How AI is reshaping Big Law - and why firms can’t afford to wait, with ex-Ashurst digital chief

Welcome to the numberable podcast. In this episode we sit down with Tara Waters. Tara is a leading voice in legal tech and a lawyer with more than 15 years experience of firms including A&O, Simmons and Asher's, where she was a partner and chief business officer. We discuss the state of legal tech, how lawful of them should assess this ROI, Tara's favourite AI tools on the market, and some of her best advice to help junior lawyers get ahead. Now Tara, for those that might not know, could you give us a little bit of quick intro on yourself and your work? Yeah, sure. So hi everyone, I'm Tara Waters, coming to you from London, but originally from the States. I've lived here in the UK for the past nearly 15 years, where I have been practicing as a lawyer at a few different UK law firms. In my background, actually before I moved here was working in technology in the US. And so over time, my practice started to focus in on that Venn diagram where technology and the law intersected, and it was really fortunate that at my last law firm, which was Asher's, Tyrann London, I was able to leverage that experience to not only hone my practice in and working and advising with technology-focused companies, but also then working internally within Asher's, and how we were making decisions about technology and looking to use it to improve our services. And so for roughly the last seven to eightish years, I was looking after what we referred to as digital within Asher. So that was specifically looking at how we leverage technology to improve our services and also develop new services and products for our clients. And that ultimately culminated over the past few years, looking very specifically at AI and Gen AI, leading a firm wide rollout of Harvey across the firm. But unfortunately, I made the decision that actually, I was ready to take some steps outside of law firm life. And so now I am consulting. I've set up my own consulting business, and I'm working with a range of law firms as well as legal technology companies. In fact, and hopefully over time, some corporates and in-house teams on how they are approaching their own decisions around technology and thinking a little bit more broadly as well around digital transformation of businesses. So, Tara, we're going to get into all of that good stuff because I know you are one of the leading figures really in this sort of legal text base over here in the UK market, for sure. Before we do that, you turn it on there, Tara. So you actually started your careers as a web developer, didn't you? And then pivoted into law, which is very unusual. Tell us how many about that. Yeah, I was a little bit more usual now, but certainly not. And when I was strong in my full-time legal careers, very unusual for someone to have made that tech-to-law transition. A lot of people were at that point in time trying to try to get into tech out of law. And to be honest, it was a little bit of circumstances and timing. I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I lived in a household that for whatever reason was a little bit probably more tech-forward than the rest. So our household was on the internet quite early on. And I took to that. And so when I went to university, I ended up studying electronic art and communication, which was basically using computers and technology to do design work in art. And that was always a little bit more creative minded, I guess, when I was younger. And when I graduated at university, which was 2000, height of the.com boom, there are so many opportunities in the technology sector. And it just seemed like a natural next step for me in terms of the opportunity that was there in the skill sets that I had studied as well as taught myself. So it was very much about self-taught development and things like that. So I worked in tech in New York, straight out of university. Sadly, I missed becoming a millionaire, unfortunately, but I gained a lot of really interesting insight and experience in technology. And that was also the point in time when Napster and PureFile sharing in this whole discussion around technology outhacing law in terms of regulatory developments. And law really needed to start to understand better what was happening in the technology sector seemed like an interesting space. And I got convinced with some place that maybe I might have some unique perspectives and something to add and ended up going to law school in the US, which is postgraduate degree and deciding that I wanted to pursue that. And that's what took me to the UK, actually, when I graduated, I had gotten a job directly in Allen and Overy based in London, because I was really interested also in working internationally. Oh, wow. Okay. So you went to law school in the US and then I suppose that you qualified again in the UK. I didn't know. So at that point in time and still now, actually, there are a handful of practices that require and almost always have a US advisory element. And so I went into a capital markets team doing both debt and equity capital markets because US securities law are extiterritorial. A lot of the big practices internationally will actually hire directly US lawyers into their team. So it was very fortunate. I joined a big US team based here in London and practiced in that area. And actually, I got to do a couple really cool tech IPOs like Betfair and Ocado. And that was kind of how I tried to stay close to the industry. I tried to get involved with that many clients and transactions that involved tech, even though I was practicing as a securities lawyer. So I think after A&O then Tara, I think you went to Simmons for a bit, didn't you? Yeah, that's right. A couple years there, I think. And then you went to Asher's. And that's where also the parts kind of crossed. I mean, we never worked together directly, but you were an ECM lawyer at Asher's. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So I did ECM as well at Simmons, but Simmons was a much smaller team than A&O and even Asher's. And I got the opportunity there to get exposed also to the UK side of the deals because the team was so small, I was actually the only American or the US qualified associate in the firm that was practicing as a US qualified associate. So I got the opportunity to advise on both sides of the transaction overseeing, of course, by both American and UK partners. So when I transitioned over to Asher's, I was able to come in and say like, I could work actually really broadly across all these different types and deals, which was, I hope, attractive to Asher's part of what part of why I got recruited over and then have the opportunity as well, then because it was a much bigger corporate practice to get involved in other types of transactions beyond capital markets and that I kind of did the opposite of what a lot of sort of younger lawyers do, which is try to really focus in on a single practice and become that sole expert. I actually decided, I want to do the exact opposite. I brought in my skillset capability. I've done every type of transaction possible from a corporate perspective and I really wanted to give myself that broader base of experience knowing how important, especially for the tech sector, it was to have that kind of, quote unquote, trusted advisor. I wanted to be a person that could be a common advisor to to my clients and actually be able to work with them across all types of legal matters that they might have. Notwithstanding, you would always still bring in your experts at the right time, I think in the technology sector, what