Hey there again, Victor Cho here in this episode of the Victor Cho podcast. I am so pleased to be talking to Monica Zant, a pioneering legal industry innovator. She's a CEO ahead of multiple organizations, technologists at her heart. And the one key thing that you'll get out of this conversation is we're going to go deep into how AI is impacting the legal field. AI is of course, rippling through every single knowledge worker industry on the planet. And we're going to have a deep dive discussion around what's happening in the legal side of the world with Monica. So I think you'll really get an insider's look at how the market is evolving. So please stay tuned and a quick cool addition. You'll notice a little QR code there on the bottom of the screen. That is that's actually from a mover, the company that I run. And it is a visual proof that this podcast is in fact being recorded from a real human being, which is me. So when you scan that, you will see the actual visual proof of my identity and you'll even be able to send me a message. So please check that out. Welcome to another amazing conversation. I think you were going to be riveted by this one. I am so excited to have Monica Zant in a half hour to a little bit longer conversation. And I've known Monica for many, many years, but I would describe her a serial legal entrepreneur. She's probably started three to four, maybe more different companies or organizations in the legal compliance space. She has been at the heart of using technology in really interesting ways in this industry. And why I'm particularly excited to have this chat is as many of you guys know, there's a collision happening between AI and knowledge work. And I really think her perspective is at this point in time are going to be really, really valuable. She's also, she's a licensed attorney. She's a writer, a speaker. She was in the military. I didn't even know that Monica looking at you in background. That's incredible. So excited to have you as part of this conversation. Thank you, Victor. It's a pleasure to be here on the pod. I'm so excited and it's great to reconnect and really looking forward to our chat. Wonderful. Wonderful. So let's just dive straight into it. You are the founder and CEO of a wonderful network because I used it when I was, when I was running e-vite. We used your services and they were phenomenal. We tapped into some incredible talent. So I would love you to just maybe to start with, describe Zent Law, kind of how it works. And then from there, I would love to really talk about the impact of AI on that model because you guys will hear in two seconds, right? It is all about finding really good talented resources, but human beings. So talk about what's going to happen in this new world from your perspective. Exactly. Well, yeah, great to have you to share. I mean, of course, you're familiar with Zent Law because you're one of our clients. But you know, for the audience, happy to share. Zent Law is an alternative legal services provider. As of April of this year, we've been around for 24 years. We were one of the earliest in the market, really bringing in a hard to believe, right, in a long time. But we brought kind of efficiency, scalability and reliability to the market at a time when the only kind of models that were out there were law firms and the in-house models. So the ALSP model does deliver upon a lot of these benefits for clients in terms of flexibility value, reliability and efficiency and scale. And so that's always been core to our DNA at Zent Law. And we deliver this through a number of different solutions that we have from our flexible legal talent to our subscription solutions to legal operations work that we've been doing for a long time to some of our new offerings along the AI front. And of course, we've been involved in legal tech and sort of the tech ecosystem for a very long time. So happy to chat about that too. Do you think this is accurate because at least when I was running, even and used you that the brilliance of the model was like we couldn't to something we couldn't afford, but we didn't need a full time ahead of all these different functions. But we wanted best in class. And there was no great model to get that. And so I don't know if you would consider it like a fraction or they have all these fractional sea level models. How do you think about it, you know, fractional like a fractional expert versus just a contracted expert or those one at the same at the end of the day? Absolutely. I mean, it's outlaw as you know, and even at your experience at the event, I mean, we are sort of delivered upon the fractional expert model with, you know, sort of basically deploying one of our fractional general counsel to work, you know, at the event. And that's how we work. I mean, we have folks and talent from all different sort of parts of the legal ecosystem, from attorneys at all different level at the fractional general counsel level that we deploy on engagements with clients all the way to sort of your junior counsel, your paralegals, contracts managers, legal compliance specialist, legal ops professionals. So lots of different talent across the ecosystem that we deploy on our engagements with clients. And again, it's really about for us at Zantlott's always been about that high touch approach, really looking at what clients need, what makes sense, what's cost effective. But also, where is that sort of fit going to be and ensuring that it's a really solid fit in terms of experience and cultural