In Conversation With Bjarne Tellmann

Welcome to a clearly got leaves antitrust review, a podcast focused on antitrust enforcement policy and practice. In an increasingly complex and noisy world we strived to provide insight, clarity, wisdom and light. My name is Nick Levy and I'll be your host today. I've known today's guest for over 30 years as a client, a coach and a friend. He began his legal career in big law before working as corporate council for a number of major global companies, Kimberly Clark, Coca-Cola, Pearson, GSK, Halian and Aramco, where he held leadership positions across the US, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. In recent years he's become a recognized thought leader. He's written two really interesting books, the first about being an in-house council, building an outstanding legal team, battle-tested strategies from a general council. And the second, which is about to be published and we'll be discussing today, is about the implications of AI for the legal profession in title law in the era of AI, clients, firms and the future of the legal industry. I'm delighted to welcome Björnny Tellman. Thank you very much, it's great to be here, Nick. Thanks, Björnny. I'd like to start at the beginning. I always knew you had an interesting life, but hadn't realized until I prepared for this interview, that you started out as a TV and film actor. So why didn't you become a lawyer? What did you enjoy most and what kept you engaged for so long? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I started out in that space because I had a fascination for understanding people, for creativity, for the nexus in communications between individuals and that's actually turned out to be very good preparation for the law. Being able to communicate, being able to have a sense of what people are actually thinking, not just what they're saying, turns out to be good preparation. But, you know, over time, I really, I became much more interested in the intersection of ideas, how ideas play with each other, and was much more interested in that, and also having an actionable overlay to ideas. So not just complex ideas, but how do they translate into the real world? So gradually, I kind of shifted away from the conservatory environment and into a regular university and then became a lawyer for my sense. So 30 years in law, Björnny, as I mentioned, you started out in big law, you were General Council of major public companies, and you wrote a book on building a legal team, strategies for a General Council. My questions are, what did you learn about law firms and what they do well and not so well? When you were choosing lawyers to be part of your teams or choosing outside council, what did you look for? And as you look back, what would you do differently if you had your time again? Well, those are great, great questions. I'd say, you know, the one thing that law firms are extraordinarily good at is developing analytical rigor, technical excellence, and it's a great place actually for any lawyer to start their career because once you've spent time in a top firm, I think you learn to think with precision, you learn to work under pressure, and that's really where I think they excel. I think though, where firms tend to struggle is connecting that technical excellence to the broader business context, and the way I think about it is, you know, firms provide this deep vertical of expertise, and then that expertise needs to be translated into something truly actionable for business people who are not lawyers, and you have a million other agendas, one of which might be law, but it typically is perhaps just one small part of a much bigger puzzle. So I think of the in-house world and sort of what they do as taking that legal advice to the final mile, but like Amazon, you know, when you sit sort of at the beginning of that supply chain in Amazon, you know, perhaps the manufacturing process in China, the shipping, the just in time delivery across the entire supply chain is absolutely critical, and obviously nothing happens if that doesn't work flawlessly. But really, as far as the customer is concerned, it's that final mile. That's where the bulk of, you know, the customer experiences, that's where most of the CO2 and most of the cost lies. And so in some ways, I think that's the difference between in-house and law firms is that final mile is a very different skill set, and I think sometimes it's just both firms and clients struggle to bridge that gap a little bit. How do you bring that deep vertical of expertise into something that is actionable business judgment? And the question about if you had your time again, what would you do differently or to frame it differently? What advice would you give to the young Bionny Talman starting out in a legal career? You know, I graduated, I mean, it's frightening to think about, but I graduated in the mid 90s. And I think if I had my time again, I would have had it to Silicon Valley, I really, really regret not having been there in the late 90s because that was really the inception of something quite remarkable that we're all experiencing now. And I think having had the opportunity to be there at the beginning, to help shape that in some form, whether at a law firm or eventually hopping in-house at a tech company in those days, that would have been something truly remarkable. A bit like London in the 1700s Vienna in the late 1800s, I think Silicon Valley in the early 2000s was an exceptional moment in history where things everything changed. So that that's that would be my one advice to young Talman at that time. Thanks, Bionny. There are at least two other aspects of your career, which I think are interesting. One is the global aspect of your life, as I mentioned, you've worked pretty much everywhere around the world. And I'd be interested in how that informed and informed your career and informed your ability to be an effective lawyer. And secondly, you began with some specialization, I think, but became a generalist over your career in a way that many lawyers, at least working for law firms, no longer have the luxury of doing. So