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An Unplanned Career in Legal Tech
Practice Management and Business Skills
Professional Skills| What area(s) of law does this episode consider? | Wenee discusses her unconventional career trajectory right out of law school, her work in the legal tech space, as well as supporting law students and young lawyers. This episode considers many themes, from starting your career as a lawyer, to making changes throughout and utilising a growth mindset to see opportunity in endeavours that may initially seem daunting. The ray of sunshine that is Wenne Yap will make you laugh, while also prompting you to consider your own career path and views about technology and innovation in the legal profession. |
| Why is this topic relevant? | Lawyers spend over 40% of their time at work utilising different types of technology, whether it’s for legal research, matter and spend management, time recording or document drafting software. People technology spend is currently about 2% of all legal industry spend across customer facing, in-house and private practice and that number is expected to increase. There is no doubt that the legal industry is experiencing a time of change that is focused on technological innovation. This shift has promoted many to wonder about the future of the profession. This is true for both lawyers and law students, the former often predicting either doubt around the impact of technology or doom and gloom that such technology will render lawyers redundant, but some lawyers and many law students instead see opportunity for change and improvement. Regardless of where you sit on that spectrum, this episode will prompt you to consider your own mindset and biases toward both your traditional view of legal practice and the role of innovation within the profession. |
| What are the main points? | Pessimism
Legal tech
Law Students and Recent Graduates
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| What are the practical takeaways? |
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| Show notes | The Deakin Law Review article titled, ‘Why Lawyers are Unhappy’ The Australia Law Students’ Association The Harvard Business Review article by Nadya Zhexembayeva titled, ‘Stop Calling It “Innovation” |
| David Turner:
1:00 | Hello and welcome to Hearsay, a podcast about Australian laws and lawyers for the Australian legal profession, my name is David Turner. As always, this podcast is proudly supported by Assured Legal Solutions, a boutique commercial law firm making complex simple. Lawyers spend over 40% of their time at work utilising some sort of legal specific technology whether it’s for legal research, matter and spend management, or document drafting software. Lawyers Weekly recently reported that the legal technology spend is currently about 2% of all legal industry spend across customer facing, in-house and private practice. In 2018, legal tech funding increased by 750% to roughly $1.9 billion. Now if these figures are anything to go by, the legal industry is in a time of change. There are naturally concerns about what the role of lawyers will be in the future. Will there be a role for the traditional technical lawyer alongside the technological solution? What will the lawyer of the future look like? And are law students being armed with the necessary skills and knowledge to weather this time of technological change? Joining me today to discuss what an unplanned career in legal innovation looks like as well as growth in the legal tech space more generally is Wenee Yap, head of growth marketing at thedocyard and co-founder of Bottled Law. Wenee thanks so much for joining me on Hearsay. |
| Wenee Yap: | Thanks for having me! |
| DT: | Now you’ve definitely had a pretty diverse career, we were talking about it a bit before the show, there’s been a few ‘flights of fancy’ as you describe them. Take us through your journey straight out of law school, what did that look like? And how did it get you to where you are today at thedocyard? |
| WY: 2:00 | Well in many senses I came of age in the last recession and that might have actually been a useful thing. So I graduated from here in Sydney, at UTS, and in 2008 I was comfortably sailing into pretty good grades, I accidentally got a clerkship interview because I went to the law careers fair and won a putt-putt tournament, and… |
| DT: | Wait, wait, wait, tell me that story. |
| WY:
3:00
4:00
5:00 | So back in the day, when we had events in person, there was a convention down in Darling Harbour, and it was the law careers fair. And I was wandering around, basically to get cool pens and my friend said we should go so we both went. And Gadens, which is a great firm incidentally, they were trying to be a little different so they said, ‘anyone to get a hole-in-one in this putt-putt tournament, can get an interview with us.’ And I was like ‘well sounds easier than doing a clerkship process! Sounds great!’ So I went up and I got it! And it’s quite hilarious because I’m actually not very good at putt-putt, not at all, but I must have felt particularly motivated, and then I freaked right out because I hadn’t really thought about this process very much. But I prepared for it, I diligently did my application and I went for my 1st round interview and clearly I did alright because I had done some legal work before, I’d worked for community legal centres and I have a lot of enthusiasm for the law, obviously! So I made it past the 1st round, made it to the final round, freaked out even more and ended up in front of the managing partner who has now gone on to found Marc who was a lovely man, and 20 minutes into the interview he said to me ‘Wenee, not sure you want to be a lawyer.’ And I said, ‘I am not sure either.’ Which is not what you’re supposed to say in an interview to become a lawyer. So, he was lovely, he called me 3 days later and he said ‘so you didn’t get it’ and I said ‘I understand,’ and that pretty much sent me on a different trajectory to try and figure out well if that’s not what I want yet I did an entire degree in this field, what did I mean by doing this? And I think that’s an important process for anyone to go through. Because I think there’s such intense pressure that lawyers put on themselves, law students put on themselves, to just get it right. And as a law lecturer now I hear it all the time ‘what am I supposed to do next? And what if it’s wrong?’ Oh I don’t know, my whole career could be wrong! And there was a kind of freedom in having someone so senior telling me ‘this is not what you want,’ and at least giving me that degree of clarity. So, that set me off on a different path, that was 2007, and around that same time I had an insight. I was in my 4th year of law, and I thought ‘there aren’t any really good guides to doing this thing of law school’, and everyone’s sort of pretending like they’ve got it together, we come out of our exams like ‘yeah I aced that, that was great.’ And I’d sit there thinking ‘did you though?’ I mean I think I did okay, but I followed a process that was ingrained into me from my like very nerdy high school. And I asked around and asked some honest questions and basically that turned into my sort of first legal start-up. Which is a start-up long before it was cool, back in 2008/2009 and that was ‘Survive Law’ which I took to my faculty very audaciously to be honest. Took it to the Dean and said ‘hey I think I can create a guide to study law, a proper guide, because I’ve gone to the law library and the guides that I’ve found in printed form are not very helpful or friendly or practical. They talk about making notes in ways that just don’t honestly make that much sense and I’m not trying to be critical, but I reckon if we like interviewed a whole bunch of successful lawyers, partners, judges, professors and aggregated their ideas to approaching the study of law, but also their careers in law, we could have something that’s kind of inspirational but also practical.’ And the Dean was very amenable to me and she gave me $4000 and went ‘go on your way Wenee. Create this, create this for our students.’ And that ended up being my entire graduate plan in 2009. |