fit and all of that. And then the same applies for our managed services side of our business at Zantlott with our subscriptions that supported by a different team, but the team of folks that support the managed services work. Again, we deploy people on each man's services account based on what the needs are and the expertise and the client. It's perfect. The background's perfect. And so now, you know, in the back of my mind, I see this crazy collision or I just know because I'm guilty of this now writing my own startup. And I'm like, oh, I could probably, let me see what the AI gives me in terms of guidance, which is probably horrible on many, many things. So what's happening with the collision with as these systems get better and better? Like, what's your perspective on? So AI and the enterprise, I mean, it's basically, it's table stakes now. So clients are looking at not just, you know, are we bringing AI in, but of course, how are we using it? And so that led to sort of a lot of the work that we do at Zantlott and some of our offerings present AI, which I can share, but also it led me to create a law and evasion agency, which I'm involved with. And law and evasion agency grow out of some of what we were seeing with clients in need of governance and structure and guidance on that front in terms of AI law and policy. And the governance structures around that in the organization as well as other AI enablement work in terms of how they get ready to bring AI into the organization. But AI is really sort of this operating system now and looking at that from an investor lens is really exciting, but also looking at that from an operator lens and sort of trying to figure out how we help clients get where they need to go when it comes to AI and maximize their ROI as well. Actually, this is a, that's actually a great segue into this next question because I know you, as you said, you've been working in machine learning early days in AI and you've released this really cool innovation for lack of a better term. Sent AI would love to hear more about that and how kind of what your vision is of using this technology to really amplify and drive efficiency as opposed to necessarily, hey, let's let's go replace everybody in the planet. Yeah. Of course, Zentei belongs to the end of last year. It's Q4 2025. And I'm really excited about it. I mean, Zentei draws from our legacy of innovation at Zent Law. We have been sort of innovating in the legal tech space for a really long time back in the day as I mentioned, we had Zent Law Labs and we created and incubated early legal technologies like LogS 360, various AI chat bots at the time, which were AI powered chat bots, a clause engine, some other technologies that we pushed out to our client base. And as you can imagine, this was 13, 14 years ago, clients were not heavily adopting or leaning into legal tech. So that was sort of a bit challenging and pushing a bolder uphill, which I tend to be used to in some of my entrepreneurial pursuits. But at the same time, it provided tremendous kind of learnings and insights into client behavior on what clients are thinking about and doing and how they adopt tech. And to the day, it's informed advice and guidance that I provide to legal tech companies that I invest in or funds that I advise on the legal tech investments in terms of client enterprise behavior when it comes to buying legal tech. But that's sort of some backstory for how we ended up launching Zentei. And so Zentei is an offering to help clients navigate sort of the AI space. And in one sense, we have sort of two key pillars. So first is our Agente AI kind of custom creation pillar. This is basically where we will go in with our legal systems architects and custom create agente AI solutions for clients that are drawn from real life examples of things that our team has seen on the ground working with the client or that clients have directly observed. And so these are highly contextual developments that are very specific to that client. And it's interesting. I've noticed that clients are more receptive to that. And it's funny. We weren't quite sure what the appetite would be, but it's interesting. Clients are receptive and it sort of ratifies an idea that I wrote about a few additions ago and venture legal about this long tail effect. So I think we'll start to see this more in enterprise where we'll start to see these agenteic solutions that people are developing or having people like us develop for them that speak to very specific context-based use cases that are very unique to what they need. I love that. Let me play that back to be sure I kind of understand. So these agenteic systems, I think, are going to be crazy wickedly powerful. But in many ways, they're just going to be overwhelming because they do. They're not smart enough to necessarily do all the right work and people aren't naturally of the mindset to. Most people don't just naturally construct new optimal business processes on a day-to-day basis. Right. That's why we exist. Yeah. Exactly. And so I love that.