I recognized was that those types of clients developed really, really strong relationships early on with their advisors and that was something that I knew that meant I needed to actually broaden my skillset rather than actually narrow in in terms of my practice. I think that's very interesting that isn't it, Tara? I suppose it's sort of like become a sector specialist rather than a kind of practice area. Exactly. And again, in my kind of level of seniority, that was actually quite new, in fact, being more industry focused, particularly with technology. And Ashur's has always had a very strong reputation with private equity and with financial institutions. Technology was something that when I was there at a senior associate level, we were just building a bit more. So it was really fortunate, I think, that the handful of us that were brought in and had that more industry, in sector focused approach coincide with the firm itself deciding that it wanted to have a stronger technology industry presence and capability. And so, again, very fortunate in terms of the timing, my level of seniority that I got recognized as having some of those skill sets that not a lot of other people had, as well as the interest, of course, and got to work a lot internally to build up a profile around technology and tech sector, which helped me then translate that into working more internally as well. Yes, I suppose the evolution then of that for you was becoming the innovation leader within Ashur's. You were one of the leaders of Ashur's vans, weren't you in the firm, which was the new Lord of vision. I think you were focusing on the digital side of things, is that right? Yeah, exactly. So Ashur's events actually, I think it was formed the year that I joined. So 2014, so Ashur's events has been around for a while. And so I'd seen it and heard about it, and I had actually known some of the people that were in the original team, which was quite small and focused in Glasgow. But as that started to grow a little bit, it became very obvious that as a firm, we're thinking a little bit differently around our approach to technology and digital internally. And that was where my reputation as being kind of the really techy lawyer started to come into play. So I was a person then that suddenly some people on the Ashur's event side and senior leadership said, "Oh, go talk to Tara about that idea," because she knows a bit more about technology. And so when we made the decision as a firm to actually expand the capability into using digital as a way to potentially sell products to our clients and build things ourselves, which was the initial concept, they actually came in and consulted with me amongst other people in the firm around what that might look like and what the need would be and how we might do that. And I took the opportunity to say, "Hey, I'm pretty sure if you're looking for someone internally to help lead this, I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the firm that's built products before because that was my whole career before I moved into law. So this is something that you might be willing to look internally to do. I'm raising my hand and saying I'm super interested in leading that. And that was what led to my transition out of practicing full time within the corporate team to moving into the Asher's events team as one of the partners there. So at this point in time, I had become a partner. And so I had the opportunity to lateral over and work closely with the Asher's events, leadership team, and become part of that. And I suppose that Asher's advanced originally, I mean a lot of big firms were starting to do that. But I suppose it wasn't so tech-driven as far as I knew. It was more just low cost provision of legal services to outsourced teams based in, for example, lower cost places like Glasgow, Belfast, etc. That would do project work for clients. Right. Yeah. And that very much was the original concept of having these alternative legal service providers or ALSPs was the idea of trying to meet that more of a less challenge from our clients, which was ultimately the client saying, we don't want to pay you so much money. Can you find a way to cut the costs? And so step one of that was very much around, okay, how do we replace higher cost resources with lower cost resources? So that was bringing in parallel legal style employees, so people that were legally educated, but not yet fully qualified as practitioners to actually come in and help support into some of the work that you didn't need a qualification to do and placing them in lower cost centers so that we can make that a little bit more attractive. Also, then it started expanding in terms of bringing in other skill sets. So like legal project management, there are a lot of clients saying, you know, we'd like to see a little bit more rigor around some of the big transactions that we're doing and making sure that's managed very well, and I want to get more regularly reporting on billing and invoicing and things like that. And so we started to introduce as well these other roles that supported the people that were actually doing some of the legal work, whether or not they're qualified or were just legally educated. And then we also then that immediately expanded to, okay, but there's all these now new technologies that can help support. So that was in the early days, things like document automation. So being able to code up your standard forms into templates so you could answer 10 questions and outpopped a fully formed document or contract, which was really exciting at that point in time. Or for example, using machine learning AI-based technologies to be able to suddenly review and pull out of 100 contracts or a thousand contracts, all of this information that in human hours couldn't ever be done to a client's timing or cost expectation. So. And do you think then it was driven primarily from clients? Was it saying, you know, these aspects of these particular projects or transactions, they should be done much more cost-effective for the elsewhere is that? It definitely was. And I think there were, you know, probably about 10, 15 years ago in the industry, there was this whole movement around. You don't have to be a qualified lawyer to do certain aspects of the legal work that gets done. And clients suddenly became a lot more open to the idea of, well, I don't have to stick with my tried and true and tested and loyal, you know, external law firms who cost a lot of money, but I pay them good money for their really solid advice. Because if I actually just want a thousand, you know, leases to be reviewed and all of these pieces of information from those leases to be extracted, I don't want to pay the cost of a mid-level associate to do that. What I know, it can be done with technology and, you know, with a mix of other lower cost resource. So the clients were definitely the drivers in terms of their willingness to start to dis aggregate some of their providers and say, actually, I've found this other firm or provider that's willing to do this for less, which has caused a lot of the bigger law firms to say, okay, how do we build that offering into our broader offerings that we can give our clients the best of both worlds and they don't actually have to go to a separate provider. I suppose that's then involved now in there's a whole sort of legal tech element, you know, supporting that, isn't there? Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's involved massively. And I think now what, while that concept around cost is always going to be one of the primary drivers, especially from a client perspective, I think what has evolved over the past 10 years is a recognition that, to be honest, the industry could be doing things differently, could be thinking about the way they service their clients differently, but also through using technology and other skill sets and other roles, there's new value to be added as well. So there's, again, in that concept of how do you actually improve and transform your service offering? It's thinking about technology just as, not just as a thing that the lawyers use, for example, but okay, maybe we could build something that our clients can use themselves, but that has information provided by the firms, whether or not it's the legal advice or it's the information or it can be something as simple as just having a client portal where clients can access some of the regular documentation and regular information much more easily, just to smooth out the relationship and information sharing all the way through to now, what a lot of firms offer now are legal services and products that you are almost purely digital in some way. So people are collaborating a lot more through technology and also accessing their service directly from their providers now using technology. Okay, so Tara, bring it up to date then today. Could you describe the current state of legal tech and its adoption right now? Yeah, I think, well, today it's a very different story than maybe 24 to 36 months ago because what's happened in the past two years as I think everyone will know is the rise of generative AI, not just within the industry, but across the whole globe. And that's really genuinely resulted in a complete change in attitudes in the industry around the use of technology, whereas I think probably two to three years ago, legal tech was still a thriving and exciting place and there are a lot of providers looking to solve problems for the legal industry and in particular trying to find technology tools that would help lawyers do their jobs better and services clients better. And there was a lot out there, but I think two to three years ago, it was still a big struggle for those of us that were trying to bring some of those tools into our firms to actually get the interest and buy in an adoption from the lawyers. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that, but in particular ultimately I think the lawyers just, you know, they're busy, they've got hours they have to build, they've got client demands, they have to meet and to ask them to start to use new tools and learn new things and focus their energy on that was always a challenging ask. And I think we didn't always necessarily put the best tools in front of them and that didn't always immediately show them, oh, this is this is so much better than the old way of doing things and that was ultimately the challenge is how do we convince lawyers who are well entrenched in certain ways of working to change the way they work, even just a little bit, you know, and we're not talking about drastic changes and ask them to shift to moving to a different type of platform or shift to thinking a little bit differently about how they do their work. So the so sorry, sorry, sorry, I suppose then my sort of take is that as you said then, so legal tech, you know, there was always innovation happening in legal tech, but it seemed to me that most of it was happening in the sort of back office, middle office, there were sort of practice management software, time recording software that was getting better all the time. Suddenly two years ago, you know, AI, generative AI just changes the game completely and the focus now is on that sort of delivery piece, right, the client facing bit. Yeah, it's exactly, I think that's exactly what happened and I think it's the legal tech game has largely been focused on efficiencies and I think that hargains back to what you mentioned in picked up, which is this whole, you know, reduced reduction of costs play in the whole in that whole narrative, I think has driven a lot of what legal tech has been proposing to offer to law firms and to lawyers, whereas with the advent of chat GBT in November 30th, 2022, basically every single lawyer saw that and suddenly was like, that looks easy to use. I bet I could use it to do X or Y or Z and they even could go for free and try it out because you could, you could set up a free account with OpenAI and they, you know, notwithstanding you didn't always work on everything and they were immediately able to say, oh, I did this and it did it and it looked really good. Actually, it gave me a really good answer, it gave me a really good response and suddenly we had something that we never had and I think in the legal tech industry, which all the lawyers going to their innovation and digital teams and saying, what are we doing about this thing? Can I have it? How do I get access to it? I'd like to use it. What's happening here? And that was happening across the whole of the firm. So, you know, I had very, very senior partners telling me they already paying for the premium account because they wanted to make sure they could access it because you refer on the free account. Sometimes you got told, oh, you have to wait in like, in half an hour, you'll be able to access it again. And, you know, a tool got put in front of them is very, very rudimentary. It was ultimately just a chatbot interface, but people were so able to use it so easily and test themselves so quickly what it was possible to do with it. That suddenly you had this whole rush of, we have to be using this this new generative AI technology. How do we use it? And that I think has really changed internally within firms and within innovation teams and digital teams, the mission, which was okay. Like, now that there's suddenly demand, I'm not pushing, I'm being pulled in the direction of the lawyers. How do I by now find the right tools to bring into a firm that are going to be secure from a client data perspective, that are going to be trustworthy and reliable because lawyers often want perfection and how do you bring these types of tools in that are going to be usable, genuinely usable, and that the actual lawyers are going to want to use and be able to use immediately to get their work done. And then I think the interesting thing that's even in the past two years that has been this evolution, again, out of not just cost savings and time savings, but okay, what can we be doing now for our clients because our clients don't have access, or I should say they have access to this technology in the same way, but they're also asking the same question. So there's this unique opportunity for everyone in the legal industry to be working together and learning together. What are the right tools? How is this technology best used? How is it not best used? And how can we actually use this collectively and together to improve and change the way legal work gets done? So we've finally had this moment where we're starting to see that mindset shift, that we've all been trying to make happen within the legal community, finally happen where the lawyers are saying we want to work differently. If you give us the right tools, we will work differently and we will adopt this actually and start to change the way we do our jobs. And at that stage then, was it mainly about the generative AI bit? So prepare this, I first draft up this email for me or rewrite this or something like that, in a quite basic tasks that you're asking chat GPT to do. Was it? Yeah, I think that was the original allure, which is you can ask a really simple question and you just get out all this text. And you see it streaming, so you see it typing out. It looks