I'd be interested in your reaction to those two observations. Yeah, great, great comments and questions. I think you know, I did have a global career to spend sort of many, many different cities. London, Vienna, Athens, Tokyo, Atlanta, New York, and then back to London again, and then Stockholm and Helsinki in the early days. So you know, a lot of different exposures and experiences, I do think that being able to move fluently across cultures has been something that really informed my later leadership period. Because you know, I think cultural intelligence, having an understanding of how do you set something up to be effective in the cultural context within which it's framed? Is it is a critical skill for leadership? You know, how do you build trust in Asia versus how you build trust in the Netherlands? My people are different. In the Netherlands, it's typically much more based on the knowledge and the expertise you bring, builds that trust fairly quickly, whereas in Asia, it may be more of a relationship. That's built over time. And you could say the same thing around how logic is structured, hierarchies, you know, conflict, how that's managed, the role of women, etc. etc. So I think that transnational experience was extremely helpful. Later on, my career as I began leading teams. I think the generalist question, you know, I think a general council today, and this may be something that we'll get into, is partly about being a generalist, but it's also partly about being a business leader and being an orchestrator of an increasingly fragmented supply chain that that spans from internal to external and across many, many different verticals. So I think that generalist expertise is helpful there in really teaching you how to think about complex systems and how to structure them in the right way to deliver services with maximal effectiveness. I think there's another piece to the generalist aspect which might have been helpful from my experience. And that is judgment. Because really at the end of the day as a general council, you're spending most of your time wrestling with things that don't have easy answers, where there may actually not be the perfect answer. And so you have to exercise judgment, and that requires you to blend a whole range of different verticals, risk, business, law, to arrive at the right outcome. Thanks, Bionny. So let's turn to AI. You're now CEO of Fjordstream, a consultancy specializing in innovation and digital transformation in the legal industry. And you've written a fascinating and timely book that you kindly gave me an opportunity to read an advanced copy of. It's about the disruptive effect of AI, entitled law in the era of AI, clients, firms, and the future of the legal industry. You examine how AI is reshaping the legal industry. You describe AI as a general purpose technology akin to a steam engine, electricity, or the internal combustion engine that catalyze transformative innovation. You predict and I quote that AI will reshape the provision of legal services. redefining how companies are structured, how they operate and how they create value. The legal departments and law firms will need to re-engineer their core processes and operating models around AI, and that companies will drive disruption due to transformed expectations about efficiency, innovation and value. So a lot to unpack, but a few questions to get us going. When did you realize the AI was going to be transformative? What are some of the most interesting use cases you've seen? How exactly drilling down a little, do you think AI is going to transform the legal profession? And what do you think the main opportunities and risks for companies and law firms are? Well, those are loaded questions. I would say, look, I think the moment for me, the tipping point was chat GPT in 2022. As it was, I think, for most people. The first time you used it, it was quite clear that this was not just another iteration of a search engine. This was something that didn't just improve a process that reorganized the entire space. And yes, I do think that AI is a general purpose technology. In the sense that like electricity, like steam, it has a couple of characteristics that suggest it will reorient the entire industry or actually all industry economy. The first is that it's incredibly pervasive. So if you think about, you know, chat GPT one from zero to 800 million users in two years, it took Google 12 years to hit that same metric. So the pervasiveness is just insane in terms of the rapidness of that. It's also technology that has the ability to change other industries. So the innovation itself spawns additional innovations, which we're seeing everywhere. And then it has the ability to rapidly improve itself. So if you think about, chat GPT took the New York bar, the first time it took it, it scored in the 10th percentile. Few months later, it was in the 90th percentile. The same thing with general knowledge tests across almost every domain. It's now scoring at or above the level of experts across all of those domains. So just an insane trajectory that it's been on. In terms of the most interesting use cases, I'd say there are three, you know, digital platforms that are powered by AI tend to have three sort of characteristics that I think are interesting in their use cases across all three of those in the legal domain as well. The first of those is that it can scale. It can scale at near zero marginal cost. So every additional user is virtually cost-free. With the exception of maybe a little bit of cloud computing cost, it's Amazon, every additional customer at Amazon is virtually free. If you think about the legal space, that scaling effect, one interesting use case that actually has been around for a while is JP Morgan's coin, COIN, it's a sort of an automated loan agreement, tool. That replaced in the first year that it was launched, it replaced 380,000 hours of human time. It can ingest 12,000 loan agreements a second, and it saved JP Morgan $150 million in the first year alone in fraud losses because it actually was better than humans at reviewing those loan agreements and making assessments. That's