| DT: | Yeah right. |
| WY: 6:00
7:00 | Yeah which was sort of fine because that was also the year of the GFC hitting and sweeping across the industry. So a lot of friends of mine who got my stellar grades were actually being paid to not take up their graduate offers. TIP: Something we hear often enough, particularly when graduating from law school, is that there are too many law students and the market is just flooded with lawyers. Now whether that’s true or not is another matter altogether, but the Council of Australian Law Deans estimates that there are approximately 7,500 law graduates every year, although some argue that this is a conservative estimate and the real number could be much higher. In 2014 the Law Society of NSW released a report about the future prospects of law graduates. That report found that there’s anxiety in the legal profession and in law schools about the lack of employment opportunities for law graduates in legal practice. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why many students who graduate with a law degree never go on to practice law. But law graduates are highly employable, even if they aren’t seeking to practice. According to Graduate Careers Australia, 74% of Australian law school graduates obtain full-time employment within four months of graduation, which is higher than the national average of 69%. |
| DT: | I think what you’re describing there about that anxiety of ‘am I doing this right? What do I do next?’ is definitely something that would resonate with a lot of our listeners, I know it resonates with me. I think law attracts a lot of risk-averse people and that includes being risk-averse about one’s own future. And that sometimes produces those anxieties. And I want to come back to Survive Law later because whether our current law students today in 2020 are being equipped with the skills they need to survive in the future is something I want to discuss, but tell me a bit about how you got into legal tech? |
| WY: 8:00
9:00
10:00 | My entire career is accidental! Really! I think I just show a great enthusiasm for things. So Survive Law sort of led me towards the College of Law. Someone that I’d worked with at UTS she ended up being very senior at the College of Law and said to their marketing manager ‘you have to work with Wenee, she’s very clever and she likes everything’ and that turned out to be true. So I turned up in their marketing team as a contractor and ended up just writing for a lot of their publications, and one of them happened to be the Centre for Legal Innovation so I would cover a lot of different legal entrepreneurs. Both in Australia and New Zealand and also around the world. And that was just an incredible way to be able to hear directly from, often people who were lawyers or people who were sort of associated with lawyers, the innovation heads within major firms, but also younger lawyers who thought ‘nup there’s a different way to do this, I’m going to work it out’ and they might’ve come from a dev background, a development background, might have been self-taught! Which is so true of so many developers. And they just gave it a crack and I got to talk to them. And that just ignited a whole passion for that area because these people sounded a bit nuts! Like Me! And I think I just related to them to be honest. I liked the way that they balanced the natural learned pessimism that all lawyers must have to be good lawyers, but that causes us to have deep internal conflict all the time. Because we want to think that things will get better but we’ve seen how badly things can go. And so to sort of move into this field and meet all these people sort of helped bring balance to my internal force. TIP: Are lawyers more pessimistic? According to a 2005 article published by the Deakin Law Review titled ‘Why Lawyers are Unhappy” the answer is unfortunately yes. The article suggests that the qualities that make for a good lawyer, one of which includes pessimism, don’t make for a happy human being. According to the authors, lawyers are selected for their pessimism and law students might even study law because of their own pessimistic tendencies. And that pessimistic outlook is adopted outside of their professional lives too. Pessimism is defined by the article not in the colloquial sense of “seeing the glass as half full or half empty” but rather, the tendency to interpret the causes of negative events in stable, global and internal ways. In other words, the pessimist views a negative event as unchangeable, while the optimist sees it as just a temporary set-back. The authors of the article suggest that the challenge for lawyers is remaining prudent professionally, being healthily pessimistic, while being mindful of keeping those pessimistic tendencies away from the domains of our life outside the office. We’ll include a link to this article in the show notes. |
| DT:
11:00 | That’s a great insight actually about the benefits and drawbacks of that, as you so well described it, that learned pessimism, because it does make us wary of opportunity I suppose. And I think that probably feeds into what I’m about to ask you which is, your enthusiasm for legal tech is really clear. Some listeners would share it, I certainly share it, but there would be many people in our profession that would have that pessimism about how technology can improve their practice. In your experience from those early stages in a career in legal tech all the way to working with thedocyard now, what has been your experience trying to promote or educate the profession about the benefits of technology? |
| WY: | That’s a great question. I think for me, I had a real moment, an Oprah ‘ah-ha!’ moment as she would say. Because I had a lot of that fear as I was starting to learn, especially about artificial intelligence and things like that, and I think it also helped that both my parents worked in IT so I kind of grew up in a language of IT. I was terrible at it just to be clear. I’m the kind of person that broke their own computer at 15 years old and my parents almost disowned me, like I am not that good at technology, but I have gotten better. |
| DT: | You’re the black sheep in the IT family. |
| WY: | I really was. They were like ‘oh you want to do drama and law? Oh I guess law is acceptable. You can go.’ |
| DT: | Sufficiently technical. |
| WY: 12:00
13:00