like magic. I mean, that's ultimately just a technology choice to show it streaming. It could just have popped it all up at once, but to show you it in flow, everyone just was like, wow, this is amazing. So that's the thing that caught everyone's interest. But I think what I've learned, and I've now done, a global rollout at Asherst. I'm currently one of my first clients is a mid-sized firm here in London. And we're now doing a suite of pilots with a couple of different tools. And what I've definitely started to see is that that bit is the alluring bit that gets people interested. But then I think the lawyers quickly shift to, but how is this actually really helping me do my work? Because what I don't often sit around is ask open-ended questions and wait for a two and a half pages to get printed out. Because that's not really the work that I'm doing. I'm reviewing this contract, and I'm going to have the 10 same questions and pieces of information that I'm going to want to know about this contract. Or I've got my checklist of things that I always look at or try to draft in when I'm negotiating. So people, I think, get quickly to the brass tax. But what does this thing do that actually helps me right now to get my work done? And that's what's been really interesting is the evolution of the tools themselves away from just chat interfaces to tools where, for example, now there's a whole bunch of tools that are built right into word. So if you open up any document in word, suddenly you have this AI assistant sitting at the sidebar, and you can ask it to review certain things. You can ask it to scan and suggest improvements. You can ask it to find your gaps and things like that where you're really able to just work directly with the documents instead of asking a question waiting for information to pop out. And these are co-pilots. Is that the technical term? Oh, it's more similar to co-pilots. Yeah, I think. Yeah, definitely. I think I would say more just assistant. So they're there, and they've got capabilities, and you can ask it to do a number of different things. And most of them now are programmed to do certain things. So there's platforms right now built into word where you can literally press a button and say, OK, this is a lease agreement. So click, go through a standard lease review without me even instructing it the things that don't matter because they come pre-programmed to know these are the 15 things that you almost always check in a lease. So you can just do that first quick review at a click of a button. And then you can start to read through the feedback and it'll provide you with explanations. It'll jump you to the points in the document where you need that help. So yeah, it's that little assistant sitting alongside of you. And again, we're talking about these are provided by third-party technology providers. We've got one of them happens to be using. So you have your sort of assistance. Then maybe a more advanced layer is your co-pilot. Is that right? And then my understanding is the full most advanced tool might be something like a Harvey, for example, which seems to be just more complete. Maybe describe that for me. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily-- I was going to say, I only avoid the phrase co-pilot because there's a Microsoft tool called co-pilot. And in fact, there's like a 27 Microsoft tool that's called co-pilot. So I think that phrase is a little bit confusing. So I would say that there's generalist assistance and then there's specific assistance. So I think that assistant is the one where there's just like something within the application itself that helps you-- it's a little sidebar that helps you do things. But I think there's also the chat interface assistance, which is a very standard chat GPS style of working, which now-- to be honest, it's just table stakes. Every single AI provider allows you it's somewhere within their platform to have a little chat window and just to just ask questions through that interface because that's what people are used to. And that's what people expect to be able to do. But I think what we're shifting more towards are workflow-based platforms. So those are platforms where they might have a chat section or an asked section, but they also have features and functionality that are specific to certain types of legal work. So there's a number of providers now that, for example, will let you upload a larger number of documents, somewhere 50 to 1,000 documents, for example. And it'll let you then say, OK, for all of these, I want to pull out the same 20 pieces of information. And so you can type that in. It could be different types of clauses. It can be questions about the document. Does this document have a allow termination with convenience, et cetera? It could be a mix of what you're looking for. And it'll actually then just start populating those with the answers to those questions or the information that you're looking for. So that's more of a workflow where you're setting up some parameters, and then it's populating all the information for you in an automated way. Or, for example, you can, as I said, you could say, OK, at my firm, we're doing due diligence. And we always ask these 10 questions of leases, these 20 questions of share purchase agreements, these five questions about articles of association. You can actually just create these templates that then are tailored to your organization and not dictated by the provider. And then you can just keep those are reusable and shareable across an organization. So there's these-- I would say it's a general or general or built in assistance. Then you have workflows. And then those will either be separate providers or those will be platforms like a Harvey where they've got all of those all in one platform, for example, where, and different vendors are taking different approaches in terms of whether they are making their solutions more specific to certain practice areas or certain work types or domains versus something that they think is a little bit more all-purpose like a Harvey. So talking about Harvey and Tara, so Harvey is the biggest name in legal AI. I swear to say, they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, lots and lots of hype. You had it at the team responsible for rolling that out at Asha's last year. Just tell me about that. Yeah, so Harvey was one of-- at the time, we spent about a summer looking at every single new Genai tool that had come across our desks. And at the-- ultimately, we picked the ones that we wanted to trial. And Harvey seemed like at that point in time the strongest general platform that was legal specific. We also trialled one that was very specific to it disputes workflow. And then we also looked at co-pilot at the same time. We went into those trials with the intention of basically putting it in the hands of our people and then letting our people dictate what we did next. So we very much spent a lot of time in design those trials in a way that we were able to get qualitative and quantitative measurement about the experience, about how good the outputs were of those platforms and how usable they were. And therefore, what should we do next as a firm in terms of how does this help inform what we want to do around generative AI overall? And I think ultimately, we were fortunate in that we ran those trials in such a structured way. The R team was able to take all of that quantitative and qualitative data. And it was very, very clear that the people that were involved in the Harvey trial, which was, I think, just and just 300 people globally across the whole of Asher's, which is pretty