technology at scale in the legal space. The second characteristic is scope. Digital platforms are modular. You can sell cloud services and you can sell books and you can sell a million other things, leveraging the same infrastructure. A non-digital company can't do that. A bookstore can't sell cloud services very easily. If you think about that in the legal context, I think an interesting use case was Honeywell has been combining its legal data and the infrastructure behind that, with ESG data, with compliance data, with finance data across the enterprise. What that does is it radically improves turnaround time, contract time, auditing time. So if an invoice comes in and no one knows what that invoice is associated with, now that's instantaneous, whereas previously it wasn't. That's saving them 10 to 15 million in the first year alone, just in terms of the speed at which it can deliver. And then the third and finally, continuous learning. So if you think about Tesla, every car on the road that learns something, every other car on the road learns that same thing at the same time. There's a continuous learning loop that improves the system. You see that across a lot of legal tools, adaptive contract tools, fraud tools that readjust their baseline to whatever the latest fraud technique is. That to me is just incredible. And when you put those three things together and you think about where all of this will be in five or 10 years, it's quite something to think about. So Honeywell, talk about how it's going to transform the legal profession in a second. Before we do, I'd like to ask a question about regulation, which listeners will know is the main beat of this pod. You observe in the book that regulation is increasing, not only in volume, but also in complexity, enforcement intensity, and unpredictability, making compliance, a constantly shifting target. And maybe antitrust is the sharpest illustration, enforcement priorities of shifted merger controls, become more complex, practice has become global, the risk of litigation has increased, the stakes have become higher. So how should companies manage antitrust risk in an AI era? And what role can AI play in helping companies keep pace with the increasing complexity of antitrust enforcement? It's a great question. I think that much of what we just talked about really applies directly to to use cases such as antitrust. I mean, one of the interesting things though, if you think about the era we're in right now, as far as computational antitrust in particular concerns, but also the regulatory environment more generally, I think there's a, we're living through a very strange period in which the environment is both increasingly complex, ever more complex. And at the same time, ever more unpredictable. You have business models that rise and fall before the regulatory environment catches up. You have regimes that are highly complex, but perhaps not enforcing quite the same way they were just a few years ago. And a lot of inconsistencies between those. I think with that, what all of that suggests is it's a space that is very, you know, potentially very attractive for AI. And I think what it might allow is a shift towards a more proactive approach to monitoring the regulatory environment. There are tools out there that I've heard of that I'm sure you're very familiar with that, you know, not only monitor the regulatory environment for antitrust, but also scan and assess where, for example, merger control, filings need to be made across many many jurisdictions instantaneously, which saves, you know, a huge amount of prep time work and human hours, kind of in the same way that we talked about with JP Morgan. So I think that that shifting to a more reactive, should we say, from a reactive to a more proactive, monitoring and governance approach is one of the things that AI is going to do for this space. But that doesn't really solve, you know, the first dimension that we just talked about, you know, the inconsistency, the fragmented nature and the environment that we're in right now, the rapidly moving, a reorganization of business models that may feel out of place in the current competition environment. I think all of that suggests judgment is critical as well. And, you know, the good news is, judgment really is the domain of senior experts, you know, and I think that's going to be there for quite some time yet. So we'll come to judgment, which obviously has to be acquired and the broader question of how people acquire that judgment over time in a world where AI can provide so much in terms of substantive knowledge and accelerator processes and so forth. You talked about how AI might ease the task of determining where transactions are subject to merger review. I'm sure that's right. We're already seeing that. But do you see a future perhaps in the not too distant future where AI can, for example, help a general counsel, identify in a kind of minority report way, if people know the movie or the book, whether particular individuals are likely to engage in cartel conduct or what's occurred in meetings or whether documents that have been generated can be susceptible to adverse interpretation. I haven't seen that myself, but I can absolutely imagine a world where that where that will happen, both in the sort of, you know, in the anti-trust space, but more generally across the fraud environment, I think internal monitoring and fraud controls are another area that's just absolutely right for this technology. A pattern recognition, being able to assess large volumes of data over a significant period of time and distill insights from it, that's kind of inherent in the technology itself. So yes, I imagine that will change both the in-house practice and also what in-house lawyers will expect from law firms. And it's part of a broader point that maybe we'll get to, but I really do believe, you know, if you think think about the kernel of the argument in my book, it really is that the disruptor in this space or the legal industry is going to be the client. And that's not because legal departments are particularly sophisticated when it comes