14:00 | Sufficiently technical, probably, you know, fit all of the Asian boxes as well. And I had a real moment when one of the legal founders of a fantastic company called McCarthy Finch in New Zealand and they’re spun out of Minter Ellison Rudd Watts, I love this guy and the company that he created. He said ‘robots aren’t going to take legal jobs. Because, there’s a very simple reason for this, legal analysis of the level that lawyers do really well involves understanding the human issues at play.’ And once he said that to me I thought oh my god of course not, I mean that’s so hard. Then I thought about how technology actually worked and the kind technology as it’s applied even in the law that I could see, and it’s fixing the simplest problems. It’s fixing mostly workflow problems, it’s helping us get out of the deep, painful mire of emails that can come at any time of day. The sweet spot for technology certainly at this stage and probably continuing, is changing how we work, it’s optimising it in a way that I’d seen sweep other professions. Because I have several feet, even though I only have two feet, in other jobs. I’m a sessional lecturer at UTS and I’ve done that ever since I graduated, I’m a marketer, and both those fields have innovated a little more comfortably because they’re a little bit less risk-averse than we are. Once I had that insight, it became a lot easier to just address the concern right up front and say look ‘robots aren’t going to take our jobs because it’s not cost effective to make robots do that, it’s really hard to train a robot to deal with all the permutations of human fragility, and behaviour, and emotion, and that’s a whole other layer that does get layered into a legal conflict. Because by the time it hits a lawyer, there’s a lot of other things that have happened to make a conflict escalate that far. And a great lawyer understands that. |
| DT: | I always see it as automation and AI is going to make our job more interesting. |
| WY: | Yes! |
| DT:
| It’s going to give us more time to focus on the things that we’re actually passionate about. You know the example I always think of, I can’t remember where this was, but I remember there was a demonstration of the capacity of a learning algorithm and a human law student to find a particular provision in the Income Tax Assessment Act. I can’t remember what show this was on, but it was recorded, and of course the algorithm found it much more quickly, but is that the core skill of our profession? You know, searching the index for the right section and then reciting it? Of course not, it’s the contextualisation and understanding how that fits into the lives, businesses and commercial context of our clients. I’m so glad that you offer that salve to the nerves of some of our lawyers who might be concerned that robots will replace them. |
| WY: | Nope! |
| DT: 15:00
| But as you say, there’s a lot of ways that you can leverage technology to improve your practice, to make your job more interesting, but you don’t have to start big I suppose. You don’t have to start with implementing a learning algorithm to replace all of your legal research, right, you can start small. What are some of the ways that you can start small and then kind of leverage that commitment bias to get more comfortable with using technology in your practice? |
| WY:
16:00
17:00
18:00 | That’s a great question, I totally understand why law firms and legal teams tend to approach technology that way, we’re a very action-orientated group of people. You know, we wake up in the morning, we’ve got our to-do list, we plan our days, tick tick tick, we fix the legal innovation box. But it’s interesting I was talking to a good friend of mine, her name is Sarah Raymond, she’s a legal design thinking specialist and she’s an ex-lawyer from the big firms. And we were talking about how good technology and good innovation is always user driven. That is, the first step you should take is actually look at how you’re working. That’s step one! Before you ever look at any legal company, before you look at my company or anyone’s technology, work out ok so how do I work in a day and which parts feel the most repetitive? The parts that don’t really engage my higher-level analysis and creativity, and what do they involve? Usually a lot of it is administrative, it’s literally things like taking apart contracts, reading them, finding specific words in them, analysing them, putting them somewhere else. Sometimes it’s even more simple than that, it’s calling 5 people or 10 people to work out where they’re at in a project, it’s sifting through emails that aren’t well filed and working out ‘ok is this the latest version of the document? Does anyone even know? What day is it?’ And I think you know, do that kind of analysis, it won’t take that long, but it’s actually the first step that’s often missing. TIP: What Wenee is getting at here is the need to research the problem you are trying to solve first – before researching the technology that will solve it. It sounds pretty basic, but if you haven’t identified the root cause of the problem, you won’t have sufficient information to identify the right solution. And that last part of what Wenee was saying is so important, that the technology that works for a Big Firm might not work for a boutique, and the technology that works for one mid-size firm might not work for another. Once the problem is identified, then comes the process of trialling and testing all kinds of new technologies to analyse which one, if any of them, might solve that particular problem. Because I’ve seen this time and time again, that organisations will kind of go ‘oh that other team, or that other lawyer, or that other organisation, they took this technology, so we just have to use this one.’ When really any sensible person would assess all the differences. I mean we do it with our phones right? We go ‘ok this is Samsung, this is Apple, why do I like them? What works?’ And at least for me from my perspective, I choose one over the other because one is easier to use. It doesn’t require such a painful learning curve, and that would, and should, play a factor in how you choose to adopt technology. It’s not about speed so much as it is about what you specifically need to change. And that is a process but taking the time to do that process will mean that it’s not a painful disrupting period where you’ve suddenly lost all your billable time and hours to learning technology that doesn’t actually make that much sense. |
| DT:
19:00 | Yeah, I think that’s a great tip. That, you know, you don’t actually start by buying the technology and then implementing, you start by working out what you need. You’re right, there is this view that ‘well if my competitors have this sort of technological solution then obviously I need it too.’ But the first step is to try and analyse what’s going to make your life easier, because that is the focus; not including it because it ticks a box. And you know a lot of the things you’ve described there aren’t necessarily problems that an AI or automation solution solves, it might be that some of those problems need project management solutions. It might be that you need a better way to communicate with your team and you need a Slack channel or something, really that first piece is diagnosing your own opportunities to improve your processes. And I think our listeners should be much more comfortable doing that rather than going out and buying something. Now for those firms that are unwilling to undertake that process of looking for opportunities to improve, whether they’re big ones or small ones, what do you think is going to happen to those sorts of firms? |