this idea that it's like, no, no, no, you can't just give, you can't just, you know, turn Claude on to your whole company and they're suddenly going to magically create these workflows that are going to fundamentally change everything. You actually need the experts to come in, understand what you're trying to achieve and do that. And what I hear that's that I really love is this idea that it's, it's really going to be custom to your company because your company is different. Mm-hmm. So what else is company? Just like your marketing workflow, like, you know, there's a lot of marketing automation happening right now, but those, those are all highly custom because, you know, company A versus company B's marketing workflow and their marketing stack is very different. So it's, it feels like the perfect time to bring that kind of capability into market. Um, so that, now that's exciting. That's exciting. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Do you have a paper agent or agent pick system that you guys are working with or do you work with them all? Yeah. Right. Neural. We have some different projects. I'm not liberty to discuss, but they're, they touch different areas of work that we touch with clients. Um, so some could be in the contract space, the compliance space, the product space, even the legal ops space. So, um, those are sort of the broad categories, but yeah, very interesting and exciting work. And then the second pillar of Zentei is our curated legal tech stack. And, um, this again is drawn from our years of experience, um, sort of on the legal ops front, um, doing that type of work and advising clients, um, including way back in the day when they would buy legal technology or think about legal technology and they weren't sure what to buy or what happens after they implemented or a lot of times they would come to us after the fags when they had inherited or bought something that wasn't the right fit. And so that component of Zentei is really our curated legal tech stack where we have vetted partners, best in class, AI legal tech solutions that we make available to clients. And part of the reason for this is because we've seen time and again with our, our background is that a lot, a lot of times clients will want to buy technology, but it may not be the right fit. And so we try to help them identify the right fit and ensure there's alignment. Many times there can be a misalignment and you can have the best technology out there, including right now. We have some wonderful legal tech solutions in our, our partner program, but it may not be the right fit for every client. And so we try to sort of identify what's the right fit and focus on fit over features and really helping clients navigate this, this, um, the space. And what we've noticed is clients are somewhat relieved by it because many of them are getting decision fatigue. There are so many AI legal tech tools out there and they want to try them, but they also are not sure what makes sense. And so we help identify the right point solutions for them based on what their needs are. I know. Now that's how I, and I would love your take on this prediction, maybe I'll call it a prediction. When I think about what's the end state of a bunch of different industries, kind of where do they go with AI legal at a macro level is one where I could see a exponential explosion in, in litigation and attacks because it's just going to become so easy to get an AI to say, oh, here's the 20 companies we could go out. And so I, there's part of me which says the legal work just explodes in a world of AI and companies that don't have the right AI enhancements systems, processes, agentic workflows are going to get buried. Is that a dooms, do you think that's a doomsday for the ship? Or do you pick it up? No, it's, it's, it's accurate. I mean, I could see it as an operator and founder for a long time in an enterprise sector, but also putting my investor hat on. I know you've been an investor for a long time. I've been an angel investor in legal tech for 14 years almost now and continue to invest in advice and those that do invest in the sector. And yeah, absolutely from an investment perspective, it is exploding and it will continue to explode. I mean, there's a massive disruption right now happening with knowledge work and the future of work. And again, topics have written and covered as well on Kibble continue to write about, but there's this huge explosion happening with AI and tremendous potential. And so there are a lot of opportunities. I mean, even just, you know, on the legal tech front, I mean, just taking that as an example in terms of low hanging fruit and again, putting an investor hat on, I've noticed that we have sort of a lot of incumbent technology, older legal tech that has been around for a while. And so, you know, the way clients are using and nothing against these technologies, but it's sort of like you're trying to retrofit a house that's decades old and it just is a longer, harder process than opposed to if you bought, you know, sort of build from the ground up, right? With everything that is the way it should be based on the latest and greatest standards and materials. And so it's the same idea with technology. If you're building something with an AI native backbone today, that's going to unseat and incumbent. To me, that's sort of a lot of, it presents a lot of opportunity. And so I look at that from an investor perspective. I mean, I just as recently as last month invested in a company that is sort of doing something like that. So there's a lot of opportunity there. And I do believe that that's also a mindset we try to help clients understand is that technology by its nature is, I mean, there is an expiration date on it and it's going to become obsolete after a period of time. So understanding these expectations to some degree as you go in and look at buying these technologies and using them, understanding that they're going to continue