Between the Briefs

Corporate greed and care cannot exist together. The only way to win is if you play a different game altogether. In this episode of Between the Briefs by Steno, Victoria Schall, New Jersey Supreme Court certified civil trial attorney and Founder of Schall at Law, reveals her rule book for advocating against nursing home abuse and winning neglect litigation. 

What You’ll Learn:

• How to leverage the "dignity matters" framework in jury selection by asking jurors whether the manner of death matters to them

• Why electronic health records (EHR) systems like PointClickCare require specialized litigation support

• The corporate structure strategy and how to beat it

• How to build cases around residents' rights violations in addition to physical injuries

• The staffing data methodology and why it’s a sign of systemic corporate failure

• Why family engagement and detailed documentation matter for case strength

Tune in for her inspiring journey of mastering the intersection of corporate accountability and resident dignity.

Highlights:

00:00 Introduction 

02:06 From Teenage Volunteer to Nursing Home Advocate

07:56 Dignity Over Age: Reframing the Standard of Care

10:14 The Connection Between Culture and Care 

13:08 Private Equity's Impact on Resident Care Quality

17:32 Navigating Corporate Structure in Litigation Strategy

20:10 Electronic Health Records: The AI Opportunity Gap

21:37 Building Expert Teams Through Industry Knowledge

25:49 Strategic Jury Selection: The Dignity Question

30:24 A Good Family is One That Cared  

31:37 Residents' Rights Violations as Standalone Claims

36:46 Advising Administrators: Accountability and Whistleblowing

39:10 Defining Success Beyond Settlements

47:13 Victoria’s Hot Take: Transparency as the Industry's 

49:00 Key Takeaways & Final Thoughts

Quotes:

1. "For me, dignity matters no matter what age you are, no matter what your conditions are. The nursing standard of care requires them to do full body head to toe assessments and provide proper care based on those assessments. I would rather focus on the dignity of what everyone deserves as a human being, regardless of their age and whatever conditions they have."
2. "There's studies that show that the care under private equity is worse than you would get under state or nonprofit type of facility operations. When a facility goes from nonprofit to privately owned, you end up with people whose pay is slashed, benefits are slashed, and a lot of the older staff ends up getting forced out. You can watch from a timeline perspective what happens in a facility when you go from nonprofit to private equity."
3. The question should be, let's see your financial statements and let's have that corporate transparency in order to understand where the money is going. More times than not, the money is not going back to direct care, but it's going to ownership pockets."
4. ‘For me, success is always about getting the accountability of what happened, regardless of what the actual final dollar amount is. I never want to take a case where I make a fee and my costs get paid back, but the client doesn't see anything at the end of the day.”

Between The Briefs is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Law firm operations are undergoing a massive overhaul - as they should, in the age of AI. In this episode of Between the Briefs, hosts Adrian Cea and Joe Stephens sit down with Bill Ryan, Senior Vice President and Chief Compliance Officer at AT&T, to explore how enterprise legal departments can harness AI to disrupt traditional workflows and what this means for enterprise compliance. 

What You’ll Learn:

• How to build organizational trust as the foundation for technological change

• Why dedicated teams outperform wide AI operation 

• Why “vision without execution is just hallucination” 

• How to approach outside counsel partnerships in an AI-driven market 

• Why human judgement becomes more critical as technology scales

• The dual risk-opportunity dynamic in AI democratization

Tune in to learn the leadership principles that make technological transformation actually work.

Highlights:

00:00 Introduction 

01:57 From Teaching to Compliance: A Purpose-Driven Legal Career

04:19 Problem-Solving as the Foundation of Legal Excellence

06:40 Transform Change by Honoring Past Achievements

08:56 Human Judgment Becomes Critical as Technology Scales

12:04 Building Organizational Culture Before Technological Change

15:12 AT&T Legal Edge: The AI-First In-House Law Firm

20:05 Hiring for Adaptability Over Technical AI Expertise

22:27 Why Law Firms Must Evolve Their Pricing Models

26:50 Aligning Leadership to Navigate Internal Skepticism

29:46 AI Democratization Creates Dual Risk-Opportunity Dynamics

33:15 Speed, Focus and Execution: Lessons for Legal Innovation

36:45 Reimagining the Legal Industry in Five Years

38:43 The Role of Proximity to Great Leaders in Shaping Vision

40:58 What Law Students Need to Thrive in an AI-Integrated Future

44:35 Hot Take: 2026 is a Pivotal Year for Legal Industry Transformation

46:44 Key Takeaways & Closing Thoughts 

Quotes:

1. "People love problem solvers. If you have somebody on your team or you have somebody that you're talking to that's really, really effective at solving a problem, your instinct is to give them the bigger problems. And bigger problems usually come with increased responsibility and an expanded scope and a broader team."
2. “As we start to navigate the world that's moving so rapidly around us, human judgment and the creation of trust of the path we're about to navigate, is what people are going to look more and more to. The people I continue to prioritize aren't just creating output, but building teams that trust their leadership, I think are gonna be the most effectively navigated."
3. "We need these partnerships to be successful. What we're asking for them is to acknowledge that the world's changing at the pace that we think it's changing, that we have to change our model. For those partnerships that lean in and kind of evolve and strategically navigate this, I think it's an unbelievably awesome upside."
4. "The wide availability, the democratization of AI, means anyone in the world can now send a letter or a file or come up with a draft lawsuit to file against a company if they go into ChatGPT. At the same time, our ability to process work and create output is growing, so the playing field is exponentially growing."

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Can legal technology be a catalyst for access to justice while preserving what makes legal work meaningful in the first place? That depends on how you use it. In this episode of Between the Briefs by Steno, hosts Adrian Cea and Joe Stephens sit down with David Cowen, Founder of the Solid Legal Summit and President of the Cowen Group, to explore why the legal industry stands at an unprecedented inflection point. 

What You’ll Learn:

• Why the dinner table remains the most powerful predictor of professional success
• How to identify and invest in the radically curious 20%
• The art of curation as competitive advantage
• Why AI will expand, not contract, demand for legal services
• How to leverage self-serving altruism to build unbreakable professional networks
• Why wrestling with AI (rather than accepting it) is essential for attorneys

Tune in for expert insights on building meaningful professional connections, asking better questions and positioning yourself at the forefront of legal practice transformation.

Highlights:


00:00 Introduction

00:51 From Staffing to Legal Innovation: David’s Career Journey

03:00 The Art of Building Community Through Authentic Connection

12:47 The Dinner Table Question: Understanding Professional Character

21:54 The Strategic Advantage of Connecting the Right People

25:07 Where You Should Invest Your Mentorship

32:42 Vulnerability, AI and the Human Element in Decision-Making

37:40 Making AI Work: Critical Interrogation Over Passive Acceptance

39:56 Reckoning the Pace of Technological Change and Legal Practice

42:06 Why AI Expands Rather Than Contracts Legal Markets

46:42 David’s Hot Take: The Importance of Embracing Professional Mobility

48:35 Key Takeaways & Closing Thoughts

Quotes:

1. “Legal is who brought me to the dance. There's a character and an integrity in legal professionals; they say what they mean, they mean what they say and they know what they don't know. I'm respected by people that I think are way smarter than I am, and that's a great place to be as a professional.”
2. "I have a favorite question from my staffing and recruiting days: tell me about your dinner table when you were seven, eight, or nine years old. When you ask people this question, they just unwrap who they are. You find out if it was lonely or family, if it was tough, if they had siblings. You find more in that question than almost any other question you can ask."
3. "I think it's important to be an informed optimist and not an informed pessimist because we have to figure it out. When I have a conversation with ChatGPT or Claude, I get a dopamine hit because I have the answer, but that's not the same as the feeling of love you have when you connect with somebody.”
4. “The importance of wrestling with AI is critical. Take questions, get answers back, challenge the AI consciously, take it from ChatGPT to Claude to different platforms, wrestle it down to the ground. I think we've been really accepting of the miracle of the answer at our fingertips, but we need to learn how to challenge AI, not accept anything at face value."
5. “My hot take is that you couldn't be in a better place at a better time - we are at the beginning of the beginning of next. Your career is a jungle gym, not a ladder, so wherever you've been, there's an entire other side of the jungle gym to explore. Look at history: electricity, cars, railroads, mobile, ecommerce. This is the same story all over again, and the question is, who do you want to be in that story?"