| WY: 20:00
21:00 | What’s happened to all other industries. It’s quite unavoidable actually. I think there’s many exciting things in the law, and one thing exciting to come out of the great lockdown, of the great virus, the great plague that’s sweeping our world, is in many ways a lot of lawyers I’ve talked to have re-ignited their passion for what they actually do. Which is that we are a profession, we’re here to provide service. And I want to preface what I say next with that, because I think that a lot of those firms that are very resistant to change are actually filled with great lawyers, who are deeply committed to that ideal, and it’s one of the reasons that I love being in this field because we remain so committed, it’s different to a lot of fields that might be more mercantile in nature. And in that sense we share social goals with doctors. TIP: The Law Society of New South Wales released its FLIP – or the Future of Law and Innovation in the Profession report in 2017. And it’s a really good read – both, if you’re thinking of incorporating legal technology into your business, but don’t quite know where to start, but also if your firm has already embraced technology. Law Society members can also log into the portal to access the FLIP podcast, which covers topics such as legal tech, change management, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and cloud computing. We’ll leave a link to the report and the FLIP portal in our show notes. |
| DT: | I’m glad you mentioned that, it’s something that we’ve discussed on the show before with another one of our guests, Dr George Beaton, who talked about our history as a profession that serves the public and that many attitudes about resisting change are really about a concern that that sense of professionalism and public service could be eroded by the change. |
| WY:
22:00
23:00 | Absolutely! Big fan of Dr George Beaton as well. Yeah, absolutely. whereas in my view, from what I’ve seen of the technology available, we can actually provide more of that service at greater scale (the start-up dream) to more people at an affordable rate. Because we know this, we know this as lawyers, there’s a missing middle, a lot of studies that have born this out, where people bawk at hiring us because they can’t afford us but then we can’t provide the services for less because it takes a certain amount of time. And part of the reason it takes that certain amount of time is because of the processes that we need to do in the background, which we don’t even enjoy. So we’re caught in this sort of uncomfortable middle ground where people don’t understand why we’re doing it or the value of it and it is very valuable. So to circle back to your question, what happens to the firms that don’t adapt, they will change, that is, the people within them might seek different processes. As we know, and it’s been often coined, the legal profession is currently on a burning platform. It’s on fire, the coronavirus put some gasoline on that fire and said, ‘have fun!’ And what I have seen, which is really interesting, was a friend of mine, who is a bit younger than me, so I’m 34, he’s a little bit younger than me, and he ended up taking over a firm from an much, much older practitioner and they had a conversation basically and the older practitioner was basically like ‘look I don’t know if I actually want to make all these changes to my practice but you do, and you’re great at what you do. So how about I maintain a consulting role, because obviously I’m still, you know, a good font of knowledge’ and my friend totally respected the older practitioner for this. There’s this sense I think right now that technology is this, you know, tech punk disruptor, no respect for the establishment, oh we are so the establishment we always will be, we’re the law! But it’s knowing more deeply that people are having these kinds of conversations because if you don’t want to learn and grapple…I mean it’s very exhausting what’s happened to us in coronavirus. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had nights where I’m thinking ‘I don’t think I can learn a new piece of technology, another kind of video conferencing software, or try to set up a monitor one more time.’ |
| DT: | Yeah absolutely. |
| WY: 24:00 | It’s tiring! And if you’ve reached a point where you don’t want to and you’re comfortable financially to not be able to do that, I don’t think there needs to be such an aggressive push to do that. It’s about finding a balance in between, and I thought that particular approach was a brilliant one because my friend’s still young! There’s lots of stuff he’s not going to know! And I think that respect and that communication of respect needs to be there as well. |
| DT:
25:00 | Yeah that’s such a great partnership between complementary skill sets and it also really solves a succession issue in a lot of firms as well where some practitioners, again we’ve talked about this on another episode of Hearsay, where the difficulty of law firm succession is you get to the end of a very successful career in the law and there’s not a lot that you can do to improve the value of your business to a prospective buyer. But that’s a great example of creating some longevity and some legacy. TIP: I’m referring here to my interview with Craig Osborne which discusses succession planning for law firm owners, in particular smaller firms and sole practitioners, with some practical tips from an acquirer of law firms on how to maximise the value in a practice before retirement. We’ve talked about a few different ways to introduce technology into a legal practice, I think for the lawyers that are passionate about this area and who know a little about this area, automation is kind of preaching to the choir a little bit. In the sense I think both of us have mentioned it a dozen times in this episode, the lawyers who do want to use technology are definitely alive to the opportunity to automate document creation and things like that. What are some of the technological solutions that those lawyers, who are already enthusiastic and who might be aware of some of the automation solutions, what are some non-automation technology solutions that they can implement? |
| WY: 26:00
27:00
28:00
29:00 | What an interesting question! Look I think we have touched upon it a few times, it’s about workflow processes, and they’re the main things to consider. Lawyers are…we do love our research so it’s a research exercise. Look to other fields, look to other professions and areas, especially Silicon Valley. I think it helped that before thedocyard I worked for another big legal tech company, a global one, that implemented a lot of workflow ideas, the idea of stand-ups, using Slack to basically manage remote teams, the use of Trello etc. and it was mainstreamed. So when the respective companies needed to go into lockdown, we were fine. It’s also why the tech companies in Sydney went into lockdown first because there was no real issue. And that’s I think the first place to look. Look to your own area of practice and look to the workflow tools and technology available. Obviously, thedocyard focuses on reconstructing, insolvency, M&A deals, but it’s been really interesting because we’ve had lawyers from other areas of practice finance, property etc. realise ‘this is essentially a project management tool. It was built for deal makers but it basically, you can click a button and see a Gantt chart of the work. So that’s nice, that’s when it was supposed to be due. That’s good to know,’ or assign tasks to people. And we’re one of a few different providers that can do a lot of different things, it really depends on what you need to do, but it really is that looking at how other industries have approached managing projects. And my biggest take away has always been keep it really really straightforward. The more straightforward you do it, the more you’ll be able to scale it to any personality and team. So it was interesting for example, right at the start of lockdown the College of Law, who I write for, asked me ‘Wenee can you put together some kind of story on how we can work remotely during this time?’ because they knew that my team had already gone in. And I said, ‘yeah, yeah I can do that.’ And it was really, really simple things, it was in the morning and the evening asking everybody to check in with a short list of what they’re working on. It doesn’t matter if they’re not actually related within the team, everyone then knows and everyone can make a comment and say, ‘oh I’ll help you with this’ or ‘oh gosh I realised this is an issue,’ it’s full transparency but it’s written. So, in my team we use Slack for that, and it’s just so easy! And that means that you can sort of replicate a lot of the sort of water cooler chat etc., I literally have like a Slack channel called ‘water cooler’ TIP: I’m sure a lot of us can relate to this, particularly after 2020. Transitioning to working from home has meant that we’re all had to trial, and implement, different ways of checking in with one another. Wenee mentioned Slack and Trello as ways to do this. For those of us who might not be familiar, Slack is a really useful file sharing and instant messaging tool. You can create different channels for different topics of conversation. Trello on the other hand is like a to-do list. You can create different Trello boards for practice areas or projects, with lists for different team members to jot down their tasks and check them off as they go. Are these some of the tools your team or firm is using? We’d love to hear how you stayed organised and in touch during this period – drop a post on our Facebook page. Just search Facebook for ‘Hearsay The Legal Podcast’. |
| DT:
30:00 | I mean I think that kind of informal written communication is really useful for that and it does replace, I mean certainly for us, we work in an open plan and that’s a really useful tool to informally share information in the group. And Slack, or something similar is a great way to replace that. But what you’ve described there is a really important practical point about introducing these kind of changes to your practice which is as a manager you can make those decisions and you can decide ‘I’ve analysed our landscape, I’ve decided this is what we need’ but you’ve then got to communicate it to the team and make it really clear how they can use it because otherwise it’s not going to be used. In your experience working for a few different legal tech companies, most recently thedocyard, you would’ve seen some firms do this integration process well, and some not so well. Can you tell me a bit about one that did it well and one that didn’t do it so well? |
| WY:
31:00 | Yes, yes I certainly can. It’s really interesting, so one firm I’m going to call out because I’m just a big fan of them, and they appeared on Bottled Law because they’re just nice people, and stuck in Melbourne right now poor people, is the firm Legalite which won partner of the year last year I believe. They’re a small boutique law firm who, ex BigLaw, the whole usual story that you often hear, and they implemented what was then LEAP really really well. But that was because they started from a values and culture perspective. So the partner who headed it up, who still heads it up, Marianne Marchesi, she said ‘Ok, what do I actually need?’ How am I going to use it?’ She had that thoughtful conversation with herself mostly and then took in the team and said, ‘ok these are the tools, let’s try them and report back to me what’s working, what are you finding hard about it, you know, why is that and then we’ll assess how we use it.’ You know, she empowered her team to learn and she has a super small team. I went down to Melbourne, in what feels like a lifetime ago, and I went to her offices there, she has an office dog which is always fun, but she empowered all the members of her team, her older practice manager who doesn’t even live and work in the same office, she lives and works on the Great Ocean Road, but it was possible because of the technology. And then she empowered one of her newer you know younger lawyers, who just had an enthusiasm for using tech a bit more and we know that story is pretty common and he would go in ‘ooh let’s try this thing’ or ‘ooh I wonder how this feature works’ and then he’d report back and he would share. And that was so much the reason that she’s the model for what can work. |
| DT: 32:00
| And that story, I mean so many great tips come out of that. One is, and principally this really jumps out at me, the idea that introducing these kinds of technological products isn’t its own business function. You know it’s not some separate thing that you’re doing on top of everything else. It was a part of their existing practice and it was a part of their core values that they already had, right? I think something that says is that having a culture that facilitates that kind of change is probably an important precondition and probably having a set of values that the team actually adopts is an important precondition. The other thing that story really highlights is, you know, it might be a manager’s decision to implement this solution over the other but then it’s a conversation. |
| WY:
33:00
| Absolutely, absolutely. I hate bringing up these kinds of references, but my fiancé told me about some marine who you know, who’s quoted a lot as an inspirational speaker and he said, ‘the key with leadership is to take extreme ownership.’ And I said yes actually you know what yes, I usually don’t listen to you at all but that is totally true. What happened in this scenario that made it so successful is the leader, who is a lawyer, took extreme ownership of the actual decision to innovate, what that would look like, what technology it would involve. If you put it away as a separate business function, then it’s someone else’s worry. And also that business function is usually not actually given a seat at the table as high as all the other fee-earning leaders within a firm and that’s obviously problematic! Because how are they going to, you know, share their ideas! It doesn’t really make sense! |
| DT:
34:00
| Yeah sometimes a fun side project for when we have time and then you get conversations like ‘well I just don’t have time for it today.’ TIP: There’s a great Harvard Business Review article published in February 2020 by Nadya Zhexembayeva which cites an estimate that there are around 70,000 books on innovation available for purchase today. Innovation has certainly become an important issue for every industry, including the law, but research has shown that it’s not always a popular topic. In fact, some research suggests that a majority of employees hate innovation. The University of Toronto surveyed 1,000 North American university educated workers to assess their attitudes towards innovation. The scientists conducting the research looked into things like “grit” and “openness to risk”. The drive for innovation among participants in the survey varied from 14% to just 28%. And their willingness to take risks at between just 11% and 19%. I know most people are risk-averse but wow! One of the suggestions in this article is to stop calling it innovation and select a phrase that captures the concept of continuity and benefit, rather than risk. We’ll include a link to this article in the show notes. |