dispersed firm, pretty much universally saying, this was fantastic. It works really well here. Here are some places that works less well. But overall, the consensus from the data was, we want to use this tool. We think this tool is usable. We think it adds value. We think it saves money. We think it can improve the way that we work. And we would be willing to adopt it. We want to adopt it. And I think those are the key things we're looking for was, what's the quality that's coming out of here? What's the experience of using it? Is it something that we can support the ongoing use of? And do the people really want it? are they telling us quite clearly, yes, this is something that we want. And we heard that pretty much very clearly across the board. So we made the decision to go for an enterprise license because at that point in time, we didn't have that strong of the feedback around the other tools that we had used. And we also felt really strongly that as a firm, we didn't want to have Genie I have and have nots. So I suppose it sounds then like the lawyers themselves were again, they were up for it. How do you, I mean, this must have been a multi-multi-million-pound investment for the firm. How would you go about getting buy-in from, you know, the other partners? Yeah, and again, well, so I think within Asher, again, I never personally in my role as Chief Digital Officer or any other sort of digital leadership roles that I held before that title. I never really had a lot of problems with the partners. And I think that was, I was going to say, not wholly unique, but I think that was something special about Asher. It was that the partnership was very bought into the idea of being a technology first organization. And they knew that that was going to be something really positive for them. They just needed to be shown the proof points and how it worked for them individually in particular. So I wasn't necessarily the partnership, but very much, you know, in terms of the financial investment, as well as the resource investment, you know, those were robust conversations that we had within the firm. And I think that ultimately, you know, I think the senior leadership recognized that this was something that we needed to do. We need to do quickly, you know, the size of the firm meant that the investment was going to be at a certain level. And you know, that that just is what it is. And I think that, you know, we had a process around, you know, putting forward the business case and really showing the return on investment, not just from a pure financial perspective, but all the other aspects, the qualitative elements, as well. And I think that ultimately, you know, we were able to successfully get the buy-in to make the level of investment that we did, because we were really clear on this is how we're going to measure things. These are the qualitative and quantitative ways we plan to measure things. And we also set, you know, did our best to set expectations to say we're not going to in year one, for example, be able to say there's a clear quantitative ROI that we can point to because the data is really difficult and challenging to collect. But what we will collect is this and we will be working with our commercial teams and our pricing teams, etc. to gather as much information to help us be on track, to get to those financial ROI measurements. What do you think the ROI should be then for a legal AI, to like Harvey for a law firm, Tara? I mean, I think that, so I think there's two ways to think about. So I think there's a very narrow and traditional way of thinking about it, but ultimately, I think, is relatively easy to put forward. You can go around, I think, at a minimum, right, the investment cost should be cost-covered by a metric of time saved of getting some of the work done. Like, I think that it's actually relatively easy to do those math to get to say, listen, if it costs this per person, and each person uses it x amount of times and saves five minutes each time they do it, it's clearly cost-covered. I don't think that's the best way to present it, and I wouldn't personally advocate innovation teams try to build their business case solely on those types of measurements, because I think it misses the big point. And the big point is this isn't just about cost savings. As I said, we're moving beyond that conversation from 10, 15 years ago that this is all about cutting costs and having lower costs in as many places as possible. This is actually about how you leverage a technology as a growth engine for your business. And therefore, I think there's a lot of other areas in terms of, and I know, again, it's challenging to do some of these measurements, but this is why also, for example, when we were at Asher, we brought in all of the other, you know, functions and teams to be part of the conversation and part of the roll-up so that they could start thinking about what do we need to be doing differently to help us actually substantiate and continue this investment and retain access to this technology, because you can go and you can start thinking about, okay, well, off the back of, you know, for example, a single press release, we've had this many client conversations and enriching client conversations about the way they're using technology, and that's turned into, you know, X-Meni offers to pitch for new work, either related to AI or completely not related to AI, but just because we came across their desk most recently. Suddenly, we were in frame for more work from them. And then, you know, again, you could be thinking about, and we're starting to see this happen. A&O has done it, their far lens has done it. I'm sure, I'm sure Asher's team, my old team there, I'm sure they're thinking about it. How can you use this technology now to provide very specific client-facing services, right? Like for the clients that don't have access to a broad legal gen AI tool, which a lot of clients currently don't, how can we make this technology accessible to them so that we're actually managing them as well, and also strengthening our relationships with our clients? I think there's so many other ways to think about ROI when it comes to this technology. Plus, you know, the concept of attracting and retaining the best talent by maintaining your position as a market leader in technological innovation and the employee experience, right? Like at some point, not quite yet, but we're getting there, you know, law firms that don't offer some of these capabilities to their employees and staff are going to be less attractive than the ones that do. And that's why, you know, a recent PWC survey came out that said, now 90% of the top 100 firms in the UK have either already implemented a general AI tool or are in the process of assessing and evaluating one. So I think there's quickly going to become a point at which if you don't have something like this within your firm, it's going to start to become a differentiator also for your people. So even though it sounds to me like the actual sort of legal advice might not necessarily be enhanced by this technology. Is that fair? Well, I think, well, I think the value of the legal advice I think still is going to be the lawyers, you know, knowledge, expertise and experience, but the packaging of that legal advice, the quickness at which you can get to it, or to be honest with you in some cases, you know, and I come from a transactional background, the amount of time that you could spend thinking through the robustness of that advice, versus spending lots of time locating files and information and collating information from files, you know, versus spending