Between The Briefs is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Everyone’s worried that AI will take their job. But what they should be worried about is AI exposing how bad some people have been at their jobs. In this episode of Between the Briefs, hosts Adrian Cea and Joe Stephens welcome Nicole Black, Principal Legal Insight Strategist at 8AM, for an eye-opening discussion on how AI is really shaping the ground reality of law today. 

What You’ll Learn:

• Why hallucinated case citations and fabricated legal propositions represent a systemic competence crisis

• How to build internal AI governance policies and training frameworks that protect your firm 

• The strategic difference between guardrailed AI systems and open-ended legal research AI 

• Why not using AI may soon constitute malpractice once hallucination problems are solved

• How to evaluate legal tech adoption for firms of all sizes, from solo practitioners to large firms 

• Why authentic access-to-justice promises often mask profit-driven corporate interests

Her insights as a legal technology authority make for essential listening. 

Highlights:


00:00 Introduction

00:01 From Public Defender to Legal Tech Pioneer

00:06 The Evolution of Social Media in Legal Practice

00:10 AI Adoption and the Hallucination Crisis

00:13 Incompetence Exposed: AI's Real Impact on the Profession

00:18 Professional Obligations vs. Malpractice Standards

00:20 Guardrailed AI for Accuracy; Legal Research Remains Risky

00:21 Building AI Governance Policies Before Crisis

00:22 Scaling Tech Adoption: Solo Firms to Large Practices

00:25 Evaluating Legal Tech: What to Look For

00:27 Gen X Resilience: Learning Law Without Modern Tech

00:29 What Makes a Great Lawyer: The Public Defender Advantage

00:31 Access to Justice: Cynicism, Capitalism, and Real Impact

00:34 The Writer's Journey: Passion Meets Technology

00:36 Using AI in the Writing Process

00:40 Predicting the Future of Legal Tech

00:41 Nicole’s Hot Take: AI Exposing Legal Profession's Ugly Underbelly

00:43 Key Takeaways & Final Thoughts


Quotes:

1. "2017 is when you first started seeing legal tech products with AI in them, not generative AI, but AI. Once ChatGPT rolled out in November 2022, it has certainly impacted the practice of law. The rate of adoption is unlike anything I've seen before. It pretty much doubles year over year in terms of legal tech adoption."
2. "I don't even think it's a misdeployment. It's all the pressures the lawyers are under - they're far worse than they used to be in terms of billable hours, client demands, and competition. What's happening now is that what ChatGPT spits out looks really good. It's convincing, it sounds good, it looks good - and people are just assuming that it's accurate without verification."
3. With technology and AI, you have a professional obligation to understand the technology and make an educated decision about whether to use it or not use it. Right now, I think it's arguably malpractice not to understand AI and make a decision about when and when you shouldn't be using it, but we're certainly gonna get there faster than we have with previous tools."
4. "Generative AI and its hallucinations are just exposing the ugly underbelly of incompetence that's always existed in our profession. A lot of people have gotten away with incompetent legal work for far too long and been given the benefit of the doubt. But now when a case doesn't even exist, it's so easy to prove that they didn't read it, and this is just exposing incompetence that's been getting worse."

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Three sisters, Lauren, Erica and Gianna Kelly, switch sides, from being defense lawyers to giving a voice to plaintiffs. The result? The creation of The Kelly Firm, LLC and a transformation of the medical malpractice space. In this episode of Between the Briefs by Steno, the trio joins hosts Adrian Cea and Joe Stephens to explore the full story. 