| WY:
35:00
| Rome as they say wasn’t built in a day, I don’t know, I wasn’t alive for it, maybe it was. But certainly in terms of technological adoption, it’s not an overnight thing, it doesn’t need to be an overnight thing. And I think this is something that lawyers, because of our quest for perfection, we don’t always grapple with, or understand as perfectly. The tech world is very comfortable with everything mildly falling apart all the time because their whole purpose was to break things, that’s why it’s called disruption. Why does tech even work so well? Because they took an existing industry and went ‘hm I think I could try to do that better,’ broke a bunch of stuff and their tech didn’t work well for a long time. Every dev team is like this. But us as lawyers we’re like ‘oh it’s not working perfectly, guess we have to stop doing it entirely.’ |
| DT:
36:00 | Yeah that kind of shame associated with not getting it right the first time. Whereas you really need to have a more experimental kind of mindset. You know it’s funny that the problem of just being too busy with the business as usual tasks is so common to so many problems in legal practices. Whether it’s getting out and marketing, creating a pipeline ‘I can’t do that because I’m too busy,’ implementing organisational change ‘I can’t do that I’m too busy.’ Even the relatively non-controversial stuff like continuous learning, CPD stuff, ‘can’t do it, too busy.’ It’s really, I mean that’s probably the biggest mindset shift we have to make in the profession, right? That there are other things that are just as important as the client work and that in the long term will make us do that work better, faster, more responsively. |
| WY:
| I think so. And I think in that sense we can as I said look to the commercial world because most companies, not all of them there are good companies and bad companies, good cultures and bad cultures, but really good companies look at their departments. They’re not all fee-earning departments. |
| DT: | Yeah I know! This is a great point to make that it’s not like a manufacturing company has like 90% of its staff manufacturing and it’s like ‘well we don’t have time to sell the product, we’ve just got to keep building it.’ |
| WY: 37:00 | Yes and it really is the same idea. You can let go a little bit to free up a little bit of your brain space to create a sales pipeline, to think about your marketing processes (that’s my marketing hat coming on), and also to think about organisational change because we’ll probably improve what matters the most which is that clients think you’re valuable. It almost matters as much as you are delivering value, because they are the same idea actually. But that comes down to how you’re delivering your legal advice and at least from what I’ve seen, you know our work can be really hard. It can be very analytical, it can be tiring, and so sometimes the advice that we deliver at the end can seem a bit technical. And being able to layer over the top that human side, is what makes things seem valuable to clients. And a lot of these other shifts will allow that to happen because you’ll have enough breathing space and emotional space to make it happen. |
| DT: 38:00 | And I think that’s probably a skill set that we need to start imbuing in junior lawyers or graduates or law students as part of their education. But tell me a bit about Bottled Law. |
| WY:
39:00
40:00 | That’s an iso initiative! I saw that term coined by someone else in March and I thought yeah that’s what this can be, yes, an iso initiative. Well Bottled Law came about because I found myself lecturing law to myself in March. And I knew it had to happen, in fact I went in as soon as possible because it didn’t make sense for it not to happen. I think I knew that the pandemic was going to be bad because I’m Asian, we cancelled Chinese New Year! That means stuff is real! That’s like our Christmas, we do not cancel this! And when I heard that I was like ‘oh this is very bad.’ And so I found myself in my pyjamas lecturing to myself, and I had a moment where I flashbacked to 2009 and I thought ‘ooh this recession is going to be bad this one’ and it was tough for my generation to go through, I mean it was tough for everybody let’s face it. But when you have the least amount of experience and you can’t get in until you have that experience, you know it’s going to be really challenging. I guess I just found myself in conversation with my law students, so I teach Administrative Law, the law of the governments, the law of lockdown it turned out in 2020. And I said hey you know, the thing is I think the real misunderstanding around what we need to do, I think that there’s a sense in the legal profession that we should cut out everyone’s who’s not a fee-earner and I’ve seen that a few times in some of the emerging business models. But I don’t think that’s actually the issue because I think that means you didn’t fully understand what the technology can do. The technology is cutting out all of the repetitive work and due diligence, this means literally being locked in a room with piles of boxes, with paralegals crying themselves to sleep as they highlight bits of words, you know that is something technology can do. So we shouldn’t be equipping our law students and our new lawyers to do that skill. And we should always get away from thinking that is the only way to train a new lawyer, because the best lawyers aren’t known to clients because they have got great highlighting skills in rooms. That’s not why you choose a partner from X firm or a barrister, that’s not what it is. |
| DT: | Yeah chambers doesn’t rank a space for our ability to work without sleep, do they? |
| WY:
41:00 | No, although maybe it would be a good metric. And so Bottled Law really came out of that, it was ‘alright so let’s identify what some of these skills actually are.’ Because that’s an emerging theme that I’ve noticed when I was talking to legal entrepreneurs, they were consistently saying ‘look it’s not that junior lawyers won’t have jobs, it’s not that, it’s their jobs will be a lot different and in fact their skill set will be a lot different.’ There’ll be a much stronger emphasis on EQ, on emotional quotient, on empathy, on understanding what a client is really saying to you, and that’s a tough skill, that’s a whole skill in itself. Because a client will say this is their problem, but you may not know what they’re really willing to give up, to concede to, also what they also really want. What are their long-term views? |
| DT: | Outcomes rather than problems. |
| WY:
| Exactly right, exactly right. Obviously I went through law school, as you did, and I’ve been teaching it for ages, and in UTS I think I was fortunate enough to be hired on contract to help re-invigorate their courses to map them more towards these kind of, what’s often been unfairly called ‘soft skills.’ They’re not soft. |
