#95 - Legal Will Lead The AI Revolution

We have to justify why we use law firms. If they're using AI and they're not passing the benefit back to their clients, that also becomes a difficult conversation around billing. If you don't lean in, the risk is that you end up working in a way that is very outdated very quickly. - Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of Pearls on Gloves Off. I am your host, Mario Carroll, CEO of Legal and Consulting Group. Well, a lot has happened since the last couple weeks since we dropped our last episode, including all of us descending upon Chicago for this year's Clock Global Institute or CGI. It was the first time that the event took place in Chicago instead of Vegas, which I think definitely changed the vibe a bit. Some liked it more, some liked it less personally. I am looking forward to going back to Vegas next year just because I think it's a lot easier to bump into people organically and kind of hop from dinner to reception to after party and maximize time with the people you bump into. But overall, as always, an incredible event. I'm really glad to have gone and such a great opportunity to reconnect with people across legal ops, legal tech and across the entire ecosystem. And of course, meet a lot of new faces that were there this year as well. One of the highlights for me was that I was originally supposed to do a small round table conversation on the evolution of legal ops. We planned it for about 20 people and then more than 500 people ended up signing up to the event at the last minute. So thank you to the clock team for quickly pivoting and moving us into a much bigger space on the exhibit hall stage. It was a really fun conversation. We talked about where the profession is headed and how the role continues to evolve. So that was really great. And no surprise, I think honestly, the dominant theme across the entire conference was, of course, AI. So every booth on the exhibit hall floor had AI plastered across it. I think there was a lot of new emerging vendors entering the space. But probably one of the most interesting takeaways I heard from a friend, he said that the takeaway was that the real bottleneck to legal modernization and AI adoption is not going to be technology. It's going to be people and talent. And I think that that is exactly right in a great observation. We've talked about this on the podcast before. And I've written it on my substack. But there's kind of a growing need for people who can actually translate the legal processes into technology and operational workflows. And so buying technology is no longer the hard part. Even launching it is not the hard part anymore. So the ongoing build, maintenance, optimization, and evolution of these systems and tools is going to be the challenge. And that's because the technology is now changing even more quickly. So you can't just implement something and walk away from it anymore. This sort of like build and maintain layer of the market is only becoming more critical as AI adoption accelerates. And honestly, that's exactly why I joined to LECG because we offer this as a service. Another funny trend that I think I wanted to mention that seemed to emerge over the last few weeks is the term hargora, where people have basically merged Harvey and Ligora into one shorthand word. So in phrases like, how does this compete with hargora? And I find that interesting because these comparisons are happening more and more now. But it also starts to raise the question, whether these tools are actually as interchangeable as people are starting to assume or to use that term to indicate. And then-- so there's so much news, right? And then, of course, while we were all at clock and Thropic dropped a huge announcement around Claude and its new MCP connectors, including integrations with a number of existing leading legal technology platforms, that sparked a lot of debate across the conference about what this means for the emerging legal AI companies and where the value ultimately sits in the ecosystem. So that conversation will continue on this week. And probably it's just getting started. All right. So a lot of stuff happened, but now onto today's show. Today's guest is one of the true pioneers of modern legal operations and a dear, dear friend, Anya Lyons. So long before legal ops became the global movement that it is today, Anya was helping define what the function could be. She was a founding member of clock, the corporate legal operations consortium. With me, in the early day, she played a hugely instrumental role in expanding the community across UK and Europe and helping shape the profession for thousands of legal leaders around the world. I want to just pause and give her credit. I really don't think clock in the UK and Europe would have taken off the way it did without her strong contributions early in the days. Over the course of her career, of course, she has led transformational work inside some of the largest technology companies, including Schneider Electric, VMware, and Nowwork Day, where she serves as Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at one of the biggest SaaS companies in the world. The Financial Times also celebrated on your last year during their 20th anniversary of their legal research as one of the leading legal entrepreneurs of the last 20 years. And I think that is quite a big honor. What I love about Anya's perspective today is that despite being such a strong voice and champion for legal ops, she is still innovating. And I found it so interesting that Workday does not have a traditional legal ops team model. Instead, they've built something much more forward thinking, a scalable legal services organization that's built around centers of excellence, shared services, AI-driven operations, specialized resource pools. And if you had listened to our earlier episodes, there was one with AT&T about legal edge and the idea of building at an internal law firm model. There are a lot of parallels here with how Anya's been thinking about the delivery of legal services inside the enterprise. And she has consistently been ahead of the curve on transformation, operational design and technology adoption. So today, she's helping shape how legal organizations evolve for the AI era. This was such a fun and thoughtful conversation about leadership innovation and what the future of legal really looks like. If you are watching today's episode on YouTube, you will see us in a beautiful studio setting. This was a special conversation because we were able to go in-person to record from their headquarters and studio. So as always, thank you to our podcast sponsor, Workday. And thank you for the water bottle that I use here. For years, the world's leading enterprises have relied on Workday to move their people and their money forward. Now the same momentum is coming to legal. With the acquisition of EVISORT, 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 onto my conversation with Anya. Anya, so happy to have you. So great to be here. And this is not your first time on this podcast, which, I guess it's been two or three years now. Just thinking how many episodes we've done. Time has flown by. You were one of my earlier guinea pigs. So I feel like we've gotten a lot better over the year. Let's go back. Let's not. But this is fun because