time talking with your client, thinking through their, their really challenging questions and trying to give them the best possible advice that's really, really well informed and maybe you're able to draw upon more sources because you have more time and technology allowed you to uncover more sources of information to help inform your advice, I think. Is the, from my perspective, is the way to think about it and the, I mean, I think, and anecdotally, I think, you know, the comments that have been made in the press from law firms over the past two years has sort of indicated that again, it's not just about, oh, suddenly I spend 50% less time on your matter, actually, the amount of time your spending is maybe the same, but it's the mix of time. You're not spending 50% of the time, again, with an army of junior and middle-level lawyers trying to search and collate and find information that you can do that in an hour and then you've got all this rich information to work from to actually then all spend time together thinking through like, okay, what is the advice that we need to give? How can we make sure it's bulletproof? How do we avoid there being gaps? How do we uncover information that we wouldn't have had time to go uncover all that sort of stuff that we can present back the client and hopefully the advice is more enriched, it's more comprehensive and, and complete and hopefully, you know, more tailored to the client because you can also start thinking through some, you know, move away from, okay, here's kind of the generic advice I'd always give anyone on this matter to actually making that really client-specific because you're able to spend that extra time doing that where you might not when you only have an on-worlder of time in the mix is so heavily skewed to the fighting and sorting and collating versus the thinking and the advising. I suppose there's a whole related question, isn't there, around how this plays up against the bill of allowable model. You know, a lot of cynics will say adoption is obviously going to be pushed back against, you know, because it does impact the bill of allowable and, you know, there's a whole rabbit hole we could go down there on, but I mean, presumably then, you see it as, you know, not necessarily a threat to the bill of allowable model or you think that actually that bill of allowable model needs to be looked at. I mean, but I would say I feel strongly on both counts. So, yes, hypothetically, certain words that you do, you typically do on a legal matter, you can do in less time. So, yes, that might mean the hours spent doing a thing is lower, but what that also means, as I said, is either you can reallocate that time to higher value things that the client is still willing to pay for, or you could reallocate that time to doing more matters. But I don't think the name of the game is necessarily just volume-volving, let's make sure every second of your day is billable. So, but certainly the mere fact that that the amount of time it takes you to do something doesn't necessarily mean something you're losing money because you can, the time that's then freed up can be spent doing other productive, invaluable things that make money. So I think that's one element of it. I think on the flip side, as you say, I think hopefully this, again, it's reopened to the conversation, although I don't think the conversation's ever been closed, but it's sort of reinvigorated the conversation around how appropriate is the billable hour and should that be the base of some which we charge for our work. And I think, first of all, generally speaking, I don't think, I think there's quite a lot of practice areas that haven't used the billable hour and ages already. And I think people always forget to mention that. But I do think it shifts the conversation more towards what is the value of lawyers and what is it that a law for a particular external law firms bring to a client? And I think hopefully it's shifting the conversation more towards firms reassessing what is our value generally because if the AI can do some of what the lawyers do, then they have to be asking themselves, well, what is it that we bring that anyone wants to pay for and is of value? And then they could hopefully think a little bit about how they price what they do in a way that's facing the value that they're bringing to their clients. - I think the right thing, I think one misconception among sort of non-lawyers is that you just sort of set your time and running at the start of the day and that's how everything that ends up being invoiced to the client. Obviously, there's so much kind of low cost, commoditized work that is fixed fee, and that's like that. And then even on transactions these days, it's not just what's on the clock at the end of the matter, just gets billed, is it? - No, unfortunately not. - And you can see, let's say on an M&A transaction, investment bankers get paid a percentage of the purchase price, are we moving to a place where law firms will operate on that basis as well? - Yeah, possibly. And I think other ways to think about it, for example, even several years ago, I had clients saying, oh, we got this amazing proposal from a firm and it was this. And then they said, actually, you pay a premium if you want us to do work on nights and weekends. Like, we don't want to make our people available on nights and weekends to you, but if that's what you need, we'll do it. But actually, that attracts more costs because that's not the way we want to operate our team. And we've signed up to the Mindful Business Charter, for example. It could also be, hey, like, okay, if we get to this milestone, if we get to this milestone, you know, early and, you know, meeting A, B and C requirements, then we get a bonus. We already begin uplift because we've, you know, over-delivered in terms of what you're looking for. So I think there's a lot of different tactics around pricing that unfortunately, law firms just aren't as familiar with. They're not common in the legal industry, but I think there's a lot for us to learn in the legal industry around those other ways to price and other ways to incentivize delivering great work. - So I have a question for you, Tara. And that is, you know, what's your favorite kind of legal AI tool out there on the market? - Oh, that is a tough question. In particular, because I am working with a few companies. - Well, I thought you could be a bit also to be impartial now, you know. Now you've left. - Yeah, I mean, so I have a particular, you know, a present. I have a particular viewpoint around, and I've mentioned this, the tools that are built within, for example, like Word. And I actually did a LinkedIn post about it a few weeks ago. - So, just so if anyone doesn't understand this, Word is sort of sacred to lawyers, isn't it? I mean, they're not going to use another word processing. - Yeah. - Just software, I really. - Yeah, I was an industry that is primarily working in contracts and agreements or, you know, memos of advice, court filings, things like that. Word is the base piece of software that almost all of us use all of the time to create and craft, you know, those outputs. And so for really, really long time in the legal technology space, vendors have come in and said, you should get off word because it's awful and you can't get structured data out of it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's not, it's not worked, unfortunately. Now with AI, it's a similar thing, but I think we've gotten now like a number of native Genai-based tools that are built forward and now what we're seeing is a lot of the existing vendors, whether