anyway, so the whole idea of the book is part one, is a little bit about the history of the legal profession and the stress that has been persistent in our profession, and what makes us, you know, so vulnerable to stress, and what are the lawyer personality traits that contribute to that vulnerability? And then the second half of the book is, so now what, what can we do to raise our resilience, mitigate stress, and improve well-being? And we have over 50 different evidence-based practices. Some are very simple like they have to do with breathing practices that you could do right now. Others are long-term plays like building networks of support systems, and everything in between. But they're all evidence-based, and they're all things that individuals can do without any, you know, you don't need to purchase any equipment or go to special schooling or anything. They're things that you can do yourself, just by reading the book and following the steps that we recommend. - That's great, and I can't wait to read it. It sounds like a required reading for everybody. Where can they get this book? - It's available to places, the American Bar Association. If you want, I can send you a link so people don't have to go hunting for it. And it's supposed to be published today, I believe, officially, you know, back from the printer, but I will check with the ABA 'cause these things sometimes get, you know, caught up. So, sometime this week is my expectation. And then the other place is on Amazon. And right now, if you search for thin skin and hyphenated, thin hyphen skinned, it'll pop right up. If you don't use the hyphen, it's gonna be like 30 or 40 books down. - Gotcha. - The Amazon page says it's not gonna be published till October 6th. That's not true. That's just a placeholder that you're using 'cause they thought it was safe. When the ABA gets the books back from the printer, they're gonna ship Amazon their supply and Amazon will then update the date to say it's now available. - Okay, excellent. Well, I am an early adopter and will be the first mover and get that copy. - Thank you again for the opportunity. - All right, everyone. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. I think that was officially the longest episode we've ever recorded 'cause I just didn't wanna let Larry go. There's so many more questions. I feel like I could have to have him back again soon. But I hope you all learned a lot. It's always such an interesting conversation. And if you like this content and wanna hear more of it, make sure you like and subscribe us on Spotify and Apple and wherever you get your podcasts and we will catch you in a couple of weeks. Thanks so much.