to rolling out tools such as that. I think it's because companies, the companies that they serve and that they work within are the first movers in this space. For a whole range of reasons, right? The ecosystem that they operate in is really, you might say, operating at an exponential pace, whereas the legal industry more generally is operating at a linear pace. And legal departments will get sucked into the slipstream of what companies are doing, whether they like it or not, you know, the board and the CEO and frankly, outside consultants are going to expect legal departments to keep pace with where the company is moving as it evolves into what I in the book called AI factories, borrowing Marco Jansini and Karim Laconi's term from a great book that they wrote a few years ago. So, you know, I think they'll be the first movers. And as that happens, I think it's going to have a major impact on how work is sourced, handled and priced across the entire ecosystem, starting with the client. So let's break that down, Bionny. There's a very interesting observation I think made in the introduction or forward to your book by Richard Suskin, I think, who observes that when he presents to doctors and tells them about a technology that may make their worlds more efficient and facilitate innovation, they're terribly excited. But when he presents to lawyers, they get terribly worried. They think about their business model and the implications for their business. So I'd like to unpack your predictions on the impact of AI for the provision of legal services, starting with the impact on companies, legal departments before moving onto law firms and finally to students and to law schools. Your book identifies four eras of the general council culminating in what you call the GC 4.0 era triggered by the public release of chat GPT. And you describe the general council's evolution from a compliance focused gatekeeper to a strategic enterprise-wide risk integrator who now leads a technology and abled operating model in which they need to operate like miniature CEOs balancing legal risk with a broader strategic operational or financial considerations of the departments they lead. So my question is, Bionny, first, what's your advice in this new environment for legal departments? How can legal departments and general council effectively adapt? And what kind of skill-setting competencies are going to be needed in this new world to succeed? So I think the key to running an effective AI-era legal department for general council is going to really rest on understanding where the company is heading and then adapting the department structure to configure effectively for that. And if you think about where the company is heading, it's, as I mentioned a minute ago, it's moving towards what I would call an AI factory. What is that? It's basically an organization where the enterprise data set, the enterprise library of information has been organized, sorted, filtered, tagged, and made available for algorithms and for AI to mine it for new use cases 24/7. And agentic increasingly automating much of that where humans are in the loop, but much of the, much of the process is happening automatically. And you can think about companies today like, let's say, even outside of the digital space, companies like Walmart, which have merged their physical infrastructures with their digital infrastructures in ways that allow those algorithms to make predictions, to offer discounts, to beta tests, different proposals for customers based on the information both in-store and online that they're using. So in that environment where use cases are being developed and mined at a very rapid pace, how should legal departments structure themselves? Well, you can't stand still in that environment, right? And just to give you an example, if the chief marketing officer of your company comes to you and says, well, we have a new ad campaign for a product. And in the old days, like last month, we might have given you two or three variants of the ad campaign for your review and you'd have a week to look at it. Well, now we can, we can give you 450 versions of that ad campaign and we expect you to turn it around in 24 hours, right? So you can't stand still in that environment. You need to, it's almost a norms race. So what does the structure of a legal department look like if you're serving that sort of customer? I think at the base is a technology platform, just like at the base of the company, there's a technology platform. That's an AI enabled platform consisting of five layers and those layers enabling all of those benefits we talked about, scale scope and continuous learning. Sitting on top of that platform is an upscaled legal operations team. So legal operations historically was, let's say, more of an administrative function. I think it's increasingly going to become a strategic function, one in which professionals will need to make strategic risk and budget allocation decisions based on the priorities of the company. So what tools are we going to invest in? Well, that depends a little bit on what we're actually trying to achieve, right? And how do we bring all of that together in and output that works? And then sitting on the top of that, you'll have a traditional structure of specialists and generalists embedded into the business, leveraging those tools and technologies. What's interesting too is I think that that structure that I would recommend GC's focus on is going to have certain requirements around how it connects in with its external suppliers. So because that structure will facilitate speed and scale, that is really unprecedented in our industry. And if suppliers are not able to match that speed and scale, then I think there will be friction in the sort of supply chain there. So that would be sort of my first advice to GC's is to think about that kind of structure and begin putting that in place now before your company becomes an AI factory. Another perhaps another piece of advice I would give them is, you know, you want to put guard rails and governance in place as you build that, right? It's you don't want to build a