to evolve. And so how do you ensure that, and that they're the right protections in place to ensure that your, you know, your data is protected and you have the ability to migrate systems and how nimble is your tech stack and all these considerations that we, we talk about with clients as they begin to sort of go down that journey of legal tech. I'd love to peel the onion a little bit on that because in my mind, there's this fascinating governance compliance chaos that happens when you start it, especially when you start introducing agentic systems in that have access to this. Like, I don't know where this all ends up. And in many ways, it's what we're doing in a mode that we know. You're talking about human in the loop. We know there are certain things where you need to have a verified human. Just stamp out something. And so, yeah, that's what we built our platform for. But yeah, I just think about all the different nuances of the legal flows and communications. And yeah, but what's how does the world move forward in an agentic world? I know. Well, you hit the nail in the head to Victor. I mean, because even a moment, I mean, your premise for your product makes a lot of sense for the enterprise in terms of the trust and authenticity. And I think that's going to be very important as we move forward, especially as we start to kind of go through this long tail kind of adoption of AI, right? Where we start to have individuals building their own agentech solutions. I mean, we're doing it for them. But also having people, you know, eventually empowered to do this themselves. And so as they start to build these solutions and we're already having agents building agents, right? So there's all this happening in the enterprise. And so to what degree does it create a need for enhanced trust and veracity around these systems as well as just even other other considerations in terms of redundancies and data integrity and systems of record or which system do we trust? What's output do we trust? So a lot of these trust and authenticity questions are going to be really critical on the governance front. And we do that work through law and aviation agency as we sort of help clients navigate this AI era and this new normal in terms of sort of how to think about governance and what makes sense. And it doesn't mean sort of, you know, bolt everything down with too many policies because at the end of the day, people aren't going to follow all that either in an organization. So it's kind of having that happy medium and that moderate approach, but at the same time identifying where do the right controls and guardrails need to be and what do they need to look like? That makes sense. Is there out of that kind of collective which again, sounds awesome. The lot of innovation agency concept. Is there a is there a burning common problem that you see from everyone? We're like, everyone's worried about everything. But like this, this is like the today problem that people are grappling with most or is it a big long tail of just everything because there's so much change. I know that's a great question. I mean, it's to say we have seen some patterns emerge. I would say a lot of clients can fall into a couple of different camps where they're adopting AI and they're on the road and some of them are already adopted the governance, but they're not sure on sort of the literacy front. So they're trying to educate their base on that. Sometimes you have the opposite effect where people are very literate and AI fluent, but the policy and governance piece isn't there. So we're dealing with that. And then we have, we still run into clients what we're talking with. I mean, as recent as I talked to a general council last week and they were just still trying to figure out they haven't jumped in with AI and they're trying to figure out, okay, how do we do this? What should we do? I know we need to. I want to. Our board is telling us, but what should we be using? So these are real life conversations that are happening today still. And so not everybody has jumped into it yet and some are more cautious, but they realize that they need to and so they're trying to navigate hell. Yeah. No, that makes complete sense. Have you seen, I'm curious, have you seen anything flip yet where, you know, I don't know, a year ago you would have been like, this is never going to not be a human being, but now it's like, no, we're okay. Hiding this piece of the legal process or this piece of discusing over to an AI system. I'm curious. Yeah. You know, I believe we're doing this now, but we're all comfortable when we weren't. Well, months ago, we wouldn't have been. No, I mean, I am only because I've been around legal tech for so long and really since the beginning. And so I've been sort of pushing the envelope in terms of innovation and legal tech. So for me, it's kind of like finally, the industry is sort of coming around and seeing the industry move forward. So I'm really, you know, excited about that. And I think that it's really makes a lot of sense. But it is interesting. I mean, when I look at it because I do have this perspective of client behavior over decades and kind of it's it is interesting to see the change in mindset and client behavior where, you know, pitching these kind of concepts. It's interesting. Like even the AI kind of powered workflow and tech enabled.