you and I had go back a long, long time. So for those who don't know, we must have met when we were first studying clock, right? And you were like our first European board member? Yeah, that's right. And remember our guilty pleasure after those amazing first sort of clock get together, where we brought a community that didn't know anything about sort of how we transformed the business of law. We used to go and have afternoon tea together. Yes. And one time we actually went and had champagne instead, which was also very nice way. Nice alternative now and again. Yeah, tea. Every time I get a lend, did I make sure I have my tea? So you were one of our first board members. You basically built out the international version of clock, right? Yeah, and it was so nascent because I think a lot of bigger legal departments in the US and general councils who were very forward thinking had started to build legal operations. And remember, even I think I was part of that initial sort of 15 of us that used to-- Oh, totally. --meat. And the idea that although I was based in Europe, I was mostly in the US and doing a kind of a global role. When I went back to Europe, so many people were struggling to get budget for legal ops, forget to get even traction with their GCs. And they were looking for people who had that role in the US to come and help them sort of tell the story of why it would be-- why there would be a benefit to having a legal option. I mean, it's hard to think of that now. Because now it's ubiquitous. I mean, most legal departments have some form of a legal op function or chief of staff function or a shared service type function. They're doing something to scale. But back then, that was still really new. It was really new. Like the biggest request that we got as the clock leadership was how do I pitch to get this role up in running-- We did that initial deck. Yeah, there's a lot of-- Because how you build a business just to pick-- Yeah, exactly. And now it's like you talk to any GC, and they should at least know what it is, if not already have it. And you know it was the generosity of some GCs in Europe who actually hosted us in the beginning when we brought people together. And they would talk about their challenges, which were, I'm under pressure to do more with less. I'm under pressure to go faster. I want my team to take more risk. them to embrace technology and actually the generosity of those GCs at the time, I will never forget that because there were so few of them in Europe. And then now, you know, there's such a huge community there. Yeah. And the evolution of this role is a big topic that I want to get on. And it's interesting. Actually, another group of GCs just reached out to me and asked me to come speak to them about what legal ops is today and what a modern legal department looks like today versus yesterday. And I think a lot of them have legal ops functions. So it's not like they don't know how to optimize their team. It's just that it's changing so fast. So if we rewind, you know, when we were starting clock, it's like 15 years ago now, it was about optimizing people process technology. It was about cost quality. What are my letters optimizing for speed, cost, and quality. And you thought about your lawyers as your clients and you as legal ops were like talking to all the lawyers trying to understand what's going well, what could be better. And that's how we found out what to work on the new prioritized, right? Then we went through a phase where, and I think you and I were very involved and you actually were one of the role models for this is how do you become much more strategic in your role? How do you become like the true right hand of the GC where you're not just taking orders, you're not just running the business and the train of the legal department, but actually thinking how does the legal department actually add value to the overall organization? How do we achieve the CEO and the leadership goals? And how do you get from, you know, being an operational tactical person and completely mindset shifting into a much more strategic role? So you've done that very successfully. Can you talk about kind of how that journey was and maybe maybe some advice that you have for folks? Yeah, I think I realized, I mean, I didn't know anything about legal ops like most people who were asked to do the role. In fact, when I remember making it up, like GC asked me and I was like, no, that's something I do not know how to do. So I think you have to be a self-starter in that environment. And actually, that was the value of clock in a way. We all bounced ideas off each other in those early days. But I think what I realized over time was that in many respects, just staying in a silo in legal was not having a big impact. And that legal ops sort of being this side show that the legal department, other people in the department could say, oh, well, the legal ops team will do the transformation. So I don't need to be part of it. That's their job. And if transformation doesn't work, then that's because the legal ops team has failed in some way. And I think it's, I realized looking across how other operational people in the business, in HR or in finance or in sales, how they were thinking much more strategically about solving enterprise problems and how in legal, we touch all of the enterprise. Every life cycle that there is, we're involved in advising, doing, executing, making sure things actually get done in a risk-ranked way. And I realized that we needed to get out of the silo and start kind of operating more at the enterprise level and looking across the stakeholders and saying, what are your challenges? And then how could we be involved in either automating something within the whole sales contracting life cycle? Now there's the whole AI world there, which is so exciting. Or how could we look at how we globally expand our footprint from a risk, enterprise risk perspective rather than we're thinking about just narrow compliance risks on our own. So I think it's also trying to influence change, but understanding what the business needs to influence. Because I think a lot of us were trained to say, what is the legal problem I need to solve? And actually CEOs, they're saying, I have business problems with legal dimensions. Why do you keep leading with legal? Why aren't you embracing all of the other things that other functions are doing, like embracing technology, embracing process re-engineering, embracing change management? And I think we are evolving now to more of that. And I do see many legal teams now starting to do that. But there was a time that people were almost afraid to get out of their lane. And I think people thought, was that a risk to your career that now you're kind of working more across the enterprise? But you realize very quickly that you're not going to achieve anything on your own, that you really do. And from a budget perspective, I mean, the CIO often is the person who controls the budget. So if you've got a technology need or an AI need, and you want to work on your own in legal trying to do that, that's going to be more challenging than if the CLO, the CIO come together and say, what's the risk around something like AI, but also what's the opportunity? And they work together. So I think it's just making those connections. Think about