What You’ll Learn:

• How to leverage defense litigation experience on the plaintiff side

• The optimal case vetting framework for medical malpractice litigation

• Why pre-suit negotiation timelines differ between practice areas 

• How to scale your firm without compromising on client connection and culture

• The strategic deployment of AI and legal technology in resource-constrained firms

• Building firm culture around distributed trust and complementary skill sets

• Why smaller firms deliver measurable value that scale cannot replicate

Tune in for an energizing and purposeful story from the world of law! 

Highlights:

00:00 Introduction

02:11 The Kelly Firm’s Origin Story & Switching from Defense to Plaintiff

04:05 On Being a Women-Led Firm

06:50 How Three Attorneys Manage One Case 

09:06 Family Legacy and the Evolution of Legal Practice

14:00 Why Patient Representation Matters

15:45 Gender Bias in Litigation and How to Overcome It

20:05 The Small-Firm Advantage When it Comes to Scaling 

21:35 Case Vetting & Quality Over Volume in Medical Malpractice

25:37 Pre-Suit Negotiation vs. Litigation Timelines

27:46 Trial Preparation on a Skeleton Crew

30:20 Managing Burnout: Peer Accountability and Work-Life Boundaries

33:07 The Kelly Firm Guide to Strategic Technology Investment

34:46 Why Closed Systems as Non-Negotiable

35:23 Figuring Out Personality-Client Alignment

38:35 Teaching the Next Generation: Practical Skills Over Theory

41:40 Why Critical Thinking Remains Non-Negotiable

42:06 Starting Your Own Firm & Embracing Calculated Risk

43:10 The Kelly’s Hot Take: Pittsburgh's Personal Injury Market Has Room for All

47:45 Key Takeaways & Closing Thoughts 

Quotes:

1. “We need to fight for people who can't fight for themselves. We need to fight for the patient who had a catastrophic injury due to a medical error and can't work anymore and can't support their family." - Lauren 
2. "We're creating our own type of law where we put the client first. We really try to connect with them and try to empathize with how they're feeling." - Gianna
3. "The quality of work doesn't correlate to the number of attorneys you have at a firm. When you go to a smaller firm, you know you're gonna talk to one of those attorneys, not a secretary or paralegal every time you call." - Gianna
4. "There's always somewhat of an uphill battle, not only when you're a woman, but when you're a young woman. We've many times been the youngest attorneys in the room or sometimes the only female attorneys in the room, and what that means is you have to be twice as prepared and twice as ready. We really pride ourselves on the fact that even if we are the youngest attorney, we will always be the most prepared." - Erica 

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Lawyers are always going to be important. What makes them relevant, however, is another question altogether. In the latest episode of Between the Briefs by Steno as hosts, Adrian Cea and Joe Stephens, sit down with Kyle Poe, Vice President of Legal Innovation Strategy at Legora, to explore the balance of traditional legal skills and legal services evolution in the age of AI. 


What You’ll Learn:

• How to build organizational AI literacy without disrupting existing revenue streams
  
  
• The data moat as the new competitive advantage
  
  
• How to reprice fixed-fee work intelligently using AI
  
  
• Why skepticism about AI is actually a healthy signal

• The strategic practice areas to target first for AI implementation

• How the legal industry will structurally reshape in the next decade
  
  
  

Tune in for the ultimate guide on staying relevant and staying ahead! 

Highlights:


00:00 Introduction 

01:55 Kyle’s Journey from Litigation Partner to Legal AI Pioneer

07:45 How AI’s Disrupting Law Firm Billing Models

11:25 The New Kid in Town: Fixed-Fee Models

18:10 The Importance of Internal Champions for AI Adoption

19:45 Prioritize Muscle Memory Before Complex Workflow Automation

26:05 Strategic Practice Areas for AI Implementation

29:36 Learning from History: e-Discovery, AI’s Future Impact 

37:00 Legal Tech's Sustainable Competitive Advantage

42:37 Kyle’s Hot Take: Why Traditional Skills Still Matter 

44:55 Key Takeaways & Closing Thought 

Quotes:

1. “At the top tier of the market, oftentimes, corporations are not picking the lowest cost provider - they're actually picking the highest quality provider, and so if you can use AI to deliver higher quality results, then you're not going to hurt yourself on the price side of the equation."
2. "There are two elements of learning that firms need to do. The first is what I would call muscle memory - creating AI literacy and fluency throughout your organization so AI is just another tool in the lawyer's toolkit. The second layer is building reusable workflows, where you take the knowledge and experience of attorneys and build that into applications that can be rerun over and over again."
3. “The total addressable market of legal is peanuts compared to the broader enterprise market, and legal carries specific risks. Those same institutional barriers to entry that are unique to legal have made it such that bigger players have not entered it, and I think those barriers will persist.”
4. One of the hottest takes would be that traditional skills aren't gonna matter anymore, but I actually think they will. When the dust settles, the world will be different, and some firms will leapfrog others by investing in AI and building out workflows. But the reasons you hire attorneys, the judgment, and the incentive structures around picking top tier firms aren't gonna change fundamentally."

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AI has taken over legal  in a way lawyers didn’t expect. But what if lawyers and AI could evolve alongside each other? In this episode of Between the Briefs by Steno, hosts Joe Stephens and Adrian Cea sit down with Steve Embry of embryLaw LLC, national litigator and renowned legal tech writer, to explore the collision between artificial intelligence and traditional legal practice.


What You’ll Learn:

• The Verification Paradox: How the time saved using generative AI tools may be offset or entirely negated by the time required to verify outputs
  
  
• Why senior lawyers must understand AI regardless of personal preference

• How to train the next-generation of litigators without over-reliance on AI

• The billing model crisis generative AI creates and what’s going to replace it

• Why market differentiation matters when it comes to AI implications

• Why the real risk isn’t technology failure; it’s creative stagnation 
  
  

AI isn’t all it’s cut out to be - this episode reveals what it is. 


Highlights:


00:00 Intro

02:00 Steve’s Journey: From Mass Tort Defense to Legal Tech Commentary

04:27 How to Find Your Unique Voice in Legal Technology Writing

07:34 Above the Law: Staying Focused Amid Legal Tech Overload

10:38 Steve’s Analysis of Legal AI Today

17:43 Why AI Efficiency Gains Get Consumed by Validation

25:04 Strategic Mentorship Over Tool Reliance & Training the Next Generation

31:15 Writing as the Foundation of Excellent Legal Practice

35:56 What We Lose When AI Eliminates the Struggle of Creative Work

39:29 Steve’s Hot Take: The Dangerous Conflation of AI and Generative AI in Legal Practice

42:22 Key Takeaways & Closing Thoughts 

Quotes:

1. “I would get calls from time to time about cases in the jurisdiction where I practiced and about particular judges. I would say, 'I don't have a clue. I haven't had a case here in 20 years.’ So here I was, working remotely and, in a sense, completely disconnected from the local court environment. I was operating in a much more expansive, national context, which led me to understand the value and potential of technology.”
2. “I know how law firms work. I know law firm bureaucracy. I know how consensus decisions are not made in law firms. I know the tensions. I know how lawyers and litigators sweat in the middle of the night. All of those things, I think, impact the use and value of technology in very fundamental sorts of ways.”
3. "When I first started, I was trying to write about everything legal tech. There was just so much happening, and it was exciting. But it quickly became overwhelming. It felt like I was drinking from the proverbial fire hose, trying to keep up with every new product, every new development in the space.”
4. “I think the hottest take on the industry right now is sort of the rush to embrace generative AI tools. The glossing over of real issues, the failure to sort of understand the distinction between artificial intelligence generally and generative AI specifically, the notion that all AI is generative AI, so only generative AI solutions will work for what the book we need to have done.” 
   
   

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Between The Briefs is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

The fabric of American law is changing - courts are in crisis, judges are under threat - and something needs to change. This episode of Between the Briefs by Steno reveals the ‘what’ as hosts Adrian Cea and Joe Stephens sit down with Eric Weitz, Founder of the Weitz Law Firm and President of the Pennsylvania Association for Justice. 