Ferrari without a steering wheel. That is a recipe for utter disaster. There's a great book that I would recommend called Weapons of Math Destruction. I think it's a fantastic title. The "Cathion Neal" is the author and you know, the real premise of the book is that algorithms have a tendency to scale errors in a way that can be absolutely systemic and hugely material. So you know, building this kind of speed and scale model is essential, but it's also essential to focus on governance and I think that that governance and orchestration layer is going to become a strategic value driver in the AI era. So that would be the advice to general counsel. I can't even remember any more what your other questions were. So, well, I think my questions around the implications for corporate counsel and I put in words in your mouth, I think you broadly characterize AI as being a friend for corporate counsel. It will give rise to greater efficiency, greater information, will be accessible more readily by corporate counsel and it will change the equilibrium with law firms in ways that may help corporate counsel. My question is around something I said in the opening, your book predicts that AI will help companies to drive disruption due to transformed expectations about efficiency, innovation and value. Can you talk a little more about what you meant by that and how do you think that's going to come about? So I think, you know, it's a great question. I think it really comes back to many of the dynamics we've already discussed around scale scope and learning effects. If you look at digital platforms, you know, it has a tendency to create a hockey stick effect for the first mover. So first movers have an exponential advantage in an AI era model relative to second third, fourth and fifth movers, right? And, and, you know, I think this is one that's become fairly evident, but there are some striking examples out there in the industry today. If you think about Nvidia, for example, five years ago in video's market cap was around $300 million. Today, it's five trillion. So it's one and a half times the combined value of the London stock exchange. It's twice the value of the docs. It's three times the value of the Amsterdam exchange, right? That is the, that is the impact of the first mover advantage being the business that that scales this technology most rapidly. So if you're the CEO of a company today and you see those effects and you see what it means for everyone else, you don't really have a choice. I think you need to invest rapidly and heavily in this technology, even if it's not yielding the kind of productivity gains that your CFO might like. So that's the dynamic I see is that what we're going to see is rapid gains for first movers based on this, you know, the scale scope and learning effects that we talked about. So let's turn from corporate council to law firms. There'll be a lot of, I, this is I know what the law firms and my firm and many, many others. We're grappling with how to use AI. responsibly and the implications for our business. You predict a great unbundling where work historically concentrated in law firms will increasingly be distributed across in-house teams, alternative legal service providers and technology platforms. Any identify several new law firm models that may emerge. Traditional law firms may adapt by becoming high-end boutiques, narrowing their focus to highly bespoke partner led advisory work in complex domains that AIs unlikely to disrupt in the near future or by adopting corporate style structures of external advisors and board of directors as CO led executive team. And then there are other models that you you think about that may emerge, including hybrid multidisciplinary organizations that provide legal services integrated with a broad range of complementary offerings or platform models that orchestrate sourcing workflow pricing and performance. So a couple of questions. First, why do you believe traditional law firm models cannot survive or cannot survive in their current form? And second, what can law firms and lawyers do to position themselves for success in this new AI era? So I think, you know, if you think about the model that exists today, the pyramid model that is predicated on human labor, input cost, a driven, hourly rate model, thinly capitalized with, let's say a relatively, I mean relative to say corporate environments, a relatively superficial technology layer wrapped around it, that model worked very, very well when the environment was based on three assumptions. You know, one, work is scarce, two, knowledge is difficult to access, and three, scale really at the end of the day is limited by the number of people that you can throw at a problem. All three of those are being challenged by AI, right? And they're being challenged in ways that are profound. In addition to that, I think what customers and clients need in the AI era is shifting. So yes, they need deep particles of legal expertise, but increasingly, I think GCs in particular need more holistic risk enabled advice. If you are overseeing the risk committee for your executive and you have a war in the Gulf, there's a legal issue there, but there is a much broader issue of how the legal issue, the financial issue, the supply chain issue, and a million other issues intersect. And as you advise your board on what they should consider and do, you need to bring all of that together. So seeking outside advice that gives you a narrow sliver of deep legal analysis can be useful in some domains, but increasingly across many, that's insufficient. You need integrated holistic advice. Then secondly, I think clients increasingly also need more sophisticated advice around how to operate and orchestrate this complex machine they're building. And the natural place they go is low firms. I've spoken to quite a few, a law firm partners who've informed me that clients increasingly are coming to them saying, can you help me build that machine? And it may be a naive request because nobody knows how to build it, but I sense an opportunity there. There's a market opportunity for more than just legal, narrow