how Eric Traffic Control works at a busy airport, every plane taking off, every plane landing, hundreds of flights moving at once, and one control tower making sure everything stays coordinated and nothing collides. Now imagine every piece of legal work moving through your company like that, contracts being drafted, sales asking questions, vendor agreements coming in, does that mean that you're decisions happening across the business every day without a command center legal is reacting to everything. Wordsmith is the command center for in house legal. It captures every legal request, manages every workflow and applies legal policies across the business in one platform right inside tools. Your teams already use like Slack, notion, G drive and Microsoft 365 legal sets the guard rails. The business moves within them safely and at scale. If you run an in house legal team, it's definitely worth seeing. Just go to wordsmith.ai and book your demo today. You touched on something about taking some risks and getting out of your lane. Where's I think a lot of folks who gravitate towards a legal profession are actually very risk averse and follow the rules. I think when you're trying to move from a tactical operational role into something more strategic, you have to break out of your lane and you have to like identify things and go after it and take some risks and proactively suggest things that aren't being sort of presented to you as projects or ideas. It's like, here, I see something. I have an idea. I think we should do this. That's what the leadership I think are looking to you to do. If you can prove that without someone saying, "Hey, Anya, do you have any strategic ideas for me today?" It's like, let's surface them on our own. I think another one thing that I think has worked that I didn't do in the early days, but now I try to do all the time is also bring cross-functional groups together to workshop for almost like a two-day period, maybe workshop something and then start an initiative within the company to. It may not always just be of benefit to legal. There are other functions that will benefit. I think that's how then CLOs can also articulate the value you're bringing in, I think, a more strategic way. Yeah. Okay. So then we fast forward to today. Yes. And over the last year, my God, the world has really changed and the resources, the technology that is available to legal has really changed the game for the way that we should be thinking about what a modern legal department should look like, how it should be staffed, what legal operations looks like. I want to get into all of that. But also in your role here at Workday, how long have you been at Workday? Two years. Actually this week, I think I'm two years at Workday. I'm happy you worked day-versary. So you don't have a formal or titled legal operations function here. Is that intentional because of how things have evolved over time in those two years or did you walk in? And that's how it was. How did you get to where you are? Because you have the capabilities and the function, sort of, but in a different way. And I'd love to hear about that. Yeah. I mean, I think it was intentional because I learned in my sort of prior life and roles that I think you need to be more embedded in the legal department. And you need to be more, I think, have the capability to and the mandate to work more on an enterprise level and help legal expand, the remit expand, the impact that they can have into so many other areas of the business. So it was very intentional. And although like an incredible, I joined because of the values of the company, but I also joined because it was an incredibly innovative legal team who'd done many very, I would say, forward thinking things. And we're like firmly on a path to become a modern legal department. But we then sort of did some work around, okay, well, what's the next iteration of this in the legal department, which we call LCCA? And I think what we realized was let's build a legal shared services, but let's have also within that a center of excellence, which has project management. It's got analysts, it's got legal engineers. It's got really, really senior smart lawyers who know how to transform work and look at work and risk rank work and redraft work in simple, easier ways for the business to understand. So the center of excellence powers a lot of that sort of transformation, but they don't do it on their own. The idea is that we take a lot of really smart people who are working on the front lines and we bring them together in these sort of transformation infrastructure councils. And we take the download from them of what they're seeing and what problems we should be solving from the front lines. And then we, because they've got day jobs. We take that and we build based upon that sort of super intelligence, like we use AI, we use a process reengineering, we use analytics to do a lot of that work. And then we repackage that work in a new way. And now we build agents. And so it's, we look at every work and say is that contract manager and these two agents is that two lawyers for this work or what are the personas of clients that were serving for this piece of work. And sometimes we just create the knowledge we created within the center of excellence, AI ready content group. And we look at what, what knowledge should be fed into that agent for the person of client, for example, sales or for our HR clients, so that we can empower them with very sort of safe, accurate content that we vetted and make it easier for them to just go and work, like move, work forward without even having to touch legal. That's quite a new concept. But so to answer your question, it's a multidisciplinary team. It's wrapped in a global legal shared services wrapper. There's a delivery team that does a certain segment of, you know, inbound contracting work, contracting for sales, certain segments of customers and a lot of sort of compliance workflows, things like that. You've got the center of excellence and you also sort of have a strategy in skills because really we're leaning in hard as a company or work day on. We really want to re-skill everybody so that like that super intelligence of humans and agents working together, like that we really redefine the future of work in that way. And part of that though is legal teams don't have time, I feel, to take time out of the day jobs. So you do need a structure within which that innovation can happen. And I think that is why I didn't want legal operations in Asalou. I wanted it in a way that is integrated into everything we do, not just some Asalou team that's expected to innovate on their own, which is really hard because you need everybody on board. And that's why everybody part of that transformation. This episode is brought to you by BrightFlaG. Everywhere you look, a new legal AI solution is popping up, promising to redefine the way your legal department operates. So how can your in-house team sift through the noise to find the tools that will actually make a difference? At BrightFlaG, AI isn't just a buzzword. It's the patented technology that's been powering their platform for over a decade, making it the most experienced legal AI tool on the market. BrightFlaG's intuitive AI-powered enterprise legal management platform helps corporate legal teams manage