or not they're Genai-Native, all coming out with Word add-ins because they finally have recognized that people want to work in Word. And in particular, I think lawyers don't want to work with chatbots. That's not a natural way for a lawyer to work, to like, type out long instructions, to try to get something then they have to like, copy paste and reformat. No one wants to go through those extra steps. So actually putting things directly in Word means you can cut out those extra steps and get a lot more sticky with providers. So I think they're, what I'll say is I won't pick a single one, but I'll say, you know, something like a spell book, I've been able to use recently and I actually liked it so much that I bought a personal license to spell book. I said, this is great. I want to have this in my word all the time. So I have a personal license to spell books, so I'll big them up. And there's older providers, or quick older providers, like, to finally, I've known to their founders since they were still incubating at Freshfield. And I've seen that tool evolve immensely over the past kind of six, seven, eight years. And I think it's great. I think it's amazing. It's not something I ever was able to get brought into Asher's when I was there. But I've been a supporter of them since like day one that I met them. And I know what they offer is an amalgamation of different capabilities, but all built within Word and all something that, in my view, was something that they did better than the incumbent providers. And I think that's the key thing with all of legal tech, to be honest with you. What you have to bring to the table is something that is clearly better than something that currently exists, or you're just never, you're just never gonna make it, to be honest with you. And with that understanding, with that grounding in big law, like the definedly co-founders have, right? I mean, that seems to be such a key aspect. Although I say that, I know Spellbook, the founder of Spellbook's not a legal guy. He's Scott Stevenson, isn't he? Yeah, he's a tech guy. Interesting. Yeah, I think the, again, this is a really key thing. I think the, it doesn't matter, like the pedagree of the founders or whatever doesn't matter per se, but the ability to come into our particular industry and speak in a way that's going to get people to listen, you have to be able to do that. And so I think the best way to do that is have someone with a strong legal background. I was like, but if you don't have that, I think what we've seen now is all these vendors are gobbling up, you know, junior and middle-level lawyers to come join their, their sales and go to market teams, which I think is really interesting. But, and again, you don't have to have that. I had a ton of people in my team who, Ashur, who had absolutely no background in legal, but just had this amazing ability to really quickly understand the people they were talking to and have really sophisticated conversations with them. And that's the key thing, I think. As I said, you know, people coming to me and spending the first 20 minutes of a half hour conversation telling me how much word sucked was not a smart way to spend their time with me. And it showed very much a lack of understanding of the industry. And I think that's the key thing, like the time with the lawyers and the innovation heads is precious. And so people really need to show up having done their homework and really understanding the industry enough to have conversations that are gonna make us say, "Ooh, this is really interesting." I think my lawyers would be interested. - And which law firms do you think are leading the way in legal tech and AI, Sara? - Oh, I mean, I pick its shifts every day. And I think there's a lot of firms that are doing things that we don't know about, which is, that's frustrating for me because I just wanna know what everyone else is doing 'cause I just wanna get a lay of the land. I've been saying for the past year though, it's all repeated here. I've been super impressed with Adolf Shah Goddard in what Carrie Westlin and her team have been doing. I think they've got great expertise in that team. And I think as a firm, they've showed that they're willing to invest and move really quickly. And they were, I think, in my view, I think they were one of the first firms to react really quickly and also talk about what they were doing as well very openly. And I really appreciated that because one, it was something, an example, like a point two, within my own firm, say, "Look at this firm, look at what they're doing, look at what they're saying, look at who vendors they're checking out." Like these are people we should be following, the lead of now. And I think that's been super impressive for them. And I've been championing them definitely over the past 18 months since they came out so strong. - Oh, good stuff. Big up Adolf Shah Goddard. Okay, so Tara, I just wanted to finish with a few questions for you about career advice and professional development. You've had a fantastic, amazing career in law. And I know that you're quite interested in this side of things as well. So first one I have for you is just, what's some of the best career advice you've ever received? - I think the best, some of the best career advice would be importantly to back myself. So I think there's a lot of talk in the industry with lawyers around having a posture syndrome and not always feeling ready. And I think feeling uncomfortable sometimes, getting into new spaces, learning new skills, trying to adapt to more technology enabled world. And I think people just ultimately, you need a bit more confidence. And so for me that was very much something that, I took to heart when I was told that that was my sponsor, that was at Ashhurst, actually that worked in my team. She was such a great supporter. and she just really believed in me in a way that made me believe in me. And so even when I knew there were people that had questions or doubted or where I didn't always have all the requisite expertise and experience, I still knew I was like, okay, like I'm a smart person. I learn really quickly. I listened to information, I can process it really quickly. Like I can do whatever it is that I decide to set my mind to. And I think having some of that belief is really important, especially now because we're all being put in situations where we don't have the requisite expertise. It's a little bit of the name of the game, frankly, as a lawyer. You kind of have to adapt really quickly in uncertain circumstances in order to try to then find the right way to navigate. And so, I think having more confidence in yourself is really, really important. And then I think the other thing too is something that it probably only came about in my later years of being in the law firm. But I think also appreciating that it doesn't always have to be perfect and you don't actually always have to know the answer to. Because again, as a lawyer, you always want to appear like the answer, try to, if you don't know the answer, there's always that like fake it to make it concept. And again, I think, I don't think you necessarily have to fake it till you make it. But I think you have to be completely open and honest with yourself of what your limitations are and what you don't know. And it's okay to say I don't know that. Let me go get that information or say I don't know that. But that's a really interesting question. And I'm going to go educate myself on the information. And I think it's really important to recognize what your own limitations are and not be afraid. You know, that whole concept of like, you