slivers of legal advice. So the whole predicated, the whole sort of, let's say the foundations upon which the law firm model are predicated are shifting and the needs of customers are shifting. So if you put all of that together with, you know, Moore's Law, the increasing power of these technologies and the fact that companies were forging ahead, and I think we're setting ourselves up for a point in time in which law firms that remain predicated on that model are going to struggle. And you know, there's sort of a lot of interesting theory emanating from, you know, disruption theory from Clayton Christensen's work around the innovators dilemma that, you know, I think it sits squarely in the frame of analysis when you look at law firms. You know, number one, one of the things that he really focuses on is the question of why it is that successful incumbents in one generation of technology rarely are successful when that technology shifts. And the irony is they tend to be unsuccessful precisely because they are so well adapted and so successful in the current environment that it becomes difficult to disrupt that model, right? It's not because law firms about it what they do. It's they're so good at it that makes it hard to shift. The other thing that's interesting about that theory is that, you know, the disruptors tend to come from the margins. They tend to have products that are imperfect and they tend to get dismissed by the incumbents because what they offer is to marginal customers, it's low value, it's probably clunky, it doesn't match up at all with with what you're what you're offering until suddenly it gets better and then it gets better and then suddenly it shifts everything flips. You know, I think a perfect example of that is Nokia in 2007 on the cover of Fortune magazine, can anyone cat to the iPhone king? It was at its peak of success. That was also the same year the iPhone launched 2007. It was dismissed as, you know, relatively clunky to have a keyboard. It wasn't as great a handset. It was expensive. It was it suited niche customer base that was non-business driven, etc. I think what Nokia overlooked was that it wasn't it was no longer about the handset. It was about the app store. It was about the the digital ecosystem that was building around it and with that came new jobs to be done, right? New needs states from customers. Customers suddenly wanted to be able to take a picture of themselves at a rock concert and upload it onto Instagram. You can have the world's best cell phone but if it doesn't have that capability, it doesn't it doesn't meet the current that suddenly flipped environment. And so, you know, over the next five years, Nokia went from being the cell phone king to selling its business for a patents, Microsoft, right? That is what we're talking about. And if you look at where the, you know, the current state of play is for for law firms, I think there are a number of signals in the era that suggest we're approaching that inflection point and Rita McGrath, who is a Columbia Business School professor, she wrote a great book called Looking Around Corners, which identifies some of these inflection points that tend to appear just before a market flips just before the Kodak moment as it were happens. And some of them are, you know, employing morale. It's not as good as it used to be. There are cheaper but good enough solutions that are emerging. Customers are no longer excited about what you have to offer and in fact, may even hate certain features and their predictions of change in the air. And so I look at those and certainly some of those I think one might suggest our present in the law firm environment. I'm not sure morale among all employees in law firms is at an historic high. I mean, it's been a, it is a high pressure environment where many associates and others do struggle. I think in terms of, you know, customer dissatisfaction and axiom survey that came out in 2024 is right on point. This was a survey across the US of large cap GC's hundreds of them. The interesting thing to my, to my mind was 100% of the survey, those questions in the survey of those GC's 100% said that cost quality and other challenges made them regret their law firm engagements 89% no longer view law firms as a completely affected solution and 96% so almost 100% face budget cuts. This was in the same period when law firm rates at my old firm went up to $3,400 an hour. When you raise rates in an environment where 100% of your customers are saying they no longer are satisfied with what you're selling, to me that's a signal. And if I were running a law firm, I would, I would be constructively discontent. I would look at last year's record profitability and I'd be very happy and celebrate that for a minute. And then I'd get worried and I'd ask myself are these inflection points present? And if so, what do I need to do to secure my future? What sort of strategic decisions do we need to take now in order to preserve that market leadership in the next generation of technology? So that would just be some further up. So a super interesting, Abiani, I take away a number of things. Firstly, from your last observations that the environment is fertile for disruption at least from a consumer perspective, in this case, companies, financial institutions and so forth that by legal services. Secondly, that disruption is going to happen. You may like it or not like it, but it's going to happen and you ain't seen nothing yet in terms of what that disruption is going to look like. And thirdly, it's going to occur in a number of different ways, more ready access to knowledge, to experience, to information. Changes in the way services are delivered quite possibly implications for the number of lawyers that may be required, and some implications for the way law firms charge for their legal services. So to dig down on your last comment, if you were a managing partner of a law firm, what would you be doing in order to ensure that that firm was positioning themselves for success in the AI era? I think the challenge is you can't really, very easily rebuild the plane while you're flying it. The