matters, control costs, streamline invoice review, and gain complete visibility into legal work and spend, featuring hundreds of thousands of hours of training and refinement. BrightFlaG's AI enables automated legal invoice review, deeper data insights, and more strategic decision making, giving your legal team the time and resources it needs to focus on the work that truly moves the business forward. To learn more about BrightFlaG and book a personalized demo, visit BrightFlaG.com. I think this is so interesting and the setup is so smart and it just makes a lot more sense for the time that we're in. The beauty of what AI has done for all of us in addition to accelerating the pace of change and bringing us all these new tools is that it has made modernization for legal and transformation for legal top of mind for everybody, from the C suite on down to the worker bees of the legal department. You're all everyone is having this conversation of how do we change? How do we get better? How do we modernize? And whereas before, everything that had to do with technology, you threw it to the legal ops team and you're like, you guys go deal with it. And like you said, we operated in Nassilo because nobody else was interested. Everyone else was heads down just getting their work done and we could kind of focus on the people process technology. Now the GC, the CLO, all their deputies have this as top of mind. They're all thinking about how are we using technology? How are we using AI? How are we like training different staffing, different delivering our work differently? And so when you do that, now it's not just, I want to throw it to legal ops and not talk about it again. Everyone's like, I want to be involved. I need to be involved. I want to know what's happening. I want to know what our ideas are. I want to be able to manage this up to our CEO. So the way you've kind of evolved the team into not being a silo makes a lot of sense. I'm also seeing now that our tools are able to deliver so much more value and it requires so much more creativity and understanding of all different types of work and how people do their work and where the data resides, where the knowledge resides, that you need almost this entirely new skill set that I've been talking a lot about, right? This legal engineer, I don't know if that's the right name eventually, but these process re-engineers that are able to sit down with lawyers, understand the work, identify the workflows, automate them, agent ties them, and then maintain them. Like keep them up and keep them integrated and keep up with the changing times. That seems like a lot of what you're doing, creating these shared services that are now not just about being a back office to the back office, but it's actually an execution and services layer for your team but eventually for your internal clients as well. Absolutely, and I think being that team being involved in a lot of cross-functional initiatives at the company that are new scaling AI-native technology that we're rolling out across the company and the CLO for the first time being a new persona at work day. I mean, before our personas of who we sold to were like the CFO, the CHRO, the CIO, but we've added the CLO because you're right, every CEO is also, our CEO talks about it all the time. He has so much knowledge about the legal industry, which is really new for me. Yes, so exciting. I mean, a dream about talking. It's crazy. We could never predict that that would happen. That was sort of the dream that you know we have to care about the legal industry. But really, we do, I mean, and that's why I think it's surprised a lot of people in the industry that worked day-acquired ever sort, which is typically sort of like a legal, I think it was seen as a legal tool, but actually it's the enterprise. It's an absolutely impressive. It's an enterprise that's absolutely impressive. Everywhere in you need contract intelligence and you have all that data across all those different life cycles in a company and you layer on top your contract intelligence agent. But back to the, I think the skill piece as well, we do, I feel every lawyer should now and every legal professional should also have legal upskills. So my goal is that we teach everybody how to look at work differently, how to think how to re-engineer it, how to, because our AI tools are so incredible. They're so easy to use. That actually, leaning in with some level of skill, you can build a lot of things yourself now. And if we empower people to do that, I think that will completely change legal departments. I think we'll no longer have a siloed legal ops. I think everybody will have innate legal op skills that they're going to pick up by being part of all these projects, by now using AI and leaning into, because we're using it in our daily lives. So it's easier now, I think, with the big sort of power of the LLMs, and it makes it so much easier to interact. It's so user friendly. I agree. And what I want to touch on, because you said you want to kind of have these new skill sets, when you're a lawyer and you're thinking about technology, kind of one of the messages that I've tried to get out there is, we don't want you to learn to code. We don't want you to learn how to make ages necessarily. It's not even that we want you to look at your current work and figure out how to do it faster. It's, what is the problem at hand, and then what is the output that you want at the end of the entire process, right? And don't think this, these are the 10 steps I currently do, and I want to automate them. Maybe those 10 steps don't exist. Maybe we do it a totally different way, and getting people to think not just automated the current process and making the current way faster, just throw out the current, and think totally different. Absolutely. I mean, we've been thinking, how do we make it easier for our customers to contract with us? And it was sort of, let's throw out all our thinking, even though it was perfect for the time, but we're all evolving. And the innovation that's come out by just creating the space for people to come together and reimagine how we're going to contract has created so much streamlining. Streamlining of our processes, our contracts are shorter, we're empowering through the agent that we have for our sales teams, and we put so much content in there for them, but we curated that content by thinking about what is that output we want? Our output was we want sales to be able empowered to serve themselves and answer customer questions that they don't have to come to legal because that's going to enable them to go faster. And I think it's those kind of upfront analysis of having an agent strategy, though, because I do worry that otherwise, everybody builds agents and suddenly you've got tons of agents to have. But where are you getting the ROI? So we really kind of set down and looked and there are six sort of agents that will ultimately become our front door for legal. And so we're building these six as the ones we think will have the biggest ROI, we'll have an orchestration layer, we'll have a data intelligence layer curated by us, it will be accurate. We know what the content is. And then each of those agents, we're going to, like, what are the deflection rates we're getting? And your point about marriage is so true. you