| DT: | Yeah there’s such a hierarchy with that terminology isn’t there? Seems that they’re kind of the poor cousin of technical skills. |
| WY:
42:00
43:00
44:00 | So true right! The poor cousin, right!? Begging cap in hand, please listen to me. The technical skills are vital and important, and I am a massive nerd so I like being good at the black letter law, but right alongside them is the understanding of how they apply in context. That’s what we call ‘soft skills,’ they aren’t soft. They’re human skills. And a law student and a new lawyer, they need to be great at those skills because that’s actually what we need. We need them to almost go through what we expect of associates, senior associates, we need that to happen earlier, we need to be able to identify those people who are going to be good at that earlier. And the great news is for at least someone like me, I come from an Arts/Law background, I like to do a lot of drama, I am a personable person people often tell me, and so I felt like this was a good message that I could give my law students. That, you know, you could actually do ok out of this if you move with what is sort of useful for law firms and think practically, what do they need from you? They need to know that if they put in front of a client, you’re not going to look a bit silly. So let’s figure out how to do that shall we? And that’s what Bottled Law is all about, it was me going out to my network and saying ‘hey can we run these webinars for these law students? We’ll film them, we’ll do it in a very lean start-up style, you know, film it on Zoom and put it out on YouTube and reach an audience and help them out.’ It was just kind of benevolent in many ways. And it was really fortunate I’m working with the president of ALSA which was awesome, she just happened to go to UTS and reached out to me on my birthday actually, which was in isolation. And we have a guy called Nate McCurley who is an agile change management specialist, but also a law graduate and that’s because he turned up in my classes about 6 years ago and then I just kept in touch. TIP: ALSA is the Australian Law Students’ Association which is the national representative body for all law students in Australia and currently totals around 40,000 members. ALSA advocates the interests and concerns of Australian law students, gathers and disseminates information of interest and concerns to Australian law students, facilitates communication and the exchange of information between law student societies and initiates social and intellectual activities among law students at a national level. They also run some really interesting competitions as Wenee mentioned. We will include a link to ALSA’s website in our show notes. Then we have about 3, 4 other people who are all law students in their 3rd or 4th years who just wanted to get involved and see how they could be part of something. That felt more like the change than being stuck at home like ‘oh I don’t know what to do, youth unemployment is so high’ so let’s do something about it. So that’s basically it in a nutshell. |
| DT:
| So Wenee other than signing up to view some Bottled Law webinars, what can law students today or even graduate lawyers today do to develop more of those human skills? |
| WY: | That’s a good question, I think one of the simplest things that even I was able to do is get involved. So, one competition that I participated in that I didn’t realise would be so helpful, was the Law School Negotiations Competitions. Because they were very much the poor cousin to mooting. |
| DT: | Yes, as a Negotiations Competition participant, I can definitely…that resonates with me yeah. |
| WY: 45:00
| I’m glad! I mean I did mooting too because I tried to be a good law student, but yeah I would say try the other competitions in addition to mooting, because they are actually designed to help you develop these soft skills, client interviewing etc., because they’re assessing you on these things. And negotiations, I think it only really hit home for me once I entered the workforce ‘oh my goodness most of my life is negotiations, thank god I did that negotiations competition!’ And I also ended up doing a subject in sort of crisis negotiation and conflict resolution, which was actually a lot of fun. Those are the kind of things that you need to understand more deeply, because they’re all about understanding what actually motivates humans and conflict. Read up on these topics. One of the greatest books in the area, which I’m sure you as a negotiations veteran would know, is ‘Getting to Yes.’ It’s a great book. |
| DT: | Yes, it’s a good book, a required reading. |
| WY: 46:00
47:00 | Required reading, so good! Easy to read, that’s a nice thing in law. TIP: ‘Getting to Yes’ by Roger Fisher and William L. Ury is a bestselling book from 1981 that can be seen sitting on the bookshelves of most dispute resolution lawyers. And if you’ve already read that one, try the more recent publication of ‘Never Split the Difference’ by Christopher Voss and Tahl Raz in 2016; this book is really interesting; it describes the techniques used by Voss in his role as the FBI’s lead international hostage negotiator – and it explains how those same skills can be used in any negotiation, whether that’s negotiating a salary, to bargaining over that bike you’ve spotted on Gumtree, to negotiating a strategic advantage for a client in a legal context. It’s a great book and one that comes recommended by our Hearsay Team. Now, back to Wenee explaining how law students and law graduates can build their EQ skills. Honestly, get involved in your community. I think that’s one thing that we touched upon earlier but volunteer for community legal centres. Even be willing to, and I’m not saying work for free, that’s not what I mean, but get involved with small law firms who would be open to you working with them so that you can understand how clients actually speak to lawyers, and see where you can be of benefit, because those kind of experiences are invaluable. It’s why during the clerkship rounds people with some law firm experience do so well because they actually understand the human dynamics at play. So those are really simple things to do. And reflect. |
| DT:
48:00 | Yeah and that reflection and learning I think is not just useful for the development of your own skills but it’s a mental health piece, it’s also really useful for developing your own resilience and one great tool for reflection is the action-learning cycle, which we’ll be including in the HTLP show notes. I think something that was drawn out from your answer then is that there’s actually a common feature in both the market for junior lawyers or the market for graduate lawyers, and the legal services market itself which is this idea of commoditisation of quality, you know something that’s in the B2B markets broadly that great technical quality, great product quality if you want to call it that there’s a general proposition is just expected now. Technical skills are a base level, really high. That’s why when we’re talking about these sorts of things, we’re not saying that technical skill isn’t important, it’s just uniformly really high now and so you have to be offering something else to differentiate yourself from that otherwise commoditised high-quality product. |
| WY:
49:00