law firm partner that goes to the annual partner meeting and proposes that we divert 30 to 40% of our partner profits towards investing in technology that might blow up this highly successful model in 10 years when we're all retired. I just said no one ever. I think that is precisely the dilemma. I think the good news is that business history and sort of, let's say, the experience of other industries suggests that there are things you can do that are quite successful. One is to invest in small and non-threatening side hustles as it were. Something that doesn't trigger what Readham McGrath calls the corporate immune system. If you make a radical, dramatic proposal that's going to be expensive and is quite disruptive to the existing model, that will trigger an immune system inside an organization that will ultimately expel that proposal and it will fail. If however you begin outside the company in a small way, you fund a small little startup that invests in disruptive technologies with a mission to invest in, let's say, different customer bases at different price points, perhaps with new pricing models, leveraging technology, expanding and experimenting what delivery vehicles might actually be effective and then learn from that. Just have it as a learning experiment on the side. You might find that that actually can generate some very interesting insights and there's a German steel company in the steel industry called Klöckner that made this experiment a few years back when they saw that the steel industry was changing and the technology would enable the emergence of digital platforms in that space. They may precisely that sort of experiment outside the company in a startup environment and gradually integrated that growing business back into the traditional business, created pathway career pathways that went back and forth, learned from that business and that business has increasingly become one of the core pillars of that model. That's what I would be doing. There are precedents of that. There are some great firms doing some really interesting work in that space, both outside the firm itself and in some cases even investing under the firm's roof but in a semi-autonomous fashion. That's probably the best thing you can do. Thanks, Bjorni. I'm encouraged to know we're doing both of those things. We'll see how it pans out but hopefully well. A few years ago I was asked by a group of students how I thought AI was going to change my legal career and I heubaristically said I didn't think it would change mine but it would change her there as it's already changed mine and it's certainly changing theirs. I know that many listeners are students or employees of the newly graduated or thinking about becoming law students. One implication of AI that I think we're only starting to grapple with is how young lawyers will be trained, how they will acquire the skill sets needed to be trusted, strategic advisors, how are they accumulate Malcolm, Gladwell's famous 10,000 hours. Do you identify a widening gap between what law schools teach and what the profession requires? You suggest that the traditional model in which law schools teach doctrine and analytical reasoning and law firms give young lawyers practical trading is eroding. So how do legal education change to prepare students for the AI era? If you were designing a law school curriculum for the AI era what would it look like? I want to student who are listening to this poll do in order to thrive. Yeah, so if I were the dean of a law school I think I would start with really reassessing the school's purpose. Kind of like any business that is undergoing transformation and change where the environment around you is shifting. Ask yourself what is your mission? Why do you have a license to exist? That is the purpose ultimately of a law school. Is it to teach people how to become a fact of lawyers? Is it to expand their minds in brilliant ways? So really, and I don't think the answer is universal. I've had conversations with deans of various law schools and professors working in various institutions. Some law schools perhaps some of the most elite law schools will double down on the life of the mind. That's really what they teach. They perhaps the purpose is to create the leaders of the next era, not necessarily legal leaders but leaders. And so that might be one purpose. If you're a community based institution in a state somewhere in the US, maybe your mission really is to train market ready lawyers who can go out there and open up shop and advise consumers. That's going to be a very different purpose. So I'd start with the purpose question. And then I think if you imagine the law school really having three sides of a triangle as it were, of analysis that you can put around that purpose, at first this time, you know, you, depending on the country you're in, but if you took say the US as an example and increasingly here in the UK as well, three years is quite a good bit of time. So how do you spend those three years? How do you structure the student experience? So maybe the first year is heavy on doctrine, heavy on teaching people to think like lawyers. Typically, my experience has been that the third year is, you know, is frequently somewhat of a throwaway year. People take electives. There's no real structure or guidance around what those electives should be. And it's sort of a holding pattern here where people kind of just wait to, to, to enter the profession. That might be a great opportunity to restructure that third year in a way that gives skills and capabilities. This sort of the second side of that would be subject. So what subjects do you need to teach? How much of the, let's say the existing curriculum should remain? And clearly there are building block foundational courses at every, every lawyer and law student should take towards and contracts and criminal law, etc. But you know, what other subjects do you want to weave in? In my experience, financial literacy, I can't tell you how many, how many young lawyers I've met who can't read a balance sheet who don't understand a profit and loss statement or what it's telling them