have to have people to maintain them. Yeah. And like, maintain what's going in so you don't see agent drift. Right. And I mean, again, we're lucky enough because work day acquired sauna, it's our AI, it's for us. It has, and I think legal teams are finding this with this next gen layer of AI native tools. It is so easy to use that adoption, because we struggled with adoption in legal teams over the years, as you and I well know, adoption is just so much easier, because they're just interacting with essentially a great chatbot. Like our negotiators, we built one, it's our sauna agent for like negotiations. And we just put in all the content, 450 pieces of curated content that negotiators need to close the deal. And it's just enabling because that content was scattered everywhere. And I think legal teams have content everywhere. One of the biggest problems is bringing it together, having it as a legal brain, almost your knowledge brain. And then the AI will do the context curated for you, give all the scenarios, like write me a customer email to respond to this responsible AI questions. Write me an email for a sales team. And it will just, it's powering an incredible amount of efficiency. But we did not have that before, I feel, even a couple of years ago, technology implementations were hard. It was totally different. And adoption, so painful. So painful. Yes, worse than art. In疗ations, so painful. And educating, so painful. So it's, it is an absolutely different place, which may be easier to train people on, maybe easier to get people to understand how to use it. But to your point, there's actually a lot of others things that have now emerged that are really hard. You spin up a bunch of agents. It's kind of like a bunch of new employees. Someone has to manage them. You can't just let them run free. You have to continue to train them. You have to keep things up. All the integrations have to be kept up. All the compliance. All the compliance. And the audit. So that's a whole another skill set persona. I don't know, like people skill that you need within your organization to not just build, but to maintain. I think that's a big word. But even like the data curation, you need someone to put that in place because with with a human, not an agent, you can say, like look for the good pieces of work and like read those and learn from that. When you're just pointing it as a repository, there's drafts in there. There's mess ups. There's things that you never want it to train on. And maybe our examples are really bad work. So there's, you know, there's all these other functions now that have started to emerge that I don't think any department was ready for. And these are new things that we have to start to think about. I think before we knew we needed to do work on sort of our knowledge, but I think if you do it now, you're going to get a bigger return. And I think we delayed a lot of those projects. Many teams are too busy or just didn't happen. The reason it's so important now is because of the accuracy. Because when we deploy those agents, we really need to know, these are accurate. This piece of content is right for this persona or this stakeholder group. And I think the skill set to do that is a mix of skill sets. We use a mix of, we use project managers. We use really experienced lawyers who will go through like for that 450 pieces of content. We realized some of our content was so long-winded. It was written in a way that was not going to be beneficial. That's right. And I also learned from other functions across work day who are deploying agents because we all share our sort of knowledge and learnings, which has been really beneficial. And we feed them back into our product life cycle for our agents, for our customers. Because in legal work, customer zero, for our sauna agent, for the legal departments, and for evasort, which is really unique, I think, in the industry that we're using our real life experience to do that. But what I learned from sales and marketing and HR who had built some agents before we'd started was the content was what was the challenge for them. And it's back to the thing that we never want to do, which is do the hard work of saying, reimagine our content. And legal departments, we love lengthy. And we love it. And when sales or other functions absorb it, they're like, why do I need a 10 page FAQ to tell me something that I'd really love a table or a diagram? So I also think there's new ways of telling stories and displaying data and showing how risks can be graded to your stakeholders if you really think about data in a new way. But I love what you said about the guardrails, because there has to be guardrails. And I mean, that's why agents just operating on their own. That's not going to work. Yeah. So you and I talked about this at lunch. I mean, I've been looking at tons of AI startups recently even talking to all sorts of in-house teams. And every time you talk to an in-house team, they will say guardrails, guardrails risk accuracy. When you talk to founders of AI companies, they want to talk about agentate solutions and let things kind of go free and create answers. I keep coming back to-- because when I've been looking at it from an advisor or even an investor point of view, I'm like, where's the dashboard? Where's the command center? Where's the collaboration? Where's the audit trail? Where's the governance? Yeah, I keep wanting to go back to software. And everyone's like, software's dead. You have agents. I may be alone in this, but I really believe software's more important than ever. I feel like there's going to be more software. Sass is not dead. Sass is not dead. I mean, if you think of the three life cycles, when I look at any company and my business partner, it's like higher to retire, pick your to pay, lead to cash. And we need software guardrails to run that. And yes, have our agents do tasks along that life cycle? And some of those, if they're not high risk, can be autonomous, some need human in the loop. Absolutely. But you've got to build in responsible AI. You've got to build in all the different controls. And you've got to make sure that the data-- and I think that's the advantage of really-- when you're thinking about legal tech-- trusted vendors who really have that system of record has that governance, has those controls and that ability for you to, yes, then use their agents on top, or if you're integrating agents or whatever it is that you're doing. But without those guardrails, I think definitely large enterprises. And if you want to scale, that's going to be very difficult. I do not see a world where that goes away because we need the-- We need the-- We need the system of record. Yeah. Where did the decision come from? Who's touched it? Who's revered? Where did this language come from? I just think-- I mean, the agents-- whenever I have a conversation about that, I feel like you can interchange the word agent for employee. And it's like, OK, maybe the agent/employee no longer needs certain types of software. Sure. Like they can do stuff on their own now. But for a lot of things, you want to know definitively where things are stored, who's touched it last? Where do they come up with that decision? Where does it need to go next? And the responsible AI building that in, the bias checks, the all of the different