efficiency technologies that we were creating at Zellow Labs back in the day. It was hard to get clients to kind of wrap their head around it. They wanted it. They wanted to be more efficient, but getting them to do that. And this is at a time, by the way, to remind you that clients were adopting, you know, the most of the legal technology that they were adopting was e-discovery, starting to adopt e-building, starting to adopt e-signatures. And so that was kind of the world we were living in at the time. And so at the time, going to them and saying, hey, thinking about how to be more efficient with your workflow, it was sort of far beyond where they were at that time. And so now the market has really caught up and they're looking at how can we be more efficient with our workflows? What else can we be doing? And so it's interesting. It's just fascinating to me to see the mindset shift and to see people that I had spoken with even 10 or 12 years ago, now very much sort of embracing AI and bringing it in and figuring out how we can use it to be more efficient. Yeah. That makes sense. Something you said just a random product thought for DocuSign if they're listening, which is like, we're going to need the equivalent. I'm sure someone's working on this. We're going to need the equivalent of an agentic signature. Right. Eight agents are going to be working on behalf of corporate entities and they are going to be making decisions that bind the company. So we're going to need the-- Right. And it goes back to that trust and veracity kind of authenticity and all of those systems, right? And we're going to help us be able to rely on what we need to be able to rely on, especially when it comes to audit trails and defensible agreements and things like that. And when you're looking at things you need to be able to rely on in the enterprise and in that trust and veracity piece is really key. Now. It's going to be a brave and crazy new world. I know exactly. I know exactly. How are two last questions for you? One, how do you-- I mean, your business is kind of immersed in the tech. So I think just day to day you're absorbing it. But is there anything in particular that you do where you'd recommend to people to say? Like, I would do this or I do this and this is one key way that I stay current. Exactly. So there's so many different ways. I mean, I love to read some of our H.S. readers. So I'm always reading and of course I write a lot. And so yeah, I mean, I would say just stay up on what's going on in your industry. I mean, I read a lot of this sort of industry trades. I read things that are relevant to things that I write and speak on. And of course, my space that I operate in, but everyone's industry is a little different. So looking at that and looking at what's relevant to your industry, kind of staying up on the latest trends and latest information and research. And then I do read research papers and studies and other things for sort of deeper information. And then podcasts are great. Like yours, but podcasts, kind of looking at podcasts that are in your industry. I mean, I find they're really fun to listen to when you're working out. So I'll often listen to podcasts when I work out, not all the time. I do like my music. But I will listen to podcasts now and then and I find it's a great way to kind of get through some interesting episodes and listen to the content and just hear colleagues in the ecosystem in terms of their best practices and whatnot. Yeah, that's great. Any, do you have any podcasts or maybe even podcasts, books, anything that you've experienced recently that has just changed your life? We're like, I've got to, I've got to tell people about it. Changing my life is very strong. I don't know if I did not. But I do have something I listen to or ones that I've checked out. I mean, I'm constantly sort of always scanning for like what's new. But yeah, there's some podcasts in our industry. I mean, we have, gosh, I don't know. There's so many, but just off top of my head, legally speaking by Rob Hanna. He does a great job. There's Tom Martin's podcast. He's in our industry. He does some great podcasts. There's some other interesting venture capital podcasts I've listened to. And then sort of other sort of interesting philosophical podcasts. I sometimes will pick up the Bruce Lee podcast which I enjoy from time to time. So I think there's sort of interesting, deeper thought, types of podcasts. And then I guess another suggestion is that I would have is playing with AI. I mean, just really getting your hands dirty with it. I'm a tinker by nature. I love to build. I love to tinker. So for me, I'm always in AI and playing around with it and seeing what I can create or what I can do and what the output is and just accessing everything that's out there. So I feel like people just in general. And they're best interest to kind of just play with the technology, get to know it. Use it, be comfortable with it. And if you're looking at upskilling in some way in your career, kind of look at doing that too. And there are a lot of formal programs coming out now where you can formalize that. But I don't know. I don't feel you need to go get a certificate to be AI literate. You can do it yourself. Yeah, I agree. It's not going to bite you yet. And it's. Stay curious. That's my. I love that. That's a perfect way to add. Well, I'm glad to get. Thank you so much for taking time out of your crazy schedule. Thank you, Victor. Yeah, that's great. Always great seeing you and like wise working on. Thank you so much. It was great to be here. Awesome. Have a great one. Thanks. 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