know, say, oh, this is a stupid question. Like don't say that anymore. Like just ask the question, like if you don't understand something, that's a problem. So you need to ask the questions so that you have the right level of understanding. I think some of the most impressive people I've ever worked with, many of them have been senior lawyers. Actually, they had that characteristic. It was that they were honest and transparent and very sort of humble about what they didn't know. You know, and when you open yourself to that, suddenly, you can then sort of investigate those blind spots. You know, you don't have to fake it. And no one is expecting you to actually know everything. So I think, and especially if you're, if you're, you know, on the more junior end, if you start to act like you know everything, people in fact might be suspicious. Because it's like, there's no way you know all of this information. I'm not expecting to you, but why are you, why are you trying to pretend like you're an AI, right? That knows everything. I know you don't know everything. So just tell me what you know and tell me what you need to go away and look up or ask me, how do you find that information? I'm, everyone would much rather have somebody ask them questions rather than fudge what they don't know. - So for you, then, Tara, what's one trait that separates a good lawyer from a great lawyer? - Ooh, that's a good question. I guess in terms of what has always for me personally impressed the great lawyers that I've come across, it's just how quickly in the moment they can react and respond. They just have this amazing ability to dig deep into the well of their memory and just come back with, again, you know, really specific information or really great questions to get to probe, to get to a point where they can add their information. And I think, again, that ability to, like, problem solve in the moment really quickly and react really quickly, always really impressed me. And I certainly felt like it's a moment, I've had moments where I've been like, oh, yeah, okay, and I've had moments where I'm like, I need to go process this information for like 24 hours before I can come back and respond on it. And I think either is okay, but I think the great lawyers are the ones that, they just seem like this endless fountain of flow of information that they can tap into so quickly. And you're just like, how are you doing that? Like, are you even real? - It's like, yeah, it's like that clarity of thought, even when you're under, you know, really significant pressure. - Is that exactly? - Yeah, you've probably seen this as well, but you know when it's sort of like midnight on those kind of all parties cool and the deal is about to close in 12 hours. And you know, everyone's a bit up for God knows how long and they're still able to operate so clearly. I always thought that was so impressive as well. If you could change one thing about the legal industry, Tara, what would it be? - Oh. I'm gonna say that I wish that there was more investment in learning and development for all roles and at all levels. I think that, I think part of the challenge of the legal industry is for the most part. And I know this has changed somewhat, is it's, you know, within the practicing, you know, private practice side anyway. It's lawyers who eventually become senior lawyers, who eventually become partners, who eventually become, you know, senior leadership amongst the partnership. And I don't always think that we provide the right level of learning and development at each of those stages because being a partner requires all these skills that as even a senior associate, you're not required to tap into and definitely not as a junior associate. And I would have loved to have had more development in some of those areas and learned to hone those skills quite quickly. It can be a little bit sink or swim. Like as you progress up, it's sort of like suddenly, you are now a salesperson and a marketing person and da da da da da da. And some people take to that really well and seamlessly and some people less so. But either way, I think there's interesting and new and different ways to do those things that you can learn from outside of the industry that I don't think we always bring into the industry to learn. It's a little bit too within itself sometimes. And I think if we had more of that, maybe we'd have more interesting pricing models and things like that already well established other than just like, oh, you bill or you've got a fixed or cap to fee, which is kind of like the three options currently. Right? I feel like if we had injected a bit more of that external learning, then as an industry, we could have been evolving a little bit faster. If you could recommend a book, legal or non-legal, that shaped your thinking into a Tara, what would that be? Well, so I'll pick one that's probably the most recent full book that I've read because I confess to I do start a lot of books that I don't finish. And this is a little bit coincidental, the title. And this book called Quit by Annie Duke. And I don't know if people, most people won't know. She's like a really well-known professional poker player in the United States, actually. So when watching Celebrity Poker on TV was a thing, I think. I like the early 2000s, and she was one of those people. But her book is actually much broader than that. And it's really about thinking through, like, when you're doing things, when's the right time to like stop in pivot, not even not quit, per se, but actually to stop, to press pause or to stop, or to move in a different direction. And I think for me, it's that un-training of the keep plowing head all costs must just keep your foot on the gas and keep going and going and actually, again, this is probably one of the traits of great lawyers. Knowing when to actually pause for a moment, take stock again, rethink what, remember while you're doing something, remember what the rationale and the outcome is you're looking for, and are you investing your time in the right place to get to that outcome, all of those things, and actually recognizing sometimes, especially more on the innovation and transformation side, recognizing that sometimes you're just in the wrong path and you need to just stop. It's gonna not be worthwhile any longer pursuing that pathway. You need to stop and reset and go in a different direction, do something completely differently. And again, that's actually okay to do. And that's actually the normal of R&D and fighting new things is you try 10 things, nine of them will probably fail, but one of them will succeed and you have to just try to do that, get to that one successful moment as quickly as possible. So I think that book in particular gave me a lot of great framing of reminding myself to always take pause and take a step backwards and re-look at what I'm doing and try to then make sure I'm investing my time in the right way. - Great, thank you so much Tara for your time. Just to finish then, how can people find you online if they want to reach out? - So I'm relatively active, I'm extremely active on LinkedIn. I should say I'm there every day, posting a lot and responding to comments. So you absolutely can reach me on LinkedIn. I've got through there then also a links through to my personal business. And I actually have an online site innovation Esquire that I post monthly blogs and thoughts on and all of that is linked through LinkedIn. So that's pretty much the best way to get a hold of me if you don't see me at one of the various legal innovation and tech events. - Great, okay, thanks for your time Tara. - Thanks so much.