principles of responsible AI and RCLO at workday was really forward thinking. And like eight years ago, building a responsible AI program, Rich Sawyer, there's very few companies who had that early on. Now everybody's running to create it because of the EU AI Act. But if you don't have those things built in, you're also just creating more risk. And there has to be some governance around your agents for compliance reasons. That's what customers want. That's what we all want if we're buying. I think-- but the question is, what will we be buying? Because if we think of even alternative service providers, it used to be before you would buy, like, maybe contract lawyers to do-- now it'll be you're saying to them, probably, hey, I'll take some contract manager, a lawyer, and two agents, build me two agents. If you don't have the capabilities to build them yourself. I mean, workday, it's-- we help people look after their money, their people, and their agents. That's where we're going. That's important to us. So it's exciting to be part of-- it's quite an exciting time because I think you and I are both AI optimists. I mean, we know there's all the risk. But I don't think there's ever been a more exciting time to be in our industry in the legal-- It's so exciting. And who thought you would be in legal tech? I mean, I guess we call it enterprise tech, right? So when you joined workday, you did not expect it to have a legal tech component to the job. I mean, they had acquired workday. And then Sana already had law firm clients. And so even it's sort of very cool to be part of a company where we're implementing it ourselves. We're learning from our mistakes. We built prompt libraries because we were finding we didn't have them. And now making them available to customers. So it's sort of a whole virtuous cycle of we're learning from what we're using. We're building it back into the product and we're hoping that's beneficial. Because I wish somebody had done that for me in certain scenarios in the past where it would have been great-- we did that in clock learning from each other. Oh, yeah. And learning from and sharing in a really open way. And being really transparent about what isn't working, I think that's how you build trust with customers too. And I think that's how you build trust. I always have so much more trust in vendors that say to me, Here's what we can do. Here's what we would-- what's going to be a challenge for you. When it's all being sold as it's all going to be wonderful and you're going to have no problems with implementations, that's when you really get concerned. I totally agree. And I hope more vendors hear this because yes, we know you could do that. You can do anything's possible always. But be honest about how painful that's going to be and how not standard that is for you as a vendor. That matters. Yeah, I agree. So when you guys are thinking about implementing buying technology, you have some of your own tools, you have some of your own enterprise tools. Yeah. And it's really hard to be a buyer of legal tech now as an in-house team. How are you guys thinking about it? Do you look outside? Are you looking at startups? Are you looking at more established players? I always like to stay in touch with, you know, who's out there who are the new open commerce? What's happening in the industry? But our policy is, and I think a lot of companies are adopting this policy just for security and privacy risks and responsible AI risks as well, is first look internally and see, do we have a tool? Do we have the capabilities? Or is there another team within Workday who's built something similar and try and leverage that rather than going off and building something else? And we talk a lot about our use cases. I mean, yesterday we had a customer zero workshop and we had finance, H.O.R.E. and we all came together and said, what is our wish list of what we could build together because we're all touch similar things in the enterprise and then we're building our new use cases. So I think, you know, we certainly think long and hard because the worry is, I think there's so many startups that there'll be consolidation. Yeah. And we want longevity. And I think, you know, when we invest in a partnership, you know, we really want to invest for the long term in that partnership if it's a tech partner. And so I think we really try and do our due diligence upfront also on how they are in compliance and how can they scale, can they really kind of stand over sort of new compliance, all the new AI regulation that, you know, this is just the start, the EUAIAAC. That's a very frothy place out there from a regulatory perspective. So although I love the innovation, some of them are just so niche and point solutions for specific things, I really have to think is it worth bringing that in, trying to integrate it with everything and then how, as you say, without the rails. Yeah. So I would have to think where we're going to put that along those different life cycles and what the ROI would be. And I think everybody needs to ask themselves because these, everything is expensive and using LLMs is becoming more expensive and I think you have to be very judicious about where you make your investments. Yeah. So it's hard. Yeah, it is difficult. But it's also exciting to see what's being developed because you know at some point, some acquisition of that. It has to. It will happen in some consolidation. So we're all going to benefit long-term. Right. Where are they going to go? What's fascinating? Yeah, everyone's like, what's going to happen? What's it going to look like? I have no idea. I have no idea. It has all this made you rethink how you work with your law firms and outside council, too. Yes. I mean, I think law firms are at a real inflection point now because I think we've talked about it for so many years that the billable hour has always been sort of under question. I can we evolve it? I think it's difficult. But I do think a lot more in-house teams are asking law firms, what are you using AI for with regard to our work? How much of this bill and which components of it are AI versus people? And I think law firms are going to have to think about how do they charge for the agent time? Because agents cost money, too. And I think they're going to have to really evolve. Maybe there's some kind of subscription for their agents that they have a lot of very good information that they probably want to keep inside their firewall. Maybe they're creating their own agents so that clients can come in and they can get a huge amount of certainly, I think there's a huge swath of work that you could have access to via agents that you could charge for. I just think they need to really rethink. There's also this sort of generational, it's difficult to disrupt something that's been around for so long. And the partnership structure doesn't help. Sometimes you've seen law firms, they create innovation engines, but they bring them outside the law firm. That's right. And they're almost as services back into the law firm. And I think they have to do that because of the hard to change the whole thing. The whole thing. The whole thing. It's hard to change the model because it's institutionalized almost in the industry now. But AI will certainly change it, whether that's in two years, five years, but it's