| You’re absolutely right. Look, we’re a high-performance field and we attract high performers. It’s also why we get so stressed when we aren’t performing highly enough. But that’s absolutely true and I think one of the times I realised that technical skill and that expertise was just a given was when one friend of mine, she’s a wonderful person she can just come across a little severe sometimes as I think lawyers can, when people were calling in to see whether they could work for the courts, and she’d already worked for the courts, and she said ‘do you have a distinction average?’ And the person at the other end said ‘no’ and she said, ‘well then you’re probably not going to get a look in here.’ And I felt fine, I mean I was her peer and I’d gotten a distinction average, but I think it was the first time that it had clued into me that ‘oh that’s probably going to be quite important.’ |
| DT: | Yeah and it’s a common story as well. I mean I’ve heard anecdotally that tends to be a resume culling technique as well. |
| WY:
50:00
51:00
| I actually don’t think it should be the only metric by which anyone gets measured. And certainly whether you did well in law school may not always be an indicator for how technically good you become over time, you know, because people don’t get frozen in time, otherwise IQ would get frozen, but it doesn’t. For me there was a moment in law school and it was a painful moment, where we were in a legal research subject and we were learning how to research in the library and then use online tools at the same time. I think I’m just insufferable sometimes, I am the Hermione Granger of every class, insufferable know-it-all, and I put up my hand and I said, ‘why are we in the law library if these reports are 3 weeks out of date but I can get them online and they’re like current?’ And I didn’t get an answer and it was because they didn’t know how to teach it in a different way. And that particular moment has sort of carried through, I’m 34 now so it’s 14 years in this profession, and I’m thinking that’s exactly it, you can actually improve your technical skill set through technology, that’s a part of it. And as a differentiator you do need to think about how clients perceive you. That’s what client value really is, all these distinguishing points. Are you an innovative firm? What technology do you use? How do you come across? How available are you? But that doesn’t mean you need to be available around the clock, because that also means clients need to be available around the clock and on all the time, which nobody wants because we know how hard that can actually be. At least in my experience of the lawyers who are doing really well, that’s what they’re really good at doing, giving clarity, they set expectations well and they manage them, they don’t just go ‘oh I’ll do anything to keep you! I will cut any cost to keep you!’ that doesn’t come across well I think. |
| DT: | Yeah, yeah I think that’s right and I think in the mid-market particularly where you might have a client who’s not that used to engaging with lawyers, having some clarity about the process is a bit of a balm as well that it makes the experience of dealing with a lawyer a little bit clearer and easier to understand. We’ve talked about a whole range of issues today, we’ve talked about legal technology innovation, we’ve talked about process management innovation, we’ve talked about what law students can do to prepare themselves for the future of law, we’ve talked about what current lawyers can do to prepare themselves for the future of law, but if you wanted to leave our listeners with one key take-away, maybe from a legal technology perspective, Wenee what would do you think that would be? |
| WY: 52:00
53:00
| Don’t be afraid. It’s not something to fear. We are good at fearing things and it’s an important part of our job to be a little bit fearful on the behalf of our clients, and we are great at it, but technology is not something that should cause so much concern and anxiety that it tends to in the way that I’ve seen. It is there as your partner. It is there as your supporting player in the amazing rock band that is your life, you know. And that is something that I’d like to leave with everybody from lawyers to new lawyers to law students. That a lot of the conversation tends to be around fear and that is such a fundamental misunderstanding of what the technology is doing, what the key players in technology are even trying to do, and what the potential of it actually is, you know. I think that’s the most important thing that the real potential, from what I can see of technology and innovation, is to help us be the lawyers we always dreamed of being. And I think that’s why I have such enthusiasm for it because I came of age in law school through a lot of disappointing things, you know through Guantanamo Bay and things that I went just ‘bloody lawyers.’ It wasn’t my idea. And throughout the course of my career, to be honest, things got better and they keep getting better. And lawyers have become more personally fulfilled, better at resilience, it’s even become a conversational point of wellness and ideas around it and the clients themselves have been taken on that journey. So I think that’s the biggest thing, don’t be afraid because this can really actually improve the service we deliver to our clients, improve our lives and make us better lawyers, the lawyers we hope to be. |
| DT: | And I guess coming into a recession maybe our listeners should work on their putting skills as well. |
| WY: 54:00 | Yes, I mean why not. Putting is always a lot of fun. |
| DT: | Absolutely. Wenee thanks so much for joining us on Hearsay! |
| WY: | Thank you so much! |
| DT:
55:00
| You’ve been listening to Hearsay The Legal Podcast. I’d like to thank our guest Wenee Yap from thedocyard for coming on the show. If you liked this episode about adopting legal technology, try out our episode about eDiscovery and legal process outsourcing two specific types of legal innovation. Or, try my interview with Talitha Fishburn about how advocates can adapt their skills as courts move towards conducting more of their business online. If you’re an Australian legal practitioner, you can claim 1 continuing professional development unit for listening to this episode. Whether an activity entitles you to claim a CPD point is self-assessed, but we suggest that this episode constitutes an activity in the professional skills or the practice management and business skills categories, take your pick. If you’ve claimed 5 CPD units for audio content already this CPD year, you might need to access our multimedia content to claim further points from listening to Hearsay. Visit htlp.com.au for more information on claiming and tracking your points on the Hearsay platform. The Hearsay team is Tim Edmeades who puts our sound together, Kirti Kumar who writes our educational website content, Araceli Robledo who helps us out with business development and books our guest, and me, David Turner. Nicola Cosgrove is our executive producer and director and keeps track of all the moving parts. Hearsay The Legal Podcast is proudly supported by Assured Legal Solutions – making complex simple. You can find all of our episodes, as well as summaries, transcripts, quizzes and more at htlp.com.au. That’s HTLP for Hearsay The Legal Podcast.com.au. Thanks for listening. |
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