What You’ll Learn:

• Leveraging authenticity to build courtroom credibility, instead of performance
  
  
• The critical gap between law school education and trial practice reality 

• Why non-economic settlements matter more than transactional case resolution

• How to leverage technology for strategic advantage without losing your competitive edge

• The three universal needs of every catastrophic injury client 

• The major shifts taking place in the plaintiff litigation space 

Trial lawyers find themselves at an inflection point. This episode reminds us how to make the best of it. 

Highlights:


00:00 Introduction 

02:22 From Big Law to Plaintiff Advocacy: Eric Weitz's 30-Year Journey

06:00 Authenticity as Your Most Potent Trial Weapon

07:30 Why Persuasion Beats Performance in Trial Law 

10:50 The Critical Gap Between Law School and Practice

13:33 Pennsylvania Association for Justice: Defending the Rule of Law

18:04 How Young Attorneys Can Impact the Justice System

20:20 Unity in the Trial Bar: Fighting for Common Causes

23:36 Building the Weitz Law Firm

27:16 Why Non-Economic Considerations are More Important for Trial Lawyers

31:48 Reframing Trial Lawyers: Community Leaders and Advocates for Change

34:08 How Catastrophic Injury Work Changes a Person

37:45 Technology's Double-Edged Sword in Medical Malpractice Litigation

40:05 Learning Without Technology: Lessons from Practice Evolution

41:22 Eric’s Hot Take: Consolidation, Funding Pressures and Rising Verdicts

45:05 Closing Thoughts 

Quotes:

1. “Look, whether I’m on trial and something happens where an opportunity or you see something in your daily practice, I call them gifts. It’s the way I choose to label them because I really view them that way. It’s not, “how did I not know it?”
2. “Authenticity is the single most potent weapon that anybody has. Jurors are really good at sniffing out nonsense, and if you’re trying to sell something and you’re not being genuine as a person, it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter how right you are.” 
3. “Two things strike me right off the bat… I used to be convinced when I was younger that to be a trial lawyer you had to have that it factor… until I spent enough time in a courtroom to see all sorts of different styles. The drama we see today in the media is so exaggerated and so overblown. And I have just found that that doesn’t translate well into a courtroom until the client or the lawyer have earned it.” 
4. “What are you going to law school for? You’re going to learn how to think, you’re hoping to pick up some substance to help you on the bar exam, period. Law schools very much care about their bar passage rate and since the bar is the threshold now, that’s why I think our education is so limited.”
5. “We are probably facing the single greatest attack on the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary that we have ever seen. Our federal legislature has kind of abdicated their power to the executive branch. The courts are all that’s left. The threats on their family, the threats on their lives, the attacks in the press, we forget judges are human beings too.” 
   
   
   

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Change is always uncomfortable. But in today’s tech-driven world, it is necessary. In this episode of Between the Briefs by Steno, hosts Joe Stephens and Adrian Cea welcome Carolyn Humpherys, Senior Consultant at Traveling Coaches, to explore the critical gap between implementing new technology and achieving genuine organizational adoption.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why change management and strategic training are the secret weapons behind successful AI adoption in law firms
  
  
• How to overcome the resistance that derails most digital transformation initiatives

• How to identify and remove adoption barriers within your organization

• The practical strategies for implementing emerging technologies like Microsoft Copilot and generative AI tools
  
  
• Understand the pivotal role of prompt engineering in maximizing AI productivity

• How to build a culture of innovation in traditionally risk-averse law firms

Changing is no longer a survival tactic. It’s a competitive advantage. Tune in to understand how you can leverage it. 