definitely going to disrupt that market. But maybe it'll just be that there will be new players and maybe private equity invest in new players that will just take a certain swath of work. And if law firms can't disrupt themselves, I think private equity will see the opportunity which is huge to take that swath of work and maybe just build new AI at native law firms. Yeah. And those are exploding. Even in the loop. And they are starting. I think the traction will see. I'm bringing up because I think what you're doing with your department and your centers of excellence and your service centers is actually very similar to, I don't know if you listened to my episode with AT&T. I did. Okay. Because then I loved what they're doing. Yeah, it's called legal edge. Yeah. It's a similar sort of shared service. Yeah. It's like an internal captive law firm for the legal department where I'm starting to see also and I think you might be one of the many, many legal departments now that have fed sort of all your outside counsel invoices through an LLM to surface like what are the buckets of work? Where can we be doing stuff ourselves? So we think there's, you know, when we talk about legal operations, I used to always say the job in simplest terms is right sourcing. Right? We're always trying to re optimize all of our resources. And if you think about what you're doing, what legal edge is doing, it's saying there's some of this work that we can do ourselves or we can do within our captive, you know, shared services at a much lower cost, maybe even better quality because you know our lingo, you know how we like to see. Contents. Yeah, exactly. All the day we can share stuff that we can't share externally. So yeah, does that start to like, where you're buying services, you can generate a lot of the execution layer of yourselves and my philosophy or theory now is like that you're really wanting to buy judgment, relationships, industry experience, know how, the so what of it all. And that's going to be priced and valued in a very different way and Ken Loframs get there because you're going to be able to do a lot of the stuff yourself or with somebody else who can do it a lot cheaper. I think Loframs are seeing that already. Legal teams are keeping a lot more work internally. Yeah. They're using AI and our sauna legal agent like our legal front door. We use that for so many things. Certainly first passes of things that we might have sent to a law firm. That's right. We're sending it much later in the lifecycle, I think. And I think more legal teams are doing that. And I think it's been surprising how much these agents can do. Mm-hmm. And the context is so important. And for certain use cases, they are excelling. Yeah. But I think we have to say there are certain use cases that are more complex. Of course. That we would have to build out what's the legal reasoning and judgment. I was talking about that. Yale Lofram professor, Shapiro, who's like doing that work with really complicated, complex use cases and helping build the prompts for how a lawyer would go through the legal reasoning to get to that result. And I think that's really interesting as the next generation of the value chain. Of if we could add that context for different really complex use cases for legal, I think that will really be a new frontier completely. But it takes people like that to do that work. And then we can all sort of see, okay, what are the best practices and start thinking ourselves about that? But there's no question, if you have lawyers training your own agent and we're seeing that ourselves, we built an agent, a negotiator agent and like us testing it over and over and adding more context and thinking through the prompts and building out our prompt libraries, the progress is so fast compared to how long that would have taken us before to do that work. But there is of course, like you said, I mean, what is the value that we bring as a legal team then internal legal teams and I always say to people, your value is your knowledge of the business, your judgment, you knowing the risks that the business has, you knowing where we need to lean in. And this is going to take away the tedious work, help you focus on that which is going to really accelerate how you can help the business. But there's still fear about AI's I think too. And a lot of questions around accuracy. And I do think we need to become verifiers as well because you do need to drive the accuracy. And I think that's why the deterministic rails are so important. Because that means you're tapping into a layer of data that you know has the accuracy. But I think lawyers need to become more AI verifiers and then judgment and trusted advisors, risk rankers, calibrators. So I think they're new skills. And also just what you said, like learning how to look at work differently, using more of that creativity, And if we can give them that, I feel like that's how we set people's careers up for the future. And that excites me because I don't think we want to leave anyone behind. That's why I also thought legal ops in Asylum doesn't really make sense anymore. Everybody needs to be engaged in this transformation. Yeah. I have a very optimistic view about all this. I actually think there's going to be more demand for legal work. When tech gets better, there's always more demand for everything. I think there's going to be more interesting work to be done because you get rid of the boring execution stuff and you get to do the thinking and the relationships and the creativity and the added value to the business. And I think you articulated it really well that the job changes. If your job is no longer to be a really good executor of legal work, but actually to verify it, the so what, how does this affect my business and bring the business judgment to the job. Eighth, that's just a way more interesting job, but that's also just like very different to train for to get people ready for the other thought I had is. If you're saying that you're using context, you're training it on your business. It can in a lot of ways get even better than when an outside law firm who doesn't know you that will can sort of create, especially if you have guardrails, right. I've talked to many in house teams who are like, so it can get us about 80% there. What I wonder, and this is my another thesis that I have is that we're having worked in house. The lawyers always have imperfect information. You always have deadlines of yesterday. Someone's like, hey, I know you don't know. Make a decision. I got to go now. And you have to decide with the imperfect information that you have. You need also becomes way more important. And if your AI tools are able to get to 80% and a law firm just validates it 99% of the time, maybe you just go with it. Well, in some scenarios, I think you can. I mean, I think you look at in I think you calibrate the risk of going with what you have is good enough. And then there's cases where you absolutely want to verify it. I agree the speed at which it gets you to the point where you can analyze and use your judgment before that took hours and hours of work. And I have never met an in house legal team that is not overworked or has too much work to do. Because the demands from the business keep coming. So that fear to me is I really think if people step back, this can only supercharge how we do our work. And I think if you don't lean in, you know, the risk is that you end up working in a way that is very outdated very quickly. And that's why we really are investing. We've done so much AI training and skills training because we want people to really feel like they're going to be relevant in the industry because our industry is really changing. And then for that piece that you say is still really important to verify and we have to get it absolutely right. There's a lot more value on that type of work. And if you send that outside, you should be paying a lot more for that right because you can't do it yourselves now. That's the piece that you really want someone really good to add value to and specialists. And so I think law firms, if they focus on that, rather than maybe clinging to some of this work that either internal teams can do or law firms buying their own and building their own agents. That's right. So that we don't have to build on ourselves. Exactly. And sharing them with their clients, I think, is a new way for them to look at how to serve us better. And also we have to justify why we use law firms. So if they're using AI and they're not passing the benefit back to their clients, that also becomes a difficult conversation around billing. And we really want them to be trusted partners too. Yeah. But it's a time of real change though. And I think it's happened at such a speed. For me, speed is like a competitive advantage in a business for legal teams for everybody. But at the same time, we do need to have, I think, enough time to. That's why those use cases and what's high-risk use cases versus lower-risk use cases. Having bringing people together to really talk that through and think it through as a business is really important. So we have to balance speed and innovation with also just risk as well. Yeah. And the world is, it's all speeding up. I always feel like there's not enough time for anything. You and I were talking at lunch about, you know, we're in the, let's say, longer vintage than some of the other people coming into the. We can say that. We're in a few careers. We were talking skincare. So I know we're the same bitch. But there's, you know, there's folks that are coming into the working world who are AI native and are, you know, see a problem and their reaction to it is immediately, I have a fix for this. So I can build something for this. We're in a very different place in our careers. But I think I can speak for both of us in saying that we are naturally curious and really interested in technology and have taken the time to sort of, like, understand and listen and learn and try to keep up with the changes as much as we can. And I do hear that a lot about the, and it's a real dichotomy because we have these young lawyers and legal professionals, legal engineers, legal. There's so many people that are in our profession that are also other professionals. They didn't go to law school. And I hate when people call them non-lawyers because they're just other really valued legal professions that are now in legal departments. And our department has a very high percentage of people who are. Yeah, it sounds like it. Yeah. And they add so much value. And I do think. We have to think about how to bring them together because we have a generation of people who, as you say, I mean, using AI is just really natural for them. However, what they don't have is the judgment-owned yes. So, AI skills, but the judgment isn't there yet. The verifying skills aren't there yet. And then we have really experienced lawyers who are somewhat fearful of AI or like, "Oh, do I really need to learn these new skills?" They have all the judgment that if you married them with AI and they could help train these young lawyers, like, "That's the dream." And that's what we're trying to do on our team is make sure that we have all of those professionals working together and sort of that we're better together. And that we're going to just like bust that whole intergenerational divide now as well. But it's real because you see it in law firms too. Oh, yes. And I think I've had so many conversations about the people we interact with and talk to all day are all entrenched in legal tech and AI and we can talk about everything that's happening. But there's a whole group of people like most, I would say, most lawyers are not thinking about this day and end day out, have not rolled up their sleeves and played with it. But what you're saying is absolutely right. Like, that, the people who can't, who have the judgment and the experience, if they learn just a little bit about this, they're the ones who can play with it and immediately go, "Well, that's not the right answer. That's not accurate." And that's the value of like being able to hack together solutions. If you already know what the outcome should be, then you can actually verify and go, "This is, yes, let's keep building. Let's keep using this." And that's why I think we've got to be role models for that this year and Workday is great on investing in AI skills, but also talking to governments around the need to invest socially in re-skilling workforces. Across the world in all the countries that we operate, we're like having that dialogue with governments, but I benefited from a program with the Irish government this year and went to Trinity and did an AI executive program. And it was just so interesting and valuable for me because I learned so much that I felt like if I don't model the behavior that I'm going to invest in doing this, then how can I ask other people to do it? And I think that's also really important that we help people bridge that gap now on skills too. But I think they also see, when people start seeing the use cases come to life and how it works, so you have to also build the trust that it can work and that it is going to be accurate and that it is going to add value to. And that's not perfect. Of course, they're bumps along the way and we learned a lot from building our agents. We're about to build a policies agent. You know, every company has policies everywhere. But everybody across the company needs to know, am I compliant? And they have questions, so they have to go to all these different policies. And if you layer that across like your HCM and you can have your policies agent, things like that when they come to life because legal owns a lot of those policies, I think people see, oh, that's beneficial, not just for legal, but actually for everybody. And I think legal can have such an incredible impact now if we get this right, kind of balance the risk, the innovation and get people leaning into using the tools in a way that makes them feel empowered. Yeah, well, we're here so much now about about legal departments that are leading the way and showcasing what's possible to the rest of the organization. And it is no surprise to me, Anya, that you are doing that at work day. So thank you for coming on. Just continue to do the brilliant work that you're doing. And again, no surprise that your department sounds like it is on the cutting edge and building more futuristic ways of working than most departments that I know of. So thank you for coming on and for sharing your story with everyone. It's always a pleasure, always a pleasure, Mary. Thank you. Thank you.