who have no idea what cash flow is or why that's important. Right? If you don't speak the language of business, how are you going to work in an environment where your customers are all speaking that fluently? So I think business literacy should be up there as a new course. I think technology is something that increasingly one should be teaching, helping students become fluent in technology. Design thinking might be another one. We need lawyers who are adaptable, who can flex quickly, who can redesign processes and service delivery models, teamwork, leadership, right? So there are a whole bunch of skills that one could fill that third year with. And then there's method is the third side of that triangle, right? So what method do you want to use as you teach students? You know, traditionally schools have been very heavy on the Socratic method in the United States, the lecture method in much of continental Europe, the case method, but leveraging, let's say, ancient cases from Victorian England or maybe even the medieval era to teach a principle. In many cases, the cases I read were sort of fragments of the actual case because the law school professor asked to, you know, contort the case into a pretzel to put the principle that they want forward. When I went to business school, I realized actually the case method can be tailored to the actual class, right? It doesn't have to be an ancient law case. It could be a fact pattern from reality that is designed and written to teach the principles you're putting forward. So maybe a reassessment of some of the traditional methodology and then perhaps new methodologies could come in, right? I really think that business schools teach, you know, collaboration in a way that law schools struggle with. So why not incentivize students to collaborate with each other in the same way business school students are on group projects, for example? So that's law schools. I think students look, I, I, what I say to students when I meet them is, I think, I think this could be the best or the worst of times, depending on how you look at it, right? It's certainly the worst of times if what you expect is the same professional trajectory that your grandparents had, but at the same time, and coming back to my regret about Silicon Valley, this is the best possible time to be coming out if you are keen to be part of an industry that is reimagining how it delivers, that is disrupting itself and that is going to create a vista of opportunity that is just waiting to be developed and built. And so if you're agile, if you're curious, if you're flexible, there's no better time to be coming out. The only that's such a great note to end. I've so enjoyed today's conversation. We end with some quick fire questions. But firstly, what advice would you give a young lawyer at beginning that career today? I just say focus less on the job that you get at the beginning and more on the skills that you can acquire because that's what's going to build your long adaptable career in the AI era. Second question, your proudest achievement, your greatest regret. Proudest achievement, definitely building the teams that I built, developing people and watching half a dozen of them become GCs in different large companies over the years is by far my proudest achievement. And greatest regret, apart from Silicon Valley in the 90s, I think it would still have to be Silicon Valley. That is the one I'll kick myself for forever. But beyond that, I don't have many regrets. I think careers are nonlinear, organic, and you make decisions in real time as you live it. So I tend not to live back and think about regrets. I think I'm going to be a great boss, my own two third, you read a lot of books and articles about AI. If you had to recommend just one, what would it be? I think it would be competing in the age of AI by Marco Young, CD and Karim Lacani. I mentioned it in a minute ago, brilliant book and absolutely lays out where the world is heading. And it was written in, I believe, 2020, maybe even earlier, 2018, ish. So it's quite dated now, but it's timeless in many ways. Bionny, you've traveled the world as we discussed early on in the pod. Where's the place you enjoy most? You're happiest place. The place I enjoy most and my happiest place might be two slightly different locations. The place I enjoy the most is Tokyo. And the thing I love about Tokyo is it's the combination of some very principled decisions the city has taken about what they bet on, preserving culture and our buildings, creating narrow streets that have bustle, allowing for buildings to just kind of, and concepts to emerge, pop up stores, etc. But then at the same time, having that chaos at the front end, I just find that an endlessly fascinating place. And my happiest place is probably where I live at home. It's a place that we built over many years. And I find it serene and peaceful. And finally, Bionny, is there one thing you can tell us about yourself that's not why do you know? There's a lot that's not widely known. I was very active in martial arts over most of my life. Karate in particular, I was a national champion in Norway in 1984 and stuck with it and switched styles over the years. Now that I'm old and gray, I've focused more and more on the spiritual side of it, the meditation, stoicism. I find that really fascinating. And how it links both to martial arts, but also to life is something that I'm very preoccupied with at the moment. Bionny, thank you so much. Incidentally, for those who can't see Bionny, he doesn't look old and he's certainly not gray. I'm so happy you agreed to be on today's part, even if we flexed its traditional beat. I've known you a long time, as I mentioned, and have always so appreciated your advice and thoughtfulness and counsel and so forth. It feels like we're at a historic inflection point, so I very much hope you return in a few years' time to take stock of how AI is panned out and what our legal world looks like then. For the time being, though, many, many thanks. I'm Nick Levy, the host of the Ants Just Review and look forward to working you to the next edition of the pod. [Music]