Highlights:


00:00 Introduction & Meeting Carolyn Humpherys 

00:41 From Skepticism to Innovation: How Top Law Firms Embrace Change

08:40 Why Adoption, Not Implementation, Is the Real Challenge

12:56 Mastering AI Prompting & The "Questions Before You Begin" Technique

16:19 Measuring Success Beyond Time

25:02 Why Leadership Must Model Technology Adoption

29:49 How to Convert Tech Skeptics

32:41 The "Woo Factor" & Why it Beats Hierarchy

34:12 The Reasons Why Legal Tech Implementation Fails 

38:03 The Science of Hiring to Build High-Performing Teams 

39:49 Why Proof-of-Concepts Should Empower End-Users

43:28 Carolyn’s Hottest Take: Democratizing AI Access 

45:14 Closing Thoughts 

Quotes:

1. "I would say the most common gap is to be able to execute change, to get adoption of whatever that change is. Maybe it's a workflow, maybe it's taking advantage of new technologies. Whatever that change is, firms struggle to get everybody going in the same direction and to get that adoption because adoption only happens when the majority of people within that organization choose to change and it is a choice, right?” 
2. “If it's wrong to do it yourself, it's wrong to do it using AI. We would never put case law into a brief that we haven't shepherdedized, that we haven't looked up and validated word for word, that we got that quote right, that we know for sure that it's accurate.
3. “I think that the trap is they think that there's one magic prompt that's going to spit out a perfect answer and it doesn't work that way. You may need to iterate your way through it. You may need to ask some follow-up questions. A little trick that I like to use is at the end of my prompt, ask AI, "What questions do you have before you begin?”
4. “We need to see our leaders using technology, following the rules, following that knowledge management, all of those rules, because if they're not doing it, guess what? Their lawyers that report to them aren't going to do it either.” 
   
   
   

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Retaining top legal talent often feels like an uphill climb. Unless you have Karen Mesmer’s playbook. In this episode of Between the Briefs, Karen, Legal Services Manager at Shook, Hardy and Bacon, joins hosts Adrian Cea and Joe Stephens to explore how premier litigation firms are evolving their operations in the face of technological disruption.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to evaluate AI tools without replacing institutional knowledge
  
  
• The essential soft skills that no technology can replicate

• Why technical fluency in platforms like Excel and document management systems is now table stakes

• The retention secret of fostering a culture of deliberate care and shared responsibility
  
  
• How to structure career pathways that grow talent internally

• The discipline of vendor evaluation & prioritizing transparency and fair value exchange

The legal industry is nothing without its people. So, it’s time we started paying attention to them. 

Highlights:


00:00 Introduction & Meeting Karen Mesmer

03:00 Behind Karen’s Four Decades of Legal Innovation

04:45 Why Energy and Soft Skills Beat Credentials

06:06 Navigating the Tech Transitions of Legal 

10:56 Hiring, Firing, Manners and Accountability

17:20 AI as Enhancement, Not Replacement: The Future of Legal Work

20:46 Digital Literacy as Table Stakes for Modern Operations

21:53 The Secret to Career Advancement in Law Firms

24:33 Lessons from the Paralegal Years: Presence and Boundaries

27:47 Professional Development and Internal Growth Pathways

29:30 Vendor Fatigue and Transparent Technology Evaluation

33:21 Building Cultures Where Nobody Leaves: The Shook Model

36:21 Preparing Your Successor and Planning for Transition

37:18 Karen’s Hot Take: Protecting Young People from Irreversible Decisions

38:52 Closing Thoughts 

Quotes:

1. “Manners is another good one. You know, I think please and thank you go a long way. I sometimes have to, you know, do backspace, backspace and put in the word please because I'm shooting something off really fast. But I think those are important. I do think someone who cares about the firm and cares about the people that are on their team is really important.”
2. “The customer is always right, which means our clients, even if they're not right, they're right. You've got to know that because that's the way you need to treat them.”
3. “And when COVID happened, that took a nice chunk of business, you know, stopped it. And I can't remember if it was six months before we ever went back into the courtroom or maybe even longer, maybe it was a year, but no one got laid off. They made it work. I swear it's just a kindness that I see. And another thing is you'll see people who, you know, all of a sudden someone's got an emergency and so we'll send out some emails for help. Tons of people say, "I'll help.”
4. “You have to like change. I mean, there are some people that have probably never moved the furniture around in their house. And if they haven't, and they're not going to necessarily change in this environment, and this especially since COVID, this environment has really